Silent Killer, Part II

It took some money, but they found him. It had not taken long to convince Gennie of the need to find Scott, Gennie's old boyfriend that had been, and still was, a private investigator.

Neither of them had the patience to be content with a simple Google or Facebook search.

Omar was living about a thousand miles away. He had served in a tour in Iraq, one in Afganistan. He had a blog that he had set up, mainly for his family, but Scott couldn't determine if he was doing any other writing worth mentioning.

Reading the blog, let alone finding it, would have been out of the question since it was locked with a password. Getting a hold of that would have cost too much extra to be worth it.

Dust kicked up and clouded behind their car down the long drive to the place they were told was Omar's home. He lived on a peach orchard in the cheerfully hot Sacramento valley.

Michael felt a little tickle of nervousness in his chest the closer they got, tightening his grip on the Jeep's steering wheel. Gennie looked over at him from the passenger seat.

"You going to be okay?"

"I'm not thinking about me."

She looked out the window a long time, watching the trees pass in neatly regimented rows. "I'm going to be okay," she said.

"Omar may be the only person who knows that for sure."

They continued slowly down the drive. Michael would accelerate impatiently only to hear gravel ping the steel plates protecting the undercarriage. Michael slowed down in response, bringing the car down to an agonizing crawl as the farmhouse in the distance grew larger behind the brown fog of dirt and dust.

"Maybe he isn't home," Gennie said.

"He's home. See the car in the driveway?"

"Whatever he knows or doesn't know, honey, it's going to be okay. I'm going to be okay."

No, Michael thought, it wouldn't be. The thought of Gennie's death was like cup of briney olive oil, impossible to swallow and keep down.

"There's a difference between knowledge and power," she muttered, almost to herself. Michael figured he must be giving off a "let's end the conversation" vibe.

A man came out of the house holding a cell phone to his ear. Michael thrilled at the idea that this might be Omar. It was strange, he had learned, to see people he had known after a very long time, even if he had known them well. Somehow there was always something about them foreign, strange, and off-putting at first. After all, he mused, you don't really know the new person they've become. You have to start all over again.

He took a good look at the man. He looked to be about the right age. If it was Omar, his stocky frame had grown a little, mostly in horizontal directions. The man hung up his cell phone and put it in the pocket of his dusty jeans.

Michael parked and made to get out of the car. This close there was no mistaking his old friend. The thrill of seeing him bubbled up in his chest and he felt an overpowering desire to shout and run to him and give him a big hug. He resisted, but still wore a big smile on his face, suddenly forgetting why they were there.

He got out of the car, smiling big, and holding out a hand in eager greeting. But Omar's look slowed him down. Whatever enthusiasm Omar might have shared at seeing an old friend was hidden behind a look of meloncholly that threatened to set panic loose in Michael's chest. His eyes were fixed solidly on Gennie, his mouth slightly agape.

The moustache was a little off-putting too.

It took Michael only a moment to piece together the reason for the look. What he couldn't place was the feeling behind it, staring at her as he was as though he were looking into the face of death itself.

Omar, it's Michael. Do you remember me?"

Omar said nothing, only looked at Gennie, winced, and then rubbed his face. Michael thought he heard the man mutter something to himself, though he couldn't make it out. When his brown face peered out from behind his hands he looked them both over. He smiled politely.

"Michael!" he said. The two men clasped hands and then embraced. They laughed together.

"This is my wife Gennie."

"Of course," said Omar. He shook her hand. At this, Michael's stomach dropped into a bottomless pit in his heart. Everything went quiet.

"You remember," Michael said.

"How could I forget. That was the first time. Come in, both of you. It's hot out. I have some limeade inside. It's too bad Lori isn't here. I'd introduce you."

They followed him into the farm house. It was built small and tight, for a time when smaller mortgages had more value than a few extra square feet.

"What have you been up to these past few years?" Omar asked over his shoulder as he stuck his nose in the fridge.

"Things have been, well, difficult."

"Yes," he said, pulling out a pitcher of lemonade. "Yes. Life kicks you in the ass."

Just then Michael noticed something strange about Omar's arm. It didn't exactly seem to be his, though he used it well enough that he carried the illusion off rather well.

"What happened there?" Michael had to stop himself from mentioning the war or anything they had learned about Omar before coming to visit him.

"Iraq. IED. You know the story." Omar talked about amputation like it was just another item he had seen in the news; something that didn't impact him in any direct way.

Omar sat down accross from Michael at the table, looking him square in the eye for the first time since there arrival. There was something both cool and sad in the man's look that made him seem older. Strange, Michael thought, that I had ever gone to school with this man, old before his time.

"You came here to ask me something," said Omar.

Michael looked at Gennie, nodded, and took a deep breath.

"Gennie has cancer. I hoped . . . We had hoped, you could tell me something about . . ." Was he really going to bring it out, admit the insane theory this entire visit was premised on? Michael reached into his back pocket, pulling out the folded pages of the story Omar had written all those years ago.

He put it out on the table in front of Omar, spreading it out and smoothing the corners. Omar picked it up and furrowed his brow, looking it over it while his guests allowed their limeade to sweat in the summer heat.

"I came, Omar, because I wanted to know how this ends. I have to know why you refused to finish the story. Could you finish it?"

