Blvd. of Blood

Book 2, chapters 14–16

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

(Colin Lang continues to plan some horrible atrocity. His girlfriend Carol Wernick has no idea what he’s up to. Perhaps he left a clue or two in his house (back before he had a girlfriend and everything was safer. Meanwhile, low-level cop John Oberman and his hacker pal Sp!der continue to probe the weak link in Colin Lang’s plan, a loose-lipped accomplice they only know by his Twitter feed.)

14.

Yes, yes, Colin finally got to the library and looked up what streets had Wednesday-morning garbage pickup. He used his phone for other searches, of course. Under the circumstances it wasn’t even suspicious to begin googling adult onset dementia. In fact, it was better to keep a record of these searches! The phone was perfect for this, but at times he sneaked a quick search in at work, just to leave another trail.

He cleared some extra space in his garage so that he could drive his car three or four feet forward without fear of hitting a lawn mower. He bought some exfoliant and an electric razor—these he could buy just anywhere. He’d never used an electric razor before. He plugged it into a basement outlet to charge. The next day, in the bathroom, he carefully shaved the backs of his hands, from his knuckles to the tops of his wrists. He tried to “fade” the cut gradually into his arm hair. He was fair enough that a casual glance should spot no difference. He cleaned up the hairs and moved the razor back to the basement.

With his eyes closed he practiced closing and opening the combination lock on his bicycle. It had three dials, each 0 to 9, and if he moved one dial one click one way when he locked it, he could move it a click the other way to unlock it without even looking.

There was a three-foot chainlink fence behind his yard, separating him from a neighbor he’d never met. When he returned from his morning bike-and-hike he went in the back and practiced vaulting over it: one hand on top, and, with a glove on, the tops of the chains sticking up didn’t dig into his hand, as he’d feared they would. It was easy and it didn’t hurt. Just in case, he kept practicing, several mornings, back and forth, after a bike-and-hike, before he went in for a shower.

He brought his burner phone along on one early morning bike ride and tested it. The battery was mostly full. The phone had actual physical press buttons that he could use with gloves on, so Colin dialed the time and an infomercial’s 800 number, trying not to let the phone touch his ear or the condensation of his breath; and it to seemed to work fine, as a phone. He probably wouldn’t even need it.

And one day Colin told Carol he was interested in finding the best slice of pizza in Cottinend. A project! She seemed surprised, but was willing on weekends to get takeout slices for lunch, a different place each time. Sometimes they both went and sometimes it was just Colin and sometimes it was just Carol, bringing a little square box back while the other one set the table—a trivial task, for pizza. When Carol was going alone, Colin suggested Pizza King, just to get it out of the way. When Colin went alone—it was on a terrifying day, a stupid blunder he didn’t even want to think about—he went to Choice, pulling deliberately into a corner of the rear parking lot, where a dumpster stood. He put on sunglasses and an old checkered cap he had that he hadn’t worn for years. He took a moment to walk around the car, feigning he was looking for dents; but his eye, behind the shades, was trained on the back of the dumpster. He was confirming there was a sturdy handle there. He took a moment to drop a small scrap of paper, wadded up and drawn from his pocket, into the dumpster’s maw. Then he got the slices quickly, and left. He was proud of having established a pattern of going to pizza parlors, but he didn’t like the fact that he had stopped in himself. It seemed sloppy, and the hat and shades were no proper disguise, really. Too much today had been sloppy.

He brought the pizza back to Carol’s place and broached the subject of his mother.

“I know you said you were worried about her…” Carol began, trailing off invitingly.

“It’s just the senior moments; they’re getting more common, you know? She’ll tell me a story and then three minutes later she’ll tell me the same story.”

“I haven’t noticed; on the phone, I mean,” Carol said.

“It’s not always like that,” Colin agreed. “But I’m afraid it’s more likely to get worse than get better. I was thinking it might be time for her to move—”

“For her to move in with you?” Carol said, surprised.

“Oh, good grief no! No, I just meant she should move closer. Do you know Ridgemont Rest?”

“No?”

“It’s a senior facility. It’s not a home, it’s just assisted living. I mean, it’s more or less like the place she’s at now, except it’s right here in Cottinend, just north of the highway.”

Carol nodded, but she seemed unsure of what to say.

“I mean—I don’t know what it’s like. I’ve never been there, obviously. I’ve just driven past. I drove past today. I mean—would you go see it with me?”

“See it?”

“I just want to look at the place. See the facilities and everything. It gets good reviews, but I’d want to see it. Just so I know in case it becomes, you know, necessary.”

“Yes, of course I’d go with you.”

“Thank you. I hate this pizza, by the way.”

“Really,” Carol said. “I thought it was pretty good.”

“This one and Pizza King, they really kind of made me feel sick. I’d prefer,” he said this part carefully, “to avoid them in the future.”

15.

As Carol settled into the transition from assemblage-of-dates to in-a-relationship—not that they talked about being in a relationship—she never stopped worrying at the strange secret genius of Colin Lang.

He had a quirky, almost childlike charm. After a month and a half of dating, she was holding his hand as they watched an old movie and she realized—

“Why is your wrist so smooth?” she asked.

“Oh! The arm hairs were catching in my watchband, so I shaved my left wrist. Then to balance it out I shaved my right.”

She ran her hands over his.

“My mother hasn’t even noticed,” he said.

Nevertheless: She had promised herself, long ago, that she’d be fussier about relationships. It was too easy to find a guy in perpetual adolescence who sleepwalked through life without tastes, without opinions, without long-term bonds, without ambitions that did not involve video games or the consumption of pornography. Maybe she’d been too fussy about relationships, so long had she been without one—but she had also promised herself that once in a relationship she would not obsess over a guy, whatever his admirable, curious, or fascinating qualities. She was Carol Wernick and she would never be one of those women who was a cipher, her tastes and opinions a collection of the tastes and opinions of old boyfriends.

