Blvd. of Blood
Book 3, chapters 11–15
(Upcoming appearances: June 1, 12–5, Skullastic Book Fair, American Legion Post 16, Shelton CT | July 15, 6–7:30, author talk, Hagaman Library, East Haven CT)
This is a serialized “thriller” novel. Continued from here. Table of contents for ease of navigation here.
(The story so far: It is very early in the morning on April 10—the day Bernie has marked on his calendar! Colin Lang has spent the night in last-minute preparations, marking one space on the side of the Blande Blvd. with a red bandana. Everything is according to plan…)
11.
Carol lay in bed not sleeping. She felt pathetic for thinking so much about a silly thing. She always felt pathetic when she spent too much time thinking about a boy, about Colin; and what else had she thought about these last three months? Was her life really this small that she couldn’t spend two or three days without him around?
It was past midnight, so she probably shouldn’t call him. She definitely shouldn’t call him, anyway, but it was rude to call past midnight. She texted instead, just a thinking about you. Then she called. There was no response.
The stupidest thing to do would be to go to his house.
He was almost certainly sleeping after all. She couldn’t let herself in because she didn’t have a key. Was it weird that she didn’t have a key?
Even if he was sleeping, she certainly was not. There was no harm in her driving past his house. She could look at his house. If a light was on downstairs, only then would she knock on the door.
She told herself this was a stupid idea, but she already had flats and an overcoat on. She already had her keys in her hand.
There was, indeed a light on, in his living room. His car was in the driveway, which was only slightly unusual—he tended to put it in the garage, but sometimes, on clear nights, he kept it out.
It was not a clear night.
Carol parked behind his car. She knocked at his door, then rang the doorbell. No answer, so she slipped behind a shrubbery and peeked through the window. The TV was on, but she couldn’t see anyone there. Had he fallen asleep on the couch?
Suddenly embarrassed that she’d come, Carol scurried back to her car. She winced when the motor caught—surely he had heard it, surely he was waking up. She just wanted to get home before anyone knew she’d left.
She’d pulled out of the driveway and had rounded a corner when she saw in her headlights a man paying a cab. She knew at a glance that the man was Colin Lang. She drove by with her shoulders hunched up, although of course her face would be invisible in the dark car anyway. Either Colin had looked up and recognized her license plate or he hadn’t. And based on what she could make out in her rear view mirror he hadn’t.
A few houses down Carol stopped and backed into a driveway. Her heart was hammering. There was nothing particularly strange about taking a cab home—she’d never known Colin to do it, but it wasn’t crazy. Why didn’t he take the cab all the way home, though? Why did he get out a block away? She waited until that self-same cab drove past her and then she pulled out of the driveway and tailed it. This, she thought, was absurd. And yet she did it; it was ridiculously easy to follow a pair of tail lights along the dark empty streets. She tailed the cab until it hit a stoplight on Scenic Heights. She pulled up behind; immediately, Carol hopped out of the car, leaving the door open and ran to the cab. She knocked on the widow.
The cabby looked scared as he rolled the window down. Carol could hardly be mistaken for a robber; was he afraid she was going to complain about his driving to his manager?
“It’s okay,” she said, trying to smile big, trying to look friendly. “I just had a question.”
The man smiled back, but it the smile was a rictus of fear. He was a sikh. Maybe he was a foreigner; maybe he was concerned she was going to try to deport him.
“That last fare you had. Right back there? I just wanted to know where you picked him up.”
“Krakow Nights, lady.” And of course at first she thought he’d said, “Krakow, nice lady,” like Jerry Lewis confessing he’d driven from Poland. But then she remembered that it was a bar.
Back in her car, and then back in her bed, she worried that maybe she’d forgotten to thank the cabby, or even maybe she should have tipped him. But mostly she worried about Colin Lang. Even if it was not ridiculous to go out to a bar when worried about a loved one, and then to take a cab home like a responsible drinker—none of this was like him.
She did not necessarily vow that she would stake him out the next night and see what was up, but she knew, on a deeper level, that she was going to be doing it. And only then could she fall asleep.
12.
Bernie was up at dawn. He looked out the window and corrected himself. He was up before dawn.
Some part of him remembered the day he’d jumped Alan Jancewicz, so many years ago. He’d had a fantasy, before he’d done it, that the act would make him popular. That the next day he’d come to school and the whole school would be gathered, laughing and chatting. When he arrived, everyone would cheer, and want to slap his hand. The girls would giggle nervously.
It didn’t go that way, of course. He was a laughingstock because he’d lost, but some part of him, over the years, had come to understand that he would have been worse off if he had won. It had been a trap! If Alan beat up Bernie, then Bernie was a joke; if Bernie beat up Alan, then Bernie was a villain.
This was so unfair it only made Bernie hate Alan more! Just thinking about the trap got Bernie feeling angry again.
But he was dimly aware, only deep deep down but still aware that there was some relevance to his current situation, and he might have had time to stop and think and figure out what it was if he wasn’t so busy waiting for the sun to sidle up and the great day to begin.
13.
John Oberman had the early shift that week, which sounded worse than it was. He had to be at work by seven, but he got off at 3:30.
He woke up on April tenth expecting the news to be full of some atrocity, but everything was quiet. This was good! It meant he wasn’t too late. The Sp!der could call at any moment. Everything could fall into place
The quiet smiles of his compatriots Oberman bore stoically. He could hear them suppressing a chuckle as he walked by. “If nothing happens they are going to roast me alive,” Oberman thought.
Campbell suppressed nothing. “Where’s your damned massacre?” he had asked first thing when Oberman picked him up, and he asked it again after roll call.
“Pray God nothing happens,” Oberman said.
“Well, somewhere in Bangladesh,” Campbell started. But then they were driving past the fire station, so Campbell angrily rolled down his window and threw a lit cigarette at the station house. It bounced around on the driveway. “Fucking losers,” he said. “Anyway, mark my words, somewhere in Cottinened, Bangladesh, or somewhere like that, you’ll see a Muslim bombing on the news and it’ll all fall into place.”
14.
He wore work shoes, but then he always wore work shoes when he went to see his mother. She liked him to dress “nicely.” He took Blande, of course, and he noted, as he went, that last night’s red bandana still waved.
15.
Amber hung up the Pizza King’s phone. She had always pitied Bernie, but now—she knew his parents were dead, but here his beloved aunt had died and no one knew how to reach him. His cousin called just to get his address, which of course Amber didn’t know. She had a cell number—all the employees passed them around in case they needed to swap shifts, but the cousin was oddly uninterested. All Amber could tell her was to look up Bernard Feldstein in Cottinend. It seemed so sad.
Maybe, she thought, the death and his grief explained why Bernie wasn’t at work today. But that didn’t make any sense—how would he know before his cousin called? And anyway, she remembered now that Mr. Prishtine had said that Bernie had phoned out, that he was just very drunk.
One thing Amber was not was suspicious. The cousin had referred to Bernie by the same name Bernie’s friends did, when they came by the pizza place, before Mr. Prishtine’d kick them out. She called him Nardo.
(Continued here.)