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Authors: James Scott Bell

BOOK: Don't Leave Me
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Chapter 15
Wendy Tower’s apartment was warm and filled with the smells of sea and spices. As she attended to final touches in the kitchen, Chuck and Stan sat in the living room. Stan had a smile on his face, a Cupid grin. With his eyes Chuck warned Stan not to say anything
or else.
Stan’s smile widened.
Keep it up, baby brother and I’ll give you a wedgie. This whole thing didn’t feel right, it was like a boat listing and it would keep on till it capsized. But Chuck was sick of things not feeling right. He had to get over what he couldn’t change, namely the past. Now was as good a time as any. Grit your teeth and just do it, pal.
A Native American-style artwork—beads and feathers on a buff backdrop—hung on one wall, right over a small entertainment center with a TV, receiver, and set of small speakers. He remembered an old joke about Indians without electricity, having to watch TV by firelight. The joke did not make him smile. For some reason he felt the juxtaposition of the two images was just not right. Things were together that shouldn’t be.
Or maybe he was just nervous. Standing outside Wendy’s door, only a few short minutes ago, he felt like he was sixteen and going out for the first time with a pretty girl, hoping he wouldn’t come off like a doofus with pimples and non-matching socks.
Now, inside, seated, he was still trying to work himself into fitting here, being comfortable. He knew it was the knife guy and the fire and the stirring up of his bruised and battered psyche, but come on! He couldn’t let things outside him dictate his every move forever.
Wendy had music going from an iPod in a dock. Somebody that sounded like Nat King Cole was singing. And then Chuck reminded himself that no one sounded like Nat King Cole except Nat King Cole. He smiled at last.
On the coffee table was the big book
Baseball,
from the Ken Burns documentary. Chuck and Stan loved it when it first appeared, watching it together while eating popcorn and peanuts and even hot dogs. “You a baseball fan?” Chuck said toward the kitchen.
“Totally,” Wendy said.
“Me, too,” Stan said. “I’m Stan the Man.”
Wendy appeared at the pass through. “That was Stan Musial’s nickname.”
“Yes!” Stan said.
“One of the greats,” Wendy said.
“You know about Musial?” Chuck said.
“My grampa is a die-hard Cardinals fan. He told me so many Stan the Man stories I began to think he came from Mount Olympus.”
“No!” Stan said. “Donora, Pennsylvania. Born November 21, 1920. Stanislaw Franciszek Musial. Career batting average .331. Hit total, three thousand, six hundred and thirty. Four hundred and seventy-five career home runs.”
“Wow!” Wendy said.
“Ask me about Dizzy Dean,” Stan said.
Chuck put a hand on his brother’s arm. “Maybe after dinner—”
“Real name Jerome Herman Dean, or Jay Hanna Dean. Career Earned Run Average 3.02. Win-loss—”
“Thank you, Stan,” Chuck said, squeezing the arm.
“Ow,” Stan said. He took his arm back and rubbed it.
“I’ll ask you more later, Stan,” Wendy said. “You’re amazing.” She went back to the kitchen.
“I’m amazing,” Stan whispered hard, in firm rebuke.
“So true,” Chuck said.
“She likes you.”
“Slow down, Stan the Man.”
“I’ll look away and you can kiss her.”
“Almost ready,” Wendy called from the kitchen.
“See?” Stan said.
“She meant the dinner,” Chuck said.
Stan punched Chuck’s shoulder, with a little extra oomph than usual. “I was just joking you. You think I’m stupid or something?”
What was no joke was the
paella de marisco.
In presentation and aroma and, most important, taste. As they all finally sat around the table, Chuck lifted his wine glass. “Here’s to baseball, fine food, and good company.”
Wendy smiled and joined the toast, as did Stan with his preferred drink, 7-Up.
Then Stan said, “Do the knife trick.”
“What’s that?” Wendy said.
“Nothing,” Chuck said.
“Chuck does magic!”
“
Did
magic,” Chuck said. “A long time ago.”
“Oh please,” said Wendy. “Do it.”
He did not want to do it. He did not want to do any of those little magic tricks he’d done as a kid, then for awhile at a bar during the summer after college. He got to be pretty good, and the tricks rendered Julia open-mouthed the first time she saw them. To do them again was going to bring that last memory back in full color.
“I’d really like to see it,” Wendy said. She wasn’t to blame for anything in his life. And he was her guest. He could do it, sure, and maybe get past the memories. Maybe Julia would have wanted him to.
“All right,” Chuck said. “Please notice that my hands will not leave my arms at any time.”
“He
always
says that,” Stan said.
Chuck placed both his hands over his knife, slid it toward him and off the table, into his lap. He kept the motion smooth and put his hands up to his mouth and pretended he was swallowing the knife.
But as he did the knife slid off his lap and hit the floor with a
clank.
“Oops,” Stan said.
Chuck had not blown that trick in twenty years. He looked at his hands like they were foreign objects who had betrayed him.
