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Yellowhead Raymond Embrack |
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In the sacred afternoon, the yellow canopy flutters summer wind and cool shadow. Shadows cross the sunny green grass as the twins play. The twins live in a bright mustard-yellow house. The twins wear matching bright yellow. The twins lie on the grass, gaze up at the deep blue. DADDYRW: I have to see you!! JESSI: I want to see you too! DADDYRW: Soon. JESSI: OK DADDYRW: When? JESSI: I don’t know… DADDYRW: I can’t wait. JESSI: I can’t wait either. DADDYRW: Set a day and a time and I will be there. JESSI: OK. This week is cool. DADDYRW: Tomorrow? JESSI: OK DADDYRW: (smiling emoticon) JESSI: (smiling emoticon) DADDYRW: At your place? JESSI: Yes. DADDYRW: Will we be alone? JESSI: Yes. DADDYRW: Will your parents be out? JESSI: Yes. DADDYRW: When? What hours? JESSI: 6 to 11. DADDYRW: Kewl. JESSI: I can’t wait! DADDYRW: Me 2. JESSI: Will u send me a pic first? DADDYRW: Camera’s still in the shop. You’ll know me tho. JESSI: How? DADDYRW: You already seen my unit. JESSI: Oh it’s soooo thick… DADDYRW: Tomorrow it will be all yours. JESSI: Mmmmm…. DADDYRW: Do u want it in your mouth? JESSI: Yes. DADDYRW: You hot little girl. JESSI: You make me hot. DADDYRW: t y JESSI: I feel like a bad girl tho. DADDYRW: You’re not a bad girl. You’re a beautiful 12 year old. JESSI: Do you think I’m beautiful? DADDYRW: I think you’re so beautiful. I look at your pics everyday. JESSI: Really? DADDYRW: Yes. You’re ready to start growing up. JESSI: Will u help me grow up? DADDYRW: Yes I will. Will u give me yourself completely? Your body? JESSI: Yes I will. DADDYRW: Will u let me inside u? JESSI: Yes. DADDYRW: I will kiss u and lick u all over. Then I will put my 10 inches in you. JESSI: Will it hurt? DADDYRW: It will hurt but you’ll love it. JESSI: I can’t wait!!! I wish u could come tonight. Will u come? DADDYRW: lol. I will definitely come. JESSI: Kewl. DADDYRW: I will teach u so much. JESSI: I so want u to teach me Daddy. The thing about Yellowheads is they do half of the work for you. They will buy anything you tell them, they want it so bad. Night fell on Yellowville, the house on Pinetree Street. Lots of pines, tall trees between the widely spaced houses, the houses one-story and woodsy. Everything was in place. The front door was half-open. Cody was behind the door. Yellowhead said a silver mini van. At eight, a silver mini van rolled into the driveway. Yellowhead had driven his stiff cock all the way from Redwood County to get to Blue Lake just to get to Jessi. Yellowhead got out, walked to the house, walked to the door. Yellowhead’s face stepped from the darkness into the front door light. Cody didn’t have a photo. DaddyRW was horny and Cody wasn’t going to wait. Fuck it. Showing up was his ID. Yellowhead knocked on the half-open door. “Hello?” He knocked harder. “Hello?” He waited a half-minute. He pushed open the door, stepped into the house. The baseball bat takes them out above the neck and they drop. They pinball between the walls, land at the living room entrance. With a cracked skull, they don’t move. Cody puts the splatter bag over Yellowhead’s head, puts the S&W behind one ear. The hollow-point doesn’t exit, pops the head inside the splatter bag. Then Yellowhead goes into the body bag. Cody has clean up time down to five minutes. Then the vehicle is moved into the garage. The body bag goes into the trunk. Then back inside to turn off the lights, lock up, then the drive to the landfill, where Cody’s car is waiting. Cody then moves the yellowmobile, torches it. Cody had him inside the body bag. The door knocked. “Hello?” A female voice outside the door. “Darryl?” Cody’s heart stopped. His dick fell off. He had five brains trying to run in six directions but unable to move. “Hello?” Cody went to the door, opened it, saw a white female in her late thirties. She said, “Darryl? Oh. Excuse me. Is this…?” The woman was face down on the floor when the bat took her in the back of the head. Cody gave it ten more swings to make sure. Cody looked outside, freaked. There were more people in the mini van. He got the S&W, kept it behind his back, went out to the mini van. In the mini van there was a teenage girl and a male age six. When the gun came out, they started screaming. Through the glass Cody shot the girl in the head two times, the boy