by Debra Lynch
That night, I tapped my steering wheel and made the turn onto Dennis’s street.
Did the man learn nothing from his time behind bars? Number one: Don’t guzzle down a drink just because a stranger offers it to you. Number two: Don’t pretend the woman you just met is a friend because she’s pretty and you want oh so badly for her to be your girlfriend. Three: Don’t agree to meet a beautiful stranger at yoga class. And four: Don’t blackmail Rachel Goodman and expect she’ll take it lying down.
I slowly cruised past Dennis’s Costa Mesa address in my breaking and entering attire: Black jeans, black sweatshirt, black tennis shoes, black backpack, and most importantly, black knit cap. When I had tucked my blond hair into the hat, I’d noticed it was well past time to color my hair. The black roots were growing in, and I had an image to maintain for my adoring public. Wouldn’t do to start looking unkempt when they wanted the California surfer girl yogi look.
Costa Mesa sat directly next to Newport Beach, but very few blocks in Costa Mesa shared the posh appeal of Newport’s 92660 zip code. The pre-World War II bungalows may have been stylish at one time. A few were still maintained to a decent standard with nicely trimmed hedges, flower boxes displaying a profusion of colorful begonias, white picket fences. Sadly, this was not the case with Dennis’s dust heap.
The squat one-story house screamed for a coat of paint while weeds threatened to choke what was left of the front lawn. Someone must’ve had good intentions by installing flower containers on the windowsills. But now the boxes sagged and cracked with the weight of soil and dried vegetation hanging forlornly over the rims. The wood shingle roof missed more than a few shingles, and what was there warped under the elements. Jeez. What must it be like to live in that kind of dilapidated mess? I knew only too well, and no way was I going back to that life.
My heart sped up, and my throat grew dry with excitement. I gagged every time I thought about Dennis. The way his beady eyes stared out at me from behind his ridiculous glasses. His skinny frame and pale skin, his clammy touch. I wanted to boil up some peanut oil until it sizzled, grip the cast iron pot and dump it over his flesh so I could watch him writhe in pain.
I parked my car several blocks away and began the walk to Dennis’s place.
I thought I might be nervous. But I wasn’t.
It’s not as hard to break into a house as most people think. My father taught me how to pick locks but made me promise I’d never use the knowledge for harm. This is just a puzzle we’ll work on together. Well, desperate times call for desperate measures, and no way was I going to figure out puzzles behind bars.
First thing I did was skulk around the outside of the house checking for surveillance cameras. None.
Standing on the sagging porch of Dennis’s house, I took a deep breath. I snapped on latex gloves, reached into my pants pocket, and pulled out a credit card. I slid it along the edge of the door and started to fiddle with the catch. Unfortunately, I was a bit out of practice so it took me a full minute before the latch gave way with a satisfying click.
I pumped my fist once and creaked the door open.
The first thing I noticed was photos of me. What kind of creepy guy does this? He had about eight in all. Yep, Rachel Goodman, modeling yoga clothes, evening wear, and a few of me demonstrating yoga poses were taped to his living room walls. His printer must have been low on ink the way the grainy colors bled into one another. Slimeball. I suppressed a shudder and trotted through the small shack, checking corners of the ceilings for video surveillance. None.
Dennis’s laptop sat on his rickety kitchen table. I scraped the chair back and perched on the edge, firing up his computer. The ancient Mac came to life with his screensaver photo. And just like the freak promised, he’d made the selfie of the two of us his wallpaper. I winced at my toothpaste commercial grin and pretty dress, my cleavage embarrassingly full. My fingers jerked off the keyboard as though I’d touched a hot stove. Freakshow.
Impatiently, I waited for the icons to load. Luckily the computer was not password protected. If it were, I would’ve taken it with me. I said a silent prayer of thanks to whatever entity watched out for orphans. I knew this night wouldn’t be simple, but at least one thing worked in my favor.
I scanned the desktop, and there it was, a folder titled Rachel. I hurriedly opened it, and the only thing it contained was a QuickTime Movie file.
A shudder jolted through me as I viewed my sins. I moved the file to the trash and emptied the trash, permanently deleting the offending evidence. Not very smart of Dennis leaving this lying around for anyone to find. But I think we’ve confirmed the fact that Dennis’s brain is no larger than a house fly’s.
