Read from the Beginning
Read Part 9
It was nearly 5:00 pm when Gilbert finally awoke in his apartment. The sun was already setting on what appeared to have been a cold winter day. He couldn’t remember any details about the weather, only that they were finally making some progress on their murder case. He rolled over and grabbed the phone.
Parme picked up his cell phone on the second ring. “What?”
“Did the lab call? About the DNA.”
“Yeah,” his partner growled on the other end of the line.
Gilbert rolled out of bed, sitting up on the edge and letting his bare feet touch the cold hardwood floor. “Well, are you going to tell me?” He could hear Parme spit on the other end of the line. He must be outside or in his car. Now that he listened, Gilbert could hear street traffic. Not much of a rush hour in this town, it seemed.
“It’s not him. We cut the little bastard loose this afternoon.”
Gilbert blinked. He wasn’t sure how to feel about this. On the one hand, he never really believed the little man was capable of the brutal murder he was investigating. On the other hand, he was really looking forward to cracking his first case. He didn’t have to guess how Parme felt about it. He decided not to rub it in.
“So…,” Gilbert started.
“So, we keep working the case. I’ll see you at the diner first thing in the morning. And Rob, don’t be late.” There was an edge to his voice that made tardiness sound like a very bad idea.
“Yeah, right. Good night.” Gilbert hung up the phone. The sun was just falling below the horizon. Darkness was coming. He thought about Eagan. If he hadn’t committed the crime he tried to confess to, he must be crazy. Crazy and alone. And heading home in the dark. Whatever he was afraid of would be waiting for him there.
Gilbert thought briefly of going over to Eagan’s apartment, but the thought withered when his mind went back to the case. You don’t waste time on dead ends. That just creates cold case files. Better to focus on the investigation, continue to run it to ground. Anything else was a waste of his time.
He got out of bed and headed to the bathroom.
Across town, his partner shut his cell phone and dropped it unceremoniously into the cup holder next to his seat. He couldn’t believe that little shit wasn’t the perp they were looking for, but he’d learned long ago not to question the lab results. That’s a battle the detectives never won.
He had toyed with the idea of pressing charges against him for popping him in the nose, but had decided it wasn’t worth the crap the other detectives would give him. He was too old to chase down punks like Eagan and give them the beating they deserved, so he let it go.
Letting go of things was something Parme had become good at over the years. Everything was a lot easier that way. It was a lesson he wished he had learned on his first ex-wife. He hadn’t. It had taken a second divorce to get the lesson through his thick skull, but now it was one he wouldn’t forget. He was practicing with his current girlfriend. They were close, but he knew that he could drop the whole thing in a heartbeat if he needed to.
He watched her from the car as she left the diner and headed to the curb, making a beeline for his car. She looked as pretty as she had when she’d served him breakfast that morning. She always did. She leaned against the passenger door and put her head in the window.
“Hey, sailor. Give a girl a ride?”
Parme smiled in spite of himself. He knew he looked like a dork when he smiled, but she brought it out of him. He looked down at her blouse, stained from a long day of moving food from counter to table and back again. She still wore “Barb” on her name tag because it was the same old pin her mother had worn. Not good at letting go, this girl.
“Sure,” he said. “Get in.”
As Pat was slamming the door of Parme’s car, Arlington Eagon was opening the door of his apartment building. He had been released earlier in the afternoon and took a cab from the precinct house back to his apartment, but at the last minute he had asked the driver to pull over and let him out a few blocks away from his building. He had been wandering around the neighborhood since then, afraid to go home. Now, he was almost frozen and had chosen to enter the building instead of risk hypothermia.
Eagan new he was sick. Crazy, actually. Which might be the same thing, but he wasn’t sure. He had been to doctors and therapists and psychic healers and they’d all told him pretty much the same thing. He had a victim complex and people who had that were going to get victimized. That’s just how it worked.
He had hoped that by simplifying his life, he could avoid much of the confrontation that led to his eventual victimization and it had worked, for a while. But now that he knew he was not in control of his own body when he fell asleep, his fears had taken on a whole new dimension.
He had thought about what he could do about his situation for hours, as he walked the streets of his neighborhood. He kept coming back to the same solution. The only solution. He would have to run. Fast and far. And he would have to start this very night.
