PANIC (15 page)

He had no breath to catch but pretended to, just because he didn't know how to accuse this total stranger of being totally indifferent to his having leapt from the jaws of death. Her nonreaction had made him irritated beyond reason.

He approached to speak and she turned to leave, bus suddenly forgotten. He watched her incredulously for a moment, first seeing her kitten heels clack the pavement and her browned calves tense, her long, straight, jet-dark hair swaying like plumage — it was her.

"Hey," he said, unconcerned with the panic in his exclamation. "Hey, wait up!"

She walked ahead, not missing a beat. Even as he broke into a light jog, she didn't seem to get any closer, skillfully staying ahead of him with precise runway strides.

No, she wasn’t blind, walking confidently like that, much faster than he could catch up to her. It didn’t seem possible. Certainly, it wasn’t possible.

There was a high hedge where she took her opportunity, slipping around the corner, her body tilting out of sight as his feet began skipping until he broke into the jog again when it hit him. The crunch of his sneakers on the pavement and his own puffing breath was all he heard. The tack-tack-tack of her shoes chiseling the sidewalk so loud it echoed was gone. Not faded off into the distance as he might expect, as unlikely as that would normally seem. It was worse. They'd stopped entirely.

So did he.

He listened for the whisper of a burly protector whispering around the corner, then her whispering for him to be quiet. He listened for the sound of her heels scraping gravel as she tried to hold herself still.

The stiff, waxy pines of the hedge rustled and swished, and the thin branches leaned ever so much in a little breeze, but that was it.

Off in the distance, cars passed, making the impression of the current of a wide river. He didn’t believe in that calm procession. Behind it lay madness, reckless drivers veering off course for no reason at all except to get him.

He listened as long as he could for some indication of her, for kitten heels tapping testily, waiting for him to come around the corner, grab her roughly and plant one on her, but there was just quiet, as if she’d never existed.

Inside, he clenched. Anything might lay beyond.

He backed off, then turned, then took the long way home.

T
HREE

OH, HE TOOK the long way home alright, hugging walls and sticking to the sidewalk like a trolley track. The girl was the thing; he was too freaked to look again. For the first time maybe ever he was fully aware of his surroundings as he walked from here to there, though it was otherwise completely routine.

None of this had ever happened before he’d seen her, there was just the daily routine of study, eat, sleep, with the requisite breaks for various distractions; permissible distractions like TV shows he was barely following as he scrolled through albums worth of girls next door, selfies gone wild, whatever.

In her picture, though, holding up the right pointer finger, bent over and crouched down to get her long legs in frame, it seemed she was looking right into him, had spontaneously captured a moment just for him.

In the next picture she might take that finger and make a finger gun.

Wish you were here. Bang bang!

When Julia looked at him, pretending to only be interested in him platonically, it didn’t seem nearly as real and as soulful, that is, whenever he bothered to meet her eyes and hold them. It just wasn’t the same. He had never met this girl and they just connected.

And then he saw her and wheels started turning.

He was noticing all sorts of things he hadn't before, for example, how heavy cars seemed as they passed so close to him, mere feet away. So easily he could be bounced off the hood and chucked in the air, floating weightlessly like one of the goose feathers for a moment before slamming the ground in a mushy tangle of limbs.

At the moment he sat on the bed eating a plain ham sandwich on plain sliced bread, with yellow mustard from a squeeze bottle instead of the brown he liked. He refused to use a knife for fear it would slip from his hand mysteriously and cut something important. The first thing before raiding the fridge was snatch the sheets off his bed and toss the bundle underneath, where tangled, suffocating sheets couldn’t do him any harm.

Before, he'd never noticed how rough even four stories up was because he hadn't lived in the off-campus student housing apartment long enough to experience a blackout or an elevator failure and thus had never taken the stairs. He climbed eleven flights up and caught his breath limping down the hallway to the place that was his alone for the next few days.

Thank goodness Jon wouldn't be around to witness this madness and ridicule him for it, but surely it would pass before then. He finished the sandwich and went for his lifeline again.

