The Boulevard Monster, page 15
“What are these?” he asked, jiggling the flyers.
I stepped toward him. How dare he. Dumbass. I motioned at the flyers. “Why are you snooping through my shit? How long have you been here? How did you get in?”
“Why do you have them?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“None of my…” He shook his head seemingly in disgust. “I know why you have them.”
“Oh yeah, Sherlock. You know everything, don’t you?”
He glanced at the flyers, back at me. “You’re involved with the disappearance of these girls.”
I didn’t answer.
“It all fits.” His grip tightened on the flyers, twisting them into a crumple. “Randy’s weird disappearance. The change in your personality. The new money. The blood on your hands that one night. Going out to Plemons and digging.” A pause. “Someone’s paying you to do it, huh?”
I forced out a raspy, nervous chuckle that sounded like PVC pipe clacking together. “You’ve seen one too many movies, man.”
“You know I’m right.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yeah, you do.”
“First off,” I said, “why would I call the cops about the body in Randy’s truck if I was involved? That would be fucking stupid.”
He’d thought about this a lot, had an answer ready to leap off the tip of his tongue. “To blame him. I think he was helping you and you either got scared he would talk, or you got greedy and wanted all the money for yourself.”
“Did Morrell feed you that bullshit? How many times have you talked to him?” I pushed a frustrated breath. “The money is from an investment. I told you that, remember?”
“Then how come I couldn’t find any information about EnviroTek online?” A pause. His eyes were full of that’s-right-I-researched-it pride. “And how come the guy I talked to at Brewer’s Investment Services hadn’t heard of it? If it was such a huge international success you’d think more people would know about it. Or it would at least have a fucking website.”
“I can show you the check stubs if you want. The tax forms.” My voice cracked, sounded weak. “And the blood on my hands that night was from…” I held my hands out then swiped them through the air as if scattering a fart cloud. I wanted to lash out at him for following me, spying on me, for endangering himself and our family. “Forget it,” I said. “I told you what that was from. You can believe me or not. I don’t care.”
He jiggled the flyers again. “Why do you have these if you don’t have anything to do with it? Most normal people don’t have a stack of these flyers hidden in their house.”
“They weren’t hidden.”
“Does Brianne know about them?”
I looked toward the large window facing the backyard. The blinds were open. Two blue jays were on the ledge outside, watching, listening, as usual. Fuck. My eyes swiveled to Ryan’s. “Maybe I feel guilty because one of them was the one I found in Randy’s truck. Maybe I could’ve stopped him or something. It eats away at me every fucking day.”
“You’re lying. Most of these girls went missing after he vanished. And since then, you’ve gotten richer and richer, shadier and shadier. But,” he chuckled, “I bet you’ll say that’s just a coincidence, huh?”
I marched forward, kicked a cardboard box filled with clothes aside, and stopped a two feet in front of him. “Tell me something,” I said. “How long have you been spying on me? Are you the one that called the cops?” I threw up finger quotes. “Anonymously.”
Apprehension flashed across his eyes.
“I thought you said we could talk about anything,” I said. “Why didn’t you just ask me about it if we’re supposed to be so close?”
He stayed silent. Sweat beaded up on his temples. I snatched the flyers out of his hand. Some ripped in two, and he dropped the remnants and raised his fists head-high, fight-high. “Why didn’t you just tell me that you…” he trailed off, shaking his head.
“Tell you what?” I asked, and tapped his bony chest with a stiff finger. “You better mind your own business and stop snooping around my fucking house before I—”
“Before you what? Make me vanish like Randy?”
Slow, silent seconds unwound. I eyed the watchful birds, trying to decide what to do. When I finally glanced at Ryan’s hands, I smirked. “Maybe I will. What are you going to do about it?”
He hit me square in the nose. Not hard enough to knock me down, but hard enough to sting like a son-of-a-bitch and blur my eyes. I immediately tossed my lucky Rangers cap aside and swung back, landing my knuckles on the side of his head. He growled and tackled me to the ground, and we wrestled into the doorway.