Now for the thumb drive.
Many people hide valuables in their freezer, so I’d start there. But when I sliced through Dennis’s bags of organic peas and broccoli, tore open bags of grass-fed hamburger patties and pawed through a pack of whole-grain dinner rolls, there was no sign of the drive. For fun, I overturned the ice cube trays and emptied the lot onto his cracked linoleum floor, spooning out his Tofutti frozen dessert on top of that. Just like playing in a sandbox.
I spied the overflowing trash can. So much for Dennis’s healthy lifestyle. Big fat liar. Wadded up McDonald’s wrappers nestled in next to the biggest cliché of all junk food eaters: Twinkie wrappers. I yanked open the fridge, and wouldn’t you know it? Dennis, good little boy that he was, actually had a bag of kale, some tofu hot dogs, a loaf of gluten-free bread, a jar of agave, a pound of organic coffee, and a dozen cage-free hormone-free eggs. I pushed food out of the way, and still no sign of it.
I turned my back on dirty dishes piled high in the rust-stained sink and went into the living room. A terrarium holding a fuzzy black spider stood against one wall. Was that a tarantula? I liked animals but not at the expense of being bit and pumped full of venom. Just like Dennis to have a spider as a pet. He probably thought it made him seem like a cool hipster. Did he read Hipster Daily or some such rag? I let out a laugh. Maybe he could start his own YouTube channel showing people how to be just like The Osbournes.
A worn beanbag chair sat on top of a matted olive drab shag carpet. Hadn’t anyone gotten word to the interior designer of this hell hole that the 70s were over? A bookcase stood against one wall, and I haphazardly pulled books off the shelves rifling through the pages to no avail. I checked inside a wooden box but found nothing but a pair of dice, opened a ceramic container to find a few cones of incense but no memory stick.
The bathroom was next on my list, and I held my nose as I forced myself to enter and yank open the medicine cabinet. The usual—aspirin, hydrogen peroxide, a box of Band-Aids. I emptied the tin of bandages and still nothing.
When I entered Dennis’s bedroom, a cold chill worked its way up my spine. Next to his unmade bed was something that made my skin erupt in nightmarish gooseflesh.
A shrine.
I swallowed bile when my smiling face stared back at me from a silver photo frame. What the… Another picture had originally depicted Levi and me cheek to cheek. But instead of Levi’s face, Dennis had rudely torn out Levi’s likeness. He’d replaced it with his own disgusting smiling mug so that the two of us looked like some bizarre wedded couple. I didn’t even want to think about what Dennis did in this room when he was alone with my pictures.
The wooden table must’ve been something he’d rescued from the back alley of a thrift shop with all its gouges and scratches. I tiptoed closer, my heart hammering in my chest. A martini glass stood next to the photo. Dennis had gone wild with the label maker, the glass announcing, our first drink. The lid from a takeout coffee sat next to that with the proclamation, Rachel’s coffee. A small baggie held a few marijuana buds and read, our first night in. But the pièce de résistance was a plastic container, the kind one would use to store a bar of soap that said, Rachel’s private place.
My skin grew clammy, sweat breaking out on my upper lip as I picked up the box with pincer fingers. When I pried the top off t
he container, I gasped in horror, my hand covering my mouth. My stomach churned with acid, and the room swirled. You sick mother… A used tampon stared back at me, its bloody cotton mocking me. I screamed and flung the box with the sanitary device on Dennis’s bed.
Holy… If this bloodstained swab belonged to me, it meant Dennis had either followed me into a restroom somewhere or gone through my trash. My stomach lurched with sickness, my mouth filling with excess saliva, a bitter tang in my mouth. I choked as the first heaving sensation hit, and I vomited all over the dirty carpet. My throat burned as my flesh crawled like a thousand maggots were set loose on me. My eyes watered as the sickness gripped me, and the final contents of my stomach emptied onto the rug.
I wiped my mouth, my body trembling. Sprinting into the bathroom, I held my breath and rinsed my mouth with cold water. I covered my nose and fled the room. Good lord, wasn’t it enough to be a nasty, repulsive murderer? Did he really have to put my tampon in a freaking holy tabernacle, too? What was next on his list of perversions? I couldn’t let my thoughts go there.
