Bad Stacks Story Collection Box Set (53 page)

“Simple solutions are usually the best remedy.”

“Huh?”

Richard’s waitress smiled and refilled his coffee cup.  “You seem to be trying to solve a weighty problem.  People always complicate things.  Most of time, the simplest solutions are the best ones.”

Richard managed a smile.  “You know what?  I think you’re right.”

“I know I’m right,” she said and moved on to the next table.

He finished up his meal and paid the check, leaving an over-generous tip.  His coffeepot philosopher had been right.  Simple was best.  Getting back into his car, a plan was piecing itself together.

Richard parked on Hillcrest Drive.  The road was deserted.  Not many used the service road to the water plant.  He stared down the hill at the run down development and particularly, at Ted and Eleanor’s rental home backing onto the hillside.

From his lofty vantage point, there seemed to be no activity.  Eleanor would be at work, but Ted would be there, pottering around, trying to make one of his damn fool schemes succeed.  Even in Richard’s short marriage to their daughter, there’d been too many.  There was the property speculation deal--buy cheap properties with no money down and give them a quick makeover for a quick profit.  The upshot had been a string of expensive home inspections that proved that cheap houses are cheap for a reason.  Not being daft enough to buy a termite-infested shack, Ted had moved on to want ads, selling junk that no one wanted.  Their garage was still chock full of trash.  Buying cars from auctions to sell had been next.  The city had confiscated six jalopies after multiple complaints from the neighbors.  His current fad was telemarketing.  Richard had no idea how that one worked…neither did Ted, in all honesty.

What stuck in Richard’s throat was Ted’s ridiculous belief that he was as successful as Bill Gates.  Other people’s successes were his successes.  He put himself on the same level, never once acknowledging that he lived in near poverty, and he still had the audacity to consider himself better than Richard.

Just sitting there, Richard’s blood pressure skyrocketed.  Ted made him sick.  He felt sorry for Eleanor for having to be married to that, especially since he was going to kill her too.  But she was just as guilty.  She condoned every one of Ted’s harebrained schemes.  She never said, “Ted, you’re a grown man.  Act like it.”  If she had, maybe her name wouldn’t be on the death warrant.

He’d gone there to study their movements, understand their habits, in the hope of seeing a chink in their defenses.  But he knew them already.  There was nothing to learn.

Instead, Ted and Eleanor were feeding his hatred for them.  He despised their squandered lives and the way they were attempting to squander his and Michelle’s.  He hated having to be the grown up on this one.

A speeding truck from the water plant roused Richard from his angry thoughts.  The dashboard clock said it was after three. He’d been parked there for five hours.  It was time to do what had to be done.  He gunned the engine.

***

A week had passed since he spent the day watching Ted and Eleanor’s home, but tonight was the night he was going to do it.  It was all planned, and he couldn’t afford to waste any more time.  The house buying pretense wasn’t going to last much longer.  The mortgage broker had a bank ready and waiting and house viewings with the realtor were a nightly affair.  He’d turned down two excellent investment properties already.  If he didn’t act now, he’d end up in the financial hole he was trying to avoid.

Tonight was a night off from house hunting and that was his alibi.  Richard was a minority in that he loved soccer.  There was a night game in San Jose and he would be going alone.  The drive to San Jose would take him past Ted and Eleanor’s.  He would kill them, go on to the game and return home to the shocking news.  He would miss the first half, but that wouldn’t matter.  The game was being broadcast on the radio.  He took his ticket from his breast pocket and popped his “get out of jail free” card in the glove box.  He turned up the radio, listened to the game and peeled off the freeway off-ramp to Ted and Eleanor’s.

Richard concealed his Honda in the park’s overflow parking lot and joined the trail.  It was dusk and essentially the park was closed, but it was unsupervised.  Ted and Eleanor walked the trail every night to reflect on another great day in paradise.  This was their main form of entertainment because it was free and their
supposed love of nature could camouflage that.  Richard hid himself in an avenue of trees a quarter mile from the parking lot.  He slipped into coveralls, snapped on a pair of rubber gloves and pocketed a knife.

Waiting was hell.  He kept swallowing, working his tongue over the roof of his mouth, and wiping his gloved hands on his coveralls.  Paranoia seeped in.  Maybe he’d screwed up and given himself away.  With every passing second, he expected his in-laws to round the bend and the police to swoop in.  He knew it was stupid.  He was letting idiotic guilt take over, but he couldn’t stop it.

But fear, paranoia and guilt evaporated in a second when Richard heard Ted and Eleanor approaching.  Ted’s inane banter cut through the night and Richard’s hand tightened around the knife.   He couldn’t make out what was being said.  It was all noise.  But it didn’t matter.  He would pounce the moment they were level with his position.

They were laughing when Richard leapt out of the trees.  Laughing at their good fortune at his expense, no doubt.  Well, the laughing was over.

They gasped when he growled something and they spotted the knife glinting in the moonlight.  How he wished their faces hadn’t been lost in the dark.

“You’ve been taking advantage of me for too long.”  Richard didn’t wait for a plea for clemency.  He plunged the knife into Ted’s bloated belly, swollen from sponging off others.  Blood spilled over Richard’s gloved hand and he pressed the blade deeper.