“You’re a stupid paranoid snooping son-of-a-bitch,” I yelled as I tried to squirm out from under him, blocking his blows with my forearms. I managed to get a hold on both his wrists and thrust him out into the hall. Then I lunged at him as he crab-walked backwards toward the stairs. I landed on his legs and felt his ankle twist at an awkward angle under my weight. He moaned in pain, and I struggled to straddle his waist as he kicked and swung. He landed two blows to my face before I finally hit back. I hit him once in the chest, and once in the face, bloodying his nose. His fighting slowed then, and I thought he was about to give up, but then I felt a sharp pain in my arm, a pain that seemed to reach down to the bone. I screamed, and when I looked at my arm, I saw Ryan’s pocket knife sticking out of the flesh like a flagpole sticking out of the ground. As I pulled it out and blood ran down my arm, Ryan sledge-hammered me in the chest with both hands, knocking me back. Then he wiggled out from under me and headed downstairs. I chased after him.
Looking back at me, he tripped on the second to last step and rolled into the front foyer. When he stood, he spun around and held his fists head-high like he had upstairs in the Give Away Room. He had a trail of thick blood running from his nose, and he was favoring the ankle that had twisted.
Cupping my hand over the stab wound, I stared at him. We were both panting, both unwilling to flinch. We’d been in a couple of tussles before. Usually when we were drunk. I’d blacked his eye once, and he’d repaid the favor years later. But we’d never fought like this. We were both brimming with anger. He thought I was a murderer. I thought he was stupidly sacrificing himself to an evil he didn’t understand.
“Why the hell did you stab me?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. At least not with words. He attacked me, swinging his arms like a flailing bird that was struggling to stay afloat after being shot. I backed up and fell onto the stairs. He kicked at me with his good foot, but I caught his leg and easily twisted him to the floor. His shoulder smacked the hardwood with a sickening thud. He struggled to pull his leg from my grip, causing me to fall to a knee and let go. He dove at me and was furiously swinging when Sera opened the front door.
She dropped her purse and screamed, “What are you guys doing?”
I looked her way, and Ryan cold-cocked me in the chin and my lights dimmed. When my eyes refocused, Sera was trying to pull Ryan off of me. He shoved her away, and she fell over her purse and squealed when she hit the ground. Ryan paused for a moment, realizing what he’d done, and went over to console her.
“I’m sorry, Sera,” he said, reaching out for her arm. She jerked it away as I was getting to my feet.
“What’s wrong with you?” she asked, her voice shaky, eyes shimmering with tears.
“Nothing…I…I’m sorry,” Ryan said.
I grabbed him by the back of the shirt and threw him into the coat rack by the open front door. The rack snapped in the center and coats and hats fell to the ground in a heap around him. When I stepped forward and reared back to punch, Sera grabbed my arm and said, “Dad, don’t. Stop. Please. Stop.” She was crying hard now. “Stop fighting.”
I lowered my arm.
She put her head on my shoulder and cried and mumbled something I didn’t understand. I wrapped my arm around her as Ryan rose and made his way out onto the porch. Two blue jays, probably the two that had been on the windowsill upstairs, were on the front lawn facing the doorway.
“Get out of here before I go get my gun,” I yelled as Ryan dabbed blood from his nose with his shirt and limped onto the sidewalk leading to the road.
“Dad!” Sera squeezed my arm. “Stop!”
Ryan stared at us for a second before walking away.
Sera asked me what was going on, what we were fighting about, three or four times before I looked away from the birds and into her giant emotion-filled eyes. “Are you all right?” I asked. “Are you hurt?”
She shook her head. “I’m fine.”
I ran my hand through her curls. “Are you sure?”
She nodded. “Why were you guys fighting?”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. I kissed her on the head, told her to lock the door behind me, and left as she pleaded for me to stay.
Twenty-One
Collier Kids Always Stick Together
I drove all over Mercy looking for Ryan.