Wendy laughed good-naturedly. But when Chuck looked at her, she stopped laughing.
A cold blade was slicing through Chuck then. He had dishonored Julia’s memory after all. Maybe she
wouldn’t
have wanted this. Maybe her ghost knocked the knife off his lap. This was all just too soon. Only seven months since her death. He shouldn’t have come. When was the last time he actually felt normal? He tried to recall it, and it was like searching for a box in a dark warehouse with all the fuses blown and the lights out. It was somewhere, in a corner maybe, but which one?
Everybody seemed to sense it, not talking, one of those lulls in a conversation that makes everyone think they’re in an elevator with strangers.
Thankfully, there was a knock at the door.
“Excuse me,” Wendy said, getting up from the table.
“She likes you,” Stan whispered.
“Enough,” Chuck said.
“She’s a good cook,” Stan said.
“Huh?”
“I could tell her about the specials, and she could cook them for you.”
“Stan––”
“Fresh boneless, skinless chicken breasts, a dollar ninety-nine a pound.”
“How about I skin you, Stan? And make you boneless?”
“Ha ha, jacky-daw.” That was Stan’s own phrase, had been ever since he’d read a bird book when he was ten and saw jackdaws and figured out the singular rhymed with
ha ha
. It drove Chuck crazy for awhile, everything was
ha ha jacky-daw
for months.
And then Wendy was in the room again. Behind here were the two detectives who’d questioned Chuck earlier at the school. Epperson and Mooney.
Epperson said, “Charles Samson?”
Just like his mother used to sound when he was in trouble. Chuck stood. Maybe they had some news about the house.
“I am placing you under arrest,” she said.
Stan jumped so fast out of his chair he almost knocked the table over. Two water glasses fell.
Mooney came at Chuck with the bracelets. “Turn around,” he said.
“What is this?” Chuck said.
“You are under arrest for the manufacture of methamphetamine,” Epperson said.
“What?”
The next few moments were a haze of insane noise. Stan shouted, Chuck told Wendy to get Stan back to the motel, Wendy said she would, Mooney told everybody to be quiet. Chuck told Wendy to tell Ray Hunt he might miss school tomorrow. She said she’d do that, too. Mooney said be quiet again.
Then they were out the door, with Mooney squeezing Chuck’s arm hard, pushing him toward the stairwell. Apartment doors opened and people peeked out, like a Whack-a-Mole game.
Stan’s voice echoed down the hall. “You’ll never get away with this, you dirty coppers! Never!”
Chapter 16
In a Topanga station interview room, Chuck listened to Detective Epperson drone, “You’ve been advised of your rights. We cannot ask you any questions, and anything you say can be used against you in court. You can sign this waiver and talk to us, or you can wait to speak to an attorney.”
Chuck said, “Tell me, honestly, if you think I am a guy who would be dealing drugs.”
“I’m advising you not to say anything unless you sign this waiver.”
Chuck paused, looked at the form. He snatched the pen off the desk and held it up to them, like he was showing them a magic wand. Then he signed his name. “All right,” he said. “Now look at me and tell me that you think I’m a drug dealer.”
“The fire was caused by an explosion in a propane tank in your garage,” Epperson said.
“I don’t have any propane tanks in my garage,” Chuck said.
“How do you explain the presence of a propane tank, along with acetone, Freon, sodium hydroxide, sulfuric acid and paint thinner?”
Chuck stared at her. Pieces of a bizarre puzzle started flying around his brain. “I didn’t have any of that stuff. So somebody must have put it there.”
Mooney said, “And just a coincidence, I guess, that those are items used in the manufacture of methamphetamine.”
“Right,” Chuck said. “Which I sell to my fifth graders.”
Epperson said, “I advise against sarcasm, Mr. Samson.”
“I advise against any of this crap,” Chuck said. “It’s an obvious set up. Have you done any background on me? Why are you into this anyway? I thought you were homicide. You saying I killed somebody?”
“Who would go to all that trouble to set you up?” Mooney said. “What would be the purpose of that?”
“You’re the detectives. You tell me.” Chuck watched them both stiffen and didn’t care if they did.
“If you’re in the clear,” Epperson said, “just answer a few questions for us.”
“While I’m sitting here under arrest? Real friendly like?”
“Why not?”
“Then get on with it.” Chuck was worried about Stan. Wendy would be with him but he knew his brother wouldn’t be calm until they were together again. Maybe if he calmed down himself, got reasonable, they’d spring him.
Right. And pots of gold are sniffed by unicorns at the end of rainbows.
“You can just come clean about making the drugs,” Mooney said. “I mean, your life hasn’t exactly been a financial success.”
Chuck shot him a look. Mooney shot one right back. It was a regular love fest around here, and Mooney was some sort of TV-cop wannabe.
Chuck said, “I’ve got a job, okay? I teach fifth grade. I like my job. I get along. I want to keep doing that. I’m not going to make meth in my freaking garage. I have a brother I take care of. I’m not going to do anything to mess that up.”
“Real noble,” Mooney said.
