The Suicide Killer

by Zach Lamb

  It was Bobby. Mike’s legs weakened, and he stumbled back into the person behind him. He threw up his hands in a mock apology and focused on his target. There was no way Bobby and Emily would have ever been friends. She only had a couple, and they were all female. Mike wouldn’t have allowed her to have a friend who was a guy. Bobby may have made her drink a couple of times when she went into the coffee shop, but that wouldn’t explain why he was at her funeral. Her mother seemed comfortable enough with him, though. Maybe he knew her, but that didn’t feel right either.

  The funeral ended, and Bobby said his goodbyes, giving Emily’s mother a long embrace. Emily’s parents saw Mike, and he could feel the hatred radiating off them.

  “You have no right to be here. This is all your fault,” her father said.

  Mike backed away and headed to his car. Her father didn’t intimidate him, but he didn’t want to cause a scene and let Bobby see him or give him the chance to escape, again.

  “Raymond, just let him go. Don’t cause a scene here. He’s done enough to this family,” her mother said.

  The Bronco with the dented lift gate rolled past Mike. How had he missed it? He practically parked beside him and never paid attention to it. Mike revved his engine and threw some rocks in the air for her dad’s sake as he drove off in pursuit of Bobby.

  He drove through the cemetery like one of the ghosts wandering the grounds, looking for a way out had possessed him. The dam holding a small pond from flooding the creek running out the back of the property barely held onto the speeding car. He ran onto the grass to pass a car that pulled out in front of him. Bobby was at the exit preparing to turn right onto the main road, and Mike let off the gas, coasting a little ways so he wouldn’t get on his bumper and let him know he was there.

  At the exit, he pulled out and gunned the engine to catch up with Bobby and then kept a safe distance. The Bronco pulled into a gas station, and Mike followed. He waited patiently until Bobby pulled out. Now that he was so close, it was hard not to run across the parking lot and deck him, but he held himself back.

  Further down the road Bobby pulled into a bank and went inside. Mike felt a slight irritation because he would not just go home. After a few minutes, Bobby walked outside of the bank. He never looked in Mike’s direction. He pulled out of the parking lot headed for his next stop at the grocery store. Mike cursed his luck. Who runs errands after a funeral? After thirty minutes, his patience began to wear thin. The air conditioner in his car was not the strongest, and he kept wiping sweat from his face. After forty-five minutes, Mike was livid. He was ready to go into the store and pull him out, when Bobby emerged from the store with only a few bags. The rest of their ride was uneventful. Mike followed Bobby to the entrance of his subdivision and kept on driving when Bobby turned. He would drive around the neighborhood later until he found his car.

  He just hoped he didn’t have a garage.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The old Chevelle rumbled through the neighborhood at a crawl. After driving around for thirty minutes, he found his target. Mike circled around the block and parked three houses down from Bobby and backtracked through the neighbor’s yard, trying to avoid the streetlamps. The vehicle was there, but he needed to make sure it was the right one. He crept across the yard to the back of the SUV and shined the flashlight from his cellphone on the lift gate. The two dents bumped under his hand. The original plan was to walk up the front stairs and kick in the door. But now that he was at the house, he thought better of it. He didn’t know if Bobby would be alone or have a gun on him. It would be best to look around and find a quieter way to get inside.

  Mike stalked up the steps, trying not to make any noise. Sweat poured down his face and stung his eyes. He knelt beside the one window with the light on. It opened up into the dining room. Other than a place setting for one at the table, the room was empty. Mike stood to walk away, and Bobby entered the room.

  Startled, Mike crouched down. His heart felt like it was about to beat out of his chest and fall beside him on the porch. His head pounded with the pressure, and he braced himself against the windowsill. He looked back through the window, and Bobby sat at the table facing him. Mike ducked back, and when he didn’t hear any movement, he dared to take another look. Bobby was still in his chair eating dinner and reading a book.

  Mike’s blood pressure rose again. Bobby killed a woman and left her body for anybody to find, and here he was, calmly eating liver and reading Portnoy’s Complaint. He wasn’t looking out the windows paranoid or packing his bags, preparing to leave town. It was just another day to him. He wasn’t acting like anything ever happened. Mike walked off the porch and headed around the house.

  The side of the house faced an open lot going into the empty cul-de-sac. There were no neighbors to light up the area, and everything was cast in total darkness. It would be easy to hide in the shadows. Only the soft glow coming from Bobby’s dining room emitted any light, and that didn’t leave the porch. Mike walked across a retaining wall and held his arms out for balance. The blinds on the side window were only open a crack, but he could still see Bobby sitting at the table. He hadn’t left his meal or his book.

  A rusted chain-link fence surrounded the backyard. Mike tried the latch, but a decades old padlock protected it. The key probably wouldn’t even open it. The fence wobbled back and forth as he used the links as footholds to climb over. It protested his weight, but he didn’t worry about the squeaking of rusted steel on steel alerting Bobby. He swung his leg over the top and missed his next foothold. He swung his arms wildly, trying to grab onto to anything that would stop his momentum. The ground didn’t break his fall. The inside seam of his jeans caught on the sharp barb at the top of the fence. The rusted barb cut into the soft flesh of his inner leg and scraped down the length of his thigh. The pants held and swung him back into the fence. After a few swings, the denim ripped, and he landed hard on his shoulder.

