(Upcoming appearances: July 15, 6–7:30, author talk, Old Stone Church, 251 Main St., East Haven CT) | July 19, 10–3, Book Walk, Main St., Old Wethersfield CT)
Continued from here. Table of contents for ease of navigation here.
(The story so far: Officer Oberman has been investigating a deadly event on April 10, which appears to be a dud. But that night Colin Lang has come to Bernie Feldstein’s house (under cover of darkness and the codename Theodore Anderson). Only Colin’s girlfriend, Carol Wernick, has seen him leave on his mission, but she does not know why. On his way, Colin left a decoy car unlocked and running on the street, assuming someone would steal it.)
9.
Quite some time later, Carol decided that Colin was not going to return that night. She got out of her car and walked around in the night air to stretch her legs. The sky was remarkably clear; if it were day there’d’ve been sun, and there was almost never sun in April in Cottinend.
On a lark she went to Colin’s door and tried it. Then she walked around to the back of the house, and tried the sliding door. To her surprise it was unlocked. Colin would never leave the house unlocked. This breach of protocol worried her more than the sex stuff, although perhaps (she admitted to herself, eventually, after she was inside and sitting on the old familiar couch) it just gave her something less scary to worry about. Something she could wrap her head around.
She slid the door open. An inexplicable pair of pliers were on the floor in front of it. The TV was blaring as she came in, and she let it play for a while. It seemed disrespectful to change the house around, not to leave it the way he left it, even if Colin would never ordinarily leave the TV on in his absence. She used the bathroom and didn’t even put on the light, lest one extra light burning scare Colin off when he came home.
Then she remembered that her car was in the driveway. He’d know it was she turning lights on and off. She grabbed a remote off the coffee table and killed the TV. She considered lying down on the couch and getting some sleep. Or perhaps she could go into the bedroom and get some sleep.
Once she was in the bedroom, Carol figured that if Colin really was a transvestite he’d have to have a closet full of—she tried to think—fishnets? or bustiers?
She started looking for them.
10.
Seamus Donofrio left his house with his wife’s damned dog that always wanted to go for a walk when Seamus wanted to sleep. Let it go in the back yard, Seamus figured, but his wife was afraid the dog would soil her garden. Her “prize petunias,” Seamus called them, although he didn’t know if there were actually petunias there. He didn’t know what petunias looked like.
Anyway (he explained to the officer on the phone, later), Seamus was walking his wife’s dog, which should have been her responsibility, except she said she didn’t feel safe at night. Imagine not feeling safe in Cottinened! Why should Seamus feel safe, then? But Rano was a busy street, and there were plenty of street lights, and porch lights. Even if people weren’t walking around, if you yelled, someone would hear you. All you’d have to do was yell.
The damned dog was sniffing everything, doing everything except, you know, its business. It sniffed at a car parked on the side of the road and only after standing there in the horrible stink of the exhaust did Seamus realize the car was idling.
“Don’t piss there!” Seamus told the dog, with a jerk on the leash. “They’ll be right back.” All Seamus needed was some meathead to come out and catch this dog soiling his ancient wreck of a car. He could blame Seamus for all the dents and rust stains. Was that a broken window? He could blame Seamus for that too. He dragged the unwilling dog along, dragged it while it stiff-legged dug in its heels. It was like moving a table across the kitchen floor.
Don’t get Seamus started on how many times he’d had to move the kitchen table!
After what seemed like forever—an hour maybe?—the dog completed its business, you know, and Seamus ambled back home. He walked along Rano, and there was that same car, still idling.
When he got home, as his wife was screeching, “What happened, Seamus? Seamus, what’s wrong? What’s is it? Seamus? Seamus, what happened?” he called the police from the kitchen phone.
11.
Colin wasn't really watching, but he was nonetheless aware that Bernie was nervously pretending to putter around the house, performing simple tasks. He picked up and set down small items, mostly garbage. Looking busy.
But once Colin took the rifle out of the bag, there was no more pretense. Bernie just stared and smoked and smoked and stared as Colin went over it to make sure there was nothing obviously broken after its drop into the trash can. A little pacing; more staring.