two times. Cody reloaded. Cody went in through the driver’s door, fired two shots into the girl’s chest then fired two shots into the boy’s chest. Cody found the woman’s handbag, took her purse. Cody went back into the house. He found Darryl’s wallet, took it. He dismantled the PC, took the computer part, went out the back. He hoofed across the backyard to the tree line, through the fence, down to the mostly dry muddy creek. It took a mile of lugging CPU to reach his car. Cody went home. Cody Junior was in the den on the phone while watching MTV while sitting at the PC, rap music coming out of it. What was on the MTV these days looked like Claymation made by Martians on crack. Junior broke off something close to a nod. “Homework done?” “Yeah.” A closed schoolbook was on the desktop, buried under DVD covers, wrestling magazines, Rice Krispie squares. “Yo, Dad, I still need that—“ “--Later.” Marcy was in the kitchenette on her cell phone. Cody got a beer, went out on the deck. The motion sensor auto night-light went to bright. He sat out in the coolness. Somewhere, set off by the light, dogs were barking. Yellowville was over as a base of operations. No one knew Deputy Sheriff Cody McClean had been using the house, still in limbo after the former resident was busted for farming pot. Cody mentally scanned the house for evidence, meanwhile, the dead people’s credit cards were waiting for him to line up any future frame. You had to think on your feet in those situations. You have to give yourself options. The call came in from Deputy Sheriff Matt Stinson, on the way over. Cody showered, got in uniform. When he came out, Matt was in the kitchen with Marcy. Matt was a crew cut on steroids in uniform. The three of them had lived in Blue Lake all their lives, had grown up and gone to school together. Unless Cody was barbecuing, it was uncommon to see Matt at the house. Cody had never been to Matt’s apartment. Since getting married, the two didn’t hang out in their free time, Matt still the single guy who spent his free time hunting trim. Cody left with Matt, got into the squad car, Matt drove to Pinetree Street. “Haven’t seen Marcy in a while,” Matt said. Matt had this tone where he was being straight with you and mocking you at the same time. “She never changes,” Matt said. “How’s that?” “Hasn’t hit the wall yet.” “Oh. Right.” “How’s Cody Junior?” “He’s still in rehab.” “Good for him.” “Fuck you,” Cody said. “What?” Matt played innocent. “You shit on my life.” “We all make choices,” Matt smirked. “We grow up. I’m a family guy. Been one for a while now.” “Glad to hear that.” “What about you, sex machine? This interrupt your action tonight?” “You know what? The phone rang while I was in the saddle.” “Like shit.” “Wanna smell my fingers?” “Smell my balls.” “Like a family guy has seen pussy since color television.” “Good for me, single guy. You get to chase loose snatch. No HIV for me.” “We are looking at a ton of shit,” Matt said. “Huge,” Cody said. “There goes my trip to Vegas. They’ll cancel leaves behind this. Watch.” They reached the crime scene. Flashing lights in mint-blue and cocktail-red, three squad cars. Media vans with spires and dishes. Camera guys. Lights. Four dead. In Blue Lake, that doubled the homicide count for the average year. Cops were working the neighbors. Cops were waiting for the ME. The two joined Deputy Sheriff Trudy Conway. “We’re looking at a ton of shit,” Matt said. “A bloodbath,” Trudy said. “Head wounds for everybody.” “Outsiders,” Cody said. “Should’ve seen it coming,” Trudy said. “Latinos coming into town, taking over the plant jobs…the element that comes in with them…soon you’re looking at death squad hits.” Cody went into the house where more Deputies were going through the rooms, keeping mental inventory of his Yellowland provisions, a bottle of JD, an ashtray filled with Marlboro butts, a grocery paper bag for trash. Cody dug through the bag, pulled his store receipts. The fridge was stocked with beer. No food. Cody never got hungry in Yellowland. The ME showed up. Then the Sheriff himself. Sheriff Bob Niles was a fat Harry Dean Stanton with glasses. He looked the scene up and down, talked to people, said things. Sheriff Bob Niles himself had zipped the body bag on Caitlyn Jessica Deering, age 11, kidnapped/raped/tortured/murdered. When it turned out the killer had met her on the Internet, Niles started an operation that