Dave Zeltserman: Bad Karma

The second book in the Bill Shannon series, 2009

Bill Shannon ran hard from his apartment to the juice and coffee shop on the eastern end of Boulder’s Pearl Street Mall where he was going to meet Eli Rosen. He did this partly to keep from being any later than the extra ten minutes Eli had given him, and partly as a challenge to see whether he could run a half mile in under three minutes. When he arrived at Juiced Up he leaned forward, resting his hands on his knees while trying to get his breathing under control. A quick look at his watch showed that he had made it in just over three minutes. His eyes wandered down his wrist to the stubs where his ring and middle fingers used to be. Five and a half years ago they were ripped from his hand. This was the first time since then that he had gone out in public with his damaged right hand exposed. He straightened up and entered the shop.

Eli was waiting at their usual table. He was a large man with gentle eyes and heavy rounded shoulders. Thick light brown hair ran up to his neckline and covered the exposed areas of his arms and legs. Like most mornings, at least during baseball season, he wore sandals, shorts, a Bucky Dent Yankees jersey and a matching Yankees cap. Shannon nodded towards him, and Eli gave him back a deadpan stare in return. He told Shannon he was sweating. Shannon took some napkins and wiped off his forehead and the back of his neck.

Eli kept his deadpan stare intact while glancing at his watch. “It’s been eleven minutes since we talked on the phone,” he said.

“I made the mistake of taking one last look at Susan before leaving the apartment. It cost me a minute. By the way, she says hi.”

“A lovely woman, your ex-wife.”

Shannon nodded towards an empty glass in front of Eli. “How many chais you have already?” he asked.

“Three.”

“Think your bladder can handle another?”

“Only one way to find out.”

Shannon walked over to the counter and bought another chai for Eli and a wheatgrass juice for himself and brought the drinks back to the table. When he handed Eli his chai, he saw his friend’s heavy-lidded eyes open a quarter of an inch wider and knew Eli’s stare was fixed on his damaged hand.

“I knew there was something different about you this morning,” Eli said, a forced casualness in his tone. “I just realized you’re not wearing your trademark glove.”

Shannon didn’t bother to respond. He sat across from Eli and sipped his wheatgrass juice.

“You never told me before what Charlie Winters had done to your hand. The only thing I knew was he had injured you. Jesus, I had no idea.”

“That bad, huh?” Shannon asked.

Eli made a face indicating that it was. “Bill, I never pushed you before, but I need you to tell me what happened. I can’t put things in the proper perspective without knowing.”

Shannon took another couple of sips from his drink. He had never told anyone about what happened that last night with Winters. Not the cops who arrived on the scene, not the therapist he saw after he had moved to Boulder, no one. The only person who knew was Susan, and that was only because she had witnessed it.

Shannon stared stone-faced at Eli for a long moment, but the compassion flooding the other man’s eyes weakened his resolve. He shrugged. “It will sound like something out of a horror movie,” he said.

“Hey, you’re talking to one of Stephen King’s biggest fans.”

Shannon looked away from his friend to a pastel drawing on his right of Chautauqua Park. The lower part of the pastel showed a meadow done in a muted green, the four faces of the Flatirons above it were colored a soft purple.

“That last night, Winters murdered my partner, Joe Digrazia.”

“You had told me that.”

“I didn’t tell you how,” Shannon said. He kept his stare fixed on the pastel. “Winters skinned Joe alive. He made Susan watch.”

“Jesus.”

A hard grimace tightened the muscles along Shannon’s jaw. It was worse than what he had said. Charlie Winters had also made Susan beg him to kill Joe instead of herself, but Shannon couldn’t tell Eli or anyone else that part of it.

“He tied Susan up with wire and had her helpless. If I brought anyone with me, he would’ve killed her and then surrendered to the police. The only chance I had was crashing through a window and getting to him before he knew what was happening. I screwed up, though, and my foot caught on the window sill. Before I could get to my feet he hit me on the back of my head with something hard, I think a lamp. While I was on the floor, he broke my two fingers with a nutcracker. He worked on those broken fingers for almost an hour, trying to force me to cut Susan with a knife. At one point I said something that pissed him off and he twisted a little too hard with that nutcracker.”

“Jesus, Bill…”

Shannon kept his stare locked on the pastel. He waited until Eli’s voice trailed off before continuing. “I might’ve left my body then,” he said. “I don’t know, I could’ve hallucinated the whole thing. It seemed, though, as if I’d been shot up into a corner of the ceiling and then just sort of hovered there, watching everything below me with a kind of weird detachment-like it was nothing but a movie. It was like I was watching as Winters realized he was only holding onto my two torn-off fingers, then my body turning on him and using the knife he tried to make me hurt Susan with to cut off his goddamn ugly malformed head. Next thing it was as if I was sucked out of the air and back into my body.”

Shannon’s gaze shifted from the pastel to Eli. His friend’s face was ashen. “So what do you think,” Shannon asked. “Would King be able to do something with that story?”

“I’d have to think so.” Eli rubbed a hand across his jaw. “Bill, I knew you had killed Charlie Winters in self-defense, but I had no idea how savage the whole thing was. It does explain a lot, though.”

“Such as?”

“For one, why you’ve been having so much trouble inducing an out-of-body experience. The one time you left your body-and Bill, I’m convinced that you did leave your body-it was under extreme duress. It happened solely for self-preservation. To be able to leave your body peacefully, you need to feel safe in the universe. If you believe evil is out there, how can you feel safe?”

A hard smile locked on Shannon’s face. Over the last five years they’d argued about the existence of evil a countless number of times, with it always coming down to Charlie Winters-after all, what was he if not the essence of evil? Eli’s answer was that Winters was something aberrant, a broken soul who had been confused about his role in the universe. That answer always infuriated Shannon. He didn’t want their current talk to slide into that same long-standing argument. Still, he couldn’t help himself as he asked about Winters being able to leave his body. “He seemed to be able to do it at will,” Shannon said. “How do you explain that?”

“For exactly the reason I’ve been saying. He felt safe in the universe. In his confused mind, he was some sort of demigod, put on earth to dole out punishment and pain, not to receive it.” Eli shrugged his large rounded shoulders. “Enough of that. Tell me about the breakthrough you mentioned over the phone.”

“I had a lucid dream about Winters last night. But when he showed up, I felt none of the rage that I’d been feeling in past dreams.”

“And you’re sure it was a lucid dream?”