Deep down, he knew he hadn’t killed that girl. He was pretty sure he had never hurt anyone in his life. He figured he was probably incapable of it. He froze up during conflict of any kind. The whole confession thing was just a desperate attempt to run away from his apartment. It was a strategy that was woven out of panic and, predictably, it had failed.
This time, he would plan his run to freedom better. He would not panic. He would simply pack up the few things he needed and call a cab. He would meet the cab at the curb and then take it to the nearest hotel, where he would spend the night. Tomorrow, he would check himself into the nearest psychiatric facility, telling them that he was having visions of murder and that he was afraid he would hurt someone. They would have to take him.
They would put him in a room he could not escape, probably give him medication to help him sleep and make sure that he was never lured away into the darkness again. He would finally be safe.
He went over this plan again as he walked up the four flights of stairs to his floor and then down the hallway to his apartment. He was feeling much better when he inserted the key and opened his door. He stepped into his apartment and his plan was immediately forgotten.
There was a man standing in his living room. A large, hairy man. He squinted up at him for a moment and then recognized him as the factory worker who lived down the hall, Mike or Mitch or something, he couldn't remember now. The man was holding a crowbar and staring at him with heavy-lidded eyes.
The girl on his couch caught his eye when she moved, bringing a lit cigarette to her lips in a smooth motion. She was small and blonde. Eagan couldn’t remember ever having seen her before. She wasn’t wearing much clothing. She had the same half-asleep looking eyes. Were they both on drugs?
“What is this,” Eagan stammered. “I don’t have any drugs...or much money.”
“Do it, Mark,” the girl said calmly. “Do it now.”
The big man took a step toward Eagan and swung the crowbar at his head.
Read Part 11
Wednesday, July 30, 2014
Tuesday, July 29, 2014
9. A New Relationship
Read from the Beginning
Read Part 8
Gilbert headed home and fell into bed. He had been asleep for about an hour when Mark Boyle started to wake up across town in apartment 407 in Arlington Eagan’s apartment building.
It was just before noon when Boyle's alarm clock jarred him out of a dreamless sleep. He groaned and sat up on the couch in the small apartment that had become his entire world. The layout was exactly the same as Eagan’s apartment and every other in the building.
Boyle never slept in the small bedroom. It had another purpose. Most of his time, when he was not at work, was spent in the apartment’s main room. A comfortable leather couch that doubled as a bed shared the space with a big screen television, a gaming console, a couple of cheap shelves filled with video games and an end table for his beer.
There was a nearly empty bottle sitting on the end table. Boyle reached for it and drank the warm beer. He grimaced as it went down and then tossed the empty bottle into a plastic recycling container, half filled with last night’s empty glass beer bottles. At least I recycle, he thought. He used to be proud of that fact. Now, he felt nothing.
He sat back on the couch for a moment, briefly considered going back to sleep and then headed for the shower.
It took awhile for the hot water to make its way to his shower, as it always did. When it was warm, Boyle stepped under the spray and let it bring him back to life. If you could call what he was living a life. He let his head fall forward onto the tiled wall and wondered for the millionth time how he had come to this.
When Boyle left high school, his ambition had been to become a video game programmer. He’d attended technical school where they taught him to program computers that were decades out of date. It should have come as no surprise that when he emerged he was only qualified to work on machines that were as old as he was, which almost no one used anymore.
He found work in a small manufacturing facility that specialized in creating prototypes. He programmed the old CNC equipment to create whatever the engineers wanted and when that was done he programmed it to create something else.
But Boyle didn’t give up on his dream. He set aside the small bedroom in his apartment for his office, bought some used office furniture and started educating himself. He saved up for a cheap computer and an internet connection and then used those to learn how to build a faster machine. Once he had a serviceable computer, he set out to learn the new technologies that powered the latest video games.
He knew what he wanted to create. He had been an avid gamer for as long as he could remember. Instead of cable television, he spent his entertainment budget on a subscription to a gaming network, giving him access to a world of other players and a window out of his crappy apartment and into the world he really wanted to live in.
