by Landon Wark
With his foot he overturned a nearby trashcan with a bang and the hungry faces returned into the shadows for just a brief instant. His breath became heavy and clouds of steam spilled into the air around as he kicked the thing again and then a third time. Despite the freezing temperatures he felt dangerously close to spontaneously bursting into flames.
In the middle of his frenzy he got the feeling that, besides the hungry eyes that kept track of the twisted bill he had thrown on the ground, there was something else in the alleyway that was watching him. It fell into step behind him as he paced up and down the icy concrete, his new boots scuffed and marked from kicking the walls and the trashcan.
It bore down with him and as it bade him he unleashed the words in a torrent. Before he knew what he was doing a long, grizzly, smoldering scar had been cut down the length of the nearby wall. This time the hungry eyes disappeared down into the unfathomable darkness and they did not return.
Jonah slumped down against the cold wall, trembling.
The air around him quickly became a cloud of exhaust as he breathed heavily into it, trying to fill up his lungs with all the cold air he could, loosening the collar of his coat until a sharp spike of chill drove into his chest and he felt like the threat of overload had passed.
His leather gloves squealed in complaint as he clenched and unclenched his fists. The thing that had followed him into the alley slumped down with him and was then silent. A horrifying, terrible kind of silence.
“Not good enough for you?” he grumbled. “Sister can’t clothe her kids? Huhn. I can fix that.”
He pulled the remaining money out of his pocket and threw it to the ground, shoving it away from himself when a gust of wind brought it back. He looked down at the three twenties scattered around him in the snow and ice with contempt. He felt ashamed, foolish and stupid all at the same time; a feeling he could only quench in the coldness of the air around him.
He stared at the hungry eyes that were stalking back towards the alley. He scooped up the cold pile that was one of the bills and threw it towards them.
“You hear that?” His voice dropped to little more than a whimper as he rested his forehead on the knees pulled up to his chest. “I can make everything better.”
Jonah McAllister Gets Interrogated
Brendan Lamonte glanced at the clock on the car dash for the tenth time in several minutes. The two lights between the minutes and hours blinked with their irritating regularity. Reaching for the soda in the console at his right hand he pulled his hand away as the sound of Fenderman outside pissing against the dumpster struck him. He exhaled in a loose raspberry and tapped on the steering wheel.
"Christ, F-man," Lamonte half hollered through the passenger side window, "We're supposed to be incognito here. Can you piss a little quieter? Exactly how big is your bladder?"
He continued drumming his fingers on the wheel.
"Incognito," he repeated, more to hear the sound of it than as a reminder to the giant of a man waving his dick around outside. "Cop work pays the rent. For everything else there's incognito."
The streetlight in front of the motel flickered and Lamonte thought that if there was any justice in the world he would be at home with a beer trying to figure out the instructions for the new crib he had bought Stacy for Christmas. But, he needed a way to pay for the damned thing and for that there was... incognito.
"Where the hell is this kid? Some girl's place?"
Looking at the surveillance photo pinned to the home screen of his phone he tried to recall if he had seen anyone like that leaving the place since arriving two hours prior. They had knocked at the room number they had been given, but the kid didn't answer and looking through the windows hadn't yielded anyone lying inside. Both had had an evening to kill: Stacy was out of town visiting her folks, and the less he knew about Fenderman's hobbies the better.
Just then a shadow flicked out of the street and paced towards the motel. Lamonte flicked his phone on again, his eyes glancing through the windshield and then back to the phone. Exhaling slowly he lowered the glove compartment door, retrieving an old-style flip phone from inside. The phone trilled in his hand several times before a bleary voice on the other end answered.
"What?"
"Got this kid here," Lamonte said.
"So why are you calling me?"
"Just need to make sure this is still what you want. 'Cause this sorta thing isn't exactly easy. There was no evidence for any kinda warrant—"
"Christ," the voice on the other end hissed. "There was no evidence that my client was at fault. Nothing wrong with the pipes, wiring, nothing. So, they ain't paying the deductible. That means we're on the hook. Okay? And I pay you to keep us off the hook. I need my goddam bonus this year, Bren. You seen the price of toys the kids want lately? Get me off the hook and put this kid on it. You said it yourself in these reports. Kid's got no income, but he's paying up somehow. Get him to sign something. Anything. No judge is gonna side with a criminal over us."
Lamonte exhaled as the voice continued.
"I've seen the documentaries. That's what you guys are good at, right? Getting people to admit to things they didn't do? The kid's dirty, somehow. Everyone is. Make your money."
The line clicked dead and Lamonte pursed his lips before putting the phone back into the glove compartment. The caller—'Jim' he insisted on being called—was right about one thing. Toys... and cribs were expensive as hell these days. And the money coming out of Jim's wallet was as good as any, he supposed. And when pay was getting slashed and the union didn't seem to care one way or another it was good to have some extra cash. The kid was definitely guilty of something. Just because he couldn't tell what it was right now...
He opened the door and nearly jumped clear of his skin at the sight of Fenderman towering over him. He regained his composure and grabbed the large man by his tree trunk of a forearm.
"Come on, man. Time to make some cash."
He figured a few minutes in the can with F-man would be enough to make any skinny university kid cop to pretty much anything.
"You, uh, used something on your hands, right?"
In the pallor of the lone streetlight on the corner the exterior of the shitty motel looked like the dank den of some drug lord from a bad cable show. As the wind blew snow plumes from the drifts on the roof, Jonah shrugged his coat around his shoulders. While it was not terribly cold outside the lateness of the night, the lonesomeness of the street and the general unhomelike atmosphere of the motel added in their own piercing cold.
He fumbled excitedly through his pockets for the keycard for his door while still several rooms distant. If he paused silently he could have sworn that he could hear the tarp flapping in the hole where his apartment was located some blocks away. Despite the memory of standing before that very hole, in frightened awe of whatever power he had just unleashed, a rising mania gripped him. He slowly balled up his fists in an attempt to quell some of the excitement as he dug into his pocket.
He could feed all those people in the alley. He could feed any damned person he wanted.
As he passed by the soda machine sitting in the space between two of the rooms and unbuttoned his heavy coat in an attempt to get easier access to his pockets he did not notice the two men rush up the parking lot behind him, quickly weaving past the soda machine. He was just pulling the keycard gently into the light of the yellowish bulb from the streetlamp when a huge shadow loomed up behind him and a pair of hands were placed on his back, slamming him into the door.
"Open it up," someone hissed into his ear.
Panic gripped him, the card dropping from his fingers. It was scooped up immediately by a second man who slipped it gently into the old card reader slot alongside the entrance to the room. The door was shoved open and Jonah stumbled over the threshold, landing on the gritty carpet within the small entrance.
"I—wha?" he managed, certain he was being mugged by the two men.
The smaller of the men stepped into t
he tiny, dark and cold room around him. The larger man wedged first one shoulder and then the other through the frame on his way inside.
Jonah tried to scramble to his feet, only to have the hands of the massive stranger behind him grab him by the scruff of his neck and half pull, half throw him onto the bed while the shorter one began tugging on a pair of thin leather gloves. He pulled out two drawers from the tiny dresser underneath the tiny television, dumping their contents onto the floor. He was young, maybe less than a decade older than Jonah; hair slicked back, face unmarked, thin. He had more the look of a businessman than someone who would be rummaging through a hotel room, but as he bent over to reach the lower drawers of the dressers his suit jacket flicked aside and Jonah got a glimpse of a badge shining in the light spearing through the still open doorway.
Mind spluttering, trying to get a grip on exactly what was happening, Jonah tried to stand up from the bed as the man turned to his backpack sitting on the chair. He was held in place by the massive hands of the other. Sweat flowed freely under his arms and down the side of his face as he squirmed against the comforter on the bed.
A few papers and pens were followed by the thump of the linguistic textbook falling at the feet of the man with the badge. His lips pursed and kicked at the book, turning over a few pages with his foot.
