Cheap Thrills (6 Thrilling reads) (61 page)

Seventeen

“Come on out… That’s it… Faster…’ the man in the bushes says as he tips a container upside down. The container is medium-sized, the sort of container you may put leftover Chinese food in.

“Fuck!” he screams. He immediately realizes that his vocal outburst was too loud. He sucks his finger in pain. He pops his finger out of his mouth and winces at the sight of a big red sore. “Fuck,” he says again, this time quieter. He rustles around in the bushes some more and pulls out another container. This one is a little larger. He repeats the process of pouring out its contents. He does that again two more times. Each time the container gets larger. “That’s it… Follow the yellow brick road,’ he says as he looks on. “Into the crack in the wall,” he says. He gets up and shakes himself down. “Gives me the creeps,” he says while he pats himself down vigorously as if he has ants in his pants.

He quietly makes his way to his car and gets in. He looks at his reflection in the side mirror and smiles. He keys the ignition and reverses out of the driveway.

Eighteen

The police officer makes his way down the hospital hallway. Melisa spots the man first. Andy hears the chains on his belt whip against his leg. The sound makes him turn in the direction of the oncoming officer. Melisa looks on nervously. It’s as if she realizes what is happening. It’s not like she knows what’s happening, but she knows something bad is happening. She gets a funny feeling at the mere sight of the approaching officer. “Andy?” she says, sounding scared.

“What?” he asks, still looking at the oncoming officer.

“What’s going on?” she asks.

Andy turns to face Melisa. “How the hell am I supposed to know?”

The officer reaches the couple. He looks down at Andy. His expression is blank. It’s unnerving for both Melisa and Andy.

“You Andy?” the officer asks in a thick country accent.

Andy nods. “Yeah.”

“The guy with the house renovation?”

Andy nods again.

“You brought in Dayton?”

“Yeah, that’s me,” Andy says, starting to sound impatient.

“I’m afraid I need to take you to the sheriff’s office. We need some questions answered.”

Andy looks shocked. “Questions? What sort of questions?”

The police officer extends his hand as a gesture to follow him. “Just protocol in a situation like this.”

Melisa looks at Andy and then at the officer. “‘A situation like this’?” she repeats.

“Yes, ma’am. Your husband will be fine. It’s just procedure.”

“Procedure for what?”

The officer looks uncomfortable. “I’d rather not say,” he says.

“Please. Tell us what is going on. What procedure are you talking about?”

The officer grabs Andy by the arm and yanks him up to his feet. Andy hasn’t got time to react. Before he knows it, handcuffs don his wrists. “Procedure for attempted murder,” the officer says with a
hiss while dragging Andy up the hallway and out of the building. Melisa just stands there in shock.

Nineteen

“I don’t understand what’s going on,” Andy says as he braces himself on the steel folding chair. The officer goes behind him and pushes Andy in closer to the table. The sound of the chair legs scraping against the floor resembles chalk on a blackboard. “Is anyone listening to me? I need some answers. This isn’t fair!” he says, feeling trapped against the table, which is in close proximity to his sternum. “I’m innocent!” he bellows.

The officer who reprimanded him smiles a coy snaked grin. He finds Andy’s protests this early on in the “procedure” to be rather amusing. He immediately thinks that the interrogation will be a cakewalk.

“Innocent, are you?” the officer asks in his thick country accent.

Andy nods emphatically. “Yes, I am! Just tell me what’s going on.”

The officer nods. “In due time, Andy.”

Andy remains stunned into silence. He can hear his heartbeat in his head.

After a few minutes the door to the bleak interrogation room opens. A heavy-set man walks in, wheezing with every step. Sweat drips down his forehead. He has a large star emblem on his chest. It reads “Sheriff.” The man sits down opposite Andy and goes through some paperwork. The original officer with the country accent waves Andy off sarcastically and walks out of the room, leaving Andy with the strange-looking lawman. After a few more minutes of silence, the Sheriff finally looks at him. His big round face oozes sweat and authority as he takes a deep breath and opens his wide mustached mouth.

