Dave Zeltserman - Killer

While I walked back to my apartment, more heads turned my way. This was what I didn’t want. I had started to fade from the news and become invisible, and now I was being put right back on the front page. Knowing that that would happen had frozen me earlier and almost had me turning a blind eye away from the two punks gearing themselves up outside the liquor store. As awkward as it was watching the news in that bar, it was also interesting seeing the confusion on the anchor’s face as she struggled with knocking my horns off and putting a halo on me. All in all, though, it left me unsettled.

I stopped off at a convenience store for a bag of ice. I wasn’t sure if it would do any good, but I thought I’d use the ice for my shoulder. When I got to my apartment door and saw the match I had forced between the door and the doorjamb lying on the floor, I knew someone had been inside. The lock hadn’t been tampered with, so that person had either been given a key or was good with locks. I went into the apartment and saw pretty quickly that the place had been searched. It wouldn’t have been obvious to the average person since clothes hadn’t been tossed on the floor and nothing appeared out of place, but to me it was as plain as day. I had done things to let me know if drawers had been opened or items moved. I made a quick search to see if anything was missing, and found that the money I had taped on the inside of the radiator cover was still there. After dusting myself off and chewing on a few aspirin, I went to the apartment building’s administrative office.

The same dull heavy woman from before was working, or at least she was supposed to be. She offered me an empty fish-eyed stare before turning back to the magazine she was reading.

“Someone was inside my apartment,” I said.

“Apartments were sprayed today for pests,” she said flatly and without looking at me. “Notices were sent last week.”

“I didn’t get a notice.”

“You should have.”

She went back to reading her magazine. I watched for a minute before telling her that I wanted the name of the pest-control service they used. “Whoever it was, they searched my apartment,” I added.

She put down her magazine and turned her fish-eyed stare back at me. “How do you know this? Your place trashed?”

“No, but whoever did this went through my drawers.”

“Anything missing?”

“No, nothing’s missing.”

“Then what’s your beef?” she asked, challenging me more with that ugly fish-eyed stare.

“Are you sure it wasn’t the police in my apartment?”

“I told you who it was.”

I couldn’t read whether she was lying or not. “Did someone pay you to get inside my apartment?” I asked.

Her mouth tightened as she stared at me. “I’ve had enough of your nonsense,” she said, her voice still flat and dull. “You don’t like our policies here, find yourself another address. Now get out of my office before I call the police.”

There was no point in trying to get anything out of her, at least not by talking, and I wasn’t about to resort to my old methods. I left her and went back to my apartment where I first looked around the kitchen for any chemicals that a pest-control person would’ve left, then put some ice in a plastic bag, sat down in my recliner and held the ice against my right shoulder. If a pest-control person had been in there, I couldn’t find any sign of chemicals being sprayed in the kitchen, nor could I smell much beyond the damp mildewy odor that my apartment always had.

When I showed up at work later the kid working security gave me the same sort of confused look that that TV anchor had showed earlier. “I saw that video,” he said.

This was the first time he had willingly spoken to me, and it stopped me. “Yeah?” I said. “You caught me on the news?”

He shook his head. “No, YouTube.”

I didn’t know what that was, but I felt some sort of encouragement that he was volunteering to have a conversation with me. More just to keep it going than out of any real curiosity, I asked him what he thought.

He handed me the office keys and had me sign the checkout sheet before telling me that I must’ve had some sort of angle for doing what I did. “You’re no hero, that’s for damn sure,” he said, his eyes hard as they met mine.

“Fuck you,” I told him, and I left him to go do my job.

I started off the night listening to music, but after twenty minutes or so curiosity got the better of me and I tuned into the same talk show that had been talking about me when I first got out of prison. They were talking about me again; this time the calls were all over the place with some callers claiming that what I did didn’t change the fact that I was a murderous scumbag and a rat to boot and that I was still going to get mine in the end, others thinking I had some ulterior motive for my heroism, while a few scattered callers talked about forgiveness and redemption and how I should be given credit for potentially saving lives inside that liquor store. I didn’t much enjoy listening to any of it, but I couldn’t turn it off, and after a while I admitted to myself the reason why – that I was hoping that Allison, or at least the woman who sounded like my daughter, would call back in. She didn’t.

The talk show discussed me for two hours before they moved on to a different topic. I went through the radio dial then, but couldn’t find any other shows talking about me. I turned the radio off, not much in the mood to listen to anything. As it was, because of my shoulder I was moving slower than usual and was behind schedule. I had been chewing aspirin all night, but it didn’t help much, and I was only able to lift my right arm up to my chest. When I tried lifting it higher, the pain brought tears to my eyes. I tried pushing myself harder to catch up, but I didn’t finish cleaning the last office until two-thirty. When I checked the keys back in the kid working security made a comment about me being late.

“So what?”

“You’re supposed to finish by two o’clock,” he said peevishly. “Not spending a half-hour extra in those offices taking a nap or whatever else you were doing. That’s so what. I’ll have to report this.”

His new-found boldness was annoying and I decided I liked it better when he was too afraid to say much of anything. I leaned in closer to him and told him how he looked like a guy I once knew, and it was the truth.

“Duane Halvin,” I said. “Big roly-poly kid. Thirty years old and still had baby fat. Christ, the two of you could’ve been separated at birth.” I leaned in closer, added, “I had to put an ice pick through his eye, and the thing was, I used to see Duane all the time at the track and I liked the guy. He was fun to hang around. You, not so much.”

His hard grin fell slack once he registered what I was saying. I left him then, remembering how the same pretty much happened with Duane Halvin once he realized what I had the ice pick for.

I’ve never been a heavy drinker, usually limiting myself to a couple of beers or a shot now and again. When I got back to my apartment I poured six ounces of cheap whiskey into a glass. With how anxious I was, and with the way my mind was racing and my shoulder throbbing like hell, I knew without the whiskey I’d have no chance of sleeping. After I drank it, I sat in my recliner and held a bag of ice to my shoulder, waiting until my eyelids felt heavy before moving to the bed.

Mercifully, I was out after I closed my eyes.

My mom’s waiting by the curb. While we talk on the phone every week for about a minute, this is the first time I’ve seen her in three years, even though we live only twenty minutes from each other. Our weekly conversation always goes the same way: