Cut Corners Volume 2 Page 2

  I did not take my eyes from the guy on the table, but in my peripheral vision I saw the blue and amber lights of a police car flashing on the dark street in front of the house.

  He pushed himself up on both hands again in a sudden, sharp motion, and as he rose up on his knees, I pulled the knife out of his back and staggered away from the table. He planted one foot on the tabletop, then the other, and turned to me in a crouch before lunging toward me, bloody arms outstretched.

  Still using both hands, I swung the knife upward and plunged the blade into his abdomen. He vomited as he went down like a rock and it splattered over my pants. The knife was snatched out of my hands and hit the floor with him. I quickly kicked it away from him and stepped back, out of his reach.

  But he did not move again. I stood there for a moment — longer than a moment, hell, I don’t know how long I stood there — frozen solid like an ice sculpture, staring at him, thinking, You killed him. You killed him. Someone’s son. You killed someone’s son. You killed someone’s —

  “Are you the homeowner?”

  The voice made me jump and I looked up to see a police officer standing outside the window, with another behind him.

  “Uh, yeah, yes, I am. Royce. Harry Royce.”

  “May we come in, Mr. Royce?”

  “Yeah, uh, yeah, I guess you’d better.” I turned away from the window, frantically trying to remember the thing I was supposed to say to the police in a situation like this. Something about being in fear for my life, something like that.

  There were two police officers on the porch when I opened the door and security screen, and one of them came inside while the other stepped out on the lawn and spoke with my neighbors. I felt woozy and he spotted it right away.

  “Let’s get you in a chair, Mr. Royce,” he said as he guided me to the closest club chair just as my knee exploded with pain and completely collapsed, making me drop into my seat. “Would you like me to call an ambulance?”

  “Oh, no, please, I can’t afford it,” I said. I thought of Amber, who had been physically assaulted by that gibbering asshole. “But, uh, you should see how Amber’s doing. He punched her a couple of times, threatened to kill her. She may need an ambulance.”

  “Was she badly injured?”

  “Well, her lip was cut, but that’s just what I saw. I don’t know how — ”

  “Where is she right now?”

  “In the bedroom with my wife. I can call them.”

  “Hold it. Do me a favor and sit there for a minute, all right? Relax.”

  I watched as he walked over to the body on the floor. He hunkered down with his back to me. I assumed he was looking for a pulse. He stood, mumbled something into the microphone attached to his collar, then turned to me and said, “He’s not dead. He has a pulse. I’ve called an ambulance.”

  “He ... he’s not dead?”

  “No, Mr. Royce.”

  I felt relief, but it was a distant feeling. I did not feel much of anything then, but I would in a little while.

  “Your neighbors said he threatened to kill you, too.”

  “Yeah. I think he wanted to kill everybody.”

  “Was he behaving erratically?”

  “Erratically? He was on another planet. He was talking about Amber’s house changing, saying she was a witch and she was manipulating his vibrations and wanted to sacrifice him in some kind of ritual.” I turned my head back and forth finding it hard to believe it had happened, that someone had said those things to me, screamed them at me.

  The officer nodded knowingly as he removed a notepad and pen from a pocket and started jotting down notes. He was young, in his late twenties, with short, dark hair and a round face. Officer Pratt according to the nameplate above his badge.

  “Do you believe he was under the influence of drugs?”

  “Definitely. Meth would be my guess, but I’m not an expert. I’ve seen it before, though. Lot lizards. I’m a trucker.”

  He nodded again. “That’s a pretty common problem among them.” He gestured toward the body with the pen in his hand and said, “What happened here?”

  I told him everything. But I didn’t say it. I forgot to say it.

  “You were in fear for your life?” Officer Pratt said.

  “Yes! All of us were in fear for our lives. We were terrified. That’s the scariest goddamned thing that’s ever happened to me.”

  Louise and Amber came down the hall and joined us. When Amber saw the body, she began to cry and Louise put an arm around her shoulders, turned her toward Officer Pratt and me.