assigned Cody to pose as a decoy to lure online pedophile predators. At first it had been just undercover work. Then the twins found him. The twins brought the magic. The operation didn’t survive the next year’s budget, was scrapped. By then, Cody was doing it on his own time. He couldn’t stop. The department refused to let Cody do it on his own time. So he didn’t tell the department. Yellowland is out there, Yellowheads waking up, trolling for little girls, trolling for little boys. Cody found Yellowheads in chat rooms then lured them into Yellowland, where they had privacy. One year, four Yellowheads served and dealt. Except you have to do something with them. The first Yellowhead was set up for a drug bust that will keep him locked up until this becomes the planet of the apes. That tactic takes much effort, involves others, and draws too much attention. Cody took to a simpler approach: putting them in body bags. Y5: The wrong people showed up in the right vehicle. Once Darryl had been taken out, the rest had to be taken out. That created a complication to de-complicate. Time to cowboy up and handle it. The next day Sheriff Niles was still talking to people and saying things. He had he Deputies all in one room. All leaves were cancelled until the investigation was closed. The victims had been an entire nuclear family from Green Lake visiting the wife’s sister’s family. They had gotten lost in Blue Lake, went to the wrong address. By now it was clear to Cody. Four people had died because they had become lost in Yellowland. Yellowland is not a place for civilians. Only predators inhabit Yellowland. Predators and the predators of predators. The two dead parents didn’t know Operation Yellowhead made their children safer, their innocence protected from the predators hiding behind the smiling bouncing warm yellow heads on their PCs. If those parents only knew the work Cody was doing for them, they would call him a hero and shake his hand with their thanks. Probably even now. Cody went through his shift, doing what he was assigned to do, then putting in face time at the cop bar after hours. The whole time his mind was on yellow, wanting to set up Yellowland operations again and get back into the yellow world. Cody dragged out his old monitor and keyboard, set up Yellowland at home in the garage. He didn’t want it that close to the family, but at least it was a more controllable environment. He took Cody Junior to a mall to get the Psycho Killer IV video game he wanted. Cody Junior got absorbed into a group of his friends, went see ya, he’d get a ride home. Cody had nowhere to go. He found Marcy in the Wal-Mart. Marcy’s short limp red hair framed her round Harry Potter eyeglasses. She was in a brick-red sweat suit with matching sneakers. She was still tall and thin with big boobs but it was a thickening thinness. Marcy watched Austin Powers for two hours without once cracking a smile. Cody never found the movie funny again. Sometimes if he was standing near her, he’d catch her hand moving like she was fanning away his smell. She said he had too short a cock to be a really good lover. She said he was passed over for a promotion after fourteen years because he didn’t have that good a personality. She pointed out that his getting shot was ultimately his fault for being careless. Sex was on Saturday nights around nine. Saturday nights were maybe every other week. Marcy was always working it down to fewer Saturdays. Cody let her. Cody’s one good move had been becoming a cop. Being a cop gave his life meaning, gave him his identity. He was Pentecostal trailer stock. He had been a gifted child. At age six, he could preach. At age eight, he could speak in tongues. By his teens he lost the gift and as a teen, he was a high school zero, a misfit with a white blur for a face, a skinhead with no direction in life. Then one day a Deputy Sheriff spoke at the school. Cody saw the light, went for the Deputy Sheriff position, made it past the psych evaluation. Becoming a cop gave him focus, channeled his need to help people. He was a role model. Every day Cody put his life on the line. He still relived the shooting. Ten years now. Cody was out on the highway writing a ticket. A sniper in the woods put a round into his upper back like he was a nine-point buck. His chest slammed the Land Rover, he pinballed off it to the ground. It felt like metal heartburn then the pain deepened