The Devil Next Door

8

Louis Shears made it home and as he walked through the door, he swore to God he would never leave it again.

The world had gone mad and he was content to leave it to its own devices. He shut the door behind him, locked it. And then on second thought, he threw the deadbolt. He walked into the living room and then the kitchen, feeling like some wind-up toy soldier going first in this direction and then that. He sat in his recliner, got up, sat on the couch, then he got up again. Went to the cupboard above the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of Chivas Regal. He poured himself two fingers in a water glass, swallowed it down, then poured himself another.

You better get a grip already, he told himself, and that sounded good in theory, but in practice… well, it was something else again.

He sat back in the recliner.

Pulling from his drink and peering out the picture window, the world seemed all right. Cars passed on the street and leaves fluttered gently in the trees. He could hear the sound of a lawn mower and some kid going up the sidewalk on a skateboard.

These things were the normal sights and sounds of an August afternoon.

But what about what happened on Tessler Avenue? Where did any of that fit in? How did he qualify what he had seen this day? Two guys beating a kid near to death with baseball bats and then the kid attacking him and those whacked-out cops showing up? Where did that fit in the annals of a late summer’s day? Where did you find the box that would hold such things or a label to slap on it?

“You don’t,” Louis said. “You don’t even try. You just sit here and get drunk. Get shitfaced and forget about it.”

Very nice, very nice, indeed.

But hardly practical.

He thought about the steaks and the wine out in the back of the Dodge. The meat needed to be gotten into the fridge before it started to turn. Those porterhouses were nearly two inches thick, custom cut, and had cost him nearly fifteen bucks a throw.

He just couldn’t leave them out there.

But that’s exactly what he was planning on doing.

The cellphone in his shirt pocket jingled and he jumped, nearly spilling his drink. He put it to his ear, almost expecting one of those crazy cops to be on the other end. But it wasn’t them. It was Michelle.

“The weekend stretches out before you,” she said. “I hope I didn’t interrupt your nap.”

Louis started laughing. No, honey, I wasn’t taking a nap. I was sitting in my recliner sucking down whiskey. You ought to see me. Buttons popped off my shirt, bloodstains all over it, my throat bruised from some mortally wounded kid who decided to have one last hurrah and strangle me.

“What’s the matter, Louis?” Michelle said. Even half way across town over at Farm Bureau Insurance, she could sense it on him. That something was most definitely wrong.

“Where should I start?”

“Oh no… you didn’t get the accounts, did you?”

“Oh no, I got them. That part of my day was fine. It’s just that this town is going crazy. I’m just wondering if you can buy straightjackets in bulk, because I’m thinking we’re going to need a lot of them.”

Michelle said, “Oh, you heard then?”

“Heard what?”

“About the bank.”

Louis felt a heaviness in his chest. What now? “Tell me,” he said.

“I only know what they’re saying,” she said. “I guess an hour ago some old lady came into the bank across the street, you know, First Federal, and wanted to close her account. The teller told her she needed a slip to do that and the old lady just went ballistic. Get this, she whipped out a knife, a big knife, from her purse and stabbed the teller. Stabbed her like five or six times. At least, that’s what they’re saying. We heard the sirens. It was awful.”

“Shit.”

“It gets worse. The old lady supposedly walked right out with her bloody knife, sat on the bench outside, and then… well, she just slit her wrists. Slit them, Louis, and then folded them in her lap and calmly bled to death.”

“Who was it?”

“I don’t know. But they said she was smiling. Just sitting there, bleeding to death… and smiling.”

Louis swallowed. “The teller survive?”

Michelle said she didn’t know. “She lost a lot of blood, I guess. Louis, it was Kathy Ramsland.”

“Kathy?” Louis said. “Oh, Jesus, Vic’s kid sister?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

Calling Kathy a “kid” was maybe overdoing it in that she was nearly thirty. But, hell, Louis had grown up next to her, hung out tight with brother Vic right through high school.