Ted crumpled, sliding off the blade.  Eleanor screamed.  In reflex, Richard lashed out with the knife, catching Eleanor’s throat.  She went down without another sound.

Richard rummaged through Ted’s pockets for his wallet.  Their deaths couldn’t look motiveless.  They had too look like a violent robbery carried out by a desperate junkie.  Senseless tragedies like this happened every day.  He jerked out Ted’s wallet from the back pocket of his pants.  Ted groaned and Eleanor gurgled.

Richard raced back to his Honda with the wallet and Eleanor’s rings.  He dumped them with the knife into a Ziploc he’d brought with him and stuffed his coveralls and rubber gloves into a trash bag.  Peeling out of the parking lot, he headed for San Jose.

At a gas station outside San Jose, Richard filled up and dumped the trash bag in a nearby dumpster.  Five miles from the gas station, he tossed the knife out the window and down a freeway embankment.  Parking outside Spartan Stadium, he still had the wallet to get rid off.  The rings and the wallet’s contents he would keep for now and dispose of down a storm drain on the way home.  He opened up Ted’s wallet and tugged out his cash, credit cards and driver’s license.

On the drive to the game, he’d been on a high, delirious to be rid of his burden, but not anymore.  The driver’s license pictured a man who wasn’t his father-in-law.  Just to reinforce the calamity, the credit cards didn’t have Ted’s name on them, but instead, the name Thomas Fairfax.  The rings he held in his palm weren’t Eleanor’s.  He’d killed the wrong people.

“Oh God,” he murmured.

Richard stumbled into the stadium on uncertain legs, water gurgled in his ears and he couldn’t breathe.  He dropped Fairfax’s empty wallet into a nearby trashcan.  He handed his ticket to the yellow-jacketed ticket taker.  He climbed the steep steps to his seat, not taking the free program offered.

Goals flew into the back of the net one after another.  The San Jose Earthquakes were having a landmark game, but Richard couldn’t raise a smile.  The murders of two strangers weighed heavily on him, but that wasn’t what was worrying him.  Ted and Eleanor were still alive.  That meant he had it all to do again.

The fifth goal went in and the crowd leapt to their feet.  A man noticed Richard was the only one who wasn’t cheering.  “LA can’t win them all, buddy.”

Richard said nothing and the man dismissed him with a wave of his hand.

The game ended and Richard trudged back to his Honda.  He’d left the car on a residential street and trash and recycle cans for the following morning’s pick up blocked it in.  He dumped the Fairfax’s belongings in a can.

Driving home, he didn’t know what to do.  He couldn’t use the same MO to kill Ted and Eleanor now.  It was so perfect, but his bungled murders would lead to better security at the park.  He couldn’t afford to be hasty, but time was against him.  Ted and Eleanor would be evicted in less than a week.

How could he have been so wrong?  It had sounded like them.  It had looked like them.  How did he kill the wrong people?

Richard’s question went unanswered.  The eighteen-wheeler changed the subject.  The semi’s blowout rendered the rig helpless and the trailer section plowed into the Honda’s passenger side.  From the frenetic action inside the cab, the truck driver was doing a valiant job, but he lost the good fight.  The eighteen-wheeler smeared Richard’s car across the freeway and drove it into the median.

***

Richard awakened in a hospital bed.  Molasses-thick memories trickled back into his consciousness.  Progress was slow.  He tried to move but he only managed to move his head.

Suddenly with the intensity of a thunderbolt, he remembered and began to cry.  The accident had left him a quadriplegic, but he wasn’t crying because he was incapacitated for life.  He was remembering what Michelle had said to him the day after the accident. 

“We’ve all decided,” she said.  Standing on either side of her, Ted and Eleanor nodded and smiled.  “There’s no point in buying a second home, Mom and Dad can live with us.  They will look after you while I’m at work.  Just think, honey, we can all be one big happy family.  It’s the safest solution too.  Did you know there were two murders near their home last night?”

THE END

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###

SEWING CIRCLE

By Scott Nicholson

“The only Jew in town,” Morris said as Laney pulled into the church parking lot.

He pointed to the stained-glass window cut into the middle of the belfry. It looked expensive, more than a little country church could afford. Jesus smiled down from the window, arms spread in welcome and acceptance.

“The story’s about the sewing circle, not the church,” Laney said.

“Jesus as a ragpicker. Was that in the Bible?”

“You’re too cynical.”

“No, I’m just a frustrated idealist.”

Morris rubbed his stomach. He’d gone soft from years at a desk, his only exercise the occasional outdoor feature story, usually involving a free meal. He’d given up the crime beat, preferring to do the “little old lady in the holler” stuff, the cute little profile features that offended no one. Still, the fucking quilt beat was the bottom rung on the ladder he’d started climbing back down a decade ago.

“Come on, it’ll be fun,” Laney said. She was the staff photographer, and true to her trade, she managed to keep a perspective on things. Cautious yet upbeat, biding time, knowing her escape hatch was waiting down the road. For Morris, there was no escape hatch. The booby hatch, maybe.