“You’re what? Going to clean and oil it?” Bernie asked eagerly. “Take it all apart and check each piece? Then screw it back together? Like a Q?”
“A Q?”
Bernie mimed playing pool. “A cue.”
The thing was, Colin had no idea how to clean or oil a rifle. Taking the time to learn a single thing about maintenance would have ruined his reputation as someone completely uninterested in guns.
“No oil needed,” he said. “This model is self-lubricating.”
He could have sworn that Bernie choked back a laugh.
12.
Theodore Anderson was now unzipping a ratty old duffel bag. He took out two grotesque masks covered in freckles and tossed one to Bernie. “Try this on.”
The mask looked in bad shape. It smelled stale, like a basement. Bernie spent a moment looking at it. It almost looked familiar.
“Don’t worry,” Col. Anderson said, “no one will know you were involved.”
Bernie almost jumped up, but of course he was already standing. “No one will know?”
The Colonel stopped rummaging through the bag. “You want someone to know?”
And that was a new one on Bernie. He had always half assumed that he would be famous afterwards, that he’d walk into work and get high fives all around. He knew that didn’t actually make sense, when he thought about it. He knew that no one would be happy that he killed people. It was the Alan situation all over again. But if this whole exercise wasn’t going to change his status, what was the point of it?
Ah, but he’d answered his own question. There was one point. The smirking, wicked face of Alan Jancewicz.
“I’m in,” said Bernie.
“I know you’re in,” said Col. Anderson. “I was asking if you want to get caught.”
“Oh. No.”
“Good. We’ll take every precaution. You have nothing to worry about.”
“Your gun is untraceable. Your car in untraceable.” Bernie said it as a matter of course. He knew how these things worked. He wanted to show that he was not a complete fool.
“We’re taking your car, actually.”
“What? No way!”
“Don’t worry, we’ll be covering up the license plate. Like you say, untraceable. It’s unlikely they’ll be any witnesses, anyway. Just in case, try on the mask.”
Anderson had brought out of the duffel bag four pieces of plastic. They looked like bookends from the future. They looked like crab’s claws. Then he brought out a great many ammo magazines and several boxes of long, cool bullets. One by one he started inserting the bullets into the magazine. Each one snapped home with a satisfying click. To Bernie it looked like nothing so much as loading up a Pez dispenser. But it was more exciting than a Pez dispenser. Bernie felt the way he always felt at a strip club. He just wanted to touch something.
So there was this one time Col. Anderson got up to take a piss. Bernie immediately picked up the rifle. He tried sighting it, sniper style. He then picked up a magazine. It was comically long. He fumbled it into place, and it hung low like a waddle from the underside of the rifle. “This is its dick,” Bernie said to an imaginary audience.
He raised the rifle to his shoulder again and looked down its barrel. It had no scope, which probably just showed what a skilled sniper the Colonel was. He looked for a target outside, but of course all the shades had been drawn. Finally he decided to point it at the TV, because the TV would probably explode when he shot it.
Nothing happened, though, when he pulled the trigger.
Suddenly something rough was yanking the rifle from his grip, His finger caught painfully and twisted. Some skin came off. There beside him, rifle in hand, stood Col. Theodore Anderson, and the man looked furious. Usually when Bernie saw a face like that he was about to get fired. This time, he thought, he might actually get shot.
To save his life, Bernie tried to be helpful. “The gun’s broken,” he said.
Anderson took some deep breaths. “The trigger reads your prints. I didn’t authorize yours yet, and fortunately, too. If you’d shot that in here you would have ruined the whole mission.”
“Sorry. Sorry, sorry.”
“We have to be extremely careful with the rifle. It has a hair trigger if your prints are authorized. Why do you think I wear gloves?”
13.
Well after midnight, Oberman abandoned his watch. The tenth was over, and there had been nothing more interesting on the radio than an abandoned car.
Time to drive home and go to sleep. He had always needed at least eight hours to function properly, so it was already too late for him. He had to be in at seven o’clock tomorrow; where everyone would spend the day making fun of him.
He knew he should be grateful that April tenth was a dud, and on a conscious level he was. But you must understand that he had also wanted to be right.
Continued here.