Oaktown (Ten Stories)
Oblique Publishing
Smashwords Edition
Copyright © 2012 by Adam Riser
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
This story is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Image Credits: Witthaya Phonsawat, FreeDigitalPhotos.net
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The Walker
A Beginning
The walker is out early this morning: 5:45 to be exact. He makes the turn from Ridley Drive onto Parker Street, and up ahead he sees the traffic light. The light is red and, as to be expected this early, there are only a few cars whizzing by on State Route 76.
This is a strange period, the walker thinks. It isn't quite dawn yet, but the sun is starting to peek out, ever so slightly, in the east. It is a sight that most people miss, he thinks: a combination of beauty and strangeness that is ever so fitting for this town.
Oaktown.
The walker thinks there is no better place to have arrived at.
And as he approaches that traffic light just in time for it to turn green, he stops at the corner and looks into the Americo gas station. He sees the two workers for the opening shift: a man with a secret, opening the cash register for the day's business, and a young woman mopping in the parlour, a young woman who the walker knows is trapped inside the invisible walls of this town, who wants to leave but feels she can't.
These two are about to learn just how strange things can get in Oaktown.
The young woman stops her mopping and looks out the window, squinting. The walker thinks she might see him and raises his hand in greeting.
She doesn't respond with a wave back, only stares, frowning for a moment.
Then, as though the walker were just a part of her imagination getting the better of her, she goes back to work.
But they know, the walker thinks, they know Jack Colby and Henry McGivens have broken out of Clarksville Prison, just forty five miles north.
They know those two men, one a meth pusher and killer, the other a car thief and credit card scammer, are on the loose.
They know those two men could show up anywhere inside the Starkweather County lines.
They know those two men could show up at Americo.
The walker smiles, knowing this, and continues up the long stretch of Parket Street for his morning walk.
Jack Colby
Jessica Carter finished mopping the floor around 6:15 and joined Charles behind the cash register. It was still early, not even the retirees up and out of their beds yet to come in for their morning coffee and paper, and Jessica did her best to avoid Charles' attempts at conversation with deflective one-liners and nods.
She decided to take control of the conversation and brought up the news that had everyone in Oaktown buzzing with fear and excitement: the Jack Colby, Henry McGivens prison escape.
“Sheriff Parker told me that he'd be stopping by every couple hours and he'd have a couple other guys stopping by every now and then, too.”
“Yeah.” Charles stopped fidgeting with the cigarette display behind the counter. He crossed his arms and seemed especially tense “Well, all that's for nothing if those guys stop by when the sheriff isn't here.”
Jessica shrugged. “Well, if they come to rob, they come for nothing.”
Charles nodded and turned back to mess with the cigarette display again—a little too quick, Jessica thought.
But maybe Jessica was just being paranoid about Charles. Anyway, the nothing she was referring to was the less than one hundred dollars that Americo kept in the drawer at any one time, and the special part of the drawer which held “funny money”: a couple of convincing, government issued fake hundred dollar bills that, when removed, set off an alarm. And there was a classic hand alarm: a button set below the counter underneath the cash register.
But then there was the safe in the back. And if fortune happened to direct those two escapees to this Oaktown Americo, Charles was the only one who held the code. If the news reports had been correct in assessing those mens' intelligence, Colby and McGivens would be smart enough to know there was both a safe and a code.
Jessica looked around at all the aisles full of junk food, and at the freezers at the back containing booze, energy drinks, and everything in between. She mentally pinpointed all the cameras and said a silent prayer.
Sheriff Parker, the first company of the day, walked in five minutes later.
Sheriff Parker took his hat off and stepped to the counter with the signature stride of an authority figure. He was a man about fifty years old with a thick, well-trimmed brown mustache with flecks of gray starting to show on it.
“Morning Jessica.” He bowed his head in a nod. “Charles.”
“Some news, huh?” Jessica said.
The Sheriff leaned on the counter and shrugged his shoulders. “Well, I'll tell you, those old boys are smart—tough, too—but they can only run free for so long.”
