Killer

chapter 18

present

It was the next day when I spotted two punks working themselves up to rob a liquor store. At the time I was walking to the library and they were standing across the street, both in their early twenties, their heads shaved and their bodies thin to the point of emaciated. They were dressed the same, wearing loose-fitting khaki pants and the type of faded dungaree jackets that you used to be able to buy at army surplus stores. The one that I could see more clearly looked like he was having a tough time standing still, his face folded into a scowl and his eyes fixed in a death stare. I’d been around enough crystal meth users in prison to see immediately that these two were on the stuff. In my younger days I’d also robbed enough stores to know what they were planning even without seeing the bulge a gun made tucked inside one of their waistbands. I knew even before I saw them pull their ski masks out.

I wanted to keep walking. The last thing I wanted to do was get involved, but I stopped in my tracks, paralyzed. I could see how wired these two punks were, and all I could imagine was how trigger-happy they were going to be once inside the liquor store. The people they were going to kill in there would be more blood on my hands. Reluctantly, I found myself jogging across the street, then tapping the one with the gun on the shoulder and asking him if he had a smoke.

He turned to face me, his ski mask pulled on three quarters of the way. His eyes empty as he faced me, his exposed mouth ugly and his body twitching.

“What the fuck you want?” he demanded, his voice just as tight and wired as I had imagined.

“You got a cigarette?” I asked again.

“Yeah, I got something for you to suck on, you stupid fuck.”

He was taking the. 38 from his waistband. There was no doubt from the violence shining in his eyes that he was planning to shoot me. I stepped in quickly, and with my left hand took the gun away from him while at the same time hitting him in the throat with my right. The punch left him making funny noises as he struggled to breathe. Without giving him a chance to recover, I sent him hard on his ass on the concrete sidewalk, then kicked him in the head hard enough to bounce it off the concrete and put him out.

His buddy turned around then. He was still pulling his ski mask on, and I could see the dazed look in his eyes as he first stared at me and then his buddy on the ground. Slowly comprehension worked its way in.

“You dumb motherfucker,” he near spat at me.

It turned out he also had a gun in his waistband, but he was too hyped up to see that I was holding a. 38 on him. He started to pull his weapon out. I could’ve blown him to hell, but instead I flipped the. 38 in my hand and rapped him in the jaw with the gun butt. The blow sent him to his knees and his own gun tumbling out of his hand. I picked it up and dropped it in my jacket pocket. He looked up at me, blood coming out pretty good from his mouth, a thick purple bruise already showing on his jaw. His eyes were big as he noticed for the first time that I was holding a. 38 on him. One of his pupils looked dilated, showing that he had concussion. A little known fact: a blow to the jaw can cause a concussion.

“Get on your stomach,” I ordered.

“Hey, man, you don’t have to do this.”

I gestured with the gun that he’d better listen to me.

“If you quit acting like a dumb fuck, we can give you a cut,” he said.

It was laughable. His buddy out cold, him bleeding and with concussion, and he was still thinking of robbing the liquor store. I shook my head at him, and something about my expression made him listen to me and get down on his stomach.

A couple of people came out of the liquor store curious about the commotion. Their faces blanched when they saw the two punks bleeding as they lay on the sidewalk, and me holding a gun on them.

“Can someone please call the police?” I asked them.

Somebody already had. The next moment I heard the sirens approaching, then tires screeching. Without turning to look I knew that two cruisers had pulled to a stop behind me. I didn’t want them coming out with their weapons drawn and me holding a gun on these two. I lowered the gun I was holding and placed it by my feet, then raised my hands so they were visible. The punk on his stomach watched this, and I caught the calculating look in his eyes as he tried to decide whether it was worth making a run for it, or maybe even a dive for the gun. I heard the doors to the police cruisers being thrown open, then one of the cops yelling for nobody to move.

“Officer, I have another gun in my jacket pocket,” I yelled to them. “I took both guns off these two meth heads right before they were about to rob this liquor store.”

“That old man’s a psycho,” the punk on his stomach tried arguing, his voice barely a rasp. “We weren’t going to rob nothing, and I ain’t on any meth. This psycho attacked me and my brother for nothing. And those guns are his. I never saw them before.”

Maybe what he was saying would’ve carried more weight if he and his brother weren’t wearing ski masks. I glanced over my shoulder and saw one of the cops giving the punk a glazed-eyed stare. This cop noticed me looking at him and told me to stand where I was, then walked over to me so he could take the gun from my jacket pocket and pick up the one by my feet.