For a while, he had been learning, a little more each day. But lately, he had been beset by a lingering depression, a feeling that he would never reach his goal, never escape this dreary life. His bedroom/office had fallen into disuse and he spent more time playing old games and drinking beer and less time working on his future. Well, no time, lately. He had fallen into a routine. A rut, to be more accurate.
To add some stress to his depression, there were rumors at the company of another round of layoffs. The older systems were giving way to newer technologies. Instead of relying on programmers to tell them what to do, the new machines had access to a near limitless list of pre-programmed jobs. Untrained workers could tell the machines what to do by pressing a few buttons. The only good news what that the new tools were expensive and it wasn’t clear whether his firm would invest. But the threat of it filled him with dread.
The hot water started to run out and he hadn’t washed his hair yet. Quickly, he lathered up and rinsed before the warm water was completely gone. He threw on his clothes, briefly considered shaving but abandoned the idea. He grabbed his car keys off the kitchen counter on his way out of the apartment.
His apartment was at the front of the building so he didn’t have to walk far to get to the stairwell. He started down and was surprised to see the door to the 3rd floor hallway open and Sandy Gallagher leaning against it.
“Hi, Mark,” she purred at him. He stopped short.
Mark had spoken to her once, about a year ago or so at one of the ill-fated building holiday parties that the new manager had thrown in an attempt to create a sense of community. It was an awful little affair held on the small square of lawn behind the building. No one had anything in common with each other, so they sipped free bottles of beer and waited together for the delivery pizza to arrive.
Sandy had been (and remained) the only other person in the building who seemed to be near his age, so he had introduced himself. There were maybe a couple dozen words shared and then it was over, all but the pizza eating anyway.
She had never looked at him again, though he sometimes pretended it was because he came and went on an odd schedule. And now she smiled at him from the doorway to the third floor, in her nightgown. A question about why she was home at this hour was playing in the back of his mind, but it couldn’t get to the front because he was wondering why she was nearly naked. He realized he could see through the thin, white material to her small nipples.
“Um, hi,” he replied when his attention made it back up to her eyes and he realized she was waiting.
“Can you help me with something?” she asked.
“I was on my way to work.”
“It will only take a second.” She smiled at him and led him across the hallway to her apartment, which was situated directly beneath his.
She led him through the living room and into the kitchen, pulling a light bulb, still in its box, off the shelf as the went. “Can you help me put this in,” she asked sweetly. “I can’t reach it. See?” She stretched up toward the light socket, she was a few inches too short. Boyle didn’t notice that as he was caught up in the movement of her short top rising up her legs until he could see the white strap of a thong, high on her hip.
His eyes slid off her exposed legs to the kitchen chair behind her, a steady enough platform to allow a person much heavier than her reach the light. What was going on?
Boyle was not the kind of guy that girls came on to. He had been, when he was younger, but the more dedicated he became to pursuing his dream of becoming a game designer, the more ridiculous he began to look in the eyes of potential dates. He became accustomed to the confused look a date would get when he finally told her that he hoped to make a living making video games one day. It usually put a serious road block between him and a second date, to say nothing of sex.
“Well, are you going to do me...this favor or aren’t you,” she teased.
“Yeah...sure.” He took the bulb, reached up to the fixture and threaded it into the socket. The light, which was already on, came to life in his hand. He flinched and she reacted immediately by throwing her arms around him.
“Wow! That was a little scary,” she smiled up at him.
Certain that she was making fun of him, he untangled himself from her and backed away. “Well, there you go. Nice to see you, Sandy.”
She moved quickly by him and beat him to the front door, closing it securely and turning the deadbolt. “You’re not going to leave without letting me thank you, are you?”
“I’m going to be late for work. I really should go.” He felt like he said these words with some authority, but in reality his mind was spinning and it came out weakly. Logically, he knew that what he desperately hoped was happening couldn’t actually be happening. Even if it was, it would all end as soon as she found out who he really was. She was all smiles, playing with her blonde hair and batting her blue eyes. He really did not want to see her change when she learned what he was all about. That was never pretty.