“Shame what happened to that officer, what was his name?”
“Jackson.”
“Jackson, yeah. I mean, no man should ever have to go through...that.” Jessica felt awkward, as though she were treading on territory she didn't understand: power, revenge, sin. “Well, I think those guys'll get what they deserve.”
She looked over her shoulder to find Charles, but he had disappeared into the back room.
“You know those guys' faces, right? And you know that one of 'em got clipped in the leg by Jackson's nine millimeter?”
“Yeah.” Jessica nodded. “Can't forget them as scary as they look and as much as they're being shown on the news.”
“So you watch for a guy walking with a limp. And the news...that's another thing,” Sheriff Parker said. “It's rare, and I mean rare, for the media to help out the way they are. You'd think those two boys had killed a bunch of black babies or something.”
Jessica nodded, a tense smile on her face.
“Well”—the Sheriff tapped the counter with the palm of his hand—“don't hesitate to hit the buzzer as soon as you see any strange activity or feel threatened. Either I'll be here, or one of my guys'll be here, 'bout as quick as you can say 'hey.'”
“OK, Sheriff. You have a good day.”
“You too, Jessica. I'll be around.” Sheriff Parker gestured toward the back room. “And give Charles my regards.”
Jessica nodded.
And just as quick as he came, Sheriff Parker left, the door opening with a ding and bringing a warm breeze with it before shutting.
It was a quarter 'til seven now and the sun was starting to rise.
Jessica crossed her arms, pulling them close to her body, and thought of her boyfriend.
Jessica didn't have to think about David long before he showed up, in the flesh. He walked through the door about an hour later with a smile for Jessica and a suspicious glance for Charles. As of yet there had been no customers and Jessica was starting to wonder if they had all been scared away by news of the prison break.
Not David, though.
He put his hands on the counter. “How's everything going?”
“Not bad. Sheriff Parker came by about an hour ago, said he and his guys'll be stopping by every so often, just to keep an eye on things.”
“Probably doing that for the whole town.”
“Probably.”
David nodded, looking off at nothing in particular, then said, “You
got a minute?”
Jessica looked at Charles who shrugged. She met
David at a table in the parlor
He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table. “Somebody broke into the apartment this morning.”
“Somebody what?”
David took a paranoid glance at Charles who was visible at the register through a window on the parlor wall.
“They broke in, babe. I came in about eight o'clock and knew as soon as I walked in that something was off. I checked the living room, that was OK. Then I checked the bedroom, and that was when I saw it.”
“Saw what?” Jessica leaned on the table. Her blood ran cold and goosebumps broke out on her arms.
David's eyes turned dark, hard. “Your underwear drawer. Somebody...opened it and went through it.”
“What...my underwear?”
David shook his head in disgust.
It took Jessica a moment to process her feelings and gather her thoughts. She thought about Jack Colby and Henry McGivens, thought about bad men, sick men.
“Well, like I said, either Sheriff Parker or one of his guys'll be stopping through. You should hang out and when they—”
“I'm not leaving, Jessica. Something's up and I don't feel good about leaving you here to fight it alone. When I see one of them, I'll tell them about the break-in. But I'm sticking around all day.”
David rubbed his eyes and shook his head. He looked as though he hadn't slept for days. Jessica felt a kind of frantic, pounding love for him in that moment.”
“I'm tired as hell,” David said. “You get me something to drink?”
“Ah.” Jessica thought for a moment. “I can't give you a freebie, but I can let you use my employee cup.”
“That'll be fine, babe. Make it coffee if you can.”
“OK.”
Jessica reached out and touched David's hand, then she kissed him on the lips and said, “I love you.”
David loved her back, and she got him his coffee.
Another two hours went by, only two customers walking through the door that entire time, Sheriff Jefferson one of them, before trouble came into Oaktown's Americo.