“Any of you see what happened?” this cop asked the bystanders. He was a good ten years younger than me, but still looked older than the other cops at the scene, with gray hair cut close to the scalp and a fatigued expression on his long face. He reminded me of an older version of Roy Scheider from The French Connection.

The bystanders shook their heads in response to his question. One of them told him that they came out of the store after they heard a fight outside, but didn’t see anything except me holding a gun on the two youths.

This older cop let out a tired sigh. He told me I could lower my hands, and asked me to tell him how I knew these two were planning on robbing the store. The would-be robber lying on his stomach tried arguing that they weren’t planning on robbing anyone. Another cop who was in the process of handcuffing him pushed his face into the sidewalk to shut him up.

“The two of them looked suspicious standing outside the liquor store,” I told the older cop. “When I saw a gun sticking out of that one’s waistband” – I nodded towards the one who was out cold – “and then saw them both putting on ski masks, I knew what they were going to do, and knew that if I didn’t stop them, as hyped up as they were acting, they were going to be killing people in there.”

The cop I was telling this to stared at me incredulously. “What did you do to stop them?” he asked. I told him and his incredulity only intensified. He looked as if I were telling him a joke and he was waiting for the punchline. One of the other cops recognized me then. I could see it in the shift in his expression. He pulled this older cop aside and said something to him. I was warned then to make sure to keep my hands visible, and I watched as the cop I’d been talking to went back to his squad car and got on his two-way. When he came back his attitude towards me had changed.

“Put your hands behind your back,” he told me.

“What for?”

“We need to bring all of you in and sort this out,” he said.

I caught the rapt attention on the punk’s face. Concussion or not, he knew something was up, and he was trying to figure out what it was. I looked back at the older cop in front of me, the one who wanted to handcuff me. His eyes wavered as I met his stare, and I could see some worry there. I was sure he dealt with more than his share of violent crime, but it was probably domestic stuff or kids acting stupid. I was different; a hit man with twenty-eight kills, and someone who had been all over the news for months. He wasn’t quite sure how to deal with someone like me.

“What’s there to sort out?” I asked him. “What the fuck do you think went on here with these two meth heads wearing ski masks and carrying guns?”

“We took the guns off you, not them,” he said stiffly. “And until we sort this out the only crimes we have evidence of so far are assault and battery committed by you, and possession of unlicensed firearms, also committed by you. Now put your hands behind your back. I’m not telling you again.”

There was still a lot of worry in his eyes. The other cops with him edged closer to me. I put my hands behind my back and felt a throbbing pain in my right shoulder. I must’ve hurt it earlier and didn’t realize it until now because of the adrenaline rush. I told the cop about the pain in my shoulder and asked him if I could be cuffed in front instead. He ignored me and cuffed me behind. The punk who had been on his stomach was pulled up to his feet. He smirked at me. He had no idea what was going on but he knew something was working in his favor.

While I was being put in the back seat of a squad car, an ambulance pulled up to the scene. The guy I had knocked out cold was mostly still out, and they were loading him on to a stretcher. I watched all this until the squad car I was in drove off.

At the precinct, I was brought to an interrogation room, and only then were the handcuffs taken off. They took my cell phone from me, and I was left alone for an hour until a Detective John Fallow came in. He was in his forties, balding, pasty complexion, and in his cheap suit looked more like an accountant than a cop. I told him about my shoulder hurting. He ignored me and told me we needed to clear up what happened at the liquor store, and he had me go over my account of what happened.

“Here’s the problem we have,” he said. “One of the men you accosted, Jason Mueller, has given us a completely different version of the events. The other man, his brother, Thomas Mueller, has only recently regained consciousness and is receiving medical attention, but we’ll get his version soon.”

“Did Jason tell you why he and his brother were wearing ski masks on a day when it was over sixty degrees out?” I asked.

“Yes, as a matter of fact he did.” Fallow offered me a grim smile. “He claims you tried forcing them into committing armed robbery. That you made them put the ski masks on, but that when they refused to rob the liquor store you beat them both up.”

He had said that with a straight face. All I could do was stare at him and wonder where this was coming from; whether someone in the District Attorney’s office thought they could use this to send me back to prison, or whether they believed that punk’s story. Or maybe it was a matter of them wanting badly to believe his story.

Fallow and me kept up our staring contest; him offering his grim, polite smile, me trying hard to keep my temper in check.

