Call Ted
HELPFUL IS
Open Immersive Reader [prompt scene, Walter]
The summer’s sun was gloaming into dusk. The beautiful dusk that begets everything in gold. When light plays with shadow as if the two were small children who had never met before.
The dogs were running around the backyard, chasing the kids and each other. The tall marshy grass swayed with the wind running off the ocean. The strong breeze made a path through the grass straight to the docks, now laden and creaking with boats tugging at their moors, begging to be taken out to the bay. The pup took off through this new path, butt wiggling so much from her wagging tail that it moved like it was separate from her.
She gets into too much trouble. I took off after her, a brisk jog that felt great, effortless. It finally felt like home here. We were so blessed to live near the water again, even if we had to rent out our dock to cover the high NYS taxes. I chased her across the dock now. It was a bridge too. It connected to a small dirt island, with a great towering tree at its center. She was sniffing around the metal waste bin we left there for the boaters. I bent down and picked up a camera. It looked old. Worn and dirty. There was a small blue zippered pouch nearby, and a roll of film. Someone must have dropped it from their bag. I opened the cannister and unrolled the small circular strip of film. I held its middle up to the light that was getting golder with each passing second. A family. I squinted a little harder. MY family. The five of us. All there in the picture. I moved my thumbs to the next picture. Us again. Next picture. Us. Next picture. Us. I went back to the beginning of the roll. Us. All of it. Us from last week in the city park. Us leaving the grocery store. Us barbecuing in the backyard. Us. Us. Us.
I lifted my head. Were they watching now too? The boats were all docked for the evening. I didn’t want to make a scene in case they were watching. I rolled the film back up and put the canister in my pocket. I scooped the dog up and carried her tucked under my arm, talking to her back over the dock-bridge, talking like nothing was wrong. Talking like I was scolding her for getting into some garbage. My face was burning. Thank God I’d gotten some color this week. It hid the rising, searing red of fear climbing up my neck into my cheeks now. I clutched the camera tighter as I got to him. The look on my face said everything it needed to. To anyone else, I was straight-faced, calm. But he saw the terror in the slight bulge of my eyes, the tightness of my clenched jaw. He had always picked up on cues that went unnoticed by everyone else.
He called the kids. “Now, guys. Grab the other one. Let’s go in, it’s late.” The kids picked up on his cues too. His voice sounded like any dad calling his kids in from playing. But they heard the abruptness in his words, the urgency in his timbre. They hooked their dog back onto his leash and started to gather their play things. “Leave it. Tomorrow.” They looked at each other and dropped their stuff back to the ground. He ushered us back up the hill through the tall grass, and we disappeared into the sliding glass doors of our den.
………………………………….
Grab the cash. Get the keys. Grab the cash, get the keys. Phones. Wallet. Purse. Coffee pot. Stove. I ran through my mental check list before I locked up. The dogs were with a neighbor. Someone I could trust. I pulled the door shut, making sure it was locked before I moved to the car. I’d already bolted up the house. All the windows and doors. It looked like hurricane season. I explained to the neighbor we were headed back to the city for a couple weeks. She nodded her head. She’d already gotten used to my paranoid tendencies and didn’t bother asking questions anymore. I liked that about her.
I slid into the passenger seat and turned around. Kids all here, buckled up, headphones on, books already open in their laps. I let out a deep breath. Safe. I turned to the driver seat. He always drove when he was here. I was tired of being in charge all the time and liked to give up some control when I could. But only to him. He squeezed my hand before turning around to check the driveway for stray toys and stray children. Our black SUV rolled out into dawn, a dawn that seemed less gold than the gloaming the night before. The road ahead was foggy now.
…………………………….
The city was chaotic. Things weren’t getting better. When Roosevelt’s statue had been torn down, whatever decorum people had left for each other had been torn down with it. But at least here we had security guards for the building. On the island it was us. Just us, and the neighbors. They were dependable, but too spread out to rely on in a real emergency. This was beginning to look like a real emergency.
“The kids are unpacking.” I said, emptying the blue bag’s contents onto the kitchen table. “They’ll be busy for a while. I told them we needed us time. That grossed them out enough to keep them from wandering from their rooms.” He winked back at me. His wink was like a smile, so mischievous.
Papers and the odd object or two spilled from the bag. There were pencilled sketches: A sailboat. A seagull. The cemetery’s entrance. And a face. A man’s face. With a five o’clock shadow. No. Seven o’clock shadow.
