Jeff Jacobson - Foodchain

The college board wanted to know how he would read textbooks, medicine bottles, syringes. Frank demonstrated that he could count just fine, as long as the numbers were written out as words, and he could mark on the measurements on a bottle or syringe, but they wouldn’t give a definite ruling. His employers told Frank not to worry, that the school had to make sure they couldn’t get sued, either way. Weeks dragged into months. Frank’s mom moved into the hospital and didn’t come out. Yet, there was still hope.

Until the day Frank beat a man to death with a fistful of aluminum horseshoes.

The defense successfully argued that the man had been treating a race horse with exceptional cruelty, and what with Frank’s past as a promising young veterinarian, dedicated to preserving these animals’ health and safety, combined with his recent devastating brain injury, he couldn’t be held responsible for his actions that tragic day. He had to visit a psychiatrist one day a week, and his career as a vet was over, but that was it. No jail. No hospital.

Later, Frank wished he’d been locked away somewhere instead.

The men who’d paid for his aborted education wanted to know how and when he was going to pay them back. The nature of Frank’s work changed. He decided which horses had potential, which horses could stand another round of injections, and which horses would make more money if they died from insurance claims. Once in a while he would hear the grooms whispering about him in halting, flurries of Spanish and English, as if it was safer to talk about a man like that in a deliberate blurring of language. A rumor started that if he visited a horse, held up his finger to his pursed mouth and said, “Shhhh,” that horse ended up dead.

His mom never came out of the hospital. The men paid for her funeral.

And so Frank became the guy you’d go to when you needed a horse dead. At least he killed the horses humanely, with drugs so they’d just slip away, just go to sleep. Not like that sonofabitch who’d slide lubricated wires into the horse’s asshole and then connect the wires to a car battery.

* * * * *

Frank kept the needle around sixty-five and shifted on the gray leather seat, rolling his head, easing the kinks in his neck. Long, black hair hung in his face; the left side of his mouth was pulled down by an unseen fishhook. He had to find some clothes. It didn’t matter what he told the cops, if he got pulled over, that was it. They’d take one look at his nakedness and the handcuffs, and he’d be spending the night in jail. Waiting, no doubt, for more quiet gentlemen to show up. Castellari had connections everywhere. Frank probably wouldn’t last more than a few hours in jail. They’d bail him out and drag him off to a garage in the middle of nowhere and go to work on his flesh.

Clothing was the first priority. Well, that and the goddamn cuffs. He slowed the long black car to twenty miles an hour, scanning the side of the highway. Luckily, he hadn’t seen anyone way out here yet. He found a wide, level spot and pulled the car off the highway and steered it deep into the scrub brush.

Two weeks ago, he’d gotten a call from Mr. Enzo Castellari. Ten minutes before the Breeder’s Cup at the Arlington Racetrack, Frank pretended to pat The Elizabeth Dane’s flank affectionately, but he was actually shooting fifteen ccs of his own special cocktail into her bloodstream. Mom had worked as a magician’s assistant in one of the riverboat casinos for a while, and she taught Frank a few tricks. Mostly sleight of hand. He used a latex bulb syringe, used for cleaning babies’ ears, a curved needle, and a length of surgical tubing that snaked up his sleeve.

As the drugs slipped through the horse’s circulatory system, eventually hitting specific nerve endings in the brain, it was supposed to gradually stimulate her into a frenzy of strength and speed as she went charging out through the race, winning by several lengths. Then, while the insurance was quietly changed, significantly raising the coverage, the horse would slip into a coma and die in three or four days. The insurance companies were in on the scam as well, they had business insurance, and everybody just kept ripping everybody else off up and down the ladder.

But a group of animal rights activists had stormed the racetrack, delaying the race for an hour. Once the race finally got started, Castellari’s horse burst out of the pack early in the race and seemed a sure bet, until blood burst from her nostrils and she collapsed in the soft dirt in tangle of long, impossibly thin legs and leather reins, flicking the tiny rider away. The other horses simply thundered around the body as the jockey, who knew that the horse had been poisoned, got caught on camera stomping at the dead horse.

The Elizabeth Dane was supposed to slip away quietly, out of the spotlight. Instead, she died on national television. Frank knew Mr. Castellari wouldn’t give two shits about his excuses and so he ran, ran out into the parking lot, out of Chicago, out of the Midwest.

* * * * *

There was a pair of wraparound black sunglasses, half a roll of Tums, and a cassette tape of Herb Alpert and Tijuana Brass in the glove compartment, but that was it. The car was clean, so clean he couldn’t even find dirt in the plush carpeting.

Frank killed the engine and sat for a moment under an empty sky. Then he got out. He found two crisp black suits, neatly folded and pressed, still snug in their dry cleaning bags, in the back seat. Blinding white shirts too. He figured the suits might have been just in case the two quiet gentlemen got any blood on their clothing while feeding the animals. There were even two pairs of gleaming black shoes.

At first, he didn’t think the trunk key was going to work. He gripped it tight, ready to shove the key through the lock, through the metal, through the goddamn back seat if necessary, but forced himself to calm down. If the key broke, he’d have to walk back to the highway and take his chances.

After a few moments of restrained wriggling, the key clicked over, the trunk popped open. The whole thing was lined with plastic, but under that the carpet was as clean as the rest of the car; the whole thing probably got washed and detailed at least every other day. He yanked at the bottom of the trunk, pulling up the floor, something he’d been unable to do when he’d been locked back here with Red. A black leather bag lay nestled within the spare tire. It held a screwdriver, a jack so tiny it was pretty much useless, and a tire iron, one of those condensed tools, shaped like an L. At the bottom of the L was the shell for the lug bolts; the other end was flattened to a dull blade.

He looked at the screwdriver. It was a Phillips and utterly useless for the cuffs. That left the tire iron. He held the top half of the iron between his wrists, wedging the blade against the plastic strip, while bracing the bottom half of the L against his chest. Then he slowly forced his wrists towards his chest, willing the plastic to snap. It didn’t work. So he settled his hands on the bumper and leaned over, using his weight to increase the pressure on the cuffs. At first, he felt a little awkward with his naked ass sticking out in the chilly night air, but gradually, the pain in his wrists replaced the embarrassment, and nothing mattered but breaking the plastic.

It took a while. In the end, both wrists and the center of Frank’s chest were bleeding, but the plastic finally split, sending the blade into the soft tissue of his left palm. He barely felt it. He threw his head back and hissed in triumph, spreading his arms wide to the glittering stars.

* * * * *

He lived in hotels for six days, never really sleeping. The windows always drew him. It didn’t matter if he could see the flat, alien mountains of the west or a view of I-80 and a couple of neon casinos, he’d turn off the lights and the TV and sit at the little round tables in those stiff, narrow chairs in the faint light from the parking lot and stare, watching the long back car in all that neon, just watch all the lights and finish a bottle of Jamaican Rum.