“This is ridiculous,” I finally said, breaking the silence in the room. “If you check their arrest records, I’ll bet they’re lengthy and with other armed robberies.”

“Possibly,” he admitted, “but I doubt they’re as lengthy as your own.”

“You’ve got a bet,” I told him. “I was only arrested once.”

He smiled at that. I could see the argument forming that all the crimes I admitted to would be a far longer list than their arrest records could possibly be. Instead, he asked why I would’ve wanted to stop them from robbing the liquor store.

“I don’t understand what you’re asking,” I said, genuinely confused.

His smile turned patronizing. “If what you’re telling us is true, that you saw the two men standing outside a liquor store and you knew they were about to rob it, why would you get involved? I’m sorry, Mr March, but from what I’ve read about you, that doesn’t make sense.”

“How am I supposed to answer that?” I asked. “Are you saying that I’m incapable of doing something decent?”

He scratched the back of his head as he thought about that. “Yes, I guess that’s exactly what I’m saying. It’s not believable, Mr March, that you’d stick your neck out the way you did, nor is it believable that a man of your age and slight build could disable and overpower two armed men in their twenties, especially, as you claim, two men hopped up on crystal meth.”

“What’s hard to believe is you accepting this meth head’s story. Have you tested these two punks for drugs?”

He didn’t answer me. Just kept smiling his polite, grim smile. I took a deep breath and fought a losing battle with my anger.

“Why would I have two guns with me?” I heard myself asking him. “What the fuck was I doing with them, trying to force those two punks to take them off me to commit an armed robbery? Then what happened, they refused and I beat them up? Christ, use some fucking brains. If any of that were true – if they were such innocents – why wouldn’t they take the guns from me and hold me until the police arrived? Talk about your shitbrained fairy tales. You really think there’s a chance the other brother will tell the same story, at least if he isn’t prepped?”

“You have quite a temper, don’t you, Mr March?”

I closed my mouth. I understood then that he was only trying to get a rise out of me, trying to get me to say something that could be used later against me. It wasn’t worth saying another word to him.

He waited patiently, and only when he realized I wasn’t going to answer him, he continued, “To answer your question, I don’t fully believe Jason Mueller’s story, just as I don’t believe yours. The truth most likely lies somewhere in the middle. If I had to guess, you recruited these two brothers for the liquor store robbery, then had some sort of falling out with them at the last minute and things turned violent between you. But if that’s the case, we’re never going to find that out, and given your extremely violent past, their version of the events has to be considered more credible. While it would be nice to lock all three of you away, I’ll settle for sending you back to prison, Mr March. Or should I call you Leonard?”

I saw the way it was going to be then. If the other brother, the one I knocked out cold, had any smarts, he would claim a temporary loss of memory rather than risk contradicting his brother’s story. As insane as it was, I could very well end up going back to prison for the one decent thing I did in my life – and they’d send me for the maximum sentence they could. I should’ve gotten a good laugh out of the whole thing, but instead I felt sick to my stomach thinking how this was going to be played up in the papers and how justified my kids were going to feel in writing me off for good. I felt even sicker knowing that I would never see Sophie Duval again. Absently, I started massaging my throbbing shoulder while Fallow stared at me as if I were some sort of bug that he had pinned down under a magnifying glass.

There was a knock on the outside door. Fallow looked away from me, annoyed. He got up and had a quick conversation with whoever it was outside the door, then left me alone. While I sat in the room, I slipped into despair. It didn’t make much sense for me to feel that way. It wasn’t as if I had that much going for me on the outside; a few more chance encounters with Sophie before she would bring up her book idea and I would turn her down, the slim hope that my kids would give me a break and meet with me. That was really about all I had, but the thought of losing it still sent me sinking into utter blackness.

I don’t know how long I was alone. Maybe a half hour, maybe longer, but when the door opened again a different cop walked in. This one was bulkier with a face like a bulldog’s, his hair silver, his suit more expensive. He looked uncomfortable as he cleared his throat and introduced himself as Captain Edmund Gormer.

“I would like to apologize for any inconvenience that has been caused you,” he muttered in a rumbling voice. He looked past me, unable to meet my eyes, his voice sounding as if he hated every second of what he was doing. “We had to clear up a confusing situation, but that has been done, and as captain of this precinct I would like to thank you for doing your civic duty today, both in thwarting a felony and in apprehending two dangerous criminals. I believe these are yours.”