He picked the crappy scribbled portrait from the pile and studied it a moment. “Anyone you know?”
“Yea, because I know so many people.” I cocked a brow at him, the way I always do when I’m perturbed at stupid questions.
“Come on, think. A checkout clerk? He’s got pictures from you at the grocery store. A boater, or boater’s friend? There’s only one seagull at our dock with the black head. A cemetery care taker? The sketch is the same cemetery your father is buried at.”
“I know what cemetery it is. I know it’s our seagull. The grocery clerks that night were all girls. I remember because I was buying tampons and scallions. He’s not familiar to me.” I answered with certainty, but a gnawing was beginning to claw the back of my mind. I really should look people in the face more. Maybe I’d know who he is.
He sighed and put down the drawing. An old skeleton key was in the pile. I dropped my coffee mug to the floor. “Shit!! That opens the cupboard under the stairs. I’ve been looking for it all summer. Holy shit. Holy shit. He’s been in our house! I thought…I thought the kids were hiding it to play fucking Harry Potter or something. Or to text on the phone with their fucking friends in private. SHIT.”
My heart was racing. My chest tightening. It felt like the blood in my veins was vibrating and boiling all at once. All the color left his darkened skin. He looked whiter than I did, his “Ghosty” as he liked to call me.
“You checked the kids rooms when we got here, right? Go check again. Under the beds, in the closets, the bathroom, the cupboards. Just check. Make sure nothing’s missing. Make sure nothing’s new. I’m gonna make a phone call and get this sketch checked out.”
The kids knew. They always know when something’s up. I don’t even bother trying to hide it anymore. They have my reasoning skills, and his astuteness. Whoever they end up with had better be honest as Hell, and immune from its wrath. I didn’t tell them what was up. Just to help me look. We tore everything apart. Calmly. Methodically. And thoroughly.
Nothing.
What if…Yea. That’s it. He knew we would panic and leave the island. “Check the suitcases. NOW.”
In the inner zipper linings. That’s where the ass put them. Little blinking trackers. Each of our five suitcases had one. My first instinct was to crush them. To fling them out our 20 story high window. I fought back the instinct and crushed the urge. I rushed into his office, holding the trackers out in the palm of my hand.
“Thanks, get back to me as soon as you can. Next steak dinner’s on us.” He clicked the phone off and stood up, taking a tracker from me. “This little bitch...” he trailed off, turning it over.
“Nothing was here.” I responded. “He probably couldn’t get past the building’s security. These were in our suitcases.”
“The fucker probably has our car bugged too.”
“Probably.” A moment’s silence passed. Our minds were racing. “I’m gonna order some pizzas for the kids. I’ll use a new place, someplace we haven’t tried before. I’m getting my eggplant parm, you want anything special?” His answer would be no. It was always was.
“No,” he answered, sitting back down, completely absorbed in his thoughts now.
………………………….
“Where are we headed?” I always had to ask. Always. He’s so unpredictable.
“The Row over on 8th,” He said, grabbing my hand as we turned the corner.
“Isn’t that place going a little…downhill?” Ew. Downhill was putting it kindly.
“Yea. My contact called me back last night. After you and the kids passed out watching the movie. We got a hit on the sketch...”
“You know who it is. Who the fuck is it??” I was bursting with emotion at this point. A rarity for me.
“Your dad’s old cellmate.” He tersed his words.
“What? I never visited Dad in jail. I don’t know this guy.” I hadn’t talked to Dad in twenty years. At least, not Living Dad. I visit his grave now, occasionally. I like to think that maybe, now that he’s dead, he sees things more clearly. Knows what to say. Knows what his kid needs.
“Yea, I know. But apparently the feds know him. They tried to get info about your dad’s bullshit from him. And apparently, he got mad. When your dad died, no one visited him anymore. No one needed anything from him. He didn’t like that.”
“What was this psycho in for anyway?” I didn’t bother to ask why he was out. They were all out now.
“Terrorist plots. He wasn’t real religious or anything. No real cause that anyone knew of either. He just liked to blow shit up and finally got caught.”
“Crap. Are you kidding?” It wasn’t a question: I knew he wasn’t kidding, and he knew I wasn’t asking. “So. The Row on 8th?” I pressed.