The man who walked through the door just ten minutes after Sheriff Jefferson left was at least fifty years old and walked with a slight limp. Jessica squinted at him hard, feeling the resounding thump of blood vibrating inside her ears, and rested her hand on the silent alarm just beneath the counter. He wasn't Colby, wasn't McGivens, but, wearing a long black overcoat with what Jessica thought of as an “old-timer” hat atop his head—a top hat—he was somebody. And he had a graying mustache like Sheriff Parker, so he was neither Colby or McGivens.
Jessica relaxed and took her hand off the alarm.
The man stopped in front of the counter and smiled.
“Can I help you?” Jessica said.
“I think so.” The man folded his arms behind his back and looked at Charles, a smirk appearing on his face. “I'm here to make a collection.”
David appeared at the end of the counter then, an issue of People magazine in one hand, a coffee in the other. He leaned on the counter and looked at the man appraisingly.
Charles looked at Jessica and David, then at the man. He laughed a rat's laugh, and said, “A collection, but I don't owe—”
“You owe,” the man said in slowly enunciated words, “what you owe.”
Jessica gave David a frantic look, as though she hoped he could fix this problem or remove the discomfort from the interaction. There was something about this man's voice that was—Jessica scrambled for the right word—modulated, as though he were trying to cover up something, make himself sound more sophisticated.
David only shrugged: wait it out, hon.
“I...I don't know what you're talking about,” Charles said.
“Perhaps I can refresh your memory.”
The man swung both arms in front of his body and, with his free hand, reached into his coat. He pulled out a black and white picture and dropped it on the counter.
Jessica took one glance at it, then looked away. Charles looked at it for what was only a fraction of a second before turning away, blushing a deep red.
David frowned, trying to read the scene from a distance.
“You're...sick,” Jessica said, looking at Charles and backing away, her voice shaky. “You're fucked up. You have a wife, kids. And that man you're with, that's—”
“What?” David dropped the magazine and coffee and walked toward the man. “What do you have on him? What do you got on that creep? I knew something was up.”
The man smiled in reaction to David's intensity and said, “Your girlfriend's co-worker has a long buried secret.”
David moved toward the counter, his face scrunched up into a series of dark ridges and angles. He picked up the picture and looked at it.
“Holy shit,” David said, shaking his head, then looked up at Charles. “You are a fucking creep. Kept that dress in the closet, I see.”
Jessica was still shaking her head, thinking about what she had just seen: Charles, her co-worker, the guy David had warned her about, who had spoken of his “feeling” that Charles was bad news, was pictured on all fours with what was clearly a younger Jack Colby behind him, giving him the business from the rear.
“Holy shit,” David said again, still laughing. Then he frowned, taking a closer at the picture. “Is that—”
He dropped the picture back on the counter and turned to the old man.
“So...”
And then two things happened at once.
The man took a step backwards, reaching into his jacket with both hands.
The door opened with a ding, marking the arrival of either more trouble or a new customer.
Jessica turned to the door and saw Henry McGivens, looking just as bad in real life as he did in his mugshot, a .38 revolver in one hand, a nine millimeter Glock in the other, walk inside with a huge smile on his face.
She touched the alarm.
And now David was backing up into the counter, caught between Henry McGivens and the man in the coat who now had a pair of Jessica's panties in one hand and a big gun in the other, something equipped with air holes. It looked like a cross between a paintball gun and a pistol, but Jessica knew better. Something like that could fire a lot of rounds per second, rounds that would tear through a human's flesh and make them look like a pillow a dog had just torn up.
The gun, the limp. Everything came together in one crashing second.
How could I be so stupid?
Henry McGivens pointed the gun at David, blocking the exit with his body, and nodded to his partner.
Jack Colby ripped off his fake mustache with the panty hand and tossed the phony hair to the side. He smiled a big, nasty wolf smile and aimed the gun in the general direction of everyone that wasn't him or Henry.