He handed me my wallet and cell phone. So either the other brother was stupid enough to give a statement instead of claiming a loss of memory, or a witness had come forward to corroborate my version of the story. I kept a stoical exterior. I wasn’t going to show this cop shit.

“What about the bottle of aspirin your cops took off me?” I asked. “That Roy Scheider lookalike patrolman of yours injured my shoulder when he handcuffed me behind my back.

I need those aspirin.”

His skin color was a muddled gray as he told me he’d find out where my aspirin was. He cleared his throat again, and with a false smile that badly contradicted the glumness in his eyes, he told me there was going to be a press conference soon at which they were going to explain my heroism to the media. “We would like you to be there to answer their questions,” he added half-heartedly.

I shook my head. “I just want to get my aspirin and get the hell out of here.” While I told him this I had looked through my wallet. I stared up at him and told him a hundred and fifty dollars was missing. “Fuck it, maybe I will speak to the media after all,” I said.

Alarm showed in his eyes. “I’ll look into this,” he said. “Please wait here.”

Nothing had been taken out of my wallet, but I figured a hundred and fifty was more than a fair price for the ordeal they had put me through. Less than ten minutes later Captain Gormer returned handing me a new bottle of aspirin and a hundred and fifty dollars. All I could imagine was them sending out a squad car with the siren on to buy me the aspirin. I opened the bottle with my left hand, dumped a couple of tablets into my mouth, then asked Gormer whether the media was camped outside. He told me they were.

“Is there a back way out of here?” I asked.

He nodded, relief in his eyes. “I’ll have a patrolman show you the way,” he said.

I should’ve asked Gormer how they were able to corroborate my statement. I had assumed it was either Thomas Mueller fucking things up for him and his brother or a witness coming forward. It turned out it was something else entirely, and it creeped me out when I saw what it was.

I was sitting in a bar having a few Michelob drafts and trying to get my nerves under control when the news came on and a video was played that had been sent to them anonymously earlier in the day. The video showed it all; from when I stopped to watch the Mueller brothers outside the liquor store, to me running across the street and everything that followed until the police showed up. It would’ve been impossible for the police to have twisted that video to support Jason Mueller’s statement, and I should’ve been grateful that that video existed, but I couldn’t help feeling a queasiness in my gut realizing that someone had been following me without me realizing it. Not only following me, but videoing me.

Several of the other bar patrons had started staring at me as they recognized me from the video. When they showed my prison photo and talked about my recent release from prison and my violent history, more eyes turned my way. After the photo, they cut to a press conference where Captain Gormer talked about my heroism, all the while looking like he had a tooth that needed pulling. The bar became deathly quiet, the only sound coming from the TV set. No one spoke a word to me. The bartender stood off to the side looking increasingly uncomfortable as he tried to catch glimpses of me without meeting my eye. I sat silently drinking my draft, the tips of my ears burning hot. When I finished I got up and left, feeling all eyes in the bar following me out the door.

While I walked back to my apartment, more heads turned my way. This was what I didn’t want. I had started to fade from the news and become invisible, and now I was being put right back on the front page. Knowing that that would happen had frozen me earlier and almost had me turning a blind eye away from the two punks gearing themselves up outside the liquor store. As awkward as it was watching the news in that bar, it was also interesting seeing the confusion on the anchor’s face as she struggled with knocking my horns off and putting a halo on me. All in all, though, it left me unsettled.

I stopped off at a convenience store for a bag of ice. I wasn’t sure if it would do any good, but I thought I’d use the ice for my shoulder. When I got to my apartment door and saw the match I had forced between the door and the doorjamb lying on the floor, I knew someone had been inside. The lock hadn’t been tampered with, so that person had either been given a key or was good with locks. I went into the apartment and saw pretty quickly that the place had been searched. It wouldn’t have been obvious to the average person since clothes hadn’t been tossed on the floor and nothing appeared out of place, but to me it was as plain as day. I had done things to let me know if drawers had been opened or items moved. I made a quick search to see if anything was missing, and found that the money I had taped on the inside of the radiator cover was still there. After dusting myself off and chewing on a few aspirin, I went to the apartment building’s administrative office.

The same dull heavy woman from before was working, or at least she was supposed to be. She offered me an empty fish-eyed stare before turning back to the magazine she was reading.

“Someone was inside my apartment,” I said.

“Apartments were sprayed today for pests,” she said flatly and without looking at me. “Notices were sent last week.”

“I didn’t get a notice.”

“You should have.”

