Blvd. of Blood

Book 2, chapters 12–13

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

(The story so far: Colin Lang has a lot of preparation left on his plan to do something horrible in April. Meanwhile, police-adjacent hacker, in search of clues, has targeted Bernie Feldstein’s Twitter feed with a WinFatBux4Life scam.)

12.

Colin biked in the mornings, before work, with a removable light on the handlebars. It was bitter cold in early February. He started in the dark and by the time he got home the sun was coming up. He kept careful time with his wristwatch, so he would’t be late. He wore an orange safety vest.

At first he was just making sure he could bike without losing his wind. He went at random, but favored small roads with less traffic. In his back pocket was the foldable map of Cottinend. He usually had his cell phone on him, but he didn’t like looking at the map on it.

He went down plenty of dead end streets, but never Coronet. He kept his distance. But the unfolded map had showed him that Coronet ran parallel to Rano Boulevard, a cut-through street that of course did not dead end. The backyards of the houses on Rano abutted the backyards of the houses on Coronet. He rode a couple of times down Rano, trying to time it so the sun was already peeking out by the time he got there. He stopped to take a swig of water, perhaps more often than a biker would ordinarily. He was looking idly over between the houses on the north side of Rano. He was looking to see who had a fence.

One morning he found a discarded duffel bag on the side of the road, empty and ratty. He was wearing gloves already, so, after looking up and down the street to make sure no one was around, he scooped it up and hung it on the handlebars. An untraceable bag. Just some random street whose name he’d soon forget. He rode straight home and brought the bag to the basement. The boots fit inside just fine. He should probably get on the ball and do something about these boots! With a pair of needle-nosed pliers, the tips covered with duct tape, he carefully threaded the laces through the boots. By that time, he had to hurry through his shower and skip breakfast. He didn’t want to be late for work, simply because he was never late for work, and any deviation from the routine would be suspicious.

“Hey, Colin,” Carol said as he walked past her desk. He walked past her desk every day now, and kissed her on the cheek.

He put on a serious face. “Can I have a rain check on dinner tonight?” he asked. “My mother called and she says she’s out of socks. You know she’s going to make a federal production of it if I don’t…”

“No, of course, go, go.” She looked worried, and Colin let himself get lost in the moment. She looked so charming with her fretful eyes and uplifted brow. He was doing all right. Then he went to work.

After work, Colin did indeed go sock shopping, but only for himself. Several pairs of thick, black socks, completely unremarkable. He drove home, and with his car in the garage and the lights out no one would know he was there. He was in the basement, and the basement had no windows.

The socks went through the washing machine, and then the drier, and then back in the wash, for a dozen cycles. After a while Colin wasn’t sure why he was running them through the paces like this. It was nearly four in the morning. They were obviously already clean.

Colin put one pair of socks on, still warm from the drier. Then he put on his gloves and brought out the boots. He tried getting his feet into the boots, gloves still on, which proved surprisingly difficult. He went upstairs and rummaged through his sock drawer until he found an old shoehorn he’d stuck in the back. After some practice he wiggled into the boots. He took them off. He considered getting a couple of hours sleep, but decided an early start was better. There was something he’d been meaning to do anyway.

He balled up the five extra pairs of socks and lined them up on top of the drier. He could put them in the drawer later. The boots went into the found duffel, along with a plastic bag from the grocery store. Colin changed into his biking clothes. He bundled up, of course. After a few minutes riding he’d warm up, but even then, the windchill could be brutal.

On his way out of the house, he stopped and looked up a number in the phone book, jotting it down on a post-it. When he took the post-it off the pad, he took not only the top sheet, but also the five or six sheets underneath it, leaving them all glued together. They went in his pocket, along with the shoehorn.

The duffel was slung over his shoulder as he wheeled his bike out of the garage. His phone was charging at home. Perhaps as an afterthought, he took the post-its out of his pocket, rolled them up, and slid them into the hollow space at the end of his handlebars.

Ten minutes away, by bicycle, were a series of paved biking trails that wound through the woods. Hiking trails snaked all around them, sometimes running alongside, sometimes crossing. Technically the trails opened at sunrise, posted, but Colin doubted anyone really cared if he went there early. He biked to the trail, pulled his bicycle behind a tree and locked it to itself with the chain. He left the bike light on to see by. Sitting on a log, and without removing his gloves, he slid off his biking shoes and put them in the plastic bag. The plastic bag in the duffel. With the shoehorn he wrestled the new boots on.

Then he started walking. The bike light, detached from the handlebars and held like a flashlight, illuminated the trail faintly, but well enough to avoid tripping on a root. The boots were a little uncomfortable, as new boots will be. At least here among the trees the wind was less biting.

For two hours, thinking only of the plan, Colin walked back and forth along a small stretch of hiking trail. By the time he was unlocking his bicycle, his face was numb and his feet were killing him. All this to break in the boots, break them in without leaving prints around his lawn, without getting all over the soles any dirt or carpet fibers that might be recognized as his. Maybe it was too much, but he didn’t know what was too much. And what else was he going to do?

