Roadrunner

by Michael Lilly

  Now, I have precious little time with which to deliberate about where I can go.

  I definitely can’t go home, as they will, without fail, be watching our Wometzia house in addition to every place in Oregon where I have even remote ties. Considering such measures may come across as paranoid, but having dealt with this crew before, I retain that there is truly no measure of caution that could reasonably be counted as excessive. They shot Sanders. They shot at Beth and Todd and me. There are two necessary components to driving a manhunt so deep and wide simultaneously: passion and resources. And these folks have both in vast abundance.

  I hope Beth is okay. I could imagine my pursuers badgering her. Beth is good and strong, though; she’ll be able to shake them off. So, no Wometzia, and no Riverdell. Possibly no Oregon altogether, for prudence’s sake. Where, then? And can I manage to get there undetected, once I do decide on a location?

  I pull out my phone and disable my GPS. First things first: I need to get off the grid. I need a burner phone. The credit card I’ve been using is in my name, but I also have one from my mother’s account that I didn’t feel good about using. Not that I felt bad about taking the money from her—I deserve it almost as much as (if not more than) she does, to be frank—I just don’t feel okay about using my father’s filthy money. However, if there are correct uses for it, I assert that helping myself escape the consequences of his murder is a qualified candidate.

  There’s a Wal-Mart just a few blocks back into the city where I can pick up a burner phone under a fake name. I can head to the buses next—or, better yet, and more privately, call a car service. One that doesn’t mind one hell of a road trip.

  My timing must be practiced and deliberate in my trip to Wal-Mart. I need the heat of the onset of the manhunt to have died down, but still, I need to beat the distribution of my inevitable EPB. Then I’ll meet my ride a few blocks over, where I’ll begin my trip to Oregon after all. I’ll make a stop just west of the Idaho border at a gas station and use my old card, ditch that car and swap out drivers. From there, I’ll have two main options: head eastward along the Canadian border, or down the west coast. Between the two, the latter sounds more appealing, but that’s a decision I can make later on—hell, I could flip a coin before I order my second ride, for all the difference it would make to me. All I need to do is appear on a handful of security cameras on the roads toward the Pacific Northwest and let the trail end there. From there, I can turn invisible again for my trip either east or south. In either case, the essentials will remain the same: stay in the car unless covered—hood, sunglasses, the works. Avoid the light. Just don’t be seen, really. What I’m good at.

  The process feels just like old times: practiced, methodical, but natural. A part of me fears that my entire existence will revert back to the unfeeling husk that I was a year ago, devoid of emotion save for those that contributed to a lustful sense of revenge.

  Of course, there’s extensive philosophy available to assess the relative morality of my actions over the past few years. Naturally, one of the more dominant schools of thought, on its own, is pretty simple: that killing is wrong. However, that sentence alone comes attached to a blizzard of asterisks, all with bubbling and sentient exceptions, extenuating circumstances, and the inevitable position of killing in self-defense.

  I like to assert (to myself, mostly) that my killing is defensive in nature, if perhaps a bit preemptive. No, I was not personally in peril for my kills, save for Perkins, but their lives’ continuations threatened those of innocent people, and if a life is to be forfeit at the hands of another, I choose that of the perpetrator over those of their would-be victims.

  I have my new phone and my ride is on its way. My driver is named Preston. I drop my old phone into a sewer on my way out to the small street where I requested my pickup. In the process, I find a figure following behind me. I can’t get a good look at him without displaying my awareness of his presence, and I may not be in a position to reveal that information just yet.

  When I reach a sizable patch of shadow, I’m emboldened to look over my shoulder, careful to maintain my regular pace. My follower is far enough behind that I can’t get a good look at him; he himself seems to be familiar with the practice of dodging through the light. Just who might this new playmate be?