I had to find the thumb drive. If I didn’t, everything I’d worked so hard to achieve would end in a dismal prison cell somewhere out in the scorching hot desert. I could feel the shackles digging into my ankles as a big ass prison guard roughly shoved me into a claustrophobic jail cell with one of the prison crims. No! Dennis was not ruining my life. I was ruining his.
I was a woman on fire. I sprinted through the house yanking cushions off the sofa, pulling clothes out of the bureau, overturning the mattress, crawling under the bed, emptying the contents of the cupboards, pouring oatmeal on top of the melting ice-cream-covered floor, pawing through the cutlery. The minutes ticked down before hot yoga ended.
Where the hell had Dennis hidden the drive? Was it here, or had he lied about that, too?
My phone buzzed an alert. The tracking device I’d affixed to Dennis’s car showed he was leaving Laguna Beach and on the move. Damn it. With any luck at all and maybe a traffic jam, I had thirty minutes tops. Twenty if Dennis put the pedal to the metal.
My heart beat double time, my breath coming in short gasps as I shoved the sofa away from the wall, checked underneath and tore pictures off the wall checking behind to see if it was taped to the back.
Nothing.
My blood pressure spiked as I stood in the middle of the living room, staring at the tarantula’s terrarium. The contents consisted of a water bowl, a rock, and fake plants. I squinted at what looked like black writing peeking out from under the spider’s rock.
No.
No way.
The first two letters held the distinctive script of Dennis’s label maker. R A …
I knelt in front of the cage, and there it was. All I needed to do was get past a scary arachnid with poisonous fangs. What had I read about them? Did a person have at least an hour to get to a hospital should they be bit? Or was it more like fifteen minutes? Maybe the injury was only as bad as a bee sting. Still. I could just imagine it now, my pale body lying in the middle of Dennis’s backyard as I clutched the incriminating evidence in my stiff, cold fingers.
I was getting that flash drive. No way was a spider stopping me.
I carefully slid the top off the terrarium, and the spider arched its body into a defensive position. “Nice little baby,” I cooed. “Be a good boy and let Rachel have what she wants.”
The creature backed up, the bristles on its hairy body standing on end. It would’ve been beautiful in a National Geographic kind of way if I hadn’t been so acutely aware of the time counting down until Dennis burst through the door and caught me red-handed. I didn’t even want to think about the fight he’d have on his hands. And who knew what my dear sweet Dennis carried? Switchblades were popular in his world.
My hand hovered over the rock, and the tarantula scuttled toward my fingers. Whoa. Whoa! I didn’t know spiders could move that fast. I snatched my hand away with lightning speed.
Next to the terrarium stood a smaller enclosure housing worms with a feeding tong leaning casually against the glass. I scrunched up my nose, picked up the tongs, and pinched one of the slimy crawly creatures. I gingerly hovered the worm over the animal. The spider seemed to tune its antennae, if that’s what you call it, toward the food. He slowly moved in that direction.
I didn’t waste any time. I could’ve qualified for the tarantula dodging finals of the Olympics as quickly as I moved. I dropped the worm in the tank. The spider rapidly crawled toward it and seized it so fast I barely saw it happen. I plucked up the rock and grabbed the thumb drive.
I replaced the cover on the terrarium, stood in the middle of the living room, held the drive overhead and let out a war cry. “Yesss!” I shoved it in my pocket.
Excitement spiked through my system, and I felt energized by shots of adrenaline zinging through me. I sprinted the three steps to the bookcase and overturned the whole thing onto the beanbag chair. I snatched up the ceramic box and smashed it against the wall, the remnants raining onto the matted carpet. Take that, you freakshow.
Eyeing the photos Dennis had printed on his cheap printer, I angrily snatched them off the walls, ripping them to shreds. With an energy I hadn’t felt in years, I pawed through my backpack until my hand closed around my can of red spray paint.
I didn’t have much time. Dennis would bust through the door soon. But I was going postal, and as God as my witness, I loved every second of trashing Dennis’s fleabag—no way was I backing down now. How dare he stalk me, blackmail me, set up a freaking shrine to me?