and expanded with each breath. He looked at his chest for the bullet hole, found it away from the heart, across from the badge, a rip over the right breast. He saw his blood spattered on the Land Rover. He saw the motorist take off. Mouth filling with blood, he made the call with his cell phone. That was a good Marcy moment, her visiting in the hospital room after the shooting and crying. Crying. He was out for two months. The sniper was never identified, some cop-hating psycho. In the car, Marcy started talking about the murders, now known as the Pinetree Street Massacre. “How could a thing like that happen in Blue Lake?” “I know.” “Any clues?” “Zero.” “You always feel safe then you find out you’re not safe at all,” she said. “You’re safe.” “How are we safe? That was an innocent family who went to the wrong address.” “Things happen,” he said. She could’ve broken off a headshake at the random cruelty of the universe with him, families being slaughtered, Cody being shot in the back…But instead she said: “What does that mean? Is that how you’re going to solve these murders? ‘Things happen’? This is kind of important, Cody.” Like he didn’t know his job was important and needed her to remind him. “No shit,” he said. “How communicative of you,” she said, then threw him one of her passive-aggressive specialties, Marcy’s Homestyle Hopeless Fucking Silence. Good. It was all he could stand. The twins wanted to go out and play tonight. They got home. Marcy went to the bedroom and soon there was Jay Leno’s monologue behind the half-closed door. Cody went to the garage, logged on. DaddyRW was still out there in Yellowland. DaddyRW had stood up Jessi. DaddyRW was still a witness to the murders. If he saw it on the news at eleven, he’d be the only person who could connect the address with Jessi. DaddyRW had to be terminated. Cody kept a separate screen name for each Yellowhead he collected. DaddyRW was whitehead. Shit. Cody lit a Marlboro, popped a beer, sipped JD. Stared at DaddyRW’s white head, waiting for him to turn yellow. Went through the picture file. Four pics of Jessi, Four of Jessy. Cody Junior in both parts. Cody had gotten Junior at the right time. Like a lot of boys at age eleven, Junior then had a face that could pass for either boy or girl. Cody dressed him as both for the shots, posed him in both ordinary poses and poses with a hint of sexiness. Knowing it was for police work made it okay, so Junior went along with it. Marcy gave him crap over it. How could he use his child that way, using him as bait, feeding him to those freaks? The four nude pics were his and Junior’s ultra top secret. Cody waited. Waited way past Jay Leno. Past Conan. Past a complete sleep. Past a decent sleep. Past his day and borrowing against the next day. Around three, DaddyRW finally went yellowhead. Cody darkens as the twins light up. The warm yellow glow fills you, the warm yellow glow of his yellow head, lighter than air, filled with dreams of love and adoration. You fill his yellow head with sunshine. You fill his waking moments and he is as weightless as his yellow head. You feel yourself making someone feel deeply alive. It feeds you and you feel alive again. Jessi takes over. JESSI: Daddy!!! DADDYRW: Hi sweetie. JESSI: Hi, sexy daddy! DADDYRW: Yr up late. JESSI: Couldn’t sleep. DADDYRW: How was ur day? JESSI: I had a cool day. U? DADDYRW: OK JESSI: What happened last night? DADDYRW: Sorry. Was tied up, couldn’t come. JESSI: Missed u. DADDYRW: Couldn’t be helped. JESSI: I was so ready too. Turned out DaddyRW didn’t watch the news, had heard zero about the Pinetree Street Massacre. But before the news cycle was over, he would. The media would make sure of that. They should put the media in charge of public education. But for now, DaddyRW was apologetic and horny. He even sent a face shot. No more mistakes. Running on three hours’ sleep, Cody went through the blur of his shift, the twins hot to play, tugging at his badge, hungry for darkness to fall. Finally it did, and he went straight to the garage, logged on. This time under Jessy’s screen name, Jessi’s twin brother, a hottie with his own collection of Yellowheads. The plan had been brewing all day. With DaddyRW lined up for termination, a terminator was needed. It was a good hour to start, eight p.m., with all night and hours past that to play with Yellowheads. Cody ignored the yellow heads, waited for the