Was she following through on her promises? Was she perhaps spending too much time picking at the knotty clue of Colin Lang? And Colin himself—were his apparent red flags perhaps actual red flags?

There was one time, for example. He’d terrified her. She was standing in his kitchen sipping coffee in a robe. He was getting dressed to go out for a slice of pizza. It was almost noon, but they always lingered in bed on a Saturday, only rising to sit on the patio and watch the birds come to the feeder Carol had bought him. Sometimes Colin would fry up some eggs, but often enough lunch was the first meal of the day. That’s the way it was today, and Carol was getting hungry.

“Mind if I grab a snack while you’re out?” she asked.

“Help yourself,” Colin called back. He was putting his shoes on over by the side door, the one that faced the garage.

Carol opened the pantry and leaned in. She couldn’t see Colin with her head in the pantry—from the chair he was sitting in, he could probably only see her butt sticking out—but she kept up a polite little chatter as she poked around. “Crackers…rice cakes…oh! Maybe I’ll have a few mixed nuts.”

The way he shouted then…she’d never heard such a strange voice, certainly not from Colin and probably not anywhere outside of a movie. “Stop!” he shouted, but shouted does not do it justice, his terrified, terrifying voice. She froze. She was genuinely scared; for a moment she thought he was going to kill her, and of course standing stock still was not the smartest thing to do when someone was going to kill you. She wasn’t proud of that.

He didn’t kill her, of course, and he didn’t so much push her as slide himself between her and the pantry shelves. She saw him scoop the mixed nuts up into a hug—there was no other way to describe it. Clutching it to his chest, his fists balled up, he slid back out of the pantry. He turned his back for a moment, then turned around and stood there looking at her. One hand held the can of nuts; the other was casually in his pocket.

“Sorry,” he said, “I was afraid it was a snake.”

Carol just stood there, breathing fast.

“I didn’t want it to scare you,” he added.

“A…snake?” Carol managed.

“I mean the mixed nuts. A fake can with a spring snake inside. I used to have one. I didn’t want it to scare you.”

“You scared me.”

“Yeah, I didn’t think it through. I was reacting on instinct. I didn’t want the snake to spring out, you jump, your coffee goes flying…”

“I’m not holding my coffee.”

“Yeah, well, I see that now.”

He really did look contrite. Or he looked something. He looked ashamed at least.

Then he went and got pizza and everything was all right. In fact, he asked her—it was such an intimate request for people who had only been dating a couple of months—to go look at old folks’ homes with him, for his mother. It touched her heart, and of course she was happy to go. He called one immediately and set up an appointment for the next day. Carol would have put it off for a week, or more, and perhaps she had not anticipated having to go see the place so quickly. Perhaps she had not anticipated an official tour.

Because the tour was deadly boring. Carol wasn’t sure, but she could swear Colin paid more attention to the parking lot than the actual facilities. And his questions were weird. He kept asking about security.

“To prevent elopement?” asked the tour guide, an oleaginous older woman who reminded Carol of her middle-school principal. Actually, everything about the facility reminded her of middle school.

“Yes,” said Colin, “to prevent elopement.”

The guide went through a serious of lockdowns and checkpoints that all sounded to Carol like a fire hazard. But she wasn’t really paying attention.

“And if the tenant elopes? Are there security guards patrolling that would see her leaving?”

“Our attendants are very vigilant, and are more than sufficient to apprehend any elopers.”

Colin ended the tour soon after that. Carol asked him, in the car, what he thought.

“It was generally untidy,” he said, something she hadn’t noticed. “And if they’re lax janitorially, how can I trust them in anything else?”

“At least they’re close to your new favorite pizza place,” she tried saying with a big smile.

“Choice Pizza! Barf!” he said with a laugh, and at a red light he kissed her.

16.

Sp!der’s phone rang and he knew it was John Oberman before he even looked.

“I’m working on it,” he said as he picked up.

“Working on it? Sp!der it’s already the end of February.”

“Now, February is a very short mo—”

“I need to find this guy.”

“John, John. I have several irons in the fire. They should pay off before April.”

“Irons? What does that mean?”

“You know, you’re not paying me, John.”

Oberman was yelling. “You didn’t try to contact him, did you?”

“Give me some credit,” Sp!der said.

“Did you see what he posted today? Four or five hundred dead?”

“Wait what?” Sp!der tucked the phone up against his shoulder and reached for his keyboard. He hadn’t gotten a response to his last gambit, and it had been two weeks, but he’d just assumed the target had not logged into Twitter. Yet there it was: “400 or 500 dead coming soon not in a theter its all 2 real son!!!” [sic].

After a flurry of soft soap, Sp!der uncharacteristically hurried Oberman off the phone. He sat in his swivel chair and thought. Perhaps the King of Cottinend was smarter than he typed.

“This looks like a job for Ilyana,” thought Sp!der.

Ilyana was Sp!der, of course—one of his troupe of players; an identity he kept plausibly active on the internet so she could chime in and agree with or praise Sp!der when he needed backup. Whenever Sp!der felt challenged, all the players could come out: Cowboy Rex and Big Steve, but mostly the ladies: Sue McCormick and Gertie and Pepper Anne and seven different attractive foreign women with pictures lifted from websites devoted to Russian brides. Natasha and Anastasia and all their friends each had a Facebook page and a Twitter account and more than one dating profile, with which they each kept several gentlemen strung along. Ilyana had been liking and sharing things for years. She looked legitimate.

She was going to have to develop a crush on @CottinendKing.