I nearly cackled with delight as I jerkily spray-painted the message CREEPY HIPSTER in jagged bold letters across the living room wall. Let that be the first thing Dennis saw when he came home from hot yoga. Then I charged into his bedroom, kicked over his shrine, and let loose with the spray paint. Over his bed, I angrily scrawled, YOU SICK MOTHERFUCKER.
I slung the backpack over my shoulders and made for the back door. I figured I had a few precious minutes to pick the dirty dishes out of the sink and demolish them. One by one, I hurled dishes against the wall, against the fridge, onto the counter, on the floor. They splintered into hundreds of deadly shards.
From the house next door, I heard the deep bark of a dog and the baritone yelling of a man. I peeked out the window and saw the neighbor shoving curtains aside and glaring through his windowpane.
I froze on the spot, my back glued against the wall. Either I ran for it now, or I waited for the man to stop yelling. It was the longest minute of my life as I stood in Dennis’s trashed kitchen, sucking in deep breaths.
I tiptoed to the back door and decided to make a break for it. My legs pumped, and I was halfway through the overgrown backyard when I saw a man jogging my way. I picked up the pace, but my tennis shoe snagged on an exposed sprinkler head. My hands flew in front of me, and I quickly righted myself. Oh, dear God, the man was going to catch me.
The man yelled behind me. “What the fuck? Stop!”
The dog barked louder, and I saw out of the corner of my eye that it was a big scary looking thing with bared teeth. The man didn’t appear athletic; in fact, it looked like he’d been sharing a few Twinkies with Dennis, but man, could he move. “I said stop!”
My arms pumped, and when I reached the fence, I leaped over it without even thinking about it. My tennis shoes scrabbled over the barrier, my fingers digging into the splintered wood as adrenaline roared through my system.
“I’m calling the cops!” the man yelled.
I was already halfway through the neighbor’s yard, racing onto the next street, and I didn’t stop until I was blocks away. I finally came to a park and hid behind a giant tree until I could breathe again, the air coming in long gasps. The man saw me, probably even called the cops. Oh, my god, what if he took my picture? I placed a hand on my chest, my heart banging away. All he could possibly have would be a snapshot of a person covered in black clothes. I was fine. I had to be.
I shook my hair out of the black knit cap,
pulled the dark shirt over my head, and replaced it with a happy pink rhinestone decorated T-shirt. Next, I toed out of my shoes, pulled down the black jeans, and replaced them with faded blue jeans and a pair of flip flops. As I casually strolled back to my car, I looked like any other Southern California female on the streets that night. Happy and light, whistling a merry tune, hoping to God the neighbor couldn’t identify me.
Nine
I relaxed back into the comfy seat of my Tesla as I drove out of Costa Mesa, keeping an eye on the speedometer.
It was a gorgeous California evening, and when I rolled down the window, I inhaled the briny scent of ocean air as I made my way down Newport Coast Drive, the twinkling lights of the multimillion-dollar homes laid out on my left, the brooding Pacific Ocean directly in front of me.
I had no choice but to believe that the file on Dennis’s computer and the thumb drive were his only copies. If he had duplicates, I’d deal with it. Coming up with creative solutions is what I’m good at. I’d have to take it at face value and read how he responded.
My only regret was that I wouldn’t be able to see the expression on his face when he realized that his precious thumb drive and video file were gone. I gripped the steering wheel, a smile on my face. Take that, Freakshow.
I may have been jumping the gun in my elation, but like a junkie who needs a fix, I greatly wanted to enjoy the hopped up feeling of a successful heist. Nothing was going to ruin the high I experienced that night. Or was it?
Needing a release from the adrenaline rush of my B&E, I rolled down all the windows and let the ocean breeze blow through my hair. “Dennis Smith is one sick motherfucker!” I screamed so loud that all of Newport Beach probably heard me.
Turning left on the Pacific Coast Highway, I sailed down the road. I eased my car to the side of the road where I sometimes liked to stop to watch the surfers who rode the extremely dangerous break directly next to the cliff. I always thought you’d have to be a highly skilled surfer to take on this wave because the ferocious ocean slammed against the jagged cliffside with violence. One false move and the unfortunate athlete caught in the wrong spot would be sliced to ribbons against the rock, then pulled out to sea in the vicious undertow.