Blue Stew (Second Edition) (20 page)

“Walter, are you okay?”

Walter blinked and looked Melisa in the eye. He wasn’t sure, but he might’ve been staring at her ineffectively contained breasts for some time.

“Oh . . . I think so.”

“Can I get you some coffee or tea or anything? Maybe
tea
would be good; calm the nerves . . .”

“Ah . . . that might be nice,” Walter replied absently, possibly caught it the middle of a life-altering epiphany.

“Come have a seat in the kitchen,” said Melisa, turning.

Walter nodded and followed.

As they walked through the large house, Walter experienced a bizarre stretch of time in which he was self-aware of the possibility that he was having a life-altering epiphany. He now wondered: was this real, or had he just gotten unhinged, and would his original outlook reassert itself after the haze of that night lifted?

The question momentarily dampened Walter’s elevating mood. But then he returned to the meat of it, and the wonderful feeling of clarity washed back over him.

His previous outlook on life
had
been so much like Timothy’s, but just in the very seedling stages and not the full-bloom stages. Thanks to Timothy so boldly exemplifying the full-bloom manifestation of the seeds of thought in his own mind, Walter could now perceive these seeds in a clear light, and what he saw was ugly.

He
must’ve
been in denial when he’d defended his recent life choices to his friends and to himself, he decided, because he could no longer agree with what he’d been saying. It had all just been sad excuses for his general mental weakness and terrible coping skills—his friends had been right all along.

That’s what Walter chose to conclude.

“Please have a seat,” Melisa urged gently.

Walter had no memory of their short walk through the house, and now, somehow, they were standing in the kitchen.

It was a nice kitchen. It was situated in one corner of the large house, and wide windows to the black outdoors wrapped along the two outer walls, above a marble countertop that spanned the same space, intersected by a few dark-wood cabinets. Walter couldn’t stop himself from thinking how lovely it all could be in the morning . . . a Sunday morning . . . the sun rising above the forest in the backyard . . . warm natural light filtering in through the autumn leaves . . . the smell and the splattering and popping sound of a loving partner frying some eggs over a skillet . . . Again, why had he allowed things to get so muddled in his mind?
This
was all he wanted; all he needed . . .

Immediately next to Walter was an island countertop in the middle of the room, around which were three tall chairs.

Walter finally processed Melisa’s words and took a seat.

“You have some kind of luck, getting so deeply mixed up in all this,” she spoke softly as she filled a kettle. The way she said it, Walter felt she could’ve swapped “luck” for something synonymous with “karma” and it would’ve come out about the same.

“Yeah . . .
yeah
.”

Melisa went about the kitchen for a while without talking. She was visibly on-edge. Walter completely understood why, but he didn’t know what to say. He didn’t try very hard to think of any comforting words, truth-be-told, not before he allowed himself to recede back into his active mind, back to where he had been before: His friends had been right about him.

It wasn’t simply an irreversible personality trait that had carried him into such a mental hole. No, it was a lack of mental strength and a set of unfortunate circumstances that had conspired against him—nothing that couldn’t have been avoided or that was impossible to overcome. Walter tried to tell himself, now, that even if he hadn’t gone through his very recent ordeal with Timothy, he still would’ve found a way, before long, to move his mind from such ugly surroundings.

Hadn’t his choice to walk farther upstream instead of home been indicative of an approaching tidal shift?

That didn’t really matter, though. What was done was done, and now that his outlook
had
been jarred loose, the old cliché came vaguely to mind, putting to words the overall sense that had come over Walter: life really
is
what you make it.

Walter was gravitating to a simple and clean place of mind. Somewhere
far
from where he had been before, understandably. He was latching onto and embracing the most basic, instinctual human draws, and attempting to shift out of sight of all the muddled aspects of our infinite world that had tormented him before.

Walter Boyd, sitting in the Corey’s silent kitchen, ignoring Melisa shuffling anxiously about, was realigning his mind to make a simple, happy life for himself.

Trouble was, Timothy Glass was still alive, and
he
had already realigned his mind to make life a completely rotten thing.

C
ut out of the dense surrounding forest, Timothy Glass’s property had a long, narrow front yard leading up to the medium-sized house. A slight gravel driveway ran through it, and both sides of the driveway were currently being threatened by overgrown, neglected lanes of grass and brambles.

As they rounded onto this long driveway, the house and its surroundings were assaulted by the flat white and the pulsing multicolored lights of the three police cruisers.

When he saw it, Officer Tom Corey’s true reaction was mixed, despite his outward frustration, “
Fuck
.”

“What?” asked Braylen, alarmed.

“His car is gone.”

“Oh. Oh no,” his reaction, too, betrayed a certain level of cautious relief: maybe Timothy had already fled, and there would be no further confrontation that night?