Sitting there, the booze bubbling and acidic in his belly, he was picturing Kathy as a kid. Pushing her around on her bike when she was learning to ride without the training wheels. Making her up as Bride of Frankenstein for Halloween. The awful stories Vic and he used to tell her to scare the shit out of her. The time her hamster died and she buried it in the backyard in a metal Band-Aid box and then he and Vic digging it up a week later to see what it smelled like.

Not Kathy, Christ, not Kathy.

“Louis?” Michelle said. “I don’t know what’s going on but something happened over at the high school.”

Louis swallowed. “Like what? A shooting?” he said, making the quick assumption as most did after Columbine.

“I don’t know. But I guess there’s like ten cop cars out there… the townies, sheriff, state police. Whatever it is, it must be pretty bad. That’s what Carol said. She just drove by there.”

The heaviness wasn’t just in his belly now, it was laying over him, crushing him down in the recliner. He was now starting to wonder and as he wondered, he worried. Maybe you could write off one or two weird things happening, but when they occurred in bunches then you started thinking things. You started seeing the sort of connections that canceled out coincidence. The sort of connections that made paranoia leap into the back of your mind.

“What the hell is going on?” he said out loud, though he’d honestly meant only to think it.

“I don’t know,” Michelle said. “But it’s weird, isn’t it?”

“It gets weirder,” he said and then he started telling his own tale. The assault. The dying boy. The crazy cops. And as he told that story, realizing yet again that it sounded positively absurd in the telling, he began to turn it all over in his mind. What he’d seen. The stabbing at the bank. Whatever was going down at the high school. Sure, it could have been a series of grim coincidences, but he couldn’t seem to wrap his mind around that. For deep down, he was almost scared. Scared that something was happening to Greenlawn.

Something on a huge scale.

In the distance, he could hear sirens. Lots of them. And he wondered what else was going on out there, what other awful things were occurring behind locked doors in all those neighborhoods piled up end to end.

But he stopped himself right there.

It was not healthy thinking. Just because some very odd things were happening did not mean for one moment the town was going insane. That was just paranoia doing his thinking for him. He wasn’t about to go down that road. You started thinking crazy bullshit like that, next thing you knew you were afraid to leave the house. Louis had had an aunt like that. She became a shut-in, terrified of everything outside her own door. He wasn’t about to become like that.

Yet, the feeling that something was wrong, really wrong, persisted. Like a bad taste, he just couldn’t seem to wash it out of his mouth.

“Louis? Louis? Are you there?”

“I’m here,” he told his wife.

“Are you telling me that cop was really kicking that boy’s body? Stomping on it?”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m telling you.”

“That’s scary. That’s really scary.”

“Sure,” he said. “And goddamn Greenlawn, of all places.”

“You better report this,” Michelle said. “Call down to the police station right now or go down there, tell them what those nuts were doing. Good God. It’s horrible.” She was breathing very fast on the other end. “Louis? Are you all right?”

“Yeah, I’m okay.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Well, I’m okay as I can be.” He paused, studying the whiskey in his glass. “I wish you could come home. I know it sounds stupid, but I’d just feel better if you could.”

“I’ll get there soon as I can. I have to finish up some things here first, though. I’ll be about an hour, maybe an hour and a half.”

That wasn’t good enough, but he didn’t tell her so. Every minute she was away from him made that hollow in his guts open wider. But how could he honestly explain any of it to her? How could he make her understand, make her feel what he was feeling himself?

“Okay,” he said. “Get home as soon as you can.”

“Louis… are you sure you’re all right? You don’t sound good.”

“I’m okay.”

“You’re positive?”

“Yes.”

“All right. I’ll be home soon as I can.”

“Okay. I’ll be—” He paused.

“What? What is it?”

Louis wasn’t sure himself. He heard the creaking of the steps out on the porch. It didn’t mean anything really. Could have been the kid delivering the paper or the mailman. Yet, with what he’d been through and what Michelle had told him, he was expecting something bad.

“There’s… there’s someone on the porch,” he said in almost a whisper.

“Louis… you’re scaring me, okay? Just stop this now.”

“Hurry home, baby. Please just hurry home.”

Hurry…