white head to go yellow. Whitehead was Ghostman. Ghostman was a psycho. Lots of prison time, criminally violent, mentally unstable. Ghostman gave up all the details. name, address, cell phone, his birthday. He sent pics. Trailer trash stacked 6’4” high, 300 lbs., skin headed with a whale hunter beard, an iron-pumped monster covered in Aryan Brotherhood, Nazi SS, pagan prison tats. His eyes stared at the camera like it was a pink cockroach on the wall of his cage. He was obsessed with Jessy. Around nine-thirty Ghostman went yellow. Showtime. Cody darkens as the twins light up. The warm yellow glow fills you, the warm yellow glow of his yellow head. You fill his yellow head with sunshine. You feel yourself making someone feel deeply alive. It feeds you and you feel alive again. JESSY: Hi! GHOSTMAN: Hey babe. JESSY: How r u doing? GHOSTMAN: Real good now that I’m with u. JESSY: Missed u! GHOSTMAN: I think about u all the time. JESSY: All the time? GHOSTMAN: Every waking moment. JESSY: Wow…really? GHOSTMAN: You sweet boy. JESSY: I think about u too. GHOSTMAN: Do you really? JESSY: All the time. GHOSTMAN: What r u wearing? JESSY: I’m not wearing anything. I want to be naked for u… GHOSTMAN: Touch yourself for me. JESSY: I’m touching myself. GHOSTMAN: I want to be inside u right now. JESSY: I so want to feel u inside me. GHOSTMAN: First put my cock inside your little mouth. JESSY: Ummm… GHOSTMAN: Ahh…that’s it, Jess… JESSY: I want to feel u so hard inside me. GHOSTMAN: I’m so hard right now. U make me so hard. JESSY: I want to feel you for real sooo much. GHOSTMAN: Will u leave home and be with me? JESSY: Yes. From now on I’m all yours forever. GHOSTMAN: I am reborn. JESSY: Tomorrow I’ll leave home and be your boy-wife. I will please you better than a woman. GHOSTMAN: I love you. I will take care of u forever. JESSY: Would u protect me? GHOSTMAN: Always. JESSY: I know that you’re so tough and hard cuz u been in prison so many times like u told me. So u could protect me & make me feel safe. GHOSTMAN: Always. JESSY: There is a very bad man who wants me for himself. GHOSTMAN: I will take care of him for you. Tell me all about this man. They made it so easy. At four a.m. Yellowhead was gone and Cody was cramming the last filter king into his lungs, his eyes and brain shutting down, the PC still twitching and retching. But there was still more to do before sunrise. A message for DADDYRW: Pine Valley Coffee Shop at three p.m. The next step: framing Ghostman for identity theft of the victims of the Pinetree Street Massacre. Using Ghostman’s government name, Cody made twenty-seven online purchases using the bankcards and credit cards of the victims. Kiddie porn sites, guns, Dell computers. Cody slept on the garage floor. The dreams had him tracking his tracks on the Internet, sexual scenarios left behind, years worth of them he had to track down and delete. Places where his real name existed. His name had to be deleted before anyone saw it. Each time he found his name and deleted it, his name appeared in ten thousand more places. It was like checking each grain of sand in a desert. Two hours’ sleep. Cody put on the uniform and put in face time while working on Plans B through Z. At 2:30 p.m. DADDYRW was sitting in his silver mini van parked outside the Pine Valley Coffee Shop. GHOSTMAN’s black pickup pulled in, parked beside the mini van. GHOSTMAN got out with an AK-47, walked up to the mini van’s driver’s side, splattered DADDYRW’s head. When the call came in, Cody thanked Jesus Christ for psychos. Two squad cars picked up the black pickup on Pine Creek Road. The long version was the high-speed chase. The short version was the shootout. Ghostman went down with forty-seven shells in him. Cody and Matt pulled up in the squad car just in time to see Ghostman’s body on the road, waiting for the slab. Cody thanked both Jesus Christ and Mel Gibson for psychos, the best people on Earth. Hair in their eyes, the twins stood over Ghostman trembling, in tears. Their world was ending. The twins had filled Ghostman’s yellow head with sunshine. The twins had filled his waking moments and made him deeply alive. The twins now turned and looked at the evil man who killed their boyfriends. WTF? Cody turned away so Matt wouldn’t see the fat hot teardrops, hear his sobbing. Cody’s hands trembled as the breakdown took over his body. He muscled himself back under control. Cody had