by Andrew Post
The Pescatellis’ cars, as well as the Petroskys’, were all gone, hauled off, impounded. At the sidewalk, small wooden stakes had been driven into the ground, yellow police tape keeping no one back. No one was here to gawk anymore, no more reporters, no rubbernecking neighbors elbowing for their chance to tell the camera, “But he was such a nice, quiet man.” He’d be forgotten in a handful of weeks, maybe even days. Something else would come along. Doctor Bad would become yesterday’s news.
He climbed onto the back deck and found his back door laced across with three strips of yellow police tape. He tore it away and stepped inside, the rank smell of congealed blood hitting him like a wall. They’d turned his AC off and the house smelled like a slaughterhouse in peak summer – which, really, wasn’t too far from the truth. He closed the door behind him and stood in the dark and stink of his place, listening. He was alone. He clicked on the kitchen light. And from the doorway he could see his living room’s carpet. All the bodies were gone but they’d left their stains. More red than beige, some outlines were faintly visible, the source of each one where both families had lain dying. The house felt haunted, but at the fresh point before the ghosts knew they could be seen and heard and were just waiting for someone to notice things out of place. Frank felt like a ghost himself. He stepped onto the stained carpet, hearing it crunch instead of squish now – each fiber was rigid with dried blood.
He moved to his front windows and peeked out. No one. Nobody.
The side window. Mister and Missus Shulman, he could see, were in their living room. She’d lived, but she had a massive cast taking up her entire left arm from shoulder to wrist. Her husband was waiting on her, bringing her dinner on a TV tray. She motioned for a kiss and he clutched his back, but smiled, to bend down and give her one. They watched something together on TV, Mister Shulman glancing over as his wife ate, and laughed at whatever they were watching, Mister Shulman’s eyes lingering on his laughing wife a little longer before returning his focus to the screen. Frank let the curtain fall shut before they noticed the cause of her agony was watching and smiling along with them, trying to steal their happiness and relief after nearly causing her death.
He couldn’t stay in the house forever. The police would be back. Someone would see the lights on and call. The house would be watched, if not currently, somebody would be by before long. Frank went into the kitchen and pulled open his fridge. A half carton of milk and the Tupperware of leftovers he couldn’t remember saving. He closed the fridge and went into the bathroom, figuring he’d at least get cleaned up if not fed. He didn’t feel that hungry anyway, not after all of this. He sometimes stored excess supplies for his practice in the bathroom, packing the linen closet with coils of tubing and hypodermic needles and pills and whatnot. Pulling the closet door open, looking for a towel, he noticed the ten STD test kits he’d gotten from Ted with his most recent restock.
The plan had been assembling itself on the drive home, since dropping off Amber and Jolene. Perhaps in the background of his mind, perhaps just thought and considered on the fringes, but now, seeing the test kits, waiting to give him the status of his blood – tainted or not tainted – he had his answer. It would determine what he did next. He took a sample of his own blood, smeared it on the first stick, the second stick, then the third stick. He cranked an egg timer to one hour, set it on the bathroom counter, and undressed. He showered, listening to the soothing ticking beyond the faucet spray, giving the fates their time to determine things for him.
He faced the shower wall, letting the spray run down his battered body. Even warm water hurt. He had a bus ticket waiting for him at the Greyhound station. He could get across town in an hour, and still have time. He could still run.
He watched the final seconds of the egg timer tick by. When it rang, it sounded faraway to his ruined ears.
The bus bound for Laredo would have an empty seat on it.
He dressed in a clean T-shirt and his last pair of cargo shorts. He wanted to be barefoot, but because of the carpet, slipped his shoes back on. Returning to the bathroom, he looked at himself in the mirror. One eyebrow was gone, burn marks around his left eye. The hair that’d been fried by the shotgun blast had rubbed off in the shower. He looked more like his mugshot now. Taken that night they dragged him from the airport bathroom, slicked with stress sweat, malnourished and afraid. He forced his eyes down to the counter before him, where the three strips sat in their small plastic trays with his blood smeared onto each. Three negatives, on all three tests. He had nothing. Nothing but the clean O-negative in his veins.