I checked his apartment, Wizzards, the other bars and fast food joints he frequented, a couple of his old girlfriend’s places. I even cruised up and down the Boulevard a few times, a place I’d avoided like the plague ever since learning the cops were watching me. I drove for hours, stewing in the tense silence of my cab, sweating, constantly checking the rearview mirror to make sure no cruiser was tailing me. I was terrified the birds had already delivered the news of the fight to Luther, and he’d already taken swift action to get rid of Ryan.
When I arrived home a little after midnight and found Brianne sitting at the dining table still in her work clothes, her giant belly pressed against the table’s edge, worry-creases lining her forehead, holding a mug of cold tea face-high and staring at it as though she’d been frozen mid-drink, I knew the one place I didn’t check was the first place I should’ve.
Ryan had gone to the Golden Corral to tell Brianne everything. Of course. Why the hell hadn’t I gone there first? Growing up, they’d only had one another, and when trouble arose for Ryan, he ran to Brianne for help. “Collier kids always stick together,” he and she had said to me many times over the years. They always said it in unison with childish grins plastered on their faces and their arms looped around one another’s necks, too. If they sided against me when it came to small things like what food to pick up for dinner or what movie to rent, that’s when it would happen. And when they said it, you could see how they took pride in the words, felt a sense of strength behind them, a connection that would always be there. I should’ve known he’d go to her first.
I pulled out a chair and sat across from her. She didn’t look at me or lower her mug. “Where’s Sera?” I asked.
Long seconds passed before she blinked and took in a loud breath, like she’d suddenly been plugged in and turned on. She lowered the mug and met eyes with me. “She’s asleep.”
“Is she all right?”
“She’s upset. Scared and confused.”
I took off my lucky Ranger’s cap, set it on the table, ducked my head, and ran my hand over the stubble. “I take it you already talked to Ryan?”
“Yep,” she said with conviction. Like she already had a solid grasp of the absolute truth.
I lifted me head. “Where is he now?”
“I don’t know.” By the look in her eyes, I knew she wouldn’t tell me even if she did know.
“Do you even want to hear my side of it?”
“It would help me understand what’s going on with you.” A beat. “If you would tell me the truth for once.”
“The truth? You want the truth.” I glanced at the kitchen window and saw a blue jay perched on Sera’s PAUL bird feeder, watching, listening. I put my hand on my lucky Rangers cap and squeezed it. I didn’t know what the truth was anymore. There was my truth, the Luther truth, a truth eating away at me like termites on untreated wood, and then there was the truth everyone else knew, the truth I had to maintain and repair like the upkeep on a crumbling house. It was getting harder and harder to keep the house standing, but I had to try. For a little longer. For her sake. “The truth is that I found Ryan snooping around in the house when I got home.”
“I gave him a key, and he can come here any time he wants,” she shot back. “Why do you have those flyers hidden up there in that closet?”
The stern change in her tone when she asked the question led me to believe she thought she already knew the answer, and it didn’t favor me. I knew Ryan had told her his theory on why I had them. I figured he’d been feeding her many of his theories about me for months. And I figured that she’d bought most of them hook, line, and sinker. Still, I told her the same lie I’d told Ryan. “I felt guilty about that girl I found in Randy’s truck. What if he was responsible for some of the other girls, too? I should’ve seen it. Maybe I could’ve saved some of them.”
The doubt in her eyes never faltered. She didn’t buy it. I like to believe part of her wanted to, the part that wanted the father of her child to be a good man, but she didn’t.
“You don’t believe me?” I asked.
“What about the blood on your hands and all over your shirt that one night?”
I put my lucky Ranger’s cap back on. “It was an accident. I told you, I hit a dog.”
She lowered her mug. “Ryan said he saw you sneaking around a construction site one night, and that you got mad when he found you and you swung a shovel at him and threw a beer bottle at him. Is that true?”
“I went out there to think. I was stressed about work. You know how Dan is, how I get.” I shook my head. “I swung the shovel and threw the bottle because he was drunk and being an asshole.”