- Something weird is going on, Julie.

- What's up?

- I mean it. Not just a hunch of mine. This girl is following me around.

- Secret admirer? ;)

- Stalker more like. I think she's trying to hurt me.

- Don't be ridiculous.

- You think I would joke about something like this?

- Do you know this girl?

- Of course not.

He paced by the bed, not too far from his designated safe spot and looked at the window. There could be a freak storm that night that would blow in the window and lodge glass shards in his neck and wake him up too late to have the strength to press down on the artery and keep from bleeding out. Almost anything could happen. The building could collapse when he least expected it.

There had to be a way to convince her.

- Here I’ll show you.

He sent the picture off, knowing she'd be jealous of the pretty, moon-faced girl, grinning and winking and pushing in her dimple cutely with a lacquered fingernail. It was hardly the time to tiptoe around her feelings because this was serious.

He could die.

Suddenly, it didn't seem like such a good idea to sleep at the apartment, what with the lack of fire escape and all. The unit he shared, just his luck, was right by the elevator bank but equally far from either staircase, and in an emergency like a raging inferno, he probably couldn't crawl under a blanket of smoke fast enough to escape without being braised in his own sweat.

Glad to be done with it, he looked at the picture one last time and filled the radio box in the corner of it with his thumb, making a little check mark.

Delete?

Absolutely
, he thought, allowing himself this small mercy. The photo was gone and the text alert was too, leaving no trace he'd ever been targeted. He turned the phone face down and left it on the nightstand, but didn't feel any better. Sitting on his hands just made him more nervous and expectant.

F
OUR

A SHATTERING SMASH of metal on metal rang loud enough for him to put his fists to the side of his face, shaking his head side to side in torment before he realized he wasn't imagining it.

There were ugly, rending tinfoil sounds and plastic snapping and reinforced glass pebbling and crunching, like milk on cereal, all at once, and then it was as silent as before. The nasty hiss and settling ping of a ruined engine piped up until he looked over to the window and saw sprays of water misting the glass, with the hopeful prisming of a little rainbow behind it, like a sick joke.

He got up to look, and when he couldn't see much beyond the spray, carefully unlocked the window.

He lifted with one hand and propped it up as he stuck his head out, just in case it decided to slam shut on him. A crowd formed down below, five or six people just looking, afraid to get involved. One of them was a little kid holding his mother’s hand, gnawing on an ice cream bar with a front row seat to the promise of carnage. It was the same Honda as before, rust red, squealing out of control until it jumped the curb and rammed the plug right off a bright yellow fire hydrant. If not for the hydrant, it would’ve kept going and rammed right into the apartment lobby as if trying to catch the elevator up. It sniffed him out; it must have.

The water from the blown hydrant danced up like a Vegas fountain, high in the air, and the mild breeze arced it this way and that. Cool droplets splashed his face and he did not wipe them, watching the driver push open the car door with some effort.

The rainbow appeared again over the milling idiots below, and with it, another bystander coming for their fill of misery.

His heart palpitated.

It was her, with those shiny black patent kitten heels and the out of fashion sunglasses, pushing her way through the crowd ghoulishly, as if she expected a pulped body, but none was on display. She brushed her long hair with her arm, letting it fall casually as the bent door of the compact pushed out and with it came a punch-drunk driver.

He leaned out of the window to make sure, bracing with his other hand on the ledge, still gripping the sill to make sure the window didn't get funny ideas, but there was no mistaking her, even from behind.

"Hey!" he shouted, as though he were more important than a potentially fatal accident.

Heads turned to meet him, even the guy who staggered out of the wreck.

All except hers.

"Hey!”

All of them looked silently up at him and he couldn’t read it. Puzzlement at his lack of tact, hanging out the window to get a girl’s attention? The duty as a spectator not to spoil a surprise?