Ghostman’s home address. He had evidence to plant. The twins ached to feel the last traces of Ghostman’s fading essence. He couldn’t wait, couldn’t hold back. But he had to sell it. “I’ve seen that pickup around,” Cody told Matt. “Me too,” Matt said. Cody nearly shit himself. “On Pine Creek Road.” They gave each other the nod. “Let’s do it,” Matt said. The address was at the end of Pine Creek Road. Rifles drawn, Cody and Matt trotted towards a sprawling log house at the bottom of a naked forest, its floor thick with last autumn’s leaves. Cody’s boot twanged across the tip. Like coat hanger wire. Cody dove just before the landmine took off his feet. Cody didn’t know landmines but his guess was Ghostman was bad at it, like he’d taken the Learning Annex course in landmine making. It blasted up a wall of brown leaves, the ground flipped above Cody, slammed into his back. Matt froze. “Land mines?” Cody got back on his feet, held onto a tree. “Fucking survivalist wannabe psycho.” Cody trampled across rattling leaves and vibrating light, the log house lurching ahead. They shot off the lock, booted the door open. Dark rooms thick with darkness, the air thick with bacon and cigarettes. Grease-stained grocery bags piled to the top with beer cans. Three taped-up pictures of Adolf Hitler, one of Charles Manson. An assortment of hunting knives hung on the walls, an assortment of assault rifles hung on the walls. Cody counted four human skulls. There were six fifty-pound bags of play sand. Sand crunched atop sticky floor. And there, very Spartan, was Ghostman’s PC, set up on a folding table before a stool. Cody’s heart surged and swelled. Again, his hands trembled. Below his rifle, his erection throbbed wet. He was losing it. They split up, took opposite ends of the sprawling house. There was the boom of Matt blowing the lock off a locked door. Cody came upon a locked door. Cody shot off the lock. The room stank, the temp went up eight degrees. The boy was age ten. Naked. On his back on a gray pile of play sand on the floor. Chained to the wall by his wrists. Looking away from Cody. Now looking at Cody. Seeing the uniform. Cody saw what had to be done. The boy saw the policeman leave the room. The boy saw the policeman return with one of Ghostman’s hunting knives. The boy saw him close the door of the soundproofed room. The boy saw the policeman come to him, then start kissing his mouth. The boy couldn’t tell if this was real or a nightmare. The policeman kissed down his narrow chest to his navel. The policeman took him in his mouth. Cody stood. For the first time since he was ten, he could speak in tongues. It flowed through him. In the sacred afternoon, the yellow canopy flutters summer wind and cool shadow. The twins are lying on the grass, gazing up at the deep blue. The sun goes away and star-shaped stars come out. The summer wind turns cold. The twins lose their light, fade to darkness. Cody puked. This was the end of a long bloody trail reached by the work of the Blue Lake County Sheriff’s Department. The suspect in the Blue Lake shooting murder of a Redwood County sex offender also became the suspect in the Pinetree Street Massacre. As well, he was the suspect in the brutal murder of an abducted 10 year-old boy found chained to a wall inside the suspect’s house. Inside a meat freezer, the suspect kept the severed body parts and organs of children. The suspect kept a detailed journal describing his abduction and murder of twenty more young boys across five states. Thumbs up. The Blue Lake County Sheriff’s Department owned the next two news cycles with an option on the third. It was Blue Lake’s 9/11 with a happy ending. Sheriff Bob Niles did the local morning shows then went national. On the cop bar’s TV, Niles sat across from Larry King. Next to Cody, Matt swigged his longneck bottle. “What this does for us in terms of pussy,” Matt said, “cannot be calculated.” “I’m resigning,” Cody said. “No shit? What the fuck for?” “It’s time I left Blue Lake. I can do that now. With this hype I have my pick of departments.” “Why leave Blue Lake?” “It’s time.” “Why now?” Cody took a swig of longneck. Cody wanted to get far from Blue Lake. Cody was far from Yellowland and never going back. He was no longer a slave of the twins, no longer driven to extremes and out of control. The twins were now as white as whiteheads, cold and slumbering with smiling faces. Cody brooded over