  He smiled. “Well, you acted bravely, Mr. Royce. A lot of people would have closed the door to a neighbor in trouble.”

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  “It’s true.” He nodded at the bleeding guy on the floor. “Have you seen him before?”

  “No, never.”

  “He lives with his grandmother in the apartment complex behind the Quicky Mart. She raised him. He’s been doing meth for a while now. In fact, he picked it up from her. She has quite a history. We’ve been having a lot of problems with him, but we’ve never had enough to put him away for any length of time.” He was about to say more but seemed to think better of it. He turned to Louise and Amber and said, “An ambulance is coming to deal with him. Should be here any minute.” To Amber, he said, “I need to ask you some questions.”

  As Officer Pratt talked to Amber, Louise came to my side and bent down, put a hand on my shoulder, kissed my forehead. “Are you okay, honey?”

  “Oh, yeah, sure, I’m okay. How are you?”

  “I’m fine. I was in the back, remember? Nothing happened to me.”

  “Well, nothing happened to me, either. Really, I’m fine.”

  To my embarrassment, I unexpectedly began to cry for the first time since my father died thirty years ago — just as hard, too — and Louise knelt down, wrapped her arms around me, and held me tightly.

  ****

  I did not sleep much that night. Every time I started to drift off, I heard that brick exploding through the window again and jerked awake with a gasp. In addition to that, my knee throbbed and I could not get comfortable. Louise had to get up and go to work soon and I did not want to disturb what little sleep she was getting, so I got up and went to the living room, sat on the couch and turned on the TV. Louise joined me a few minutes later.

  “Can’t sleep?” she said.

  “No. But you should stay in bed. You have to work.”

  “I’ll take the day off, if you’d like.”

  “You won’t be getting much sleep, so if you want to stay home because you’re tired, then you should. But don’t stay for me. I think I’d rather be alone, if that’s okay.”

  She put her hand on my leg. “Of course it’s okay. To be honest, I shouldn’t miss work today. There’s a meeting I need to attend.” Louise worked at a bank that was in the process of being absorbed by a larger bank, and the process created a lot of extra work.

  “You should go back to bed. I’m fine, I just can’t sleep. I’ll find a movie on Netflix.”

  She kissed me and went back down the hall.

  An ambulance had come and two EMTs had worked on the guy, then carted him off on a stretcher. The broken window over our dining table had been boarded up quickly by our neighbors Chris and Nick while the police questioned everyone, and Lois, our neighbor to the right, helped Louise and Amber clean up the kitchen, an activity for which my knee disqualified me.

  Officer Pratt had said they were not charging me with anything, that it was clearly self-defense with multiple witnesses and we were in fear for our lives. But if the guy died, it would be up to the D.A.’s office. He suspected, in that case, that nothing would change.

  After the police and ambulance had left, Amber stayed a while. I think she was afraid to go home alone for the night. We offered her the spare bedroom, but she declined. She asked to take a look at Killdagger and I told her the story behind the knife.

  “Then
this knife is important to you,” she said.

  “Sure. A gift from my son, my favorite fantasy series — what’s not to love? Look, you shouldn’t be alone tonight. Isn’t there a friend you can call?”

  “Yes, I might do that. I should go home and check on Percy.”

  Louise said, “If you need anything at all, you have our number, please call.”

  After Amber left, Louise had gone to bed and I’d stayed up for a while and read Terry Pratchett, hoping I would get sleepy. I did not. Finally, I’d gone to bed, hoping that lying in the dark would help, but we all know how that turned out.

  Nothing caught my eye as I browsed through the selection on Netflix. I got up and hobbled to the kitchen, dropped a tea bag into a mug, filled it with water, and popped it into the microwave for a couple of minutes. While the tea heated, I went to the front door, unlocked and opened it, and looked out at the darkness beyond the glow of our porch light.