“I’m the sheriff of the county. And you are Andy, I suppose?” The man’s accent seems to match the other officer’s thick country twang.

“Yes, that is correct,” Andy says, rubbing his palms on his sides, trying to wipe the fear off them.

“Born in ’72, on May the twenty-eighth?”

Andy nods. “Yes,” he says, clarifying his rapid head movements.

“Your wife is Melisa. She, too, was born in ’72? A September girl, the twenty-second?”

“Yes.”

The sheriff continues to rustle through some documents. He stops dead at a piece of paper. “You are selling your mother’s house? You had an offer of $300,000?”

Andy looks on in awe. “How do you know that?”

The sheriff smiles. “It’s our job to ‘know that.’”

“What has any of this got to do with anything? How does me selling my mom’s house implicate me in an attempted murder?”

The sheriff remains quiet. He just continues to read through some more files.

Andy feels as if the sheriff is just letting him stew. “Fucking answer me!” screams Andy.

The sheriff finally looks up at him and twitches his strawberry blond mustache. “I will not tolerate such language in my interrogation room! You got that, you no-good son of a bitch?” the sheriff roars as he thumps his fist down on the metal table.

Twenty

“They took Andy in?” asks Patsy as she consoles her daughter.

Melisa cries into her mother’s shoulder. “He didn’t do anything!” she screams hysterically. Both she and her mother are standing in the lavish doorway of the estate-like home.

Her father, Peter, comes rushing to the door. “Melisa, darling, what happened?” He embraces both Melisa and his wife Patsy.

“Daddy, they took Andy in.”

“Who took Andy in?” Peter asks, still squeezing both his wife and daughter in an embrace.

“The police took Andy in! They arrested him,” she says, crying some more.

“Has he been hitting you?” screams Peter furiously as he lets his wife and daughter out of his grip. Patsy turns to Peter and gives him a look. It’s too late, though. Melisa has already grown red faced.

“No, he didn’t! Why on earth would you think Andy would even touch me?”

Her father looks miffed and a little embarrassed. “I just…”

Melisa shuts him down. “No, you ‘just’ nothing! Andy is a good man, and he has only ever been nice to you and Mom. I don’t understand why you have it in for him!”

“I’m sorry dear. I just don’t want you to get hurt,” Peter says, stepping back a few steps, looking flushed with embarrassment. His daughter has never called him out like this before. He never knew how she truly felt about Andy. He just thought their relationship was a one-off. “I just want you to be happy,” he says.

Melisa nods. “I know,” she says, understanding where her father is coming from. It wasn’t too long ago that her father saved her from her previous boyfriend before Andy. Back then he was right. “Andy isn’t the same as Michael. Andy doesn’t hit me. You don’t need to worry about that.”

Peter nods. “Good. Truth is, I do like Andy. He seems like a good guy,” says Peter.

His wife Patsy gives him a warm smile. “He is a good man,” she says, holding her stubborn husband’s hand.

“I’ve been silly. I’m sorry, Melisa. I know how much he means to you.”

Twenty-One

Dayton is lying on the hospital bed with his eyes wide open. He is feeling a tad nauseous and could do with a sick bucket. The ceiling above him is doing backflips as it spins from left to right. He feels like he drank a bottle of whiskey and partied till the early hours. He knows where he is. It isn’t the first time he’s ended up in a hospital, and he knows that it won’t likely be the last time, either. To date, since he started his renovation business he has been in and out of hospital with all sorts of injuries. Nails in limbs, falls off ladders, fights in the yard, bar fights after the fights in the yard. Arrests for abusive language toward aggravated customers, resulting in more fights. It’s safe to assume that Dayton knows the deal when it comes to opening his eyes and staring at a hospital ceiling. The only thing that is alarming Dayton at this moment is that he’s never awoken in the hospital to find himself tied up in all sorts of tubes, as if he was on life support. It freaks him out as he comes to.