"W-what are you doing?" Jonah stammered.
Jonah felt his skin crawl as the man responded.
"All right, kid," he said with a voice that seemed oddly at ease doing what it was he was doing, "what exactly were you doing in that apartment?"
Jonah opened his mouth to reply when the huge shape behind him shifted, circling around the bed. His eyes went wide as the second figure joined the first next to the tiny folding table in the corner. This one was older, maybe close to forty and had to nearly bow his head to fit in the room. His bald head was covered with scars, likely from the times he forgot to do just that, but as they covered his face as well Jonah had to think there was another, more sinister cause all together. His fists were nearly as large as the other man’s head, bristling with scabs and sores. He leaned up against the wall silently and stared, not speaking a word; just staring with a pair of eyes so dark they were almost black.
"I-I-I wasn't doing... I didn't do anything." His brain stumbled over the words.
The man laughed. "I gotta tell you, just between you and me? That was a real shit hole of a place, man. The hole in the wall was almost an improvement. What, uh, what exactly is the rent on a little hole in the wall like that? I haven't rented since I started out with my courses."
Taken aback by the shift in the man's mannerisms, Jonah had trouble keeping up. He sputtered for an answer as his eyes darted over to where the larger of the pair was cracking his knuckles.
"Still gotta be pretty pricey for a kid like you. All day long in classes."
“Yeah, I mean, not really. I’m uh, a botanist. Well, a student at the university really. I work part time at a botany lab.”
“It must be very part time,” the first man said, still thumbing through the nightstand next to the bed, uncomfortably close to where Jonah sat. “We managed to get a hold of your supervisor, Doctor Merrin? and he told us that you haven’t been in to work for almost two weeks.”
The eyes of the giant glared clean into him, judged and convicted him of being a liar right there.
His mind had already begun crafting stories, about what had happened to his apartment wall and about the reasons behind his unusual behaviour over the past few weeks, if they even knew about that. What did they know?
“I, uh, I’ve been busy studying for, uh, class. You know.”
“You scholarship coordinator also said you haven’t been to class in as long. She says to tell you that you’ve missed two of your finals by the way. She took the liberty of revoking your scholarship last week.”
The man's eyes settled on the blue spiral notebook sitting on the upholstered chair. His back bent and his hand approached it, fingers spreading to grasp it by the coiled metal of the spine. Jonah surged forward where he sat.
"Don't touch that!"
The giant put out a hand that, while not exactly as large as a wall had the same effect. Jonah stopped just a centimeter from smacking right into it. The man wearing the badge paused for a moment, uncertain of exactly what Jonah was willing to do to prevent him from opening the ratty book on the ratty chair. He grasped it but did not immediately start leafing through it, instead he clutched it in both his gloved hand against the top of his legs as he went back to leaning against the dresser, sliding his phone over top of it.
“Would you like to guess why your wall exploded, Mr. McAllister?”
“I-I have no idea,” he said. Did they know?
The giant harrumphed, causing Jonah to jump nearly out of the seat.
“The fire crew who inspected the site are sending some samples away for analysis. You, uh, know the kind of analysis I mean. I don't really get it. Real CSI stuff, but I’m sure a smart guy like you does.” He paused. If he was gauging Jonah’s reactions his gauge would be nearly off the chart. “You know what I think they're gonna find?”
“N-no.”
“When we see a college kid, no job, no scholarship, with as much stuff in his apartment as you got, we immediately think one thing.”
“Drugs,” the giant croaked.
The smaller one gave a quick point towards the giant. "You would not believe the number of messed up kids who get into that sort of thing. 'Specially the chemistry majors. Must be the influence of TV. Smart kids, like you, just... not super savvy about the whole 'not getting caught' thing. You, uh, any good at chemistry, Mr. McAllister?"
"Wh-what—"
"Let's see." He lifted his phone from off the cover of the notebook and held it up to his face. "Huhn. Prerequisites: organic chemistry one, A-; organic chemistry two, A. Current courses: biochemistry one, C. What d'ya think of that, Ken? This kid missed his final and he's still rocking a C in biochemistry."
"They get degrees," the giant, Ken, croaked.
"And botany? Lotta shit gets made outta plants."
“I di-didn’t do anything.” Jonah's mind spun as the man drummed his fingers on the cover of the notebook. He had little idea of exactly what was going on, but found he could not take his eyes from the thin, blue, wrinkled cardboard, save for occasional sideways glances to ensure that the giant was leaning, with an uneasy calm against the wall. The muscles of his neck locked and his heart felt like it would pound its way out of his chest as the man flipped open the book and scowled at the sparse English and plentiful arcane linguistic notations on the first few pages.
"What the hell is this?" the man snorted. “Some kind of code for whatever you’re working on? We'll get our cryptographers to have a look at it.”
“Wh-what are they going to do with it?” Jonah stammered.
The man closed the book, walked over to the small foldable table in the corner and tossed the book on top of it. He sat and leaned back in a chair he pulled out, placing his hands behind his head. “I call this my ‘case closed’ lean. I only use it when I know I can go home early, grab a beer and watch the hockey game. When I know that there's gonna be one less Meth cook blowing shit up in the city.”
"N-n-n—"
Why couldn’t he get it out?
"N-no I-I-I—"
"We all know what you were doing in that apartment," the man leaned forward in the chair. "So it’d be in your best interest, hell, all our best interests if you just filled in the details. That way we can tell some of the lab guys to go home for the holidays. Some of your fellow science geeks can spend some time with their families. Judges can just get their rubber stamps out. They'll like that. Hell, judges likely still got student loan payments, right? I bet they wish they could do what you're doing. You might even be able to get out of any serious jail time.”
"Slap on the wrist." Jonah shot a glance at the giant as he spoke.
Jonah’s heart raced, he felt about read
y to drown in sweat. The logical part of his brain, long holding dominance over the rest, told his mouth to say he wanted a lawyer and then to stay shut, but its grip over his body was slipping away. A dozen other warring factions fought for their right to speak. One wanted him to spit in the man’s face, one wanted to break down and cry, still others demanded more moderate solutions. In the end, all he could do was sit and stare at the notebook, lying in dubious calm on the table.
His breath became shallow and quick.
"Tell you what," the man leaned forward in the chair as if sensing there was a victory in the mannerisms of his quarry. "I got a few forms in the car. Maybe you can give us a break and just put a signature on something. Just so we can grease the wheels. Then this whole thing won't take so long. Maybe, just maybe you can get home for Christmas. That'd be nice, huhn? Have dinner with your folks before they have to come see you in front of a judge?"
"Family bliss."
Jonah put his head in his hands, elbows braced on his knees. What was happening?
“Maybe you want a few minutes to think it over.” The man pulled out the keycard from his pocket and checked it. He gestured and the giant pushed off the wall with a thud, stomping past where Jonah sat on the bed, sweat pouring down his temples onto his fingers.
Jonah’s heart rate increased threefold as the door clicked shut behind them and he allowed his eyes to drift.
The notebook was still lying on the table.
He inhaled sharply as a thousand thoughts became a million. The logical part of his brain shut down, giving way to the emotions that pushed and pulled this way and that, trying to make him do something. Their pulling resulted in a state of equilibrium that froze his body into a state of near catatonia.
“They left it there for a reason,” he whispered to himself. “Don’t touch it.”
A single faction rose above the rest and with its rise to power came an idea. Not a particularly good idea to be sure, but one he could not shove away. He wasn't exactly sure what they were talking about with their accusing voices. The only thoughts of drugs he had ever had were upon finding syringes on occasion littering the back alleys around his apartment building. What he did understand, the thing that caused the bile to rise in the pit of his stomach was the notebook on the table. If they had it, and if they allowed anyone to just start combing over it, it was only a matter of time before a word slipped out here or there and then…