  Mike lay in the tall grass, too scared to breathe. He put pressure on his thigh to stop the blood and ease the pain. He expected Bobby to come flying out the door, shotgun in hand. The cops would believe he shot a burglar, and he’d end up getting away with another murder. But Bobby never came. The crickets were the only creatures to greet Mike. Maybe he hadn’t been as loud as he thought. When you’re sneaking around and trying to be quiet, every sound you make echoes like a jackhammer breaking up concrete that nobody can hear but you.

  Mike picked himself up and limped to the back door. There was no window for him to see where Bobby was in the house. An old wooden crate sat beneath one of the back windows. It came up to Mike’s knee. It might have been used to store lawn tools, but from how high the grass felt, they hadn’t been used in a long time. Mike pushed down on the wood to test the strength of the box and see if it would support his weight and still climbed on hesitantly with one foot cocked in the air ready for it to cave in.

  He peered into the window, but the room was too dark. The lights were off, and the door was closed. Mike pulled out his pocketknife and cut through the mesh screen covering the window. He hoped the window wasn’t painted shut or very loud. Since there was a screen on this window, he thought there was a good chance that Bobby regularly opened it to let a breeze into the house. Just to be safe, he slid the knife blade where the window met the sill to clean out anything that may have been there. He placed a hand on each end of the window and pushed up at the same time so that both sides would move simultaneously, hopefully making no noise. A crooked window would screech loud enough to alert the neighbors one street over.

  Mike paused at every slight squeak, but managed to get the window open enough to climb in. He leaped off of the box and his chest hit the windowsill, causing a muffled cough to escape his lips. He froze and listened for any footsteps that may be coming his way. When he was sure nobody was coming, he pushed himself through the window. The exertion burned through his thighs and his wound ripped open wider as he slid to the floor. Mike lay panting in the dark, pulling th
e flap of his ripped jeans tightly around his thigh to try to stop the new bleeding. Fresh blood on the windowsill wiped away like it’d never been there. He would have to check the side of the house when he left. It might be harder to clean, be he didn’t want to leave any evidence behind for the cops to find.

  Mike sat against the wall and tried to look around the room. It was pitch black, and there was no light in the backyard to help him see where the door was. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and only used the home screen for light. The flashlight would give off too much light. The dull glow only lit up a few inches of the ground in front of him as he crawled his way around the room so he wouldn’t trip over anything. Sweat ran into his eyes, blurring the light and making it more difficult to see. He bumped his head against a chest of drawers. The impact was solid but did not seem to make too much noise. He felt his way to the edge of the furniture and found the wall. From there, he worked his way around until he found the door.

  Mike eased the door open and stepped into the hallway. No lights were on in the hall, but the lights were on in the two front rooms and provided enough light for him to see where things were located. He ducked into a dark doorway that must have been the living room. Through the darkness, Mike could see the dining room where Bobby had been eating at the table.

  He was no longer there, but his book and dishes were. Mike looked around the house and down at the plate again. It still had a lot of food on it, like he hadn’t finished eating yet. Mike realized how quiet the house had been the entire time he’d been inside. Even if you live alone, you make noise. You probably make even more because you’re not worried about disturbing anybody else.

  Mike walked out of the dining room and peeked into the kitchen. It was empty. He mounted the stairs and took one step at a time, moving as softly as he could, in hopes of catching any squeaks before they became too loud. A thick blanket of dust covered the handrail. The rest of the house seemed relatively clean. The dust build-up probably came from lack of use. Bobby was young and needed no help climbing the stairs at night; he also didn’t need to put any weight on it trying to lighten the load on the stairs. The final step up onto the platform of the second story was the loudest. Mike had not expected that part of the floor to make a noise and landed with his full weight.

  He froze as the sound echoed through the house and his head. Most of the volume had probably been in his head. He stayed in the same position, balancing his body on one foot while his right hand barely touched the rail behind him. The wait to tell if he had broadcasted to anybody in the house, and possibly the neighbors that he was there felt like an eternity. When he was sure nobody was going to come rushing from one of the rooms or up the stairs behind him, Mike continued down the hall. There were four doors on this level. All the doors were closed except for the last one on the right. The door stood ajar. Mike walked toward that door, thinking it may be his bedroom and he had gone to sleep. That would be a lucky break if he were asleep. It would be much easier to grab him without so much of a struggle.

  He pushed the door open with the palm of his right hand, his left balled up ready to pound anything or anybody that may jump out at him. The room was dark except for a lamp beside the bed that gave off a sickly yellow glow. The bed and the rest of the room looked to be empty. Mike stepped in, looking for a door to a possible bathroom, but there was none. The room looked too small to be the master bedroom. Bobby’s work clothes were draped over a chair sitting in the far corner. His hat hung from the post on the bed. Pieces of paper littered the dresser. Some of the paper was balled up while others lay randomly on the glass top.