As Chuck’s fists clenched, Epperson said, “Mr. Samson, are you still on call as a Navy chaplain?”
“No.”
“Any reason why not?” Epperson asked.
“I don’t need my head shrunk, okay? I didn’t do what you think I did. That’s all you need to know.”
“That’s a great defense,” Mooney said.
Throwing up his hands, Chuck said, “Get me a lawyer.”
“Uh-huh,” Mooney said.
Epperson said, “You want private or the PD?”
Chuck had exactly $2,323 in combined checking and savings. He was not getting anything from Uncle Sam because of that paperwork snafu on his DD214 discharge form. He wasn’t going to be getting any superstar attorney. But he was
not guilty of anything
and even a freshly scrubbed law grad should be able to clear things up.
“PD,” Chuck said.
“Tomorrow morning,” Epperson said.
“What about my phone call?”
“Yes, you can have one phone call.”
Chuck called Royce Horne. He’d know what to do.
Chapter 17
His given name is Dragoslav Zivkcovic, first name Serb for
glory,
but there has been no glory for him in his twenty-eight years. And so he prefers the name he was called since coming to America, Dag Kovak, and even what some others call him, The Dog. That would be a name of respect and fear, but he knows he has not truly earned either, not in the eyes of his father, the only eyes that matter to him.
The ones who work for his father will call him Dog to his face but behind his back he suspects they mock him. They fear him only because he is the son of Svetozar Zivkcovic, now Steven Kovak. A father who has killed more men and women than he ever will, because there is no honor in America, there is no ethnic cleansing. So he, The Dog, is the weak one, who drinks too much and is protected by his father’s money. But it cannot buy honor or respect.
He hates the tears that sting his eyes and blur his vision, but he guns his Escalade through the canyon. Winding toward the ocean, windows down to smell the air, the scent of coastal sage and scrub oak, red shank and buckwheat, and his beloved Manzanita. It is a plant that is hard and twisted and sharp when dry, as he is hard and twisted, as he has made himself to be. But it is not enough and his tears shame him because his father knows that he is not as hard inside as he should be, but soft like the sand on the beaches of Malibu. There is nothing he can do to change his father’s mind except to become like him and learn to kill without a thought, and that is why he carries the Manzanita branch in his car, it will teach him.
And so he drives. Down to Pacific Coast Highway, turning left, tears flowing faster, almost turning his SUV into headlights coming the other way, that would be a nice quick way to go, maybe a good heroic way to go, choosing his own destiny. He can see––no, it’s more a sense––people laughing and eating and drinking in places that line the neon night. They are chasing dreams as he is running from nightmares and he hates them all. He can hate well.
Soon he pulls off the road and onto the shoulder, at a place where the beach is darkest. He has a place he comes to in the night to cleanse himself. With him he brings his twisted Manzanita branch, and with it he climbs over the rocks down to the sand and the branch stays with him as his companion as he whips it through the air, slashing the air as one would a fencing foil, hearing the sound.
When he reaches the spot where he will be alone he takes his clothes off carefully, ritually, this is his communion. His running shoes and white socks, his jeans and belt, his shirt, he is forming a pile. He slips off his underwear last and is naked in the cool breeze.
There is a moon out, a large mountain moon, and he looks up at it like a coyote and he is The Dog, but he does not howl. He weeps. And to stop the weeping he takes his branch of Manzanita and whips his own legs and feet, and then his genitals. Then his back, over and over, the sound of the branch and crash of the waves making hymns.
When he is done and bleeding, he walks slowly to the water and into the brine, his whipped feet stinging, his legs feeling all the salt and cleansing of the Pacific, finally his back, and it burns in the cold of the water. For one brief moment he considers swimming out into the darkness, swimming until he cannot hold himself up, and then sinking to the bottom or maybe his blood will bring sharks and he will fight them before they kill him and that will be a heroic death.
He goes under the water fully, baptizing himself, and then he knows he will not die here, he is not ready to die. He comes back to shore, exhausted, still holding the branch.
He is sweeping the sand as he walks with the stick when he sees a form by his clothes, bent over the clothes, butt toward him. In the moonlight he sees the form stand up and turn around, and it looks like a skinny teenager who almost jumps when he sees The Dog. The kid freezes, looking at the naked man who is looking right back at him. The kid has something in his hand. The Dog cannot see what it is but it very clearly came out of his pocket and as the kid begins to run. The Dog knows already what the outcome will be.
The kid is fast but he is no match for Dragoslav Zivkcovic, who was graced with strong legs like his mother, his mother who was gunned down by Albanian soldiers when he was ten. He catches the teen by the back of the shirt and with one pull yanks him down on the sand. The boy cries out and says he is sorry, sorry, please don’t do anything and The Dog puts his foot on the boy’s throat and holds him down like a butcher might hold down a live chicken.
The boy squirms and cries and begs for mercy.
Up in the sky, over the mountains, the moon is bright and glorious.
“Thank you!” Dag says to the moon.

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