“I should go,” he started, but she pressed her little hands to his chest, which he noticed had the effect of pushing her breasts together nicely, and pushed him backward to the couch. He fell into it and was surprised by how comfortable it was, but only for as long as it took for Sandy to climb on top of him. Then he forgot everything but her. She put her elbows on his shoulders and looked down into his eyes.
“I want to thank you,” she said, “and I plan to.”
Her eyes had seemed blue before, but for the life of him, Boyle couldn’t tell what color they were now, they were just beautiful. So beautiful. Her lips parted and she kissed him, deeply. He lost his breath and felt the fear start to loosen its grip on him. Maybe she would understand. He opened his eyes and looked into hers again. Yes, he was sure she would understand.
She pulled back and smiled. He realized something was happening to his body that hadn’t happened in the presence of a girl in a long time. She realized it, too, and settled herself onto him more securely.
“I’m going to thank you properly for helping me,” she said. “And then you’re going to do one more favor for me.”
He may have said yes. Later, he would swear that he could not remember anything that had happened after the time he first saw Ms. Gallagher in the stairwell.
Read Part 10
Read Part 8
Gilbert headed home and fell into bed. He had been asleep for about an hour when Mark Boyle started to wake up across town in apartment 407 in Arlington Eagan’s apartment building.
It was just before noon when Boyle's alarm clock jarred him out of a dreamless sleep. He groaned and sat up on the couch in the small apartment that had become his entire world. The layout was exactly the same as Eagan’s apartment and every other in the building.
Boyle never slept in the small bedroom. It had another purpose. Most of his time, when he was not at work, was spent in the apartment’s main room. A comfortable leather couch that doubled as a bed shared the space with a big screen television, a gaming console, a couple of cheap shelves filled with video games and an end table for his beer.
There was a nearly empty bottle sitting on the end table. Boyle reached for it and drank the warm beer. He grimaced as it went down and then tossed the empty bottle into a plastic recycling container, half filled with last night’s empty glass beer bottles. At least I recycle, he thought. He used to be proud of that fact. Now, he felt nothing.
He sat back on the couch for a moment, briefly considered going back to sleep and then headed for the shower.
It took awhile for the hot water to make its way to his shower, as it always did. When it was warm, Boyle stepped under the spray and let it bring him back to life. If you could call what he was living a life. He let his head fall forward onto the tiled wall and wondered for the millionth time how he had come to this.
When Boyle left high school, his ambition had been to become a video game programmer. He’d attended technical school where they taught him to program computers that were decades out of date. It should have come as no surprise that when he emerged he was only qualified to work on machines that were as old as he was, which almost no one used anymore.
He found work in a small manufacturing facility that specialized in creating prototypes. He programmed the old CNC equipment to create whatever the engineers wanted and when that was done he programmed it to create something else.
But Boyle didn’t give up on his dream. He set aside the small bedroom in his apartment for his office, bought some used office furniture and started educating himself. He saved up for a cheap computer and an internet connection and then used those to learn how to build a faster machine. Once he had a serviceable computer, he set out to learn the new technologies that powered the latest video games.
He knew what he wanted to create. He had been an avid gamer for as long as he could remember. Instead of cable television, he spent his entertainment budget on a subscription to a gaming network, giving him access to a world of other players and a window out of his crappy apartment and into the world he really wanted to live in.
For a while, he had been learning, a little more each day. But lately, he had been beset by a lingering depression, a feeling that he would never reach his goal, never escape this dreary life. His bedroom/office had fallen into disuse and he spent more time playing old games and drinking beer and less time working on his future. Well, no time, lately. He had fallen into a routine. A rut, to be more accurate.
To add some stress to his depression, there were rumors at the company of another round of layoffs. The older systems were giving way to newer technologies. Instead of relying on programmers to tell them what to do, the new machines had access to a near limitless list of pre-programmed jobs. Untrained workers could tell the machines what to do by pressing a few buttons. The only good news what that the new tools were expensive and it wasn’t clear whether his firm would invest. But the threat of it filled him with dread.
The hot water started to run out and he hadn’t washed his hair yet. Quickly, he lathered up and rinsed before the warm water was completely gone. He threw on his clothes, briefly considered shaving but abandoned the idea. He grabbed his car keys off the kitchen counter on his way out of the apartment.