  There are steps one might take in order to avoid altercations on the street during nights like tonight: maintain vigilant and visible situational awareness. Carry confidence. Keep one’s gaze up and around, rather than at the sidewalk (one with which I struggle, thanks to my OCD). One might travel only with friends at night or carry pepper spray or some other type of weapon, or download apps that alert police to their location.

  But a person wishing to draw the potential attacker in, someone like me, for example, will do none of these things. I keep aware of my surroundings, yes, but not in such a way as to make it visible. My confidence is buried under layers of uncertainty (both real and false), and I certainly don’t travel with companions—at least, not presently.

  I’m still several streets away from my pickup destination, and the pursuit of my goal (the acquisition of my follower, knowledge of his motives, and dealing with him appropriately, quickly, discreetly and, if possible, legally) favors taking a slower route, but as there really are no slower routes available, I instead elect to slow my pace and hope that the man doesn’t notice. His footsteps match mine in rhythm, but exceed them in volume; he wants me to know I’m being followed, just not his identity. Not yet, at least. He wants me on edge, so he can simply push me over when the time comes.

  I find a particularly shady area between two weak pools of light emitted from corner posts. It lies in front of a house without its porch lights on. A white picket fence encloses a lawn barely kept alive with probably too much water. There’s a ladybug painted on the mailbox in fading red and black paint. I lean against the fence and entertain the oddly intrusive thought that I’m going to wind up with splinters in my hip and ass.

  I pull out my phone and look at it just for a moment, then hold it up to my ear.

  “Hello?” I say. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see my stalker. His pace slows. How polite; he wants to wait until my phone call is over before assailing me. I suppose I should be grateful—humbled, even, to a degree; I personally wouldn’t have such a respect for personal boundaries if one of my victims had been on the phone. I keep up my fake conversation (Yeah. Okay. Wait, what? Well did you talk to Emilio about it? Oh, okay.) until my nighttime buddy comes to a halt only twenty feet away, by which time I’m finally able to identify him by the general shape and movement of his silhouette.

  “I gotta go,” I say into the phone, “Andre Romero is here to kill me.”

  Grateful that I didn’t discard my weapon, I draw it, rack it, and point it toward Romero, my finger resting steadily on the trigger guard.

  “I’m not here to do any such thing,” he says. His stride does not break, nor does it accelerate or slow. He approaches with his hands in the air, a white plastic shopping bag hanging from the right. It looks like it contains something heavy.

  “Why, then? And how?”

  “They released me a few hours ago. I went to Wal-Mart to pick up a couple of things”—he shakes the bag—“and when I went outside, there you were. And that’s when I realized that I wanted to talk to you. Only you.”

  His tone makes me uneasy. It’s not aggressive—in fact, one might applaud this docile manner, in other context—but it is accented by a degree of removed surrealism, like he’s not actually here with me; this experience is just a dream to him. Perhaps a nightmare. His actions don’t have consequences anymore, because nothing is real and, therefore, nothing matters.

  It’s the submissive, ethereal tone of someone who has just severed his connections to everything and everyone he loved. The part that makes me uneasy has roots in both instinct and experience. Usually, when someone has such a focused degree of removal from his or her passions, it’s by necessity—the brain can’
t conceive of being so tied to certain things and, simultaneously, being the person charged with a reckless disregard for consequence and procession. So it creates a shallow alter ego, one that cares only about the advancement of its (usually destructive self, or otherwise) agenda. I believe I’m pointing my gun at that version of Andre Romero. His level of calmness rivals that of emotionless, violent sociopaths.

  “I only want to make things right,” he says. He retains his ethereal tone, but it gains a hint of plea. The distance he’s created between his consciousness and his passions, his emotions, cares, desires, and loves closes only slightly, but he doubles his efforts to retain it. He straightens his back and squares his hips.

  “Make what right, and how?” I am curious, and asking such a question has the hidden advantage of injecting details and logistics into the conversation, which can often help to anchor the mind of one caught in such dangerous thought patterns.