  It was a cool, still morning. No dogs barking, no distant trains, no sirens. I could not even hear the traffic on Interstate 5. The bars had closed and the garbage trucks were not out yet. The world had gone to bed.

  I saw dim light behind the curtains in one of Amber’s windows. And something else. My eyes were drawn to her garage door.

  Amber parked her car at the curb in front of the house. The driveway was always empty and I had no idea what she kept in the garage if not her car. The garage door had a row of four rectangular windows in the top half. Two of them were covered on the inside by white cardboard, but two of them looked into the garage. I saw a flickering orange glow through them.

  It looked like the shimmering glow of flames.

  I opened the security screen and stepped outside in my T-shirt, sweat pants, and slippers as the microwave beeped. I closed the door, crossed the porch, and went along the narrow walk to the driveway. From the slope of our steep driveway, I could see flames inside, but at the sidewalk, I saw only the shimmering orange glow. Something was burning. The light in her front window was not very bright and could be a night light, for all I knew. I saw no sign that she was awake.

  “Shit,” I muttered as I crossed the street as fast as I could, which was not very fast because my knee was hurting like hell. I hobbled up her driveway to the garage door, but the windows were just a bit too high for me to get a good look inside. I went around to the door on the side of the garage. I expected it to be locked, so I was surprised when the knob turned and it pushed open. After her experience the night before, I would expect her to have the house locked up tight. I went inside.

  The flames were at the back of the garage, near the wall. They burned atop three torches, two of which stood about five feet tall. The flames were the only light in the garage, but it was enough to see that the torches flanked a large, red statue of a figure sitting on a pedestal, legs crossed, with the right hand pointing upward, the left downward. The figure had the head of a goat with two enormous horns, and between them, atop the great head, stood the third torch. Two dark wings were spread behind the figure, and in front, it had bare female breasts.

  The door closed loudly behind me and I spun around clumsily with a gasp.

  Amber stood a few feet away, naked and moving slowly closer with one hand behind her back.

  “Did you know we made the news?” she said. “I heard it on the radio about an hour ago. They say he’s in stable condition now. I thought maybe you had done my work for me. You even used what looked like a ritual dagger that had personal significance to you. But it didn’t turn out that way. So ... you’ll have to do.”

  She quickly closed the remaining space between us, took the knife from behind her back, and started stabbing.

  Exposed

  Monica J. O'Rourke

  I stalked him for weeks, as I imagined he’d done with my little girl.

  ****

  The cops knew who he was, but they kept saying the evidence was circumstantial, that they didn’t yet have a case. They had him under constant surveillance, I was told. Yet why did I see him running around on his own, unwatched? I’d see an unmarked cop car in his area, but no one really had tabs on him, which was insanely frustrating. They knew who kidnapped Rebecca—they knew who the guy was!—but what? his civil liberties trumped hers?

  You need to stay out of it, they said.

  Were they kidding?

  I knew where to find him. Right in front of my pickup, as fate (or GPS) would sometimes have it.

  I make this sound so easy: He was crossing the street against the light. I waited for him to turn the corner before I cut him off. I slammed on the brakes, and he bounced off the hood and landed on his back, momentarily dazed. I smashed him in the face with my fist (the balled-up fist with the roll of quarters in it …). I made sure he was out cold before dragging him to the flatbed. I managed to get him in, tied his hands and feet with zip ties, and covered him with canvas.

  No one was around, which is a small miracle in itself—never mind the media and every amateur reporter with a smartphone who also seemed to be following this guy. Isn’t that what usually happens? Even more shocking is that the cops weren’t around.

  An hour later I dragged his sorry ass inside the cabin and tied him to the bed. A quick scan of the woods satisfied my paranoia that I hadn’t been followed. Not that it mattered. I would have done anything to save my kid, including give up my freedom. Or my life.

  That’s how it all started. This part of it, anyway.

  He started the whole goddamn thing weeks ago.

  ****

  I build a fire in the fireplace.

  Andy’s waking up. I found his name on his license. Andy. Andy.

