D. Schmidt - They Ate the Waitress?

“Are you insane?” the oldest one screamed. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“That was my fault? You’re the ones playing out here in the middle of the night!”

“When are we supposed to play flashlight tag? Noon?”

“Oh, shut the hell up.” Nick pushed his way past the children and continued through the lot. Sensing some motion at Sophia’s door, he ducked behind a tree. It was Luke. In the dim light from a nearby lamppost, Luke fumbled in his pockets, eventually producing a plastic keycard. He casually unlocked Sophia’s door and slipped inside. A moment later, a light came from the front window.

“Odd. If she broke up with him, surely she would have changed the code on her door lock. Well, maybe they didn’t break up. Maybe he’s unbalanced, and she’s afraid to break up with him. Or maybe he cheated on her, and she wants revenge. Either way, she didn’t hire me to catch a stalker. She hired me to frame an innocent man. Me, a manhunter! I’m supposed to defend the law, not use it to further my own selfish ends! She wants me to break the law! …Well, alright then. Good to know.”

After some careful thought, he formed what he considered a particularly brilliant plan. Unfortunately, it would take some time to collect the things he needed. He would have to return in the morning. Besides, just then, he had a perfect opportunity to pay a visit to Renée’s ex-boyfriend, Clayton West.

As Nick’s car locked onto the highway’s magnetic rail, he put his feet up on the dashboard and closed his eyes. The navigation system’s breathy, feminine voice read off the names of the passing exits. Hearing a few familiar street names, he realized that Gordon’s apartment was on the way. A quick command reset his route. The car shifted onto a new rail with a gentle clink .

Heading toward the Columbia River, he thought, “According to Sweeney’s records, Gordon lives just inside of Oregon. Why would anyone commute so far for such a low-paying job? Well, I suppose it’s not all bad. You get to meet new people, hold one-sided conversations with them, cut them into little pieces…”

After twenty minutes of high-speed driving, he pulled into the lot of Wellington Apartments. The decaying building had once been a factory for Grandma Edith’s Snack Cakes. The company had gone out of business when it was discovered that their Chocolate Sweeties contained insecticides, mercury, and forty-three grams of saturated fat.

The new owners had converted the building into apartments and then simply let it rot. The building was the same dirty, gray color as the cement lot and just as cracked. An ancient pile of empty beer cans in the yard had been recently declared a historical landmark. The dumpster in the back hadn’t been emptied in so long that it was the site of frequent archeological digs.

“Now this is just sad,” he thought. “The guy spends all day slicing up human corpses, makes as much money as a babysitter, and he has to go home to a place like this. He’d almost be better off at a work camp. At least they get free TV.” He climbed the steep stairs to the main entrance. Despite the rundown condition of the building, the door looked very secure. There was even what appeared to be an alarm sensor mounted to the top of the doorway.

He returned to his car and pulled two bulging, paper sacks from the trunk. He carried them back up the stairs and waited. Soon, an older woman in a green sweater came up the steps to the apartment door. Pretending he had just arrived, he tried to reach into his pants pocket without putting down the sacks.

“Oh, do you need inside, honey?” the woman asked. She smiled politely, revealing teeth like popcorn kernels.

“Yes, please. I can’t reach my keys. We’re having a party and I have to get there before the girls do. You see, I’ve got the whipped cream.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Hold on, young man.” She yanked a large keycard from her purse and carefully unlocked the security door, the alarm light blinking off. The woman held the door open and waved him inside.

“Thank you so much,” he smiled. “Have a nice night.” Once the woman had gone on her way, he dropped the sacks by the door, spilling the old socks he had stuffed inside.

Gordon’s apartment was on the fifth floor. There was no alarm sensor, but there was a doorknob lock, two bolt locks, and a security chain. “I can’t believe this. He attached all this hardware to a pressed wood, hollow core door. It’s like going to war in a tee-shirt and bulletproof pants.” A couple of kicks with his steel-toed boot cracked the flimsy door nearly in half.

“Hey!” A voice from behind him. Nick turned to face a very short, very angry man in a bathrobe, Gordon’s neighbor from across the hall. “Cut out the banging!” the man snapped, shaking his fist. “You’re disturbing my ferrets!”

“Oh, sorry,” Nick said. “When it gets humid like this, the wood expands and the door sticks, so I have to force it a little.”

“Not my problem, Noisy McLoudington. Just stop with the racket!” He returned to his apartment, slamming the door closed.

Nick pushed open what was left of Gordon’s door and stepped inside. “Good thing Gordon’s at work,” he thought. “Explaining the noise to him would be much more challenging.” He turned on a flashlight and examined his surroundings. It was amazing that such a big man lived in such a tiny apartment.

There was a miniature kitchen with one of the new Schlock Products™ freezer/oven combos. He dimly remembered seeing the commercial on television: “It can’t be beat! It cools and it heats!” It looked like a great space saver, but the commercial never explained what you were supposed to do with your frozen food while you were cooking.

The living room was even smaller than the kitchen. There was an exercise machine in one corner that looked like an abstract sculpture of an octopus. College dorm-style, cinderblock-and-wooden-plank shelves lined three walls. There was a camera and a few memory tabs on a shelf, mostly movies recorded from TV. Resting on top of the memory tabs was a long, silver tube that was either a large flashlight or a shockingly huge marital aid. Next to the tabs was a small, wire-bound notebook. It was mostly filled with grocery and to-do lists, but one page was different. This page was blank, save for two words written large and underlined: insurance fraud.

“Well, that’s interesting. Is that about Renée? Or is it just a reminder to commit insurance fraud later? Like, by burning this dump to the ground..?”

The shelf also held a brass, second-place trophy engraved with “Ellison High Kendo Team”. On the other side of the room hung Gordon’s diploma, again from Ellison High School. The date Gordon graduated was printed at the bottom. “Let’s see, that would make him twenty-four or twenty-five. He looks older, though. …I wonder if he was voted ‘Most Likely to Carve up Human Corpses for a Living.’”

He examined the rest of the shelves and, other than an exhaustingly comprehensive pornography collection, found nothing of interest. He decided to try the bedroom.

A nude woman was sprawled across the bed. Her head was shaved almost to the skin. Her small, strikingly perky breasts gently rose and fell with the soft whisper of her breathing. Around her neck, a tiny, gold crucifix reflected the beam of his flashlight. On the floor by the bed lay a crumpled, black dress. A decorative rack on the wall behind her held half a dozen Japanese swords.

“‘Kendo’ must be a Japanese style of sword fighting,” he thought. “Well, I can’t very well search the room with her in there, especially since she’s six inches away from a weapon. She looks like the type that would stab below the belt… Well, nothing else I can do here. Looks like it’s time to go see Clayton.”