  “Everything. You. Perkins. Stan.” His voice becomes more desperate when he mentions his son’s name. “I need to know,” he says, “how you do it.”

  I lower my weapon, but retain my grip and don’t move my finger from the trigger guard. “Do what?” I say.

  “How you kill … without the guilt. I tried, I thought I could do it—I’m already going to hell, why the fuck not, right? I tried letting go, but I can’t. And now it’s too late—Anthony and Firenze, they’re gone. Stanley is in the hospital. So I need you to tell me how you do it.”

  Even in the darkness, I can tell he’s crying—his face is barely visible, but there are tears in his eyes reflecting distant street lights at an angle his eyes just couldn’t manage on their own.

  “Our situations aren’t identical,” I say, “and I’m afraid that the differences between them are what allow me to cope.” If he’s wearing a wire, trying to get a confession out of me, he’s a damn good actor, but it won’t hold up in court; at no point did he identify me, nor I myself, and my voice is not unique enough to derive any measure of certainty from that alone. Whether consciously or not, I find myself speaking at a slightly deeper pitch than normal, anyway.

  I don’t think that’s what this is, though. I think he’s having the come-to-Jesus moment that, if he’d had two weeks ago, could have spared two kids their lives and one the remainder of his innocence.

  “But how? How is it any different?” he says. “We’re both killers. We both arrange for the transportation of living souls into the afterlife.

  I drop my voice to a whisper. “But my targets are exclusively hellbound. And their trips were arranged out of necessity, out of the protection of innocent lives. Their very existences were threats to the lives of others and the law alone was not enough to stop them. I took those guilty lives to save countless innocent ones, not for some savage, bullshit revenge ritual.”

  “But … it’s the same,” he says. As his alter ego reconnects with his old ones, his tone becomes more and more pleading, but less coherent through sobs and whimpers. Now I must be cautious; the dangerous parts of the two active egos right now—the desperate, claustrophobic, buried-alive, lucid part of the cognitive brain and the erratic, disregarding part of the emotional brain have fused, and that’s when escalation happens.

  “It’s not,” I say. I imbue my voice with an authority that I normally reserve for work duties.

  Rather than responding or trying to make further sense of the monster he’s become, he falls to his knees and cries onto the pavement for some time.

  After a minute, he stops and rises to his feet, not bothering to wipe the tears from his face or the snot from his nose. My finger, still resting on the trigger guard, twitches and I prime the neuropathways involved in taking aim and firing. Romero’s eyes glaze over with the absence of before. He reaches into his Wal-Mart shopping bag. The shape of a handgun of his own becomes apparent to my eyes.

  “Hold it!” I say.

  But Romero’s intentions are undeterred. He pulls out a revolver and points it toward me. I dive out of the way just in time to hear the shot take a chunk out of the sidewalk; he must not have raised the gun all the way before pulling the trigger. I roll out of my dive in an awkward arc that spans the curb and leaves my back with a pang.

  I sprint across the street, the angle intended to disturb the aim of any further shots. He unloads three more rounds before I reach a small collection of bushes and shrubs in the neighbor’s yard across the street, whizzing and pocking the yard. I crouch behind a low shrub and Romero fires one more round, then stops. I listen closely, but hear no footsteps.

  It takes me a full minute to decide to expose my face for long enough to peek by the side of the bush; he’s been counting his shots. He fired five of a standard revolver’s six-shot capacity and doesn’t want to waste or misuse his final shot, or be locked into a state of vulnerability by reloading the firearm, if he even had the foresight to purchase or bring extra ammunition.

  I expect him to be standing at the ready, waiting for a sure shot on which to spend his last bullet, but I’m surprised to find, instead, that he’s holding the piece in both hands, horizontally, as though he’s just been introduced to the device and is trying to figure out its functions and purpose. I find a small stone by my feet and hurl it onto the road. The subsequent clatter is distinct and audible, but Romero doesn’t look up. The sound caused by the stone fades fast, unimpeded by moisture or excessive vegetation. The atmosphere has taken on an alien stillness, like the drawn-out last half-second at the crest of a rise on a roller coaster, when both the experience beforehand and afterward seem like such foreign sensations, and all that exist are you and the weighted anticipation.