“Way I see it,” he said, the fake sophisticated accent gone in favor of a honky tonk cracker's voice, “this young lady here—who was generous enough to provide a pair of her cute as a button undies—has hit the alarm, which means we have five minutes to get the ball rolling. You and you”—he pointed at David and Jessica respectively—“back room. And you”—Colby pointed the big gun at Charles, then held up the panties—“you gonna open the safe for daddy and take a trip with me and my new friend, Henry. I think you'll like him, my sweet Charles. I seen him fuck a boy so hard back inside Clarksville, that he almost came up that boy's ass and out his mouth.”
Jessica felt her stomach drop and her face go pale. She thought she might throw up, but held the urge back through sheer will.
Colby looked at McGivens and nodded. McGivens seemed like a man who wasn't prone to say much. He fucked “boys” up the ass and came out their mouth. He didn't have to say much.
Jessica felt a shiver run through her body.
Colby smiled that wolf smile again and gestured toward the back room with his gun. “Let's get on with it. We got to get it, get out. Come on.”
Everyone walked to the backroom quickly, Jessica noticing how pale Charles was, even from behind.
She looked across the counter at David who was moving fast, too, Colby and McGivens behind him.
He didn't look concerned, but had a stern expression on his face, his brow furrowed, his eyes looking inside himself at some deep, secret place.
Jessica felt her stomach sink even further.
That was his thinking face.
And as Jessica and Charles walked around the counter and met David at the door to the backroom, herded inside by Colby and McGivens, she prayed that David wouldn't think too hard; that he wouldn't come up with some heroic plan that would get either of them killed.
She was still praying as the door shut behind them and Colby and McGivens watched Charles as he punched the code into the safe, not looking at anyone, a sad, dour expression on his face.
Opening the safe was the easy part.
Charles had retrieved about two thousand dollars in varying stacks of bills and was instructed by Colby to put it all in a plastic bag. Jessica watched with a kind of detached fascination as the whole thing took place, David next to her on the floor. The power dynamic between Colby and Charles was subtle, and she wondered what their relationship was—other than the obvious.
Jessica bit down on her lower lip, thinking to herself, Don't ask. Just keep your mouth shut. Another minute and they'll be out of here. Charles'll be gone, upper management'll have another day manager hired to replace Charles by next week, and you'll have a story to tell the kids when you and David decide you're really ready to have those rug rats. And what you thought about David was wrong. He hasn't done anything, even though he had that look in his eyes. Everything's OK. It's almost over.
So keep it shut.
But Jessica wanted to know the secret of this middle-aged man she had worked shoulder to shoulder with for almost a year now.
“So, you guys,” Jessica said, then swallowed, “how do know each other? How did that happen?”
David turned his head and looked at Jessica in amazement, his eyes wide, sharp.
She licked her lips.
Charles had just finished putting all the safe money in the bag and Colby turned from him and looked at Jessica, a quizzical smile on his face. McGivens narrowed his eyes. He had been watching David and Jessica for the past couple minutes, keeping the gun trained on them.
“Young lady if you're trying to stall this situation so the law can get here faster and break things up, I suggest you cease and desist in your actions right now.” He took a step forward and put the gun to David's head. “'Cause if you don't, boyfriend's gonna go bye-bye. And it ain't gonna be pretty, you seeing all them brains and blood.”
Jessica swallowed again. “Forget...forget I asked.”
Colby nodded, then looked down at David again. “Pretty.” He looked back at McGivens. “Henry, what you think? Them pouty lips, nice tough body?”
McGivens smiled and snorted: a nasty, thick sound. “I think he
might be fit for the road, might be fit for the bed when we lay up
again. He and your boy might get along if we make 'em.”
Colby
put the barrel of the gun to David's lips and parted them slightly.
David looked up at the killer with raw hatred, an animalistic emotion
that was bred in the roughest of conflict and relieved by the
shedding of blood.
“By golly,” Colby said, “I think you might be right. I think this might be a sweet, sweet boy. I think—”
And then Jessica saw Charles, a tubby, closet homosexual, forty-something man, charge Henry McGivens. Colby turned his head, relaxing just long enough for David to grab Colby's wrist at the point closest to the gun and spring up, driving all his weight into the man's body.
