by Jeff Vrolyks
Chapter Twenty
Michael glanced at the directions he had entered in his phone as he pulled onto the freeway onramp. He copied and pasted it into his phone’s GPS system and was routed. It was 8:45 PM, according to the Buick’s digital clock. There were nervous butterflies in his stomach, as there always were preceding such a mission. But he thought the butterflies might not have been nervous ones but ones of excitement. Countless times he had lain in bed staring up at the dark ceiling ruminating over the copycat killer, what he’d like to do to him if he ever caught him. He concocted all kinds of neat torture devices in his imagination. There was always the accompanying thought that he’d never get a chance at bringing the copycat killer to justice—to borrow a colloquialism that politicians and the media adored. If the man was caught he’d go to jail, and thus escape Michael’s vengeful wrath. If he remained undiscovered Michael would never learn his identity, and again he’d escape Michael’s wrath. My how his fortune had changed! Thanks to his new friend Eddie. And a wonderful friend he was, arguably the best he ever had—which was a little sad to consider. Not acquaintance or pal or guys who knew each other, as Eddie had said (a little too rashly, Michael thought). They were special breed of friends, ones who knew the darkest secrets of the other and accepted them unconditionally.
As he drove to Roseville, he reflected on all manner of things, random thoughts and memories. The other night at the Parcher’s everything went shitty. The woman screamed (twice!) even after he threatened to execute her if she did. That had never happened before. He had forgotten to don his gloves before opening the window, then forgot to wipe away his fingerprints on said window until he was making his escape halfway across the front yard. Having to go back to wipe it clean could have been the difference between getting away and being caught. That’s how killers get caught, imperfections both large and seemingly insignificant. You must be perpetually perfect, make errors never. The other night was one imperfection after the next. And the truth was, he should never have killed them to begin with. Mr. John Parcher was a piece of shit, but his wife Barbara might not have been. She was a victim of circumstance: had she not been married to that fucker, she’d still be alive.
If Mr. Parcher’s ‘crime’ was put before a judge and jury, he’d not have been found guilty of anything, would have walked. Michael, seeing himself as the judge and jury, found John to be anything but innocent. The Parcher’s next door neighbor has a fourteen-year-old daughter, Jessica. Jessica sits behind Michael in English class. Last week Michael was pretending to be listening to his iPod and poring over his notes a few minutes before class started, but instead was eavesdropping on Jessica and her best friend Brandy who sat beside her. Jessica was whispering a story to Brandy. It was funny to the girls, not so much for Michael. What she said was this: she was in a bikini in the backyard, suntanning. Mr. Parcher was doing yard work and spied her over the brick wall, said howdy. Jessica said hi back. Mr. Parcher said they have a nice cool swimming pool that never gets any use, and isn’t that a shame? He said she ought to come over and go for a swim. Are you sure? Yes, he was sure. So she took a towel, bottle of water, some suntan oil, and relocated next door. She jumped into the pool to cool off, swam for a couple minutes, got out and sprawled out on a towel. Mr. Parcher approached her, offering to rub some oil on her back and shoulders. She hesitated before accepting his offer. He pulled the spaghetti string of her bikini, assuring her it was only to oil her up better. She had always considered him to be a normal nice guy so she wasn’t alarmed by the proposition. She hadn’t noticed that he took her cold bottle of water and unscrewed the top. He splashed some on her back. The freezing cold water started her: she rolled over and sat up, breasts now exposed. He ogled them. He apologized, said that the oil was water soluble and it worked better being rubbed in with water—even though she was already wet from jumping in. She apologized to him! Apologized for having turned over and subjected him to see her budding little breasts. He said he’d let her be and returned to his yard work, but continued leering at her while he did so. He grew braver and braver, his leers more and more direct. She was a piece of forbidden fruit and he wanted to eat it, no matter the cost.
