A Guardian of Innocents (6 page)

As I turned the corner from that little side street onto Ridglea Avenue, though, I saw a man dressed all in black. Black trench coat, black pants and boots. His shoulder-length hair could have also been black maybe, or perhaps dark brown. He was leaning against a light pole, but as I approached he stood up straight, snapping to attention as if he recognized my car.

I knew there was no way he could see me clearly inside my car but he locked eyes with me just the same. A ghostly smile formed on his face, gleaming white teeth beneath a hook nose. He appeared maybe ten years older than me, taller and certainly more broad-shouldered.

When I turned the corner he turned his body with me, watching me intently. His lips were moving as if he was trying to tell me something. I listened with my mind, but heard nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

Now some people do have strong minds that are difficult to break into, but I’d never met someone, not in all my life, who could block me out so completely.

And in the silence of my night drive to Watauga, I thought little of the murder. I thought little of my strategy for not getting caught. I thought mostly of that black figure, with that hideous grin.

Chapter 4

The night air was chilly with a light breeze as I stripped off the Salvation Army clothes in front of the open hole I’d dug only a few hours before. I used the flannel and the gray t-shirt both to wipe Jack’s blood off the gun, being careful that my naked hands didn’t touch the pistol; not an easy task since the congealed blood had adhered to it like wet taffy to a child’s fingers.

Confident that none of my prints were left on it, I dropped the gun into the hole first before anything else. I then used the other articles of clothing to clean the blood from my hands and face. Again I thought of how it would have been easier if I’d just brought some damn water with me. I wiped vigorously, feeling my skin become raw.

I stood there in the silence of the night, wearing nothing but my briefs, throwing the bloody clothes down the hole like a pile of dirty laundry, then stepping on them to push them further into the earth.

I contemplated tossing Jack’s wallet in there, but then I thought if someone
did
discover this buried treasure, they would only be able to determine this was hidden evidence of a murder, one out of hundreds that have taken place in the Fort Worth area in recent years. But if I threw in the wallet with all the rest of the evidence… 

So I filled in the hole with a nearby mound of dirt, kicking it in with my feet and spreading it around with my hands since I had stupidly forgotten to bring the shovel back with me. I cursed myself for that as I stomped on the dirt to compact it and then spread the rest around so there were no visible lumps anywhere.

I walked around the area collecting fallen leaves and twigs, and scattered them over the mound to better hide the difference between the freshly sifted dirt and the settled earth. After brushing all the crap off my body, I changed into my regular clothes and headed home, all the while scanning the area for people that might be watching me. There was one old man in a nearby second-story apartment watching pro wrestling on cable when he heard my car start up. He took a glance out the window at me, but I could feel that he only saw the Nova, not the driver inside it. He thought it a bit unusual for one of the other tenants to be going out this late but thought little of it. He didn’t care.

For the first two minutes or so of driving I was okay. I was feeling the jittery after-effects of the adrenaline rush from the night’s escapades, but other than that I was really okay.

But then it all just hit me. All at once. What I’d done. It was the strangest mixture of emotions I’d ever felt, like some weird alcoholic concoction invented by some wacked-out bartender, full of various exotic liquors that tasted both sweet and bitter at the same time, harsh and smooth.

I’d murdered the only man I’d known to be my father. I still can’t bring myself even now to call him my dad. I guess that’s a defense mechanism, to detach the role of
FATHER
from the man I’d killed.

The twenty minutes it took to get home gave me too much time to think about it. I committed murder, worse yet I committed patricide. I felt sick inside. Acid ate away at my empty stomach while cold shivers gave way to full bodyquakes, the kind you get the morning after a night of binge drinking.

Tears welled up in my eyes, but I didn’t want to cry, not for him. I tried to force myself not to, but I couldn’t stop it. My chin started to quiver and that was it. I lost the battle.

The song
Black
by Pearl Jam was playing on the radio and that didn’t help. It was 1993, so it was still a fairly new song, slow and sad.

I began singing along in a raspy whisper towards the end, “Doo-duh-doo-doo, doo-duh-doo. . .

About a block away from my house a sudden jolt zapped my mind out of its sad reverie. Doris is wide awake. She’s crying—she’s crying because she knows. 

As I rounded the corner, my house became visible and the premonition grew stronger. I could see as I approached that the living room light was on.

Am I caught?
I silently asked myself,
Has she already talked to the police?

A cold fountain of fear sprang up within me. I knew whatever had happened, the police were not there now and I didn’t sense anyone else inside.

I pulled in the driveway and killed the headlights. I left the engine running just in case I had to get away fast and jogged to the front door. I reached in my pocket to find my keys and realized, like an idiot, they were still in the ignition of the idling Nova. I felt like such a scatterbrained jackass.

Somewhere far away the gods were snickering at me.

I was turning around to retrieve the keys from the car when Doris opened the door. There was a wide-eyed frantic look about her as she spoke to me in rapid hyperspeech, “What are you doing out here? Why aren’t choo in bed? What’ve you been out doing?”

“Mom, I was jus—“

“Oh God, Phillip, never mind! The police called—“

My stomach dropped.

“—They want me to come identify a body. Some man was mugged and shot outside a strip tease club and they think it’s your father. I know he’d never go to one those kinds of places but he still hasn’t come home from work and...”

It was then that I committed fuck-up number one by asking, “Did you tell the police I wasn’t home?”