Jessica shrank against the wall, watching this scene take place. Charles had McGivens wrapped up, engulfed.
A shot hit the ceiling, the report loud and muscular, like a firework.
And then Jessica saw the mathematics of the situation in her mind...three of us, two of them.
Jessica, sprung forward by anger at her own stupidity and rage at Colby and McGivens for trying to take her boyfriend, to make him less than a man, jumped into the melee and, seeing that David had disarmed Colby and had him on the floor nearest the wall, beating him, ran toward the fleshy tornado that was Charles and McGivens.
McGivens had the gun aimed at the ceiling and let off another round, struggling with Charles.
Jessica, with a high pitched ringing in her ears, kicked McGivens just behind his knee. He fell backward, letting out an angry cry, and carried Charles with him.
She wasted no time in grabbing McGivens by the wrist, keeping the gun so it was pointed at the door, away from her boyfriend and the now badly beaten Colby, and headbutted him in the nose.
McGivens gave an angry animal snarl in response as Jessica headbutted him in the face again, this time making contact below his left eye socket, and Charles beat weakly at his gut.
Red and white stars flashed in Jessica's head with each head butt.
She hit McGivens again.
For my BOYFRIEND.
Again.
You murdering fucker.
Again.
Blood covered McGivens' face. He didn't move. Only his eyes and mouth were visible. His nose was flattened, caked with dark blood.
Again.
“Jessica, Jessica.”
She was being pulled away, still whipping her head forward, blood dripping down her forehead and clouding her vision.
Her sight was red. The inside of her mind was red. She hurt, throbbed. Red everywhere. Now she wanted to cry both tears of anger and sadness at being picked by God, by chance on this day.
And now the light of the store made her squint and Colby and McGivens were two unmoving bodies in the backroom. She was being dragged by two strong arms and she looked up, saw David, his brow furrowed, staring forward, and Charles, a vacant, shocked expression in his eyes, blood on his white Americo shirt, also moving forward.
Jessica moaned and looked behind her, saw Sheriff Parker with his hand on his service pistol, standing just inside the door. She didn't even hear the bell ding.
“What the hell happened?”
Jessica didn't hear the rest. Now she was being carried by all three men and she felt safe, safer than she ever had.
And into black, into darkness where she couldn't be hurt by anyone or anything.
Jessica was safe, safe as a lamb.
When Jessica came to she was lying in the back of David's SUV, the backseat folded back. He was sitting next to her, a concerned expression on his face.
“Are you OK?”
“Yeah. What.”
Jessica looked around, saw the Americo's parlor window through the windshield, saw a fleet of police cruisers parked in the lot, their lights on. The sun was bright, almost blinding.
She squinted and started to sit up.
“No, no, no.” David put a staying hand on her and kept her down. “Here, have some of this.”
Jessica took the bottle of water David handed her, noticing his swollen, red hand, and continued looking out at the scene in front of the gas station, fascinated. It had all really happened, and it was coming back with frightening speed.
“David, did I kill—”
That staying hand of David's gripped her at the chest, keeping her down on the seat. “It's over, Jessica. Everything's going to be fine. We did everything right.”
“But, I killed him.” Jessica looked at David with wide, frightened eyes. “We did everything right, but I killed him.”
David's eyes looked sad then, as though something had passed between the two of them. Jessica wanted him to say something reassuring, something that would put this whole thing into some kind of simple perspective that would allow her to live in peace, without the blood of someone else staining her conscience permanently.
But he had nothing.
David hugged Jessica, holding her tight, saying again, “We did the right thing. We're alive.”
He kissed her on the forehead.
“We're alive.”
--Nov. 2011
The Assassination of Hinson
When I was twelve years old, I became a murderer.
It all started on the walk home from the first day of sixth grade. The new kid, Andrew Hinson, caught up with me on this hot, