Blvd. of Blood

Book 1, chapters 18–21

Continued from here. Table of contents for ease of navigation here.

(The story so far: Colin Lang, respectable actuary at Radcliffe Worth Partners, is supposed to be planning some sort of murder spree come spring; Carol Wernick is a coworker he meets at an office party. Meanwhile local cop John Oberman and local patsy Bernie Feldstein have yet to figure out what is really going on; nor has Carol; but has the reader?)

18.

Bernie’s bandage fell off one morning on the drive to work. Yes, the Fines had hurried him to the hospital, but all the understaffed, holiday-glum nurses had done was slap on some salve and a bandage. Bernie could have done that himself! He held his arm outside the shower every morning, and it took a full month for the medical tape to flap loose. That’s how careful Bernie had been.

The skin underneath the bandage was white and puckered. With it off, the smell of the unwashed flesh began to fill the poorly ventilated car. It smelled like the white flowers on the trees outside the pizza parlor. It made him think of spring.

19.

There had been a time—many years ago—when Colin had tried. And when he tried, he had generally been successful.

The cop car story, stealing a cop car—this youthful indiscretion was his cocktail party staple, and it was always a hit. His respectable facade was armor enough against any possibility that by this admission he had gone “too far.” It was so long ago! He was a button-down solid citizen. But as far as crazy pasts went, a high speed-chase in a stolen cop car could usually trump the party. Anything worse and you simply couldn’t joke about it. Anything worse was a tragedy.

Raise a glass to Colin Lang! He was well-dressed and owned his own house, and back when he was trying he found it easy to get a date by means of this story. He found it easy to get his dates to come to his house for a nightcap.

At first there was nothing weird about the house. He had no pictures on the walls, but who knew, maybe he had just moved in. Maybe he had just had it painted. Dates gave him the benefit of the doubt. Only later did it seem creepy. Only later did the deadness behind his eyes drift to the font of his eyes; or perhaps the eyes just became pellucid enough that you could see it through them.

He had not used the story in years, but when Carol started talking to him it had slipped out. They exchanged phone numbers, and on Christmas he sent her a friendly text. He was on his way, he explained, to his mother’s. Have a great holiday.

It had been years since he tried, and he honestly wasn’t really trying now. It was all autopilot. He was thinking about the plan.

20.

Someone had called in a tip, but it was just a “worry-tip,” and those were low priority. It eventually got passed to John Oberman, which was ridiculous—this was a job for a detective, not a patrolman.

“You like this nerd shit,” Detective Smith said with a giggle. He dropped the paper on Oberman’s desk. He left, still giggling; he had a movie giggle, Oberman thought, like a supervillain.

It was a printout of two related tweets that a certain @CottinendKing had produced a week prior, on New Years Day. The first read: “next yer u will see how powrfull i am when i kil u all”. The second: “i ment this yer sory”. The tweets did not make a thread but presumably they were supposed to.

This was not even his job, but Oberman took out his phone, opened the Twitter app, and looked up @CottinendKing. The account did not post very much, and when it did it was mostly about wrestling. It had zero followers.

“Who called this in?” he yelled over to Smith.

As they drove around on patrol, Campbell just pooh-poohed the tweets. “There have to be a million Cottinends in America. How do you know this is even the king of this Cottinend.”

“There are absolutely not a million Cottinends in America. This is actually the only Cottinend in the whole world.”

Campbell kept trying to light his cigarette, but this was hard to do one-handed with a greasy old matchbook while driving. Theoretically, Campbell could do it, as he had done it before; but he was not doing it today. The cigarette bobbled in his lips wildly as he said, “How could you possibly know that?”

“‘Kill you all,’” Oberman said. “How is this guy going to kill us all?”

“He’s not literally the King of Cottinend, I’ll tell you that much.”

21.

So many boxes got recycled in the weeks after Christmas, surely no one would notice several boxes for VHS tape holders, disassembled, turned inside out and pressed flat.

It was ice cold out, but Colin started biking. He’d go for a quick ride before work, when it was still dark. If he unsnapped two levers and took the front wheel off, he found, his new bike could fit in his back seat, but he didn’t actually bother driving it anywhere. He just rode around the neighborhood. It’s like they said: you never forget. But his leg muscles had been dormant since junior high, and although he’d tried to build them back up with the stationary bike at the gym, it turned out that the a gym bike wasn’t quite the same as a ride up and down hills. It might take a while before he felt could ride for any length of time easily.

He’d expected to do most of his biking on the weekend—the plan called for biking on the weekend—but there was a monkey wrench in the plan. It was a weekend wrench, now. Its name was Carol Wernick.

(Here ends book one. Book two (of five) starts here.)