She went back to reading her magazine. I watched for a minute before telling her that I wanted the name of the pest-control service they used. “Whoever it was, they searched my apartment,” I added.

She put down her magazine and turned her fish-eyed stare back at me. “How do you know this? Your place trashed?”

“No, but whoever did this went through my drawers.”

“Anything missing?”

“No, nothing’s missing.”

“Then what’s your beef?” she asked, challenging me more with that ugly fish-eyed stare.

“Are you sure it wasn’t the police in my apartment?”

“I told you who it was.”

I couldn’t read whether she was lying or not. “Did someone pay you to get inside my apartment?” I asked.

Her mouth tightened as she stared at me. “I’ve had enough of your nonsense,” she said, her voice still flat and dull. “You don’t like our policies here, find yourself another address. Now get out of my office before I call the police.”

There was no point in trying to get anything out of her, at least not by talking, and I wasn’t about to resort to my old methods. I left her and went back to my apartment where I first looked around the kitchen for any chemicals that a pest-control person would’ve left, then put some ice in a plastic bag, sat down in my recliner and held the ice against my right shoulder. If a pest-control person had been in there, I couldn’t find any sign of chemicals being sprayed in the kitchen, nor could I smell much beyond the damp mildewy odor that my apartment always had.

When I showed up at work later the kid working security gave me the same sort of confused look that that TV anchor had showed earlier. “I saw that video,” he said.

This was the first time he had willingly spoken to me, and it stopped me. “Yeah?” I said. “You caught me on the news?”

He shook his head. “No, YouTube.”

I didn’t know what that was, but I felt some sort of encouragement that he was volunteering to have a conversation with me. More just to keep it going than out of any real curiosity, I asked him what he thought.

He handed me the office keys and had me sign the checkout sheet before telling me that I must’ve had some sort of angle for doing what I did. “You’re no hero, that’s for damn sure,” he said, his eyes hard as they met mine.

“Fuck you,” I told him, and I left him to go do my job.

I started off the night listening to music, but after twenty minutes or so curiosity got the better of me and I tuned into the same talk show that had been talking about me when I first got out of prison. They were talking about me again; this time the calls were all over the place with some callers claiming that what I did didn’t change the fact that I was a murderous scumbag and a rat to boot and that I was still going to get mine in the end, others thinking I had some ulterior motive for my heroism, while a few scattered callers talked about forgiveness and redemption and how I should be given credit for potentially saving lives inside that liquor store. I didn’t much enjoy listening to any of it, but I couldn’t turn it off, and after a while I admitted to myself the reason why – that I was hoping that Allison, or at least the woman who sounded like my daughter, would call back in. She didn’t.

The talk show discussed me for two hours before they moved on to a different topic. I went through the radio dial then, but couldn’t find any other shows talking about me. I turned the radio off, not much in the mood to listen to anything. As it was, because of my shoulder I was moving slower than usual and was behind schedule. I had been chewing aspirin all night, but it didn’t help much, and I was only able to lift my right arm up to my chest. When I tried lifting it higher, the pain brought tears to my eyes. I tried pushing myself harder to catch up, but I didn’t finish cleaning the last office until two-thirty. When I checked the keys back in the kid working security made a comment about me being late.

“So what?”

“You’re supposed to finish by two o’clock,” he said peevishly. “Not spending a half-hour extra in those offices taking a nap or whatever else you were doing. That’s so what. I’ll have to report this.”

His new-found boldness was annoying and I decided I liked it better when he was too afraid to say much of anything. I leaned in closer to him and told him how he looked like a guy I once knew, and it was the truth.

“Duane Halvin,” I said. “Big roly-poly kid. Thirty years old and still had baby fat. Christ, the two of you could’ve been separated at birth.” I leaned in closer, added, “I had to put an ice pick through his eye, and the thing was, I used to see Duane all the time at the track and I liked the guy. He was fun to hang around. You, not so much.”

His hard grin fell slack once he registered what I was saying. I left him then, remembering how the same pretty much happened with Duane Halvin once he realized what I had the ice pick for.

I’ve never been a heavy drinker, usually limiting myself to a couple of beers or a shot now and again. When I got back to my apartment I poured six ounces of cheap whiskey into a glass. With how anxious I was, and with the way my mind was racing and my shoulder throbbing like hell, I knew without the whiskey I’d have no chance of sleeping. After I drank it, I sat in my recliner and held a bag of ice to my shoulder, waiting until my eyelids felt heavy before moving to the bed.

Mercifully, I was out after I closed my eyes.