His apartment was at the front of the building so he didn’t have to walk far to get to the stairwell. He started down and was surprised to see the door to the 3rd floor hallway open and Sandy Gallagher leaning against it.
“Hi, Mark,” she purred at him. He stopped short.
Mark had spoken to her once, about a year ago or so at one of the ill-fated building holiday parties that the new manager had thrown in an attempt to create a sense of community. It was an awful little affair held on the small square of lawn behind the building. No one had anything in common with each other, so they sipped free bottles of beer and waited together for the delivery pizza to arrive.
Sandy had been (and remained) the only other person in the building who seemed to be near his age, so he had introduced himself. There were maybe a couple dozen words shared and then it was over, all but the pizza eating anyway.
She had never looked at him again, though he sometimes pretended it was because he came and went on an odd schedule. And now she smiled at him from the doorway to the third floor, in her nightgown. A question about why she was home at this hour was playing in the back of his mind, but it couldn’t get to the front because he was wondering why she was nearly naked. He realized he could see through the thin, white material to her small nipples.
“Um, hi,” he replied when his attention made it back up to her eyes and he realized she was waiting.
“Can you help me with something?” she asked.
“I was on my way to work.”
“It will only take a second.” She smiled at him and led him across the hallway to her apartment, which was situated directly beneath his.
She led him through the living room and into the kitchen, pulling a light bulb, still in its box, off the shelf as the went. “Can you help me put this in,” she asked sweetly. “I can’t reach it. See?” She stretched up toward the light socket, she was a few inches too short. Boyle didn’t notice that as he was caught up in the movement of her short top rising up her legs until he could see the white strap of a thong, high on her hip.
His eyes slid off her exposed legs to the kitchen chair behind her, a steady enough platform to allow a person much heavier than her reach the light. What was going on?
Boyle was not the kind of guy that girls came on to. He had been, when he was younger, but the more dedicated he became to pursuing his dream of becoming a game designer, the more ridiculous he began to look in the eyes of potential dates. He became accustomed to the confused look a date would get when he finally told her that he hoped to make a living making video games one day. It usually put a serious road block between him and a second date, to say nothing of sex.
“Well, are you going to do me...this favor or aren’t you,” she teased.
“Yeah...sure.” He took the bulb, reached up to the fixture and threaded it into the socket. The light, which was already on, came to life in his hand. He flinched and she reacted immediately by throwing her arms around him.
“Wow! That was a little scary,” she smiled up at him.
Certain that she was making fun of him, he untangled himself from her and backed away. “Well, there you go. Nice to see you, Sandy.”
She moved quickly by him and beat him to the front door, closing it securely and turning the deadbolt. “You’re not going to leave without letting me thank you, are you?”
“I’m going to be late for work. I really should go.” He felt like he said these words with some authority, but in reality his mind was spinning and it came out weakly. Logically, he knew that what he desperately hoped was happening couldn’t actually be happening. Even if it was, it would all end as soon as she found out who he really was. She was all smiles, playing with her blonde hair and batting her blue eyes. He really did not want to see her change when she learned what he was all about. That was never pretty.
“I should go,” he started, but she pressed her little hands to his chest, which he noticed had the effect of pushing her breasts together nicely, and pushed him backward to the couch. He fell into it and was surprised by how comfortable it was, but only for as long as it took for Sandy to climb on top of him. Then he forgot everything but her. She put her elbows on his shoulders and looked down into his eyes.
“I want to thank you,” she said, “and I plan to.”
Her eyes had seemed blue before, but for the life of him, Boyle couldn’t tell what color they were now, they were just beautiful. So beautiful. Her lips parted and she kissed him, deeply. He lost his breath and felt the fear start to loosen its grip on him. Maybe she would understand. He opened his eyes and looked into hers again. Yes, he was sure she would understand.
She pulled back and smiled. He realized something was happening to his body that hadn’t happened in the presence of a girl in a long time. She realized it, too, and settled herself onto him more securely.
“I’m going to thank you properly for helping me,” she said. “And then you’re going to do one more favor for me.”
He may have said yes. Later, he would swear that he could not remember anything that had happened after the time he first saw Ms. Gallagher in the stairwell.
Read Part 10
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