  And then gravity happens.

  “I guess there’s no way to reconcile this,” he says. It’s quiet, sober, but the night is more so, and I hear it even from across the street. Now he looks up, in my exact direction.

  “I’ll be in touch,” he says. He turns away from me and the intensity grips my heart.

  Andre Romero lifts his gun to his temple, pulls the hammer, and unloads the contents of his skull onto the asphalt, from my angle a sickening, morbid firework in ugly grays and violent reds.

  The second-long cranial deluge nearly makes me vomit, and for a moment, I’m at a loss as to what to do.

  But I’m not left with many options. My best hope is to continue with the execution of my escape plan and pray that this mess is cleaned up before any kids see it. If Albuquerque is anything like Riverdell, runners will be out before anyone else. There’s a strong possibility that he’ll be found tonight—the gunshot has to have been heard by someone. Right?

  Bearing that in mind, I jog the rest of the way to meet up with my cross-country ride. I want desperately to call Todd and let him know that I’m okay. I want to tell him my plan and establish a line of communication, but for now, at least, it’s too dangerous. Before I’m out of the line of sight, I indulge the urge to look back at the mess I’m leaving behind.

  There lies Andre Romero. Abusive father, murderer. Overwhelmed with remorse and a sense of inescapability. It doesn’t seem permanent quite yet, like he could still change his mind, un-pull the trigger and stuff his brain back into his head, plug the hole up with a cork, like some kind of gothic wine bottle.

  I don’t know who’s hunting me, specifically, but I know why. If it’s someone with the appropriate contacts, text messages, even the cryptic kind that we used earlier, it would put Todd in danger. And if I’m in legal trouble, such as would be evoked by the surfacing of evidence that incriminates me, Todd would be in almost as deep of shit as me, if he had any idea where I’m going. I can’t have him destroyed by my decisions.

  Ideally, my decisions destroy only those whom I elect as victims of either my knife or my manipulation of an investigation. On rare occasion, a gun. I accepted long ago that I may become a victim of my own actions, and this reality only frightens me because to go to prison likely means to lock me up with many of the people whom I’ve put there over the years. In most of the c
ases in which I orchestrated a crime scene, that person not only didn’t know it was me, but had no idea who I am to begin with. Keroth, on the other hand, knew well before he even got ‘caught,’ and he was hurled into prison along with a heap of his own vile breed. If they spread word that it was my hand, I may find myself fighting off a small army for twenty to life. Even so, that prospect is far better than inflicting the same fate upon Todd. The thought of him suffering even now bores a tender hole in my heart. The shit he puts up with for me, honestly. Humanity as a whole doesn’t deserve people as great as Todd, and somehow I, the least deserving of all, end up knowing him most intimately, only to fuck him over time after time at the hands of my reckless vigilantism. It’s neither fair nor right, and yet he sticks by my side. What a man.

  And now I’m taking steps to remove myself from his life and, subsequently, him from mine, for an undetermined amount of time. With an insane amount of luck, maybe we can reunite one day. With an even more insane amount of luck, maybe we can reunite soon. Getting used to life without him is a task that I hoped never to have to tackle, but this situation requires nothing less than total disconnect.

  My mental lasso for bringing my mind back into the present is well used and perhaps a little too flexible, but for now, it gets the job done. When my mind’s eye returns to match my physical eye, the couple of streets between my destination and me has already passed underfoot. I double-check the address I sent my driver and sit on a dark section of the curb waiting for him; I don’t want to be visible immediately, in case someone managed to pin me down so quickly. It would require a colossal amount of communicative dexterity, but I can’t rule it out just yet.