Charlaine Harris - An Apple for the Creature

“Damn it!” Ramsey leapt up and threw his bottle across the room. It smashed into a framed Le Chat Noir poster propped against the wall. He took some satisfaction from the way the explosion of glass made the little man on the couch flinch.

Abrams said nothing for a moment. He just tipped back his head and took his first real drink since coming inside. When he was done, his bottle was empty, too. He bent over to place it oh-so-gently on the floor, then looked up into Ramsey’s eyes.

“You’re wrong on a few counts, Bob,” he said calmly. “I didn’t have to pry Karen away from you. She ran, remember? And you’re not getting her back. Ever. Because now she’s with me.”

To this, Ramsey said the only thing he could.

“Huh?”

Abrams nodded, another small, tight smile pinching his thick lips.

“It’s ironic, really. All those jealous rages of yours. The suspicions. The accusations. The paranoia. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Eventually, you weren’t being paranoid. Karen was having an affair.”

Ramsey took a step toward Abrams. He was still in shock, but he managed to grate out a slightly more articulate reply this time.

“What?”

“Oh, come on, Bob. What do you need—a syllabus? I’ve been shtupping Karen for a couple of years now. It started not long after you split her lip the first time. It was me who convinced her to move out. Me who suggested going to Katz. Me who said it was time for a restraining order. Me who took those e-mails and letters to the police.”

Ramsey took another step toward the smugly smiling man sitting on his couch. He could feel the old, familiar rage boiling up inside him. He even had a name for it: “The Hulk.” That’s what he called it whenever he was apologizing to Karen. It was something alien, something other, something he couldn’t control.

“Just . . . don’t get me angry,” he would say. “You won’t like me when I’m angry.”

“Gee, Bob,” Abrams said to him now, “you’re not about to Hulk-out on me, are you?”

Ramsey clenched his fists so hard his fingernails bit into his palms, breaking the skin.

“Why are you doing this?” he growled.

“So you can see what life’s going to be like for you if you stay. Everyone knows you’re a psycho, Bob. None of your old friends will have anything to do with you. I mean, there’s Cynthia and Jason right on the corner, practically across the street, and have they dropped by with balloons and cake? No. Because you’re an outcast. Totally alone. All you’ll get if you stay is the knowledge that at any minute you could walk around a corner and bump into me and Karen strolling hand in hand. Maybe we wouldn’t call the police, Bob, but it would be our—”

“I am not Bob!”

Ramsey wasn’t even aware of the last few steps to the couch. It was as if those seconds had been snipped from a film he was watching. One moment he was standing, the next he was on the floor, sitting on Abrams’s chest, his hands wrapped around the man’s throat.

“Do I look like a Bob? Is this what Bobs do? If I’m Bob, why am I in Robert’s house? Huh? Do you see what Bob is doing to you? I wish Bob would stop, but what can I do? I’m Robert! ”

Abrams flailed, squirmed, kicked. But not hard. Just enough to make Ramsey squeeze more tightly, bang Abrams’s head against the floor with more force, until there was no reason to keep squeezing or banging or anything.

Abrams lay still beneath him.

Ramsey rolled over onto his back, stared up at his hands, sobbed. He didn’t cry long, though. After a couple minutes, he stumbled to the kitchen in a daze and got one of his own beers from the fridge. One slurp sobered him up. By the time he was taking his second, he knew what he had to do.

SATURDAY, 12:01 A.M.

There was a knock on Robert Ramsey’s door. It was loud, insistent. Maybe it started off soft, but if so Ramsey hadn’t heard it over the sound of running water.

He was in the bathroom washing the dirt from his hands. He turned the water off and waited for the knocking to stop.

It didn’t.

He thought he’d been careful. Karen’s old flower bed was around back, flush against the house, blocked from view by bushes and the tall wooden fence around the yard. He’d worked by the light of the moon, though it was a cloudy night and the world around him had been little more than gray blurs in blackness.

But maybe the neighbors had heard him. There’s not much you can do to muffle the sound of a shovel biting into earth.

Ramsey crept into the hall and peeped at the picture window in the living room, thinking he might see red and blue lights flashing through the blinds. The police would need a warrant, wouldn’t they? They couldn’t just come barging in, no matter what someone had seen or heard . . . right?

But there were no flashing lights, and when Ramsey sneaked to the window and peeked at the street all he saw out front was the old Corolla he’d have to move soon with the key he’d taken from Andy Abrams’s pocket. The porch was out of his line of sight.

And still the knocking didn’t stop.

He had no choice. Whoever it was—nosy neighbors, stoned students trying to get into the wrong house, his former tenants dropping by to tell him what a tool he was for kicking them out—he’d have to shoo them away, fast. He couldn’t let anyone draw attention to his house or the car parked out front.

It occurred to him as he walked to the door that it might be Karen. Perhaps she’d found out that Andy was coming to see him. What a nightmare that would be. Or what an opportunity . . .

The knocking got louder.

“All right! I’m coming!” Ramsey faked a yawn as he reached for the doorknob. “You woke me up in the middle of the most beautiful dr AHHHH !”

“Hi, Bob,” Andy Abrams said.

His clothes were dirty and disheveled, and there were clumps of sod in his dark, curly hair. But there were no marks around his throat, and his face had lost the purple-blue hue it had the last time Ramsey had seen it. Which had been, of course, the last time Ramsey had expected to see it.

“Mind if I come in?” Abrams asked. His tone was relaxed, his expression pleasant.

“Uhhhhhh . . . sure.”

“Thanks.”

Ramsey let Abrams move past him into the house. Then he leaned out and scanned the street and the neighboring homes. No one seemed to have noticed the freshly exhumed man standing on his porch.

Ramsey closed the door and joined him in the living room.

“Andy, I . . . I don’t know what to say.”

“I know.” Abrams smiled blandly. “Awk-ward!”

“Yeah. Look. I wonder . . . Do you know . . . Is it clear to you that . . . I mean . . . What do you think happened?”

“Oh, I remember everything, if that’s what you’re trying to ask. It’s not like I woke up in the flower bed thinking, ‘Golly, what am I doing here ?’ But don’t worry. I’m not mad.”

“You’re not?” Ramsey said.

Abrams gave him an “awww, pshaw” swipe of the hand. Pebbles and dirt slid from his sleeve.

“Perish the thought. I was prodding you, Bob. Testing you. And you simply reacted according to your nature . . . which I think we’ve established pretty solidly now is ‘psychopath.’”

Ramsey gritted his teeth. “I am not a psycho.”

Abrams shrugged. “The proof is in the pudding, Bob. And up until ten minutes ago, it was in your backyard. But as I said—no hard feelings. Just pack up, get out of town, and we’ll forget the whole thing.”

“You really expect me to believe that you wouldn’t tell the cops I . . . You know. Lost my temper?”

“Sure. Don’t look a gift mitzvah in the mouth, Bob. And anyway, what choice do you have?”