J. Gonzalez - They

This continued for a long time. How long, John didn’t know. At one point, he woke up to see the group of people stripped naked, hovering over a lone nude figure on the floor. The figure was a female and very dead. Her chest had been cut open and the woman that had been flirting with him reached into the corpse’s chest and pulled out her heart. She took a bite out of it and then John felt strong hands grip his arms and herd him over to the body. He was pushed toward the corpse, a hand clutching a bloody hunk of meat was thrust in his face and before he passed out again he saw one of the men, his erection hard and sticking up stiffly, move the corpse’s buttocks up into position for penetration.

The next thing he remembered was being thrown out of a moving car. He hit the pavement hard and rolled toward the curb, covering his head with his arms. When he came to rest he scrambled to his feet. The car he was thrown from was already receding in the distance and he looked around. His clothes were on; his tie unknotted and hanging limply from his neck, shirt unbuttoned, his suit coat rumpled and dirty. He was in a ritzy neighborhood, probably somewhere near Bel Air where the party was held. For a moment he didn’t remember what he was doing there, but then suddenly the memory came screaming at him. He yelled and began running down the moonlit, quiet street.

The Beverly Hills police picked him up that night for disturbing the peace. But when he blurted his story out to them, they chuckled in disbelief. “There’s nothing wrong with you except you’re drunk as shit,” one of the cops told him. They’d put him in the drunk tank and he made bail the next day, called for a cab and came straight home. He tried calling the man he met at the social mixer, Paul.

It was answered on the third ring by a woman who spoke Spanish. John had hung up, redialed the number, and got the same woman. “Who is this?” she demanded, this time switching to English effortlessly.

With a shaking voice, John asked her: “Is this 965-3948?” He’d read the number carefully from the business card Paul had given him.

“Yes?” Deep suspicion in the woman’s voice.

John sighed. He’d dialed the right number. “I’d like to speak to Paul, please.”

“There’s nobody here named Paul.”

“But…” John had fumbled for the card again, verifying the number. “I called this number just yesterday and spoke to him. I’ve been calling this number for the past three months and have reached him here!”

“I’ve had this phone number for ten years,” the woman said, clearly in no mood for John. “You sound drunk.” She’d hung up on him.

John hadn’t been drunk, but getting there proved to be no problem. He’d driven to the liquor store and stocked up. He’d spent the next two days drinking. Then he called Mike.

Mike didn’t know what to make of John’s story. John swore by it, and when Mike stopped by John’s house the next morning he calmly asked him to take off his shirt. John glowered at Mike with red-rimmed eyes. “You don’t believe me.”

“I believe you,” Mike said. “I just want to see how badly hurt you are.”

John seemed to brood, as if he were ashamed of something. Then he muttered “oh hell,” and took off his shirt. “There’s nothing, see? I looked at myself the minute I got home. I don’t have any bruises, any wounds from what they did to me.”

He was right. John’s pudgy flesh was unmarked by bruises and didn’t bear the faintest hint of trauma except for a few scrapes that could have been caused from his tumbling from the car. In fact, the wounds that exhibited this were the only ones that matched John’s story.

“So there was nothing physical to support John’s story?” Vince asked mid-way through the narrative.

“None at all,” Mike said. He poured himself a second cup of iced coffee and took a sip. “I tried to take him back to the spot where he said the party was held, but he couldn’t even remember what house it was at. We ended up driving around in circles through Beverly Hills and Bel Air.”

“So what happened?” Vince asked.

What happened was John went downhill. He stopped his investigation. He told Mike that if he wanted to tackle it that he was more than welcome to. But as far as he was concerned, he was out of it. He gave Mike all his notes and the master key to the safe deposit box and turned his attention to drinking. He married again, meeting his second wife at a bar in Huntington Beach, and got divorced again two years later. By this time his business was gone, taken over by one of the lesser partners who took the reins when John began to devote more time to the bottle. John didn’t care. He took a job as a lawyer with another firm and tried to control his drinking. He sold his share in his former law office to his successor, not wanting to waste the time or drinking energy it would take to go to court. For the next ten years he made a meager living practicing law and drinking. He retired in 1994 and died in 1996 from liver failure.

“That’s when I decided to get into it,” Mike said. Frank remained sitting in the easy chair, sipping his iced coffee and listening to the story, not offering comments. “I made the decision at John’s funeral as a promise to him and Jesse. I told them I would find out who was behind this complete destruction of two beautiful lives.” He looked at Frank briefly, as if seeing his old friend Jesse in the younger man’s face, and then turned back to Vince. “I still keep in contact with Diane. In the years since her… warning, I guess you’d call it, she’s become increasingly religious. Jesse and Diane came from a Catholic Family, and Diane really got into her faith more and more. She’s pretty much a complete religious nut now. A real loony.”

Like my mother , Vince thought.

“Not too long after John had his little incident, Diane got word from the Miami Police Department that Jesse had been found dead. He’d drank himself to death and was found in an alley in a bad section of town. He was identified through fingerprints, which turned up the arrest in San Francisco, along with a host of others through the years, mostly for vagrancy and public drunkenness. The body was shipped back to El Paso, and Diane said that when she and her sister Arlene viewed it they barely recognized him. He…” Mike licked his lips. “He’d really let himself go, to say the least.”

Vince nodded, visualizing what over fifteen years of continuous drinking and living on the streets would do to a man’s physical appearance. Not to mention what the mental breakdown could do as well.

Mike started his own investigation a year after John’s death. He did it discreetly. Retired from teaching and living quietly with Carol in Huntington Beach, California, the kids all out of the house and starting families and careers of their own, Mike first indulged in the pleasures of retired life. Waking up leisurely, catching up on his reading, traveling with Carol, visiting the kids. After a few months he began reading books on the occult and true crime. Carol didn’t object to the reading material at all—she was an avid Stephen King and Dean Koontz fan herself. Mike didn’t tell her his reasons for delving into such subject matter. As much as he loved his wife, he didn’t want to scare her. If she knew the truth, she would be mortified with fear.

Carol already knew some of the details. She couldn’t help but hear some of it when Jesse originally disappeared. Mike shielded her from the grisly aspects of it and told her that Gladys had left Jesse and taken their son Frank up to San Francisco. Jesse had started drinking and… she bought it. Hook, line and sinker. From then on, Carol simply assumed Jesse had turned into a deadbeat dad.