Authors: Jason McIntyre
This life was nearing its conclusion. He had stepped out for a drink, just one bloody drink, and it had landed him here.
Two birds and one fucking stone
. The buzzing in his ears made everything worse. It always got worse. His judgement would leave entirely and if he didn’t act soon there would be no way back to the world. Alone, he would drift away to his icy spot and he didn’t know what would happen after that.
“My wallet. Look. I. M. in— an. Epis. Ode. I jus— ne— a drink and then. I’ll. Be. Fin— Money. Late— r.“
He reached for the can, knocked over the jerky box and a host of other displays with a crash that lit the insides of his head with further pain. The buzz blared in his ears and his sight teetered. The view of Ahmed swayed like the world might if his eyes were at the end of two long springs. He finally clasped his fingers loosely around the can of pop, picked it up and popped the tab.
Under his crinkled and damp brow, with shaky hand, and confusion, Ahmed Farukh pulled the derringer from under the counter. In his muddled anxiety his finger nearly squeezed the trigger. He pointed it at Will—
The bell above the front door rang out.
A man stood there, dressed in long brown pea coat, eyes wide with realization of what he had stepped into.
Willem Nash called for the remainder of the strength in his body, fought back the buzzing in his ears, and dove across the counter, spilling fizzy Orange Crush across everything.
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The man in the long brown pea coat was a counselor for inner city youth at the rec center on Price Street. He loved his work, loved the kids, and drove in from his basement suite in Richmond Hill six mornings a week to set up basketball schedules and look over case files starting at seven. Unlucky for him, he drank coffee on these mornings. While in his heart he loved the kids and the early start, his eyes and his brain didn’t always feel up to the challenge. Today, yet again, a can of coffee crystals in a plastic grocery bag sat forgotten by his apartment door. He had been meaning to bring it with him all last week, after someone had donated a coffee maker which waited just outside his office. He would bring the crystals tomorrow, he thought. But right now, he really needed a coffee. Digging in his coat pocket for change, he pushed open the door of the Farukh-owned Pit Stop.
There was a jingle of bells. He looked up. Into the crammed shop. He saw things happen like a flash across a television screen: they didn’t seem real.
One man dove across the counter mixed into the spray of orange liquid. The other flinched. The two intertwined with the diving man overtaking the other.
The counselor fell to his knees covering his face with his hands. But it was all over in seconds.
The man wrestled the weapon away from the clerk. The counselor recognized him from other mornings when a hot cup was his only fix. The weapon went off, blowing a hole through the proprietor’s throat, just off to one side of dead-center. The sound erupted inside his head and something spattered behind him, coating cigarette cartons with darkness. The explosion rang through the tiny store like a sonic boom. He had seen gunshot wounds, had even held one bleeding boy in his arms waiting for paramedics to arrive, but he had never heard the sound of a gun. Only on T.V. Not a real one.
Both bodies were gone, vanished behind the counter like wraiths that had never even existed in the real world. In its little darkened window the register still read $.80.
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Ahmed’s mother had always made her boys wear a white dress shirt, dark wool slacks and a necktie to work. She insisted they both shave clean and put on cologne and if that shirt was even a little wrinkled they would be made to take it off and re-iron it before leaving the house. This was every day. No exceptions. It was an ethic she wanted instilled in them both, and since her husband was gone now, she counted on only herself to deliver it.
The first thing the counselor did when he crossed to the other side of the counter and crouch at the spattered bodies there, was to pull Ahmed’s tie off. His frantic thinking was on the money; this would help open an air passage and allow him to press a hand against the clerk’s bleeding throat. Blood bloomed on the white collar of Ahmed’s crisp shirt and, as the counselor checked for pulses on both he and Nash, Ahmed’s eyes flickered white under shaking eyelids. They rolled back in his head.
The other was gone. The one who had dived across the counter, soaked in orange soda, was dead. But the counsellor found a faint pulse beating inside Ahmed. He applied pressure on the wound with a quivering palm, performed CPR as best he could, then paused to call nine-one-one on the telephone beside the register.
