• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

"Are you a complete fucking idiot?"

Hartness said nothing. He just stared at my brother.

"You watch the news?" Orson asked, his voice more courteous.

"Yeah."

"And you don’t know who I am? Washington D.C. Thirty-seven boxes. Ring a bell?"

"Look, I know what a crank is. I know when I’m being lied to. The FBI sent out a memo to every police station in the country. They receive around 90 cranks a day relating to the Heart Surgeon case. We’ve had one over the phone already this week."

"That’s funny," Orson said, livid. "I had a feeling you wouldn’t take me seriously."

"Good instinct," Hartness said, rising to his feet. "You just committed a felony, and I’m gonna arrest…"

"Barry Johnson’s in the trunk of my car you prick."

The detective placed his hands on the table and leaned towards Orson. "I don’t think you wanna take the credit for kidnapping that police officer," Hartness said with a smug grin.

Orson reached into his jeans' pocket and tossed a shiny badge and a driver’s license onto the table. "I killed him, too."

The cocky, wise-ass smile vanished from the detective’s face. He looked down at the badge which rested face-up on the colorful photographs. Lifting the driver’s license, he stared at it a moment, then looked back down at the pictures. The burning cigarette fell from his lips, and he drew his gun. He pointed it at Orson, but my brother only laughed, nodding in approval.

"Stay right there," Hartness said, his voice low, filled with malice, his hands shaking. He edged to the door and opened it.

"Want the car keys?" Orson asked. "So you can get that smelly body out of my trunk. I waive my rights."

"Take them out slowly," Hartness said, and I reached carefully into my pocket and withdrew the keys. I tossed them to the detective and he caught them in his left hand as he pointed his 9mm at Orson. Then he slammed the door and locked it.

# # #

The detective had been gone two minutes when Orson straightened himself in his chair and turned towards me. He put his face into his hands and ran his fingers through his greasy hair.

"Andy," he said, lifting his head, his eyes alive again, a smile edging across his lips. "Now I've gotta let you in on something."

My head ripped apart. Involuntarily, my eyes closed and when I opened them again, I was walking towards a woman, chained to the pole in the desert shed. I held a hunting knife in my hand, blinked, and was on her. Her screams were strangely pleasing, like I'd acquired the taste of a long-despised food. I stared down at her face as she exhaled her last bloody breath. It contorted into another, and this face breathed its last, gurgling breath, too, replaced by another, and over and over again I watched the men and women die.

I stood on the desert in the dead of night. All around me, there were open holes in the sand. I walked beside each one, and peering down inside, saw the heartless bodies, their eyes open, staring at me with a hollow rage, though they were not alive. The horrible scream rang out, inhuman, eternal. It was always there, in the back of my mind, as loud as I'd let it be.

Like movie frames passing in slow motion, a surge of images engulfed me. Standing at a podium and lecturing to fifty students. Running through a city street at night towards a railroad car. Fire in a rusted oil drum. Pounding rock into skull. Driving a black prostitute out of south Charlotte towards my lake house. Burying her in my backyard. Waiting on the shoulder of a dark highway for someone to pull over and help me with my car. Leaving boxes in Washington before dawn. Strangling my crying mother in her bed, her wide, confused eyes as the pantyhose tightens. Walter begging for his life and screaming why in the cold woods. Dragging a police officer from his car across the road. Shoving him bleeding into the trunk. Writing letters to a man named Andrew Thomas, who had no idea what he'd done or what he was.

I opened my eyes. My heart pounded, but the screaming had stopped. In the interrogation room, the tape recorder still running, the light