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One eye cracks open and all it sees is mush. Ambient light is harsh, muddling. It’s also taken on a bronze hue and I hope that is from blood and not dusk. I try and open the other eye but it feels huge. Swollen. Leave it alone then.
I slowly drag one hand up from my waist. Then the other. I exhale into the pool of sick mess around my mouth. I push up off the floor and peel my face from the drying vomit. My neck can’t support my head’s weight. I go up anyways. My chest hurts. My left side especially. The only times it feels like this is when I get drilled in the ribs. One hot, stabbing spot.
I crash back onto my ass, legs bent beneath me. Feel my face. Shiner over the eye. I manage a look at the clock nearby. Almost six p.m. Fuck. I work my way to my feet. Aches and pains, stiffness and atrophy burn and come alive with screeching alarm.
I walk to the machine. It flashes zero. I hit the PLAY button and get nothing.
You have no new messages. I hit it again. You have no new messages You have no new messages You have no new messages You have no new messages You have no new messages
I rub my face and go to the bathroom. Wash the stink off of me. I don’t have hallucinations preceding a Big Fry smear. That shit happened. I got a phone call from the rapist.
Water running down my face, etching lines through my stubble, my eyes sore and dry and bulging from the whiskey, even my teeth feel gritty and ache. My stomach sour and vile, my shoulders twisted because I slept on them wrong, stuffed onto the couch. I get weary just cataloging my body’s condition.
I remember flashes of the morning. Funeral. Then holding her picture. Holding her ring. Stumbling like I do when I drink to forget her as opposed to just drinking. Somehow I got on the couch. I remember trying the TV for a while. I remember lying with my head at one end and then later, with my head at the other end.
A wave of nausea percolates up from my twisted gut and I close the toilet lid. Sit down. The phone ringing climbs up from my memory like a rat clawing to the top of a sewer drain as it backs up. The ringing echoes. His voice comes across. He knows my name, although he commits the cardinal sin of calling me Dick.
No one calls me Dick. No one.
He got the email, he said. He tailed Petticoat. Then the smear. I sit. Wait for my stomach to back off. In the meantime, the sounds of the living world continue to sneak around corners and play out next to my ears. People down on the street, yapping as they live their lives and pass into and out of my own by walking on my sidewalk. Birds busy building nests on signs and ledges where there are no pigeon spikes to interrupt them. Taxis zooming around, surely speeding and nearly hitting pedestrians.
I hear my neighbor unlock his door. Slam it shut. Something different about it. Louder. More crisp. Jerry is an asshole and prone to being obnoxious and loud, but this is different.
I open my eyes, stare into the lightless bathroom. Tune an ear. Jerry’s door opens again. His footfalls like explosions into the hallway. The wood floors and bare walls outside my doorstep magnify the sounds of his existence. He shuts his door, jangles keys into a lock. The deadbolt falls home and Jerry trots off. All too blaringly loud.
I uncover my face. Stand. Open the bathroom door. Walk into the front room and look. My door is open. Wide fucking open.
Someone came inside my place while I was there on the floor, unconscious, defenseless, destroyed and in a pool of my own vomit.
17
The front door lock has been picked, not kicked in, drilled out, blown up or anything else.
If the rapist was involved in a burglary and the late Detective Gillispie didn’t find anything resembling forced entry, I figure he has more skills than just having sex with unwilling women. He came here.
I shut the door quietly and my mind begins to race on what I need to do. Search the house for
missing items, bugs and bombs for sure. Send him another email and try to meet. Find out why he would call me, leave a message, then just come over here and erase it. What was in that message? Why come here and risk it? Better yet, why come here and leave me alive?
I walk to my wife’s closet. Unmolested. My gun, still loaded and in the holster. For an hour I search the house. No bugs, no bombs. I feel the hot spot on my ribs and think he did kick me. I brew some coffee, take a shot of whiskey and go over to the answering machine. It’s a long shot but I try and lift a fingerprint from the ERASE button.
I get one and doubts immediately come to the surface. Might be my own. I fingerprint the outside door handle. Look for anything else disturbed. Nothing. He could very well have called, got the machine, left a message he immediately regretted, figured since he got the machine I wasn’t home, raced over, picked the lock, came inside and saw me on the floor, erased the message and gloated while he kicked me on his way out. Left the door standing open as a taunt.
I brace the front door with a two by four. I walk into the bedroom and strip down. As I pull my shirt up over my head it leaves a wet trail up my neck onto my scalp. I examine it. Spit. I see red.
Did this fucking guy really loom over me, kick me and spit on me? Please, God, say he did. He already called me Dick. I have to breathe in and out in a slow, methodical manner to keep my steam from blowing like a nuke. I collect my wits, get a sample of the spit and keep it with the fingerprints.
I have to do something to vent. I punch a hole in the wall.
I shower. Smoke half a pack while I tear a sheet of paper into thin strips. Concentrate. Ruin something. Exercise my anger.
Finally I crush out a Rum Coast and open up the laptop. View Petticoat’s email. Nothing new. Just like me, the rapist is trying to keep Petticoat in the dark about this. And why not? If Petticoat is still paying him his blackmail cash, why upset the apple cart with anything?
I email the rapist and write, “We should meet.” Hit SEND.
Willibald and I sit on his front porch, the music of beer bottle caps popping off filling the night.
Graham is inside; stirring some horrible concoction he refers to as his “famous buffalo tuna dip.” The red pepper sauce dances along the air through the living room, waving acrid tendrils along our nostrils. Mix that with the oil-canned tuna and I’m ready for another beer.