Her eyes held steady. “He also said he followed you out to Plemons after that and saw you digging with a shovel. What were you doing out there?”
“I went out there to be alone after we got in that shovel-fight. I wasn’t digging, though. I don’t know why the hell he said that.”
“He saw you, Seth.”
“I wasn’t digging. I don’t know what else to tell you.”
“Tell me the truth.”
“I’m trying. You just seem to already have your mind made up so what’s the point. You always believe him over me. Always have, always will.”
She wrapped both her hands tightly around her mug and leaned forward as far as her belly allowed. “I only believe him over you when his story makes more sense than yours.”
I glanced at the window and saw two birds now, one on each feeder. They almost seemed eager to tattle. To let Luther know Brianne was getting close, too. I slid my eyes back to Brianne’s belly, then up to her eyes. “You really think it makes sense that I’ve been lying about investing in EnviroTek? That our money is coming from somewhere else? That I’m working for the mob or some shit like that, like Ryan thinks?” She just stared. “You think it makes sense that I have those flyers because I killed those girls or something? Like trophies? You think that blood on my hands was from a kill? You think I called the cops on Randy to get him to take the fall? After all these years, you think any of that makes sense when it comes to me? Do you have any idea how ridiculous that sounds?”
“I know that even though you’ve been trying real hard to act normal, you’ve changed since Randy vanished. At first I thought you were cheating. Especially before the wedding, remember? But now…” She looked down into her mug.
I slammed my hand down onto the table, and her eyes shot up at mine. “Now what? What?!”
She didn’t answer.
“You’re just regurgitating Ryan’s bullshit theories. Do you have any thoughts of your own on this?”
After a long pause during which the only sounds were our alternating breaths and the ticking of the kitchen clock, she said, “Where’d you get the envelope full of cash at the wedding?”
I’d forgotten all about that, but Ryan hadn’t. “It was a bonus from the guys at EnviroTek. I told Ryan that, but I guess he didn’t believe me. So I guess you don’t either.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about it? Why didn’t you introduce me to the other investors at the wedding?”
“Didn’t Ryan tell you? They didn’t come to the wedding. I found it in the mail box on my way out of the house before the ceremony, and by the time the wedding was over it had slipped my mind. Remember all the cash we spent on our honeymoon, that was it. Happy.” I sighed. “Jesus-fucking-Christ, Bri. Ryan has your head running in paranoid circles. This isn’t good for the baby. I swear to God if anything happens to you or the baby because he’s doing this shit to us I’ll…I’ll…”
Her eyes began to well up. “It’s not just him. Or your behavior. It’s the cops, too. They think you’re involved way more than what you say. Why would they think that? Why do they keep coming back and talking to me and Ryan? Why do they sometimes park down the street and watch the house? What do they know, Seth?”
“I thought they only came to talk to you once. Adair. When Morrell came and talked to me.”
“Morrell came to my work and talked to me two other times, and he came here a couple of weeks ago. I just didn’t tell you.”
“Why? Because you didn’t want to upset me? Or because you believe their bullshit?”
The way she looked at me gave me the answer I’d hoped wasn’t there but deep down knew was. She believed some of the cops and Ryan’s suspicions. She believed I was involved somehow, someway. Smart girl. But too smart for her own good. She had no idea the consequence of seeing my truth, knowing my truth. If she did, she would’ve been smart enough to turn a blind eye.
“I don’t want you getting upset,” I said. “It’s not good for you or the baby.” I tried to touch her hand, but she pulled back. “I don’t know what else to tell you. I’ve given you all the truth I can.” I stood up, walked to the back door, and when I glanced back over my shoulder, she was staring blankly at the mug again, like she’d been unplugged.
For the millionth time I wanted to run over and hug her and tell her everything. How scared I was. How sorry I was. How much I loved her and Sera and the Ryan and the baby. I swallowed down all the emotion that came along with the thought in a loud, dry gulp and headed to the Chevy.