He might've turned to look and possibly given himself two whole seconds to react. A ten thousand BTU air conditioner, in this case, weighs about eighty one pounds. Without proper securing, there isn't much keeping it wedged in an open window. It only takes about thirty feet for something of that bulk to get halfway to freefall, that's three stories and about two point six seconds. Something that heavy, falling that fast could take someone's head clean off, but the nine people standing in a semicircle around the car wrapped around the yellow hydrant might have a different opinion about just how clean. They had just enough time to step gingerly out of the way when the sharp corners of the laminated metal box cracked concrete, painting the ground with purplish red muscle, beige mush, and something orangey, like crab guts.

The body would hang there in the open window but not one of them screamed at the sight of it.

F
IVE

SIXTEEN MINUTES WAS enough.

He might've been cooking, or taking a shower, or god forbid, put down his phone for a while, unlikely as that seemed.

Julia bit her thumbnail cuticle, avoiding the chipped sparkly nail polish she'd been gnawing at absentmindedly whenever she could get five minutes to try and convince him to hang out. His reluctance only ever seemed to make him seem way more attractive to her, to her chagrin, much more than he deserved.

He wasn’t slick enough to string her along on purpose but the effect was about the same anyhow.

- Since you can't come out tonight, I'm gonna go anyway with Amy. We could drop by later with a soft cookie or something, if you want. Don't worry, we'll be on campus so we’ll keep an eye out for your stalker :)

She sent and immediately got a response.

Great minds
, she thought.
Finally
.

An unfilled, grey comic book dialogue bubble popped up in place of a message and her stomach dropped. Here she was trying to get him to come to coffee, studying optional, and all he could think about was some girl he had his eye on.

Her face flushed rhubarb.

The picture was of a girl that looked way too young to be taking AP college credit supplements, much less a full time student there. She looked way too young for him, with her long legs and knock knees, trying way too hard to be adorable. She was beautiful, unfairly so, with bone straight, oil-slick hair that seemed too lively to be a wig.

It figured it would be a girl like that, bad enough to rub it in, but now she felt positively old at the ripe age of nineteen.

The girl had a complexion like a doll and bright dimples and a wicked grin.

Her hand was up to her face, knuckles facing the camera, two fingers making a V. A peace sign. British for “fuck you”.

Julia got chills all over her body.

T
UESDAY

“
WHAT IN HELL am I looking at?”

Wilson mumbles to himself, looking all around him, carefully noting the evidence markers, trying to ignore the other cops on the scene milling about, cataloging, chatting. This is a familiar feeling.

He picks a spot where he thinks he’s least likely to disturb the scene and plants himself right on one of the wide paving stones leading up to the front porch of the ruined house.

He’s seeing something but not seeing it. It feels like an elephant’s tail but it could be a noose.

“You’re standing in the wrong place,” says someone nearby, almost nonchalantly. He doesn’t recognize the voice.

P.J. claps his hand on the detectives’ shoulder, not hard enough to startle a man deep in thought. He saw it from twenty feet away, a creased brow of confusion. He recognized it after nice long moment; pinpointing the puzzled expression as what he himself must’ve looked like up until a few minutes ago. He tried to hide his enthusiasm from the sober looking man who looked like TV private eye with his reading glasses and sculpted beard. A goofy grin was plastered on his face anyhow. If P.J. was crazy, at least he found a dance partner.

“I’ve got something that might interest you - here, follow me.”

Wilson recalled the face well enough; he had seen the forensic photographer in passing before on a pretty cut and dry murder-suicide. That was a grim one, the guy shot his poor wife in the head while she slept then put the gun up to his chest and shot himself in bed next to her.

He follows the guy up the slope of a lawn, between some hedges and up some steep wooden deck stairs. They step carefully, looking down as they go to avoid tracking in potentially valuable evidence.

The people next door are on vacation so they’ve taken the liberty of extending the perimeter to include this house as well. Wilson isn’t sure what the guy has to show him, but he rarely declines an opportunity to pique his curiosity. There are competent investigators, he figures, and talented investigators; obviously including himself in the latter category.