It may not go to the right people. It might all end up keeping the affluent, self-serving – like he used to be – above ground, staving off the inevitable for a few more years of golfing and not leaving a tip. But no one would get hurt.
Frank crunched over his blood-hardened carpet and sat in his recliner again in the dark. His phone had three percent of a charge left, just enough for two quick calls. He keyed in three numbers.
“911. What’s your emergency?”
“Ambulance,” Frank said and gave his address, slow and clear, and hung up.
In his contacts, he pressed his daughter’s name on the screen. She answered on the first ring.
“Dad? Are you okay? We’re still at Grandma’s. Mom’s worried. We saw the news. What’s going on? Why are they saying that about you? Dad, I—”
“Jessica,” Frank said. “You and your mom can go home now.”
“Where are you? Are you in jail?”
“No, I’m at my house.” He nearly said home. This wasn’t home, never had been. “Listen, Jessica, I have to go soon but I just wanted to call to say I love you very much.”
“Dad, you’re kinda scaring me. Do bad people have you or something?”
“No. I’m okay. But, just let me get this out. I’m sorry I missed so much time with you, Jessica, between work and my time away.” He paused. “No excuses, I was a bad dad. I should’ve been better to you, been there more. You deserved so much more than what you got with me.”
Jessica said nothing for a moment, but Frank could hear her quickening breathing. “Dad.…”
“Take care of your mother for me. I love you.”
“I love you too, Dad.”
“Bye, Jessica.”
“Dad—”
He hung up and turned off his phone so he wouldn’t hear it when she tried calling him back, if she tried calling him back. He sat in his recliner in the dark with the pistol on the armrest. He waited until his curtains lit up again. They did, but not as he was expecting. The grand finale fireworks, the color of each blast fading quickly from the far wall of his living room. It ended, and he could hear people cheering a few blocks over, his room staying dark around him. Then, soon after, swelling bright and never fading but instead flashing, harder and brighter and faster. Sirens screamed, a sound he always thought sounded like hold on, hold on, hold on. He heard tires screech outside his home and feet stamping up his front walk.
Frank Goode took one last deep breath, held it, closed his eyes, and gave himself up.
* * *
Amber woke up in a hospital bed for the second day in a row. She sat bolt upright expecting the man wearing the bulletproof vest under his scrubs to be there with the tiny screwdriver near her eye. But it wasn’t the same room, the view out the window was different. And she had a roommate. It hurt her neck to turn to look. Jolene lay next to her, multiple tubes running in and out of her, her IV stand loaded with bags of blood and clear liquids. Her heart-rate monitor bleeped, each peak strong and steady. The shape of Jolene’s blankets over her lower half was odd, like she was lying with her legs crossed at the ankle – but that wasn’t quite it. Just one hill at the end of the bed, one foot.
Yesterday – or however long it’d been – came back to Amber in a cold flood. She looked down at her own hills and valleys under her blanket, her body that lay hidd
en by the scratchy hospital blankets. She only had one foot mound and she could feel that she didn’t have her legs crossed under there, but she felt like, maybe, she had both legs. She forced herself to pick up the corners of her blanket, lift, and look.
She didn’t need to press the button to summon the nurse. Her scream did that.
It was enough to rouse Jolene from whatever drugs they had in her. She woke, blinked, looked over at Amber crying, and started crying too. The nurses didn’t want her to, but Amber insisted they help her over into Jolene’s bed. The nurses scrambled to keep their IV lines and oxygen mask tubes from getting tangled. Amber pulled Jolene close, who could barely do more than sob and wheeze apologetic-sounding noises. Neither cared about their loss. It was a shock, certainly, for Amber – but the prospect of losing Jolene was so much more scary. She would’ve given both legs. Both arms. Her goddamn head. All of it, if it meant keeping her Jo-Jo alive. And though she’d never asked her to, Amber saw Jolene would do the same – and had done the same. But they were alive. They were alive, and they had each other.