“The derelict’s squatting there now. At least our guy thinks he is. After we figured out who he was and how he knew us, Frank ran the mugshot through the city’s security feed. He saw the guy heading into The Row last month. It’s the best lead we’ve got. The only lead we’ve got.”
“And. We need to do this ourselves, right? No more cops to help. Feds are too busy I’m sure, on to their next case already.” I quickly resigned myself to what we had to do. It was the only logical solution.
The city had become a crapshoot. No one with a brain in their head left their apartment without a loaded gun on them now. At first, after the cops stepped down, all hell broke loose. But then…some started fighting back. An unsteady equilibrium was quickly established. A return to the days of old New York: Don’t fuck with me, and I won’t fuck with you. Don’t look at me, and I won’t look at you. I miss the reliability of the cops, but I like that no one looks at each other anymore. The gnawing in my head ceased, or at least lessened. I wouldn’t have recognized him if I had looked at people’s faces. But. Maybe I’d have noticed him following us. Maybe.
We crossed the crosswalk and walked up to The Row. The reception desk was outside now. They all were now. The receptionists were less likely to get held hostage that way. Small circular tables for two polka-dotted the building’s underhanging. They were all taken, each filled with couples of people drinking coffee, self-absorbed in their phones. No matter how much the city had changed, some things would never change.
“Ms.. Excuse me, Ms.? Do you know this man?” he asked the receptionist.
“We’re not supposed to disclose building tenants, sir.” She didn’t even bother looking up. Don’t look at me, I won’t look at you.
“He’s not a tenant. A squatter maybe?” he insisted on an answer.
Most of the ritzier areas had held off the steady influx of chaos. They could all afford the extra money for private security companies now that the cops were gone. But even areas like The Row were beginning to change. A slow rust of social decay was creeping back over everything, infectious and spreading. Just like the old days. Squatters were holing up in places that had been abandoned by those of us with more foresight, or more money. And they were like roaches. Once they invaded, they never left.
The receptionist’s eyes narrowed. She wasn’t supposed to disclose that the building had squatters, either, but he obviously knew already, and his intense gaze was intimidating her.
“Yea. He’s a new squatter. Came by as a “guest” of a real tenant about a month ago. And. Never. Fucking. Left. Real creepy too. But you didn’t hear that from me. I’d like to keep my job please. It’s one of the only respectable ones left here.” I gave her a reassuring smile as thanks and we turned away from her booth.
“Now what?” As soon as the words left my mouth, I was almost toppled over. A whooshing jacket and long hair were all I felt as it rushed by me. “Fucker!” I yelled after him, too angry and overwhelmed by everything to contain myself the way I usually do.
“Hey, lady. Lady! That was him, ya know. The weirdo wears a wig and that long jacket everywhere lately. Don’t know who he thinks he’s foolin’.” By the time we’d heard the receptionist’s words, he had already disappeared into the building and its elevator’s doors.
“He didn’t know we were here. He didn’t even notice us. After all that careful planning and stalking and tracing. No way he’d just blow his cover like that. What was he running from?” I asked, turning to face my guy.
No sooner had the words left my mouth, a blast of radiating heat surrounded us. The heat came first. Then the deafening noise. The crunch of steel and metal and stone. And the screams of people that got crunched under the steel and metal and stone. The pillar supporting the underhanging where we stood saved us from the billowing grey cloud of dust and debris that rolled toward us, engulfing everything like a giant wave. Like the waves my dad used to push me under as a kid, so they wouldn’t catch me in their roll. I was spluttering and choking on that wave of dust now, the way I used to come up gasping for air from the waves of water.
We grabbed hands and charged past the gaping crowd. Idiots. They all just stood there. Didn’t they realize no one would come to help them now? The way they would have before? He pushed me into the building. The security guards had already fled. Most people care more about their own asses than a paycheck when you get right down to it, don’t they? Good thing we left our kids with family.
The Row’s doors hadn’t been protected by the pillar, the way we had. Their glass had shattered, and the blast’s shockwave sent part of one door’s steel frame right into the elevator our stalker fled into. We tiptoed over glass and dust, our ears still ringing, as smoke drifted in through the building’s doorless entryway. I bent down at the elevator, peeking in at the hole ripped through its antique wooden doors. “Hey! He’s still in here, he’s right here!” The steel door frame pinned him. Right through his mouth. And out the back of his head. Like a giant dart. He was stuck to the wall on the elevator’s far side. Unmoving.