It sure seemed likely. Likely enough that, before disembarking, Officer Corey put in a call for all patrol cars to be on the lookout for what he remembered to be a red Honda four-door of some kind, instructing dispatch to look up the registration and get the exact model and plate numbers circulating ASAP.

Then Tom Corey called for Officers Eugene and Lerra to draw their weapons and get a spotlight on the house’s front door. Tom Corey pulled the loudspeaker out of his cruiser and took up position behind the crook of his door, putting a hand to his holstered gun.

As Eugene swung the spotlight onto Timothy’s front door, Tom Corey spoke into the loudspeaker, “
Timothy Glass, you are under arrest for attempted murder. Come out with your hands up.
”

•   •   •

Walter sipped the last of the tea that Melisa had made. It had been herbal tea, and the smell and aroma—subtle things that, before recently, he had had little mind for—evoked subliminal images of green summer hillsides. Walter decided, now, that he should drink more tea in his life. The thought excited him far more, certainly, than you’d expect someone who’d just had such a close brush with death
could
be excited by such a thing.

Melisa and Walter had not communicated much in the past twenty minutes. Their minds could not have been set further apart, for two individuals in such a unique situation. Melisa was caught up in the uncertain, treacherous present, while Walter was silently changing his world, leaving little room to fret over Braylen and Tom Corey and the rest.

All that changed when the phone rang.

It had been so silent in the kitchen that the moderate ringing could’ve been likened to the blaring of an alarm in a sleeping firehouse. Both Walter and Melisa jumped no less than one inch, and Walter had dug himself so deep into the under-workings of his mind that he was unable to recognize that familiar, repetitive, jarring tone before Melisa, racing across the room, grabbed the small black receiver off the wall and said, her voice breaking, “Hello?”

Walter heard nothing that was said, but he did see some tension in Melisa’s face slacken.

“But
wait
—everyone’s okay?”

A silent gap—a tense one, now that the present was reasserting itself in Walter’s head.

“He’s not . . . ?”

“Okay,
okay
, here he is . . .” Melisa, some of the tension possibly substituted for annoyance now, held the phone out for Walter. “Tom wants to ask you something.”

Walter frowned and got up. He accepted the phone and put it to his ear, “Hello?”

“Walter,” Tom Corey’s digitally reduced voice came back urgently, “we need to know, as far as you could see, did Timothy Glass have more of his Blue Stew in the sauna’s basement than—what do we have?—eight liquid-capsules?”

Walter’s head was still not entirely with it, and the lack of clear context was too much to overcome, “Huh? What’s going on?”

“Timothy has fled,” Officer Corey spoke fast. “We are trying to determine how dangerous a fugitive he is. We’ve only found a small container of eight unlabeled blue capsules down here; we want to know if you can say for sure that there was more.”

“Yeah,
yeah
,” responded Walter. “I didn’t even see those capsules—but there were maybe ten sealed vials of the stuff on the middle table . . . did you find those?”

“
Fuck
. No. He took them. I
knew
it—everything’s torn up down here.
Shit
. Okay, I have to report this immediately. Hopefully I can convince the Staties and the Feds of the severity of all this without having to get all this blue shit tested first . . .” Tom Corey seemed to lose himself in a thought for a second. “Okay, thanks Walter. Tell Melisa I’ll be home soon.”

Before Walter could say anything, he heard a
beep
, followed by disconnected silence. He handed the phone back to Melisa.

“He says he’ll be back soon . . .”

“So . . . what was that all about?”

Walter paused; the gravity of the implication was falling on him.

“He got away,” his voice was subdued. “Timothy Glass is on the loose . . . with ten full vials of . . .
it
. . .”

•   •   •

Tom Corey pulled up in his cruiser fifteen minutes later.

Melisa had been waiting in the entranceway ever since his call, while Walter had taken to loitering in the adjacent dining room, unsure how to handle her agitated mood. Both of them watched as he disembarked and moved briskly down the stone walkway. He was holding something.

Walter heard Melisa open the door. Tom Corey’s gruff voice accosted her immediately, “You have not dressed this
whole
time?”

Walter couldn’t see, but he imagined an affronted look preceded Melisa’s staggered response, “God . . . I was so worried . . . I didn’t think . . . I had far more important things on my mind!”

“Look at you; I’m sure Walter enjoyed the show.”

“Tom, what is wrong?” Her tone—rightly so, Walter felt—had gone from defensive to accusatory.

Officer Corey didn’t respond.

Walter stiffened as he heard him approaching the dining room.

Their eyes met, and if Tom Corey’s hard shell of a face could’ve conveyed a subtle emotion like embarrassment, Walter guessed that he would’ve seen some now.

“Walter,” he nodded curtly and began unbuttoning his uniform jacket.

“Tom.”

Tom Corey set what he’d been holding down on the table, near Walter, and pulled off his jacket. It was dim in the large room, but Walter was pretty sure he saw a dark stain along one of his sleeves.