Dave Zeltserman - Killer

“If I didn’t back then to DiGrassi, I’m sure as fuck not going to do it now. Besides, I wouldn’t want my wife knowing I used to hang out with people like you.”

He accepts that. Without a word he gets up and walks out of the bar. I sit and finish my beer.

present

It had been a long time since I remembered dreaming. I knew I had dreams as a kid, but couldn’t remember any since then, at least none since I was out of elementary school. That night I woke up from a doozy of one. More than that, the dream jolted me awake, and left me sweating through my underwear and sitting up fast in bed with my heart pounding so hard I could feel it in my temples.

The dream had me at a funeral home, stuck inside a room filled with coffins one stacked on top of the next. There was an unfamiliar man keeping me company. He looked almost like a cadaver himself with red rouge painted on his cheeks and sparse thin hair slicked back with grease. He was dressed in a black suit that was too small on him; it made his sleeves and pants legs pull up showing inches of his bony arms above his wrists and his white socks stretched high above his ankles. He stayed mute, refusing to say anything to me. I couldn’t place ever seeing him before, but he acted as if he knew me.

“What am I doing here?” I asked him.

He smiled showing tiny baby teeth, and gestured that I should look inside the coffins. I wanted to flee the room, I certainly didn’t want to open up any of those coffins, but it was as if I had no choice. Almost like I was a marionette being controlled by strings. I struggled to unstack the coffins. It was hard work, back-breaking work, especially since I didn’t want them falling and breaking open, but eventually I lowered them on to the floor and took the lids off. Inside were badly decomposed bodies. The stench was horrific. There wasn’t much left of any of the corpses, only ragged skin covering their skulls and parts of their bodies, but somehow there was enough left of their faces so I could recognize them as the people I had killed.

There was one coffin that stood out from the others. This one was nailed shut. I counted the coffins I had looked in, and there were twenty-eight of them. I asked the man with me about the twenty-ninth coffin. Instead of answering me he just smiled, his skin stretching tight against his face and looking as thin as if it were paper.

“Am I supposed to be in that last coffin?” I asked him.

He shook his head sadly at me, as if I were supposed to know the answer. Still, though, his smile stretched tighter.

“Jenny?”

His smile stretched still tighter. The skin covering his cheeks began to rip exposing parts of his jaw through the opening. And still, he kept smiling.

I woke up then.

Christ, what a dream. If that’s what they were like, I was grateful that was the first one I could remember in over fifty years. For a good ten minutes I sat silently before I trusted myself to move. Only after the pounding in my chest subsided did I pull myself off the bed and shuffle off to the bathroom to splash cold water over my face and dry the sweat off. I made sure not to catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I didn’t want to risk seeing those same hollowed cheeks and dead sunken eyes that that man in my dream had.

It wasn’t even three-thirty in the morning yet. I’d only been sleeping an hour. I was tired and needed more than that hour, but I didn’t go back to bed. I didn’t want to lie there thinking about what that dream meant, and I certainly didn’t want to find myself slipping back into it. Instead I sat in my recliner and picked up a book that I’d been reading earlier in the day. At some point I dozed off. When I opened my eyes again sunlight was flooding the room. According to my alarm clock it was six o’clock. I had this vague image of lights being turned on and horns being blasted – almost as if I were back in prison, and for a few seconds I could smell that prison stench coming off me in waves. It was stronger than I had smelt it in days. I stumbled to the bathroom to try to scrub it off. I ended up standing in the shower for a half hour, and afterwards I slapped on enough cologne to hide any smell of prison that might’ve lingered.

That morning the diner was busy when I got there and I had to take a table near the front window. Lucinda was too busy running from table to table to do much more than give me a wink. Like every other morning, no one bothered looking at me. As far as the other customers were concerned I was just some invisible old man not worth paying any attention. That was what I liked most about the place, that, and Lucinda.

I was halfway through my French toast and bacon when a man sat down at my table facing me. It took me by surprise, and at first I thought it was the same wannabe writer from the day before. He looked similar; forties, heavy-set, balding. But he wasn’t the same man. This one was glaring at me with a white-hot intensity. A thick ugly vein bulged from his forehead. Nothing but hatred in his face.

“You rotten piece of shit,” he swore, his voice loud enough so that everyone in the room could hear him. The din from the room faded fast after that. I could sense all eyes turned our way. I didn’t want to look, but a glimpse showed Lucinda staring intently at us.

“Why don’t we talk in private?” I offered.

“I don’t think so,” he said, his voice maybe even an octave louder and echoing through the now quiet diner. He smiled as he noticed how uncomfortable I was, then turned sideways to address the rest of the room.

“You’ve got a celebrity with you,” he said. “Lenny March, mass murderer extraordinaire. The piece of shit they’ve been talking about in the news who killed twenty-eight people for the mob. The same one who murdered my dad.”

When he first started his speech I felt a hotness flushing my face. That was gone now, replaced by something cold. Everything had gotten very still. The rest of the room seemed to dissolve as I stared back at this man, my voice odd and unnatural to me when I asked him who his pop was.

His lips curled as if he wanted to spit at me. What he spat out was the name, “Frank Mackey”.

I nodded, remembering Mackey. “Your old man was quite a piece of work,” I told him. “He used to do truck hijackings, but that wasn’t why Lombard ordered the hit. Mackey grabbed a sixteen-year-old girl off the street, and held her for three days in the basement of an abandoned warehouse where he repeatedly fucked every body orifice this poor girl had. Her family wanted justice, but they also didn’t want this girl humiliated any further by the police or the courts, so they appealed to Lombard.”

What I said stunned him. “You’re lying.”

“Sorry, I’m not. Your old man was one of the few hits that I would’ve gladly done for free. Lombard wanted it to be more than just a hit. He wanted me to make sure there would have to be a closed casket, and more, he wanted your old man to suffer. And I did a hell of a job with it. Kept him alive for hours while I whittled away pieces of him. Now get the fuck away from my table. I’m eating.”

His skin color had dropped to a milk-white. Any fury that had been raging in his eyes fizzled. He was unsure of himself, wondering how much of what I told him was true, although at some level probably realizing all of it was. I picked up my fork and continued eating my French toast. He sat across from me for another minute and made a few idle threats about how this wasn’t over, but the steam had been taken out of him. There was too much doubt, or maybe not enough.

The room remained deathly quiet after he left. I could sense people staring at me, but I just kept methodically cutting my food and chewing it slowly. Minutes later when I looked up Lucinda was standing by my table, her face hard and inscrutable, her eyes small black ice chunks.