The next time she jumped in the pool, Mr. Parcher did the same. Once in the water he asked if she’d ever skinny dipped. She said no, and wasn’t fond of the idea. It creeped her out, so she got out of the pool, considered going home but didn’t want to offend the neighbor who had a cordial relationship with her father, so she figured she’d lay out until she was dry, then head home. A few minutes later Mr. Parcher got out of the pool and he must have shed his trunks in the water, because he was as naked as the day he was born. He walked to her boldly, stopped inches from her side, and casually said, “Want to have sex?”
As Michael sat there in his chair pretending to be immersed in his studies, he was seething mad. His anger worsened when Jessica laughed out loud at this junction of the story, as did Brandy, who was both humored and in disbelief. It was amusing, not outrageously offensive, to Jessica, that an old pervert would have the audacity to proposition her like that. Brandy asked if she told her parents about it. “Hell no!” Jessica crowed. “They’d be pissed!” Well yeah, they would, but they had a right to know that their neighbor wasn’t who he pretended to be, wasn’t a model neighbor but a reprobate who deserved to spend some time looking at the inside of a prison cell.
Michael committed it to memory, every last creepy detail, and would go over them time and time again in the ensuing days (especially at nights in his bed, staring up at the dark ceiling with his hands folded together under his head) until his rage had reached a boiling point, one that always birthed consequences; one that extended the tally of The SacTown Slayer. He would have his next victim.
That night when he had the Parcher’s duct taped to their chairs, and duct tape over their mouths, he did what he always did, removed their mouth-tape and threatened their lives should they scream, then asked a series of questions.
“Am I too young to be a killer?” Michael asked them.
“You’re just a boy!” The woman said in fearful disbelief.
“Yes, too young to be a killer,” Michael agreed. “Too young to do a lot of things, I suppose. Too young for a middle-aged person to have sex with me?”
Neither responded, but looked at him quizzically.
“What if I was a girl, a year younger than I am: fourteen. Would I be too young to have sex, John?”
“What are you getting at?” He said pettishly
“You asked your neighbor Jessica to have sex with you. That’s what I’m getting at. She’s fourteen.”
Barbara looked over at her husband with an expression of disgust.
“Tell her it’s true,” Michael said. “I take that back. Tell her if it happened or not, and be honest. If you lie, I’ll kill you. Keep in mind that I know the truth.”
He waited long, too long, before nodding once.
That’s when Barbara screamed. Not from fear but anger. Michael threatened her life.
“Go on, John, tell her exactly what happened last week when you saw Jessica suntanning next door. Tell your wife everything. If I feel you glossed over a detail or lied, there are no second chances, I’ll kill you and your wife.” Michael ran the edge of his knife over his own neck to demonstrate their fate. “Go ahead.”
John told the story perfectly. In fact, he added things that Jessica had omitted. Like he had an erection standing there naked before her. Perhaps Jessica was too embarrassed to admit that to Brandy. He also said as he rubbed oil onto her back, he put some on her thighs, and drifted up to her bikini, ‘accidently’ grazed her genitalia, apologized to her.
That was when Barbara screamed again, and she tried to beat her husband with her fists, but was subdued. A second scream meant this little social experiment was over. He needed to get the hell out of Dodge. He slit the guy’s throat first, apologized to Barbara before slitting her throat, said she could thank John for what he was about to do.
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Michael strode away from the Parcher house cursing himself for having had to return to wipe his prints, cursing himself for allowing that bitch to scream not just once but twice. As if to confirm he did everything wrong that night, a car started just a few houses down and idled toward him, which hinted at intent. Michael was certain it was a cop and the jig was up. That’s exactly how the night was going. He glanced back and saw it wasn’t a cop car. Perhaps an unmarked cop car, the jig was still up. Then the damnedest thing happened and the guy rolled his window down and said get in, and wondered how Michael hadn’t been caught yet. It was a great question after the night’s string of unfortunate follies. Everybody has an off day; in retrospect, that’s all it was.
It was both one of the worst days of his life and one of the best. He took a deep satisfied breath as he considered his new friend Eddie. Eddie, who served up Michael’s arch-enemy on a platter, garnished with his address and living arrangements.
That jade idol sure was strange. He drove past a sign reading Roseville: 4 Miles. The jade idol, it could only be some kind of hoodoo relic from a witch or something. It made him feel funny when he touched it, but its true magic was granting him visions of the past, the hanged black people. He wondered if they were real, as if they were real victims of a hanging or just hallucinations altogether. He wondered what else he might see with it if he did some traveling… say, to Salem, Massachusetts. Some witches burning at the stake, perhaps? Its powers weren’t limited to glimpses into the horrible past, that was a given. It brought Eddie to a coffee tin of cash and a diamond. God knows what else he might have found with that thing’s help. How bizarre. He wondered how it directed him to the treasures. Hadn’t he said he made a friend through it? Michael would love to hear the details of that. A friend, huh? A person?—a spirit? And where the hell did he get that thing, anyway? Pretty lucky if he just found it.
Michael laughed out loud in the shadowy Buick cabin. The old man Phillip, how about that? He wanted locks to keep the SacTown Slayer out of his house. How funny it would have been for Michael to say, “Don’t worry, Mr. Stoddard, I won’t kill you and yours. Don’t bother with the locks. I’m flattered you think so highly of my cunning.”
Eddie, he must have been aching to laugh at that moment. But he didn’t. He held his composure like a professional. A true friend, one with brains and restraint.
Michael’s parents, they sure liked to give him advice on how to avoid the serial killer. That was just plain odd and unsavory to endure. They put a curfew on him (which he was breaking this very minute, but so fucking what; tonight was a special night). They also bought new door locks and even installed an alarm system on the house. If the alarm system was brilliant enough to detect serial killers, the alarm would never go off from the minute Michael entered the house.
Michael reflected back to the day he first saw boobs. Sometimes that just happens; he supposed his age and influx of hormones have something to do with it. And not just any pair of boobs, but the best boobs he could hope to see: Mae Clark’s, the girl he fell in love with the moment he first saw her, and would never stop loving her. It came at a strange time in his life. He had just killed the Davidson’s and was feeling pretty depressed. Not about killing them, but about his life in general. No friends, picked on in school, the only girl he liked (Mae) didn’t like him back, and what made that worse is Mae did like Michael’s older brother Chris. That wasn’t a fact but it might as well have been. Michael had been entertaining thoughts of suicide for the first time in his life. When he was home alone he’d go upstairs into his father’s room and take the hunting rifle out of the closet, and the shoebox full of slugs. He’d put the barrel under the shelf of his jaw, use his toe to pull the trigger. There was no slug in the chamber, but he didn’t know that to be a fact. He assumed there wasn’t, just as there wasn’t the last time he checked. Had his father loaded the gun between the previous time and this current time, Michael’s head would have exploded like a water balloon filled with cherry Kool-Aid. Dark times, they were. He had drawn pictures of Mae Clark and himself holding hands, kissing, drawing little hearts on the picture and writing corny things on the page such as ‘Mae Clark is in love with Michael Barnett.’ He had to hide those drawings, lest one of his brothers or mother stumble upon them. That would be fuel for years of teasing. Under his mattress they went. He hated to admit to himself that it wasn’t infatuation of Mae he had been nurturing, but the head over heels in love variety. The worst kind of problem to have when the girl you pine for pines for another. Thoughts of suicide came more and more frequently during that dark time in his life.
But then something incredible happened. One day as he was playing DragonQuest online, there was a knock at the front door and guess who!—it was Mae Clark. Michael said he’d go get Chris and turned away from the door.
“No, just a minute,” Mae said after him. He turned around, brow arched. “I’m here to see you.”
“Me?”
“Yeah. Want to hang out or something?” She asked.
“Sure. Where at?”
“I don’t know, your bedroom?”
“Okay.”
Michael could feel his rapid heartbeat in his eyes, throat, and thundering in his ears. It was a dream come true. It occurred to him that it might be a set up, a gag. That suspicion didn’t last long: once they were in his bedroom with the door closed, they spoke idly for a minute or two before she invited him to kiss her. He nearly fainted. He did kiss her, and it was as incredible as the thousands of times he had fantasized about it. The kissing grew more passionate, longer and more physical. Their hands started exploring the other’s body, and when he went up her shirt she allowed it. He touched her breasts over her bra. Then, being the good sport that she was, she took a step back with a wild excited expression, watched him studiously as she took a double-hold of her shirt’s hem and pulled it up over her head. She tossed the shirt aside, still watching Michael—his eyes were anywhere but her on her eyes. She unhooked her bra and let it fall down. His jaw dropped, eyes goggled. She stepped to him, took his hands and put them on her breasts. He began moving them himself before long, so she let go and enjoyed the experience. When he unzipped her pants she allowed it to happen—albeit a little hesitantly. When he put his fingers between her elastic waistband and skin, she stopped him. Oh well, it was a good run! He had never craved someone so badly as he did just then. After some more kissing they chatted for awhile, got to know each other. He wondered if she really liked him or was just bored that afternoon, looking to kill some time. She said she had to be going. He was heartbroken, but hopeful that the magical interlude would repeat itself, and soon.
The next day he didn’t see or hear from her. The following day still nothing. He couldn’t take it anymore so he went next door and knocked. Mae didn’t seem overjoyed by his presence, and that pained him. But she let him in, so it wasn’t all bad. She led him to her bedroom and they had a good conversation, one that could potentially lead the path to a relationship. What was more than that, she kissed him again. And she admitted to being curious as to what penises look like. She went for his zipper and unzipped, unbuttoned. She couldn’t get to his privates due to the belt securing the flap of his jeans in place. He jumped off the bed and in a hurry whipped the belt out of the pant-holes, and in doing so it paralyzed her with fear. It was then that he considered that she was being beaten, presumably by a belt. She didn’t admit to it but she didn’t have to. Her eyes staring in trepidation at the limp leather belt in Michael’s hand told the story well.
Was it David and Rebecca who beat her? Hell no. Hell no. They could have won some parents-of-the-year awards. They were awesome. You can sum up the kinds of people David and Rebecca were by this: they volunteered at the local church and didn’t boast about it, didn’t even talk about it. Need he say more? So awesome they were that Michael was currently driving without a license thirty miles away to murder the guy responsible for their deaths. So if it wasn’t Mae’s parents who beat her,
then who? He never really gave that much thought. He should have, but he supposed his prick was doing all the thinking when it came to Mae. Ever since that bra dropped, those glorious boobs were etched in his memory to forever relive, and relive them he did.
After that day at Mae’s, they didn’t spend any time alone. He stopped by her house a couple times, but Rebecca said she was out on a date, or at her friend Lisa’s. Ah, a date. If she had a boyfriend, of course she wouldn’t be over at Michael’s letting him feel her boobs. That was the end of their tremendously short relationship, if you could call it that. But it was what the doctor ordered. It snapped him out of his depression. He had something to live for: shared memories with Mae. Better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all, as the saying goes. It was love. It was. His first and last love. He wondered what she was up to these days? Last he heard she had moved in with her uncle following her parent’s tragic murders.
Michael exited the freeway, made the turns in accordance to his phone’s GPS. The digital clock in the car read 9:39 PM.
He wondered why Trent had killed them. To what gain? He’d ask him that before he slit his throat. He must not forget to ask that. He wondered if Trent was older, and pictured a man in his late thirties, a little overweight and going bald. A real loser. He must be a loser to have copycatted a serial killer.
The apartment complex was on his right. He pulled in and idled around the parking lot, which followed the line of units, bent around the corner. He was looking for a silver Audi convertible. That and apartment 215. He made out the apartment number of a downstairs unit: 111. He stopped and squinted up at the apartment above it. He couldn’t be sure, but it looked like 211. That would make sense. One-hundreds below and two-hundreds above. That would mean Trent’s apartment was near. He parked in a guest spot and shut the engine off. He got out and looked around the lot for the Audi. It wasn’t around. With a little luck, he was out getting a late dinner at a fast-food dive and would return shortly. Michael would have a nice little surprise lined up for him when he returned: a Beretta aimed between his eyes with an ounce of trigger-pressure away from settling the score, avenging David and Rebecca Clark.
It was a nice complex. Modern, gray and blue paint with copious amounts of bushes, trees and flowers. The kind of groundskeeping that demanded large rents. And in an upscale neighborhood, complexes with pretentious names such as Forest Pines and Shadow Brook, and Mountain Crest Overlook. The names are never descriptive of the geography. Never. This complex was named Golden Ridge. The cars in the lot were all late-model cars, several German imports. People of means.
It would be Michael’s first time on a murder scene not wearing a hoodie sweatshirt. A hoodie to stow his duct tape and knife. Handcuffs were always kept in his back pocket; Beretta in his hand. Tonight was different. Being that he wasn’t the SacTown Slayer this evening, but a man out for revenge. There would be no duct-taping his legs to a chair and slitting his throat. Not tonight. He’d simply ask a few questions that needed to be answered, such as why David and Rebecca Clark of all people, and not slit his throat but bury all seven inches of blade in Trent’s heart—or shoot him if things got messy; then a quick retreat before the cops came.
The knife was cinched above his belt, the blade sheathed between his pants and hip. The gun was tucked down the front of his pants for now, would be in hand the second he opened the apartment door. He always had pretty good luck when it came to a lack of passers-by when he approached a marked house. Tonight was no different. Nobody in sight. An occasional car zipped by on Manzanita Avenue behind him, but that was it.
He followed the walkway past this cluster of four units, to the next one. The bottom left read 114, the bottom right 115. Bingo. The upper right was the one. There was a shared patio upstairs, and a tall plant in front of 215, its pot invisible behind a stucco railing. There was but one window up there belonging to 215, and it faced the street (and currently Michael). Probably a dining room window or kitchen window. There were blinds, closed. On the edifice twelve feet above ground and above apartment 115’s recessed patio were two windows, living room windows. There would be no way to look inside those. However, he could see a blue glow flickering from them, indicative of a television. That was cause to consider. Trent’s Audi wasn’t here, but the TV was on. Trent might have left it on if he was only going to a drive-through for a burger. Maybe he had a roommate. No, Eddie had said Trent lives alone, and he trusted Eddie. Eddie wouldn’t steer him wrong and no way would he lie to him. Not his best friend Eddie. It was left on while he went out, that’s all it was. If not, if Trent was home and his car was in the shop or lent to a friend or traded in on another car, then killing Trent would make enough noise to alert the neighbors (the kind of noise that goes bang bang), which he was on board with if it came down to it. A fatal gunshot to his chest, maybe one in his head for good measure, then haul ass out of town. A high degree of risk was involved in such a murder, but it was worth it to bag Trent. And his luck had gotten him this far, he didn’t see why it wouldn’t take him a little farther.
He went up the stairs quietly, slowly, stealing glances over his shoulder: nobody around. At the top landing he removed the gun from his waistband and unsnapped the safety catch. First he’d try the door, to see if it was locked. If it wasn’t, he’d have to dissect the issue before making his next decision. He checked: locked. That was good. It was normal, and he wanted normal.
He tilted back the pot of the plant, swept his fingers under there, felt around for the key. He didn’t feel it. He picked it up and moved it over. No key.
Eddie, Eddie… what’s going on, amigo? I was just praising you, too. Come on, man…
There was a thatch of decorative moss on the soil of the plant. He lifted it and bingo!—a single silver key. He smiled at it between his thumb and forefinger, thought This here is the key to your death, you sonofabitch. He silently slid it into the lock. Before turning it, he pressed an ear against the hollow wooden door—nice apartments, but cheap as shit doors. He could hear a laugh-track, some sitcom show. Even thought the blinds were closed, he could see that it was dark inside. No lights on at all, save for what the TV emitted.
It was go-time.
He didn’t want to script what he would say or do. He wanted to operate impromptu. He took a deep quasi-nervous breath through his nose, exhaled with a sly grin. Gun pointed up, he turned the key, unlocking the door. It made the slightest sound, but with the TV on it would have gone unheard. He opened the door fully, stepped inside and closed the door softly, locked it behind him.
There his victim lay, on the couch, oblivious to the serial killer in the apartment.