  His hideous head rolls from side to side, the whites of his eyes flashing, trying to focus.

  His eyes pop open. “What—” He sees me. “Are you nuts?”

  Well that’s an auspicious beginning … I pull up a chair and straddle it. “Where is she?” I ask quietly.

  He snorts. “What? Who the hell are you? Fuck you! Untie me.”

  Does that ever work?

  My voice gets a little louder. “Where is she?”

  He laughs, glints of yellow, nicotine-stained teeth flashing. Smells, like sour mash and cheap tobacco, ooze from his pores. “Go to hell.”

  What if I told you this was a blue-eyed college kid? No nicotine stains. Smells more like Gray Flannel than old booze. Looks like someone who’d run for state senator.

  Ted Bundy was a pretty boy too.

  I slowly approach him. These are tricks I’ve learned from watching every episode of Law & Order and CSI and NCIS. I learned ways to make him nervous (as if being tied to a bed wasn’t enough). But none of it seems to be working. It always works on TV. Even when the women are in charge, the skeevy men always cave.

  “You’re starting to piss me off,” he says, licking his lips. “You’re making a big mistake. Untie me, you asshole!”

  I study his face. Is he panicking? Nervous? Shouldn’t he be? But there’s no panic. He’s just angry.

  I have a feeling he thinks I’m bluffing.

  I check the bindings on his wrists and ankles, making sure they’re solid. He’s tied spread-eagle on top of the quilts.

  He’s not going anywhere.

  “You’re killing her,” he says with a leering sideways glance. “You know that?” His face is solid, tight, the jaw line set. He gnashes his teeth.

  Or maybe I’m imagining the bravado. This is a guy who stole my kid. Stole. My. Kid. He looks like a giant slug, riddled with herpes, dripping pus.

  I have a hard time reconciling that with the young man lying there …

  I close my eyes to fight the tears. This isn’t easy; this is the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. I don’t even know how I’ll be able to—

  I open them again. “I’m not killing her,” I whisper. “I’m saving her.”

  “I’m the only one who knows where she is.” He spits in my face and struggles against the bindings.

  I walk
into the bathroom to wash the pig’s saliva off my cheek. I stare at my reflection in the medicine cabinet mirror. Eyes that haven’t rested in weeks stare back. Too many wrinkles on this old face that’s really not that old at all. Not until recently. Too many grays where there once were none in a mane full of blonde hair. The pigshit in the bed has done this to me.

  He’s yelling, cursing at me like something possessed. Screaming for me to untie him. That’s laughable. If he were to get away, I’d be dead. I was surprised I could get him in here in the first place, but a rush of adrenaline allowed me the strength. Not that I lifted him over my head or anything; I’m much smaller than him.

  I sit in the chair beside him. “Where is she?”

  “She’s dead!”

  I blanche, but I pray he’s lying. “Where is she?”

  He laughs again, but I can tell he’s nervous.

  “Look …” I say, pulling a bandana out of my back pocket. “It’s obvious you won’t voluntarily give me the information I want.”

  “What are you doing?” His eyes bulge.

  After twisting the bandana into a long line of fabric, I lay it across his mouth, knotting it near his ear. He shakes his head and tries to avoid me but can’t. He tries to head-butt me but doesn’t get far.

  “We’ll try it my way for a while. If you change your mind and want to tell me …” I shrug. “Just say something.”

  Even if he wants to speak, he can’t. It’s all head games now, you see? It’s the only way to make this work. I have no clue what I’m doing, but I hope he doesn’t see that. The main reason I gagged him was so I wouldn’t have to hear him crying and begging for help.

  I grab the scissors off the counter and cut away his clothes. I’m not about to untie him and give him any opportunity to escape. He shakes his head and groans into the bandana. I let him lie in his underpants for a few moments before cutting them off as well. I figure this posturing represents the final act of stripping him of his dignity, and that maybe I can stretch it out. Being naked is one of the most vulnerable states to be in.