  Mike shuffled through the papers. A large N with the vertical lines extended in each direction in blue ink covered the first page. It was surrounded by hundreds of smaller versions. Some ran off the page. The same symbol covered the rest of the papers as well, except each page was in a different color ink. Mike threw the papers down and went to the bed. The right half of the bed had been made, while the twisted sheets at the foot of the left side looked like it had rarely been made.

  Mike looked around the room in amazement. It appeared as if two very different people lived in this one tiny room. Half of it was neat and clean. He bet nothing was ever left out of place on that side of the room. The other half of the room was the exact opposite. A mentally disturbed person inhabited this area was the only opinion Mike had. Ripped books and paper scattered across the floor. The furniture was upside down and covered with the same N as the paper. The darkness looked like it clung to everything a little longer and didn’t want to let any light in.

  Mike picked up a red notebook with a large white N rubbed onto the cover. It looked like he had taken a pencil eraser and erased the color on the cover. Mike remembered doing the same thing in middle school, except his notebooks usually had band names and that block S everybody used to draw on the cover. He fanned through the book, but it was more of the same nonsense letter over and over again. Something in the middle of the book caught his attention, and he flipped back to it. It was a sketch of a girl in black ink. The girl leaned against a fallen tree in the forest. She held her hand out like she was beckoning for the artist to save her. The vines of the surrounding forest pointed toward her. Dark rivers of thick ink ran from her wrists and formed a puddle on the ground. Mike recognized the scene from the picture. It was Emily. Bobby knew she was there the whole time and never told anybody. Anger reignited in his body and flowed through his veins. Bobby was crazier than he thought. Killing Danielle was bad enough, but knowing about Emily and drawing her picture was on a different level. And why was she reaching out for him? He threw the notebook on the bed and backed into the hallway.

  Bobby had to be in one of these rooms. But was he hiding or going about his business while Mike stalked through his house? Mike walked back to the first door beside the stairs and pushed his way in. The air in the room was still and tasted stale, like the room had been kept closed up for a long time. The room was as outdated as the rest of the house, maybe more so. It looked like an old person’s room. The house probably belonged to his grandparents. Were they the ones who raised him? Was it their fault he became a murderer or was it his parents who originally screwed him up and the grandparents did the best that they could before they died? These questions ran through Mike’s head as he searched the room, but he didn’t really care what the answers were. Bobby deserved to be dead for what he did, and it didn’t matter why he was messed up, he had to pay.

  Dust covered everything in the room. Mike wiped the grime from a frame hanging on the wall. The Lord is greater than the giants you face was crocheted in red on the ivory fabric behind the glass. Stitched under the epigraph were the names Nicholas and Hazel Cotton, June 16th, 1951. Below the first frame was a blank area of wallpaper that looked brighter than all the rest. It looked like there was a missing frame that had been there for many years. Mike looked around the room. There wasn’t a frame that looked out of place on any of the furniture or other walls. Mike touched the bare place on the wall and looked down at the floor. He could just make out the silhouette of a frame leaning against the wall behind the nightstand. A thick sheet of dust covered this frame as well. Mike wiped it away. It was an old faded letter. Mike held his cell phone light closer to the glass, so he could make out the words.

  My dearest Hazel. I hate to think that you will be the one to find me here. Know that I have held out as long as I can. The bad days are starting to outnumber the good ones, and I don’t want to cause you any more pain. I can see it in your eyes every time you look at me, and it kills me that I can’t do anything about it. The only way I know how to help you is to end everything on my own. Know that I have always loved you, even when I couldn’t remember. I love you and hope to see you again someday. Don’t worry about me. Take care of Bobby, I’m afraid he won’t understand why it had to end this way. Love, N

  The first vertical line of the N was longer than the other lines of the letter. It was wavy, unlike the rest of the neat hand
writing, and did not end; instead, it only faded from the paper. Mike guessed Nicholas had died while signing the letter. Who would frame a suicide letter and keep it beside their bed? That was sick. He placed the frame back on its nail in the wall. The hair on the back of Mike’s neck and arms stood on end, and his entire body felt electric, like a dog who knew he was about to get beat for leaving the yard.

  Bobby’s face illuminated the doorway as he stepped into the room holding a baseball bat. He swung, striking Mike’s thigh. There wasn’t much room, but the blow was strong enough, and Mike hit the floor.

  “Damn. I was aiming for your knee. Guess that’s why I never played baseball.”

  Mike rolled on the floor, holding his leg. Bobby lifted the bat above his head and chopped down at Mike, but he rolled out of the way. The reverberations from striking the floor ran up Bobby’s arms, and he released the bat and shook his wrists.

  Mike saw it as his chance and kicked the bat, throwing Bobby off balance as he reached for it. He then kicked Bobby’s knee and sent him to the floor. Mike jumped up and lunged for the bat.

  Grappling for it, they smashed heads, dazing both. Bobby swung at Mike’s face but missed wide right. Mike countered, connecting with Bobby’s jaw. He punched Bobby in the face again and knocked him to the floor. He grabbed Bobby by the shirt and pulled him closer, punching him over and over.