I hate to admit it, but I asked that question with a very distinct level of paranoia, which all but confessed my guilt. She’d been shaking pretty badly when she opened the door, but then her trembling stopped for a few seconds as she gazed at the side of my head.

And through her eyes I saw the blood in my hair. Instinctively, my arm reflexed and my hand touched the small mat of hair held together by Jack’s congealed blood. It felt like I’d hairsprayed just a small patch of my blonde locks.

Doris’ shaking sputtered into gear again. From mild to intense. She brushed past me towards her old Nissan (that vehicle being in only slightly better condition than my own) with both hands clutching her keys to keep them from jingling so much.

My stomach turned over again with the realization that Doris knew. I watched her slowly walk to her car with her head down, seeming to study the cement of the driveway.

She was in the process of unlocking the driver’s door when she looked up at me. Our eyes met with a taut silence that was only interrupted by the
shig shig shig
sound of the idling Nova.

“It looks like you bumped your head somewhere. . . You should put some hydrogen peroxide on it and...”

She let the sentence, as well as the thought, just trail off into oblivion. I sensed in her an awful, hopeless desperation. She was giving me an excuse to dismiss what she knew to be true.

But as she got in the car and backed out of the driveway, I felt something change. I felt the switch click on. Her mind was already in the process of turning that excuse, that lie, into something she would fully believe later. . . Probably by the time she arrived at the morgue.

*          *          *

Even as a child, I had trouble sleeping. Some insomniacs can’t go to sleep until they lay in bed for a few hours; others can fall asleep easily, but awake prematurely and can’t seem to find their way back to sleep. I kinda flip-flopped in between the two. Some nights (especially Sundays) I’d lie in bed thinking thoughts that a child should never even have to consider. Some kids think of turning to suicide when life’s problems seem too much for them, but I didn’t just think about it. I fantasized about it, on a regular basis.

But that night was the worst. Doris was away until almost five o’clock in the morning. I kept thinking there’s a chance she’ll tell the police. She’s tired of making excuses. Oh dear God please don’t let her show up here with the police!

*          *          *

Two detectives from the Fort Worth P.D. were sitting in our living room late the next morning. There was a thick sediment of darkness around my bloodshot eyes, the end result of more than twenty-four hours without sleep. I wondered if that would make me look suspicious, but knew I had a good excuse if one of the cops brought it up. My father
had
been murdered after all.

And about the hours that I was away from the house last night, the police had no clue. When they had called Doris, they woke her up and she, of course, assumed I was home and told them I was there asleep, only to find out a few minutes after she hung up that I wasn’t. The police hadn’t asked about it again, and so far she hadn’t mentioned it.

While I was sensing no suspicion directed towards me, I was still greatly relieved when one of the detectives mentioned, “We think we may have already caught the kid that did it. He’s homeless, hooked on heroin. Think he was just probably looking to score some quick money to support his habit. Lives around that neighborhood. Matches the description one of our witnesses gave...”

My heart skipped a beat, maybe that’s a cliché, but it really did. My heart just froze momentarily in my chest. Witnesses? I knew it couldn’t have been the fighting couple because they hadn’t really seen me.

I tried probing their minds to extract more information, but it did no good. Their minds were occupied with other matters, such as what sounded good for lunch. Both of the cops’ main concerns were with getting out of this depressing place with its tacky furniture and heading to their favorite grease-pit diner.

*          *          *

The investigation was short. The case against the suspect, a Mr. David Silfer, was never brought to trial. There was simply nothing hard and substantial to convict him on, which meant the D.A. didn’t want to waste the county’s money trying a case he knew he would lose.

The detectives kept telling Doris the investigation was still on-going, which I interpreted into: if something happens to pop up, we’ll look into it, but other than that, we’re not gonna do a damn thing.

Time passes as always. As a teen, each year seems to flow by faster that the last. Even after Jack’s case was eventually closed as unsolved, I still felt paranoia to some degree every time I saw a cop car cruising behind me, or anytime one of the school cops walking down the hall made eye contact with me. But graduation came.

And I started to get over it.

Chapter 5

College was the second best time of my life (the best and worst were still to come.) I felt a freedom there I had never known in all of my short life. I took up acting and joined the school’s theatre department. I still to this day believe there is not a more fun group of people to go out and have a few beers with than bunch of actors. True, I was only eighteen and couldn’t get into the more prestigious bars and clubs of the Dallas area, but we knew of a bar & grill kind of place that was pretty lax on the “We Card” issue.

I performed in a few plays in my time there, made a few friends and even got laid. So I was pretty damn happy. I was living what seemed to be the normal life of a young community college student.

Then Doris had to go fuck it all up.

I was finished with my first semester at North Lake College and it was now Christmas Break. With the holidays approaching and my being eighteen, Doris thought it would be a great time to tell me about my biological parents and the immediate family connecting them.

I already knew what she had to say. You don’t have to explain a whole lot to a mind reader, but she did reveal a few things I was surprised to hear. Like I have a cousin who lives only an hour away in a small town named Granbury. And my bio-mother’s legalistic parents had died a few years back when a tornado had plucked their tiny Hyundai Accent off the road and tossed it a few football fields away.

She babbled on about a few other trivial things and then showed me the two plane tickets to Salt Lake City. We were leaving in a few days to go see my mother.

*         *         *

Doris, already a chatterbox by mature, becomes even more talkative when she gets nervous. And during the two-hour flight to Utah, I thought her tongue would fall out of her mouth by the time we landed.