When he crouched once more, the pulse felt stronger. He breathed into Ahmed’s mouth again as he heard the first set of sirens blaring north on Yonge, and was astonished to find a shallow breath come back at him.
The shocking events of the morning came to their peak in the next moment as those dark flicking eyelids settled and opened. The store clerk looked up at the stranger kneeling over him in the tiny space behind the counter. His eyes were black beads floating in pools of placid white liquid. They came into sharp focus like the sun moving out from behind a cloud. He pushed the stun-faced counselor violently aside with a force that seemed impossible only minutes behind a near-fatal gunshot. The brutality of the shove was enough to knock him sideways against the cash register’s iron drawer casing. The result was an audible clang of bone on metal.
With sirens calling to him in his head, the Thief staggered to his new feet, not sure if his next opportunity—the man who had clearly brought him back—was dead or just unconscious. Either way he was no good to the Thief. He had to go. He couldn’t waste time. Time was empty for him. He ran out of the store carrying only the long-barreled derringer. The bell above the door jingled again and past it, the dark barren morning gave him a chilly sweat.
They would be looking for him. Sirens would sit atop cars that would drive down roads and alleyways looking only for him. As he ran, the glassy, crumbly snow crunched under his dress shoes. He pinched his eyes shut tight against the stinging air and squeezed his fist around the grip of the bloody derringer. All he could see there, behind his eyelids, was the vision of that old Thunderbird’s front end sinking, sinking, sinking into icy waters.
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The Thief took a giant risk with every attempt he made, with every one he stole. Both the new life and the old had to leave at the same breath. It had never worked otherwise. And after it all went down, after he took them to his icy field and removed them for good, he needed to be pulled back. To a degree, he always required something there to give him the kiss of life again. Once yanked, pulling them all the way down was not the hardest part. And trusting that he would be pulled back afterwards was a constant. He could grab them from here, from wherever, and do anything he wanted once they got to his spot on the precipice near the edge of the water.
But getting them there was the difficulty.
Getting them there was the trick.
He knew that he had to engulf the body, put an arm around its neck, or a hand, and constrict it with brute force. That was part of it. But he needed something else: some arbitrary shock, some substantial force. An object or means that put life in question, canceling its option for renewal in an instant. A bullet, the cold edge of a knife, something blunt. Those were the quickest and the easiest, but not the best. They left gaping holes, damage that would let problems arise later. A shock that didn’t ruin what he was after would be best. It would lessen the volume of painful sounds when he took over. It would make the buzzing come later instead of sooner.
As for Willem Nash, the Thief had stolen what he had after tossing him from a causeway at the plant where he worked, then jumping after him. Both fell into a cooling tank thirty feet below. As they thrashed, he pinched the fingers of his left hand into a narrow blade. Below the surface of the water he squeezed Nash’s windpipe at his larynx with this dull finger-knife until the struggling stopped. The Thief had been a temp at the plant, showing up dutifully for about four and a half weeks when he saw Nash’s wife and kids for the first time—they arrived one evening en complet in the family wagon to pick up the man they loved after his day’s work had ended.
To the Thief, that looked like perfection.
But to Nash, the
original
Nash, it had been reason to bitch.
That made the Thief’s infection of resentment worse and so, without remorse, without guilt, he took what Nash had. The opportunity to give it back did not exist but that didn’t bother him for a second. He deserved it more than Nash, he told himself. He deserved it so much more.
But this was it. He believed—really believed—that the shove which sent Will Nash over the iron railing and into that water tank would be his very last and that he could throw this habit out of his life for good. He could settle finally, and forget the years he had spent looking. The pinging in his ears as he came conscious on a bank of graded snow, as did the sound of jangling bells over the door to that magazine shop, told him otherwise. And so did that vision of his Thunderbird’s bumper. It had come back like cancer and showed no signs of leaving again.