He tries to rip some of the tubing off his chest. The EKG monitor flatlines. Within seconds, a rush of doctors and interns spills into his room. The sound of the door swinging open frightens him even more. The look of relief on their faces is palpable.

“Mr. Rogers, please refrain from moving too much. You’ve been through quite an ordeal. You need to rest up and get better,” says one of the doctors as he approaches the reeling man.

“What happened?” asks Dayton as he tries to relax.

“You were assaulted,’” says the doctor.

“Oh…yeah,” says Dayton, getting flashes of some distant, but relevant memory.

The doctor’s eyes light up. “You remember what happened?”

Dayton nods.

“Okay, I’ll get the deputy in so he can take a statement.”

Dayton squints. “A statement?” “Yeah, you were assaulted pretty badly. You’re lucky to be alive.”

Dayton goes white. “Why? Did I die?”

The doctor goes in closer to Dayton and rests his hand on his shoulder. “Let’s just say you are lucky to be alive.”

Twenty-Two

“You handcuffed the victim and left him to die,” says the sheriff as he thumps his fist down on the table once again.

Andy swallows hard. He doesn’t know what to say. He has never even dreamed of anything like this ever happening to him. This is the sort of thing you read about. It’s the sort of thing you saw on the TV crime shows. It certainly isn’t something Andy would ever dream of doing. “I didn’t. Honestly. Why would I do such a thing?”

The sheriff thumps the table once again. “Because you’re a scumbag, that’s why. You knew you had a spiders’ nest right there. You tied Dayton up and handcuffed him. You then poured a boatload of black widows on your friend and watched him fight for his life. He was bitten a hundred times. His heart stopped, and he died. You then un-cuffed him and ran for it, waiting for somebody to find him.”

Andy shakes his head. “That’s absurd. Why on earth would I do that?”

“Why don’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t do it. I’m telling the truth. We found Dayton in the middle of our yard. He was lying face down in the dirt.”

“You moved him, didn’t you?”

“No, I didn’t move him.”

“So he was alive when you un-cuffed him. Maybe you had second thoughts. Maybe you wanted people to find him. Maybe you chickened out.”

Andy starts to panic. “But why would I do such a thing? If I wanted to kill my friend, wouldn’t it be easier to shoot him?” Andy is pulling at brass rings now; he doesn’t even know why he is defending himself by saying that he would have killed Dayton in a different manner. It’s absurd to even try to comprehend what’s happening.

“So you would have done it differently?”

Andy knows the comment was going to backfire on him. “Damn right. Why the fuck would I kill my friend with spiders? Who does something like that?”

The sheriff remains quiet for effect. “People who think they are going to get away with it,” he says, cracking his knuckles, watching the sweat pour off Andy’s head.

Twenty-Three

“I was handcuffed and tied up around a pole in the garage. He then got out a plastic container full of black widows. He had gagged me, so I couldn’t scream. I tried to, but the towel he had put in my mouth restricted my breathing. He then poured the plastic container full of spiders on my head. I could feel the spiders scatter all over my body. I was squirming relentlessly. I think it made the spiders angry. They started biting me. Before I knew it, I was feeling faint. The pain was excruciating. I nearly vomited. My entire body was hot. I could feel their fangs pierce my skin. After a few minutes of more biting, he patted the spiders off me. He was wearing gloves, and seemed like he knew how to handle them. He then punched me in the face, and then I woke up here,” Dayton says as he grips the steel bar on the side of his hospital bed. The deputy looks confused.

“So you didn’t scream for help?”

“No, I was knocked out by the punch.”

The deputy nods. “So he dragged you out of the garage and into the yard and dumped you there?”

“I guess. I certainly didn’t walk there.”

The deputy nods again, taking down more notes as he scribbles in his black notebook. “And you say you know this guy?”

Dayton nods. “Damn right I do. That’s why he got away so easily. He was pretty much expected to be there.”