The boots went back in the duffel bag, and the old biking shoes went on. For once he took off his orange safety vest and stuck it in his pocket. Colin started riding towards home, but turned aside. The orange vest flapped, half-out of his pocket. There was one lone payphone left in town, down by the Mobil station, and a day he was out with no cell phone was as good a day as any to stop by. The phone company would have a record of the call, of course, but no cell phone GPS would tie Colin to the area. He was straddling his bike as he stood in front of the payphone. He took off one glove to get a quarter from his pocket, but he put the glove back on, simply for the purpose of warmth. He fished the post-its from the handlebar, just in case he misremembered, which he did not, the number and dialed. It rang eight times.

“Gaaaah?” said a voice.

“Bernard Feldstein?” said Colin. He found himself lowering his voice an octave, unintentionally; but having started at that pitch he thought it would be weird to stop, so he kept doing it. It made him sound, in his head, like a child playing at being the president.

“Who? Who calls me Bernard?” he had obviously just woken up.

Colin had kept himself absolutely clean for three months. He had made no attempt to contact his accomplice. There was nothing tying the two of them together except one brief meeting on one forgettable night in the back of a bar. Colin was not even sure he’d be able to pick the poor kid out of a lineup.

“I’m calling about April tenth.”

“Omigod! Theodore Anderson!”

Colin almost said, “Who?” Then he remembered that Theodore Anderson—the name, slightly modified, of his junior high gym teacher—was what he’d passed himself off as. The problem with lying was that it was so hard to remember what you were improvising!

“This is Theodore Anderson,” he said. “Have you told anyone about our scheduled meeting?”

“No! No, swear to God!”

“Good. Just to confirm your identity: Where do you work?”

“Oh! Pizza King. I do deliveries.”

Colin ticked off an imaginary box in his head. He’d dimly remembered that Bernie had mentioned a job in a pizza parlor, and had long feared it was Choice Pizza. This was one worry gone.

“Good. Listen closely, there’s something I need you to do. What day to do you have garbage pickup?”

“Friday night. I mean Saturday morning”

“On the evening of the tenth you have to take your garbage can and put it at the end of the driveway.”

“Is the tenth a Friday?”

“No. I wouldn’t have to tell you to do it if the tenth were a Friday. Take the can out anyway, and—this is important—make sure it’s empty.”

“You mean the toter?”

“Yes, the toter. Make sure it’s empty.”

“But what do I do with the garbage?” Bernie whined.

“Bernie, the whole reason we’re trusting you is because of your resourcefulness. You can be resourceful, can’t you?”

“Yes, of course! Trust me!”

“Good. Don’t forget the toter. And of course you must be careful not to give anyone any hints about your mission.”

“I won’t!”

Colin wasn’t sure how far he should push this. A little further just to be sure, he figured. “There might be spies everywhere. Don’t let them even begin to get an idea that something is up.” He really milked the presidential baritone.

Afterwards, he simply dropped the post-its in the trash can at the gas station. Nothing suspicious about that. He happened to glance in the garbage can and saw three pieces of white cardboard, the kind that come in a new dress shirt. They weren’t exactly what Colin had been looking for, but they were close enough. He’d wanted something black, but he could always color them in with the Sharpie he’d bought. Still a lucky find—untraceable. He glanced over his shoulder, fished the cardboard out, and stuck them in his duffel. He could do some arts and crafts after work. It was getting late.

At home he chugged three cups of coffee and took a shower. He had perhaps overdone it with the new boots; he put bandaids on the blisters. In work shoes he stepped into the car.

As he drove to work he rehearsed a humorous story about his mother and socks. It was important to keep that in mind about lies, that they were hard to remember if you made them up on the fly. A little rehearsal could keep the lie in your memory; a little rehearsal was all it took.

But then he decided a humorous story was all wrong. He decided to say he was worried about his mother.

Just to make sure, at lunch he called Sunset Grove and said he was worried about his mother.

13.

Bernie hung up the phone. He was shaking. Here he was, standing in his underwear in the kitchen, by the old wall phone that never rang any more. He didn’t even remember getting up to answer the phone; he must have come downstairs on sleepy autopilot. How did he answer the phone and what did he say? He hoped he hadn’t sounded like an asshole.

But then he remembered, not what he said but what he’d heard. Quickly he grabbed a pen and jotted down, on the piece of paper on the fridge, “garbge out.”

There was light coming through the side windows, so it clearly was not the middle of the night. All the clocks in the downstairs were just 12:00 blinking, so he headed back to his bedroom to check his cell phone, see how many hours of sleep he had left. A lot.

He crawled into bed, but with the phone in his hand he automatically checked Twitter. He followed several hundred people he had never met in real life; everyone he knew in real life thought Twitter was (in Stone’s words) “for homos.” But today there was something so unusual he almost overlooked it. A notification, and when he tapped through…

“We are pleased to inform you…”

“Holy shit!” said Bernie to himself. “Anderson knows everything!”

(Continued next week)