And the topper on things—on every last goddamn detail—was that he felt better. The anger was good. The hate refreshed him. He felt in control. He felt new again. Since he had come across this Zeb child hiding behind the bed in his room, since he had pulled this most recent one down there with him, since he had flashed into the boy’s mind and had seen all that he had seen there, he had come back to his first true beliefs like a fire starter finding a book of matches untouched. He
felt
, plain and simple. Memories swarmed around with each other, swam in the sea of everything he knew, threatened absolute madness, promised it. He scoured his brains for original truth and found pieces of it. He latched onto those pieces, a drowning man in an edgeless pool of water. Now that he had found Zeb his tarnished faith was renewed. Now that he had found Zeb he was back on track. And now that he had found Zeb, even at the loss of Nash’s loving wife and Nash’s two boys with the golden hair of cherubs, the Thief’s crusade was resurrected.
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The sky was light, but it wasn’t entirely morning yet. Darkness lurked in crooks and in elbow-angles and under the skirts of trees. There was a haze across the neighborhood, a gossamer dawn mist. And there was light, but, most assuredly, morning had not arrived yet.
It was six-thirty-two; only seventeen minutes had passed since Shears and Lip had arrived and burst the door from its hinges. And only twenty-eight minutes had ticked along since the glass pane of a back window in the Redfield home had been shattered by an intruder. Other officers stood at their cruisers and controlled the growing group of onlookers. There was contrived silence as Shears directed Jewels Fairweather and Marlon Smithee out of the bungalow’s broken front doorway with the second gurney. Neighbors crowded lawns and sidewalks, their faces bathed in the streaking flash-glow of red and white. That second gurney to leave the Redfield home had to be carried across the lawn because the wheels wouldn’t turn in the snow. Its metal frame and the housing of its small rubber wheels were caked in frothy white.
Sebastion’s ambulance had left moments before, careened off, back tires spinning a little on the slick road and kicking up glittering snow like fairy dust or pounds of spilled sea salt.
They hurried, Jewels and Marlon, nearly slipping on ice and uneven ground, but they got the second victim to their unit. Jewels felt it in his bones: they needed to get this one to York General in one hell of a hurry. While his partner rushed around front to the driver’s seat, he wriggled his large frame in beside the clamped down stretcher within the ambulance’s tight cavity. He settled in and began preparing for another bout with the paddles even before a nameless officer threw the two back doors shut on each other with a clang-clack. The engine turned over like a talisman coming to life and Jewels took a long inhale of air. He looked down at his charge: a broken, ruined corpse, covered in red, barely recognizeable as a human being. He saw a flash of the scene in the bedroom, like an afterimage inside a closed eye: two victims, one near the drenched curtains and one at the foot of the bed.
—In my bones
, he thought again quickly.
That’s on the money. It’s in my bones and we need to hurry. Step on it Marls, we need to get him home in one hell of a hurry. I can feel it in my bones.
He let out the air in his lungs and it came in a long and desparate pant. This was already a tough shift, he thought. And it would not be getting any easier.
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Conrad Julius Fairweather—Jewels—was concise, straightforward, present-minded and clear-thinking. He paid particular attention to detail, he loved Katie Becks like the ocean loved the shore and he was built like a tanker. He was perfect.
When he played defensive line for his high school football team they called him the Gatekeeper because he never let anything through. Three years in a row he helped them arrive at a city championship and the banners from those games still hang on high in the rafters of Lansdowne Comprehensive High School’s gymnasium.
At some point during those ever-stretching semesters at Lansdowne—no one could say exactly when for sure—Katie Becks started composing lengthy notes to Jewels Fairweather. Her little sonatas were simple and plain—in general, they were about nothing at all. But inside those days of home room periods, yearbook meetings and Friday rallies, her words passed along in the hallway or the library, would fix things for him. Folded intricately into flat little squares or small stars, he might find a page of them tucked into one of his locker vents, or maybe she would have stealthily tacked a message inside his English notebook with a hairpin. He would expect them, he would wait for them, and he would read them immediately, hungrily staring at her purple, rounded handwriting. They were about nothing, that’s true. But they made being out in the world bearable. And they always began the exact same way:
You love me, Jewels
.