Dave Zeltserman - Killer

“Are you okay?” Michael asked. “You don’t sound good.”

“I’m okay. I just get these headaches. Today it’s worse than usual.”

“How long have you been getting them?”

“A long time. Years. It’s nothing to worry about.”

His voice flat, he said, “I’m not worried. I saw you on the news last night.”

“I thought you don’t watch TV?”

“Usually I don’t. A co-worker called me to tell me about it.” There was a pause, then, “If you want to meet me, I can do it today at twelve-thirty. Well?”

“Sure, I’d like that.”

“I’ll give you an address then, where we can meet.”

“Okay, sure, let me get a pencil and paper.”

Opening my eyes against the light was agony as a flood of tiny silver daggers emerged and went flying through my eyeballs and into my brain, but I ignored them as best I could and fumbled around the apartment until I found a pencil and some paper to write on, then had Michael give me the address of a coffee shop in Medfield. I knew nothing about Medfield other than that it was a good twenty miles away.

I asked, “Is that where you’re living now?”

“No, but it’s not too far from where I’m working. You should call the police about those phone calls you’re getting.”

“Yeah, I’ll probably do that.”

There was a click then as my son got off the line. I waited until my eyes could focus enough for me to dial, then I made several calls to find out how I could take the bus from Waltham to Medfield. It was going to require two bus transfers, which would leave me in Walpole, and from there I’d have to either walk four miles or take a cab, but I’d be able to get there by twelve-thirty. I made my way into the kitchen area where I poured several large glasses of lukewarm water down my throat, made a mental note that I needed to buy myself a coffee maker, then stumbled back to the bathroom. After stripping off my underwear I stood under the shower until my head started feeling more normal. At one point I tried lifting my right arm. My shoulder was sore as hell, but I was able to lift my arm higher than I could the other day, which was about all I could ask for.

When I got out of the shower I didn’t have much time before I needed to catch the bus to meet my son. Despite how empty my stomach was feeling I didn’t have time to make myself breakfast, so on the way to the bus stop I stopped off at a convenience store and bought a large coffee, a box of chocolate-glazed doughnuts and a newspaper.

I wished I had remembered my baseball cap and sunglasses, but I’d been in too big a rush and had left them back in my apartment. There weren’t a lot of people on the sidewalk, but most of those that were turned my way as I went past them, and from the way their jaws dropped, there was no question that they recognized me. I was in too much of a hurry to care. As it was, I barely caught my bus. There was an empty seat in the back row that I took, and as was common with people who regularly take public transportation, most of the riders already sitting didn’t bother looking up as I walked past them. The few that did didn’t pay enough attention to recognize me.

Once I was seated I wolfed down two doughnuts and half the coffee. It made me feel a little better, my headache more its normal dull ache than the stabbing torturous pain it had been earlier. I reached into my pocket for my bottle of aspirin and realized I’d left that back in the apartment as well. Fuck it, I decided at this point it didn’t matter. I’d be able to make it through the day okay without it.

As much as I was dreading it, I looked at the newspaper. Sure enough, I was back on the front page, and of course they had to prominently display a photo of me taken from the video that had been made. It was a long article which carried over to several pages. I tried reading it but the text blurred too much. I drank the rest of the coffee, sat back and closed my eyes. Ten minutes later I tried again. I had to hold the paper a few inches from my eyes, but this time I was able to focus enough on the print to read it.

The article dredged up all the stuff from the previous weeks, but grudgingly labeled what I did the other day “heroic”, especially after finding out about the arrest records of the two Mueller brothers, who turned out to be fraternal twins. At nineteen they had robbed a liquor store and pistol-whipped the owner and two customers, and each ended up doing a four-year stretch for that. The police were now looking at them for a recent robbery in Watertown where the perps wore ski masks and an employee at the liquor store had been shot and beaten unconscious.

I went through the article carefully. There were quotes from Captain Edmund Gormer, all complimentary to me, and no hint that at any time I’d been a suspect. The paper had to counter all of that with past quotes from my victims’ relatives. I guess it’s easier going from hero to villain than the other way around. Anyway, I got some mild satisfaction from a picture that they included of the Mueller brothers as they were being booked for a host of offenses, both with the same fixed empty gazes in their eyes that you see on every hardened con.

When I was done with the article, I put the paper down and closed my eyes, and tried to remember what Michael looked like. For the life of me, all I could picture was the way he was when he was five years old and I took him to his first Red Sox game. Back then I spent whatever free time I could with him and Allison.

The cab driver recognized me. He was about my age; wispy gray hair framing a square-shaped skull, thick caterpillar eyebrows, rubbery features, near-impossible-to-understand Russian accent. I think he smelled even worse than I did when I first got out of prison. When I entered the cab, he explained away his bad body odor by telling me that he was in the middle of a second straight shift. “Thirteen hours so far in car,” he announced proudly in his thick accent. Soon after we drove off, he started glancing at me through the rear-view mirror, his eyes befuddled under those massive eyebrows.

“You the person on TV,” he said. “One who caught two hoodlums. Beat them up good too.”

I didn’t say anything.

He nodded to himself, sure of his recognition. “I saw you on TV, right before I start driving last night,” he said. I caught the shift in his eyes as he remembered the rest of the story, about what I had done before and all the people I had murdered. He didn’t say anything after that, and I could see the tremor in his hands as he gripped the wheel. Mercifully, it was a short cab ride. When I paid him the fare he avoided eye contact with me, and kept his lips pressed shut when I stiffed him on the tip.

From what I could tell of the little I saw of Medfield it appeared to be a quiet, quaint town. At one point it must’ve been mostly farmland, and still had a country feel to it. The coffee shop I was let out in front of was a modest, brightly yellow-painted Colonial that was probably until recently a family residence, and inside it looked more like an antique store than a coffee shop. Michael sat at a table facing the door, his features tense, his eyes fixed on me as I walked in. He had two cups of coffee in front of him, and he picked both of them up as he came to meet me. Before entering the shop I’d been debating whether to try for an embrace or to offer a handshake when we saw each other, but with both his hands full neither was possible. I followed him outside to an antique-looking cast-iron bench by the side of the building where we could talk without being overheard.

After we both sat on the bench he handed me one of the coffees, and I offered him a doughnut, which he accepted.

“Why’d you do that yesterday?” he asked. “Was it to impress me and Allie? Or were you just trying to get yourself killed?”