* * *
Middle Texas was about as flat as flat could get. And quiet. Ted Beaumont couldn’t pick up a radio station no matter how slowly he turned the dial. Just fuzz.
He’d been driving for nearly eighteen hours, only stopping for gas and pissing in an old soda bottle sloshing side to side around the floorboards. But he was making good time. He glanced over at the rumpled paper bag in the passenger seat he’d put the seat belt across to hold it in place. He counted it leaving the Minneapolis impound lot, quickly – roughly half a million. It was a serious pain in the ass prying open the back of the hearse, but he did it, he got the money. And nobody, nobody, had to know he’d taken it. The story he had prepared was that Slug was, as suspected, a mole for the ATF. After cutting off Amber Hawthorne’s leg, Slug shot Becky, Luke, and Fernando. It was by Ted’s quick thinking alone that he managed to kill Slug and make it out of town with the load before the cops were drawn to the bowling alley by the gunfire. He would get the load to Juarez. He would get his payday – on top of what he retrieved from the two troublesome bitches’ hearse – and he would be set for life. It was all beaches and playing with his kids in the sand and fucking his wife under the stars listening to the ocean from here on. Fuck, he might even dump the wife and kids and hook up with some young thing. He had the money to do it now. And he always had a thing for Latin women. Hot-blooded, he heard. Just as likely to crack you across the head when they come as bring you breakfast in bed the next morning.
It would be a good life, once he got there. Just a few hundred more miles.
Dead, flat landscape and the highway ahead of him and the numbing vibration of the truck’s wheel in his hands. It felt like he’d traveled the same stretch about a million times, like the planet wasn’t a sphere but shaped like a rolling pin and he was just going down and around and up and over, down and around and up and over.…
Glancing in the side mirror to see if anyone was following him – a habit he’d developed as soon as he’d left Minnesota – he didn’t see any cop cars or Frank chasing in that ugly little yellow car, but a flock of black birds. Dozens of them, all flying low, all keeping time with the truck, some even trying to sink their talons into the sheet metal, it seemed, in an attempt to get Ted to brake.
Then the alarm started yelling at him. One dial next to the gas said the refrigerator unit was dying and the temperature back there was rapidly spiking to degrees unfriendly to delicate human tissue.
Ted pulled over to the side of the road. The truck was making weird noises, both the engine up front and the second one behind the cab that was supposed to – as he’d been told – be pretty reliable.
But no. Of course fucking not.
It’d failed and now he was in the middle of nowhere with an entire load warming up in the back. He dropped down out of the truck, immediately getting pummeled by the heat. It turned his stomach, made his brain feel loose in his skull. He couldn’t even hear the truck idling because his ears were being filled with the noise of the cloud of crows that, now that he’d stopped, swarmed the truck. They swooped low, beaks angling for Ted’s neck and cheek and forehead. One pecked him on the crown of his shaved head, and it hurt.
“Piss off!” he shouted, waggling his arms around. He went to the back of the truck, stepped up on the bumper, and tugged on the lock release. One breath and he was vomiting, violently, on hands and knees on the red-dirt roadside. The open truck door released a shallow stream of viscous brown-red fluid that dribbled off the bumper, thick as cheap syrup, each drip clinging before letting go.
The birds dove past him, diving into the truck. Ted watched in horror as they tore at the melting load inside, pecking through the cling-wrap over arms and legs sitting piled on the shelves within. They had finally caught up to him and were now, after a long chase, set about devouring everything.
Staring, seeing but not believing, Ted got out his phone to call his wife. He barely had one bar out here and the connection showed for it.
“Hey, baby,” she said, “you just missed it, the twins just had their first dip in the Gulf. I got pictures. You should really see them, they love it down here. When are you going to—”
“We have a problem. A big one.”
“What’s wrong, baby? Everything go all right leaving Minneapolis?”
“No. Nothing went right. And I got another problem staring me in the face right now.” Ted paused to swallow down the urge to gag. He picked up a rock to throw at the truck to chase off the birds – maybe something was salvageable down in there, buried deep where it was still cold. But the birds ignored the rock, and continued to peck, tear, and devour. “The truck broke down and everything’s melting. We’re fucked.”
“Can’t you call somebody?”
“Call who? They’re all dead. Get your head out of your ass.”
“Don’t you talk to your wife like that, Theodore, I’m just trying to help. Nobody told you to get wrapped up in this shit. I wanted to stay in Minnesota but no, your greedy ass just had to ‘step yourself up into the next business bracket’ didn’t you?”
Ted sighed. “I know, baby, I know. I’m sorry. It’s just…they’re expecting me down there with a load tonight. They were willing to let go what was going to New York. Load going to Cali they let slide, but only if I could get them this one. This isn’t going to be good.”
Maybe, just maybe, if somebody came along right this minute, someone who wasn’t going to ask questions about that smell coming from the back, somebody who knew how to fix the cooling system of a truck like this, Ted might be able to squeak by un-murdered. Maybe.
A sound turned him. An approaching dust cloud, made wiggly by the heat waves. He hung up on his wife, stepped up onto the bumper to slam the truck’s back doors closed – the fucking birds can stay in there if they like their free meal so much – and took off his shirt. Ted stood waving it over his head in the middle of the road, squinting to try and make out details of the approaching vehicle just over the distant hill. “Please don’t be a cop. Please don’t be a motherfucking cop.”
The little blue car solidified as it emerged from the heat waves rising up off the blacktop – snapping to sudden sharpness in Ted’s squinting eyes. A familiar car, familiar color. But they showed no signs of slowing down and he stepped aside, waving the fistful of money from his pocket at them. And as they ripped past him, he had only one second to look inside at the driver, and his passenger. The man driving tipped a trilby hat, smiling a friendly hello. The passenger, pale-skinned and asleep, lay with her head on the driver’s shoulder.
Ted turned with the car, watching it go screaming on down the highway without ever showing any signs of slowing to help him out. The car, the woman in the passenger seat.
“Simone?” Ted said, coughing away the road dust and the pervasive stink radiating from his own stranded vehicle. He watched
the blue Honda reduce to a pinprick on the horizon. And he was about to call his wife back when, again, from behind, noise drew him around. A second dust cloud was on approach out there in the far-flung, sun-blasted distance. This cloud was bigger, almost like a building sandstorm. And from it, not thunder came ringing out but many sirens layering over each other – it had to be a hundred police cars. And they too started to develop sharpness to their shapes as they emerged from the heat waves, in dogged pursuit.
Ted lowered the shirt he was waving overhead and the crumpled cash in his hand going soggy from palm sweat. He glanced back at his vehicle, now a perch for the hundreds of crows, and the puddle of congealing rot-soup snaking a long slick river across the desert highway. He wasn’t hoping for anyone to stop now.
He watched some of the police cars keep going after the Honda, but more than a few were peeling off from the pack to crunch onto the roadside, slowing, the officers inside all drawing guns before stepping out, using their open doors as shields.
Ted raised his hands, let the damp bills get snatched away by the wind, joining to float and flutter with the vultures circling and watching and waiting high overhead.
Chapter Ten
In the church basement filled with the smell of coffee and the sound of the snow melting off everyone’s shoes, a woman stood behind the podium in front of the many folding chairs and said, “So, we have a newcomer here with us tonight. Would you like to come up and introduce yourself?”
Amber pressed her cane down and struggled to stand. Some of the others around her tried helping her but she smiled, thanked them, and said she had it. She moved up to the front of the room with one shoe holding a flesh-and-blood foot and the other a foot of titanium and carbon fiber – the stuff inside space ships, the physical therapist had said the day they fitted her with it.