his longneck, thinking. Sometimes one man’s sanity comes at a high cost to others. Excuse me if my sanity is higher-maintenance than the average citizen…I’m a lawman. My actions took Ghostman off the streets and solved twenty-six murders. If I’m a psycho, my psychosis does more good for society than other people’s sanity. Except I’m not a psycho. My gift was the ability to access that portal. I’m an undercover cop who over-committed to the role. “So…” Matt said, “What does Marcy think about that, leaving Blue Lake and all?” “She’s into it,” Cody told him. “She’s already packed.” Truth was, when Cody put the idea to Marcy, she shot it down right away. Said he was having a mid-life crisis. Fuck her. His plan was to trade her in for something better once he got to a bigger market. Why waste it on Marcy? Cody turned, saw Matt looking at him differently. Like he was making a decision. “Cody, I want you to see something.” Matt got off the barstool. Cody followed him to the door, then out of the cop bar. Cody followed Matt to his squad car. Matt opened the trunk. He reached inside. He took out a rifle. He turned to Cody with the rifle pointed at his chest. “Uh…Cody…I’m gonna need you to get in the trunk.” “How’s that?” “Get in the trunk?” “You serious?” “Yeah. In the trunk.” “What the fuck, Matt?” “Just do it.” “What the fuck for?” “You know.” “I know what?” “You know why.” “I don’t know shit, Matt. Are you on coke again?” “No. Don’t make this…just get in the trunk, Cody.” “What the fuck, Matt?” “You’re not taking Marcy from me.” “What?” “I need Marcy to stay in Blue Lake.” “What’s Marcy got to do with this?” “You wouldn’t understand.” “What the fuck is this about, Matt? Are you having an affair with Marcy? Is that it? Are you kidding me?” “Right. ‘Hey, Matt, you don’t know a thing about Marcy, do you?’ Get in the fucking trunk, Cody. Do it.” “Matt. Are you losing it? This is not happening. You are insane if you think this is going to happen now after all I’ve had to deal with lately. Look, let’s cut the shit. You’re not gonna shoot me, Matt, and you know it.” “You think I won’t shoot you?” “Not you.” “Why not me, Cody? I shot you before.” ??? The sniper. Oh fuck… Quickly, like he was shooting deer, Matt raised the shotgun to aim at Cody’s face, pulled the trigger. Everything went white and hot like it was one billion degrees. Then there was nothing. Matt looked around. Zero witnesses. He put Cody’s body into the trunk, drove to the landfill. He dumped Cody’s body, buried it deep. Matt went home. He unlocked the door, switched on the hall light, entered the shrine. Every wall in the apartment was covered with the 3008 photos he had taken of Marcy McClean over the twenty years since tenth grade, when she had been Marcy Millicent. The photos were arranged by age so that the latest shots greeted Matt upon entering the apartment, going back in time to the earliest snapshots, which lined the kitchen. Pictures taken from cars, through windows, taken when he stalked her unseen along Wal-Mart aisles, Marcy a supermodel goddess among the beasts walking the aisles, shapeless rolls of gut and flab pushing strollers and carts. Matt took a shower. Matt put on a pale blue negligee and heels, a blonde wig. Matt got a can of beer. In the living room he lit the three white candles. Then he went to the altar, to Marcy’s bra. Whenever his weekly search of the McClean’s trash turned up Marcy’s discarded underwear, it added to his collection. With both hands, he raised the bra to his nose, filled both lungs with her essence. Matt went to his PC, went online. He signed onto the screen name ChrissyLoveling. Matt had tracked MarcyMillicent to a chat room for suburban lesbians in the closet as straight wives. As ChrissyLoveling, he met her. They traded photos. It had taken him thousands of women’s photos on the Internet to find the perfect look for ChrissyLoveling: blonde, fresh, accessibly beautiful. Chrissy and Marcy paired off and became Yellowheads who met on Friday nights for closet chat that led to hot lesbian cybersex. This was a Friday night. And Marcy’s yellow head was up, warm and buttery. And once again life was good. Was it wrong? If Marcy hadn’t insensitively dumped Matt for Cody, it would have never come to this. Even so, Matt forgave her. He had too much love to give.
The End
Copyright(c) 2006 by Raymond Embrack
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