Omar passed the story back accross the table, taking a long drink from his own glass. He nodded. "I could finish it. I don't suppose it would do any good to tell you that you don't really want to know how it ends, that knowing won't help you change the result."

Michael exhaled, realizing that his friend wasn't about to accuse him of being mad, but was nevertheless resistant.

"I won't argue with you Michael. I've spent enough time fighting my enemies. Life's too short to fight my friends. I know how it ends, Michael." He gave Gennie a long, sad, look.

A cold, tight feeling took hold of Michael's chest, taking his breath.

"You will miss him," he said ot her. "You will ache for him. But you should know that he loved you before he had any reason to believe you existed. You will move on after he is gone, and be happy."

Michael tried to stand, but could not. His arm burned with pain. He could hear the sound of sirens moving towards the house, and realized that Omar had been on the phone with 9-1-1 when they arrived.

Omar turned to look him in the eye, and grabbed him affectionately by the neck."This is how it ends, old friend."

Silent Killer, Part I

Michael woke he looked over at his wife. Sleeping. Present. Breathing. Warm. He gently stroked her golden brown hair in an effort not to wake her, and wondered how she would look when it was over, if it would soon be over. He wondered if he would be able to look at all, and if she would look beautiful to him if the worst of what the doctors had said were to come true.

His cousin, a beautiful girl of sixteen, had been killed in a car accident. Her fair features were bloated, somehow set awry in death. Her familiar warm colors had been changed to something startling, like a black-and-white photo with painted-in accent colors. There had been no beauty there any more, only a husk that had once been a person’s body.

He had no tears for Gennie yet: only a wild fear that ran through his blood and made it beat faster. He felt himself go cold, a pale feeling crawling up from the tips of his toes, up the back of his calf, then creeping up his spine like a leak in icy water bed.

He wanted to hold her tight, as though it might save her, but did not want to wake her. He rose, knowing that there was work to be done for the day. An early start, things to do, things to put in order.

Gennie’s mother’s visit brought with it boxloads of junk from their old place, and it had sat like unfamiliar furniture across three Saturdays in which neither of them had had the time to tackle it.

Michael found the folder in among Gennie’s old school papers she had insisted on keeping all these years. He had already dispensed with all of his long ago, or so he thought. Whatever he hadn’t thrown away he thought for sure had been forgotten in his dad’s attic in the decades since he moved out.

He had told himself that he wouldn’t open it--the yellowing manila folder with decayed, photocopies of hand-written pages of college ruled loose leaf. He feared making a mess far bigger than he had the strength or will to clean up before the weekend expired and forced him back to work.

He knew he had some of his old stories in the folder. These had been his means of escape in the hell of junior high school and had, in a way, become a career.

He had to escape now, but this was not a conscious decision on his part--only a whim that he felt he couldn’t resist, and which he never gave himself the time to challenge.

The vaguely familiar handwriting grabbed his curiosity. A few words in, and Michael was hooked.

“Silent Killer” was the title scrawled in precise-yet-awkward cursive letters, and the name of his old friend Omar Jiles.

The name brought up a face which he hadn’t seen since their third year of high school: the year when Michael and his dad had moved away.

This copy had been one of six passed around the room during a session of a weekly writer’s club meeting held after school. Michael had almost been too embarrassed to hear Omar read the story out loud in front of everyone else. He felt that he was being watched--a paranoia that had been shared by all his classmates, he was now sure, but which had been acutely intensified by the fact that this particular story of Omar’s had him, Michael, as the central character.

The story was not long, only a ten to twelve hand-written pages. Omar had been changed, unimaginatively, from Michael to Mike.

The wording was awkward in most places. The characters felt a little bit flat and ordinary. Some of the spelling was horrendous.

What kept Michaelf frozen in place as he sat alone on the living room floor, awash in a sea of cardboard, old paper, and bits of junk, was not the story’s quality, but it’s content.

Michael, in a fit of narcissistic boredom, had asked Omar to write a sci-fi story about him: a story that would take place in the future. “Silent Killer” was the result of that challenge. Parts of it had riveted his attention: the details about his wife in particular. Michael had searched in vain among the girls at school who might fit the name and description of his future wife in the slightest way.

But over all, Michael had been disappointed by the result. It hadn’t described the adolescent fantasies of his future quite the way he had hoped, and now he knew why.

It had accurately described his life in the present day with chilling accuracy: an argument he had had with his editor only yesterday, the color of his wife’s hair, and the heartbreaking news concerning Gennie’s health. He had gotten her name wrong, however, spelling it “Jenny.”

Numbly, Michael read it to the end. Omar had not really finished it--a work in progress, he had said. Michael remembered that he had asked Omar to get on with it, wanting to know what happened next. Omar had said he had lost interest and was working on something new.

When Gennie came home from therapy she found Michael sitting still, holding the story in his hands, a tear staining his face.

She came over and immediately embraced him. She had been crying herself, and had no more tears left. She held her husband as he sobbed silently. Soon his breath slowed and he held her close to him. He whispered into her ear.

“Hey honey.”

“Yeah,” she said.

“That old boyfriend of yours--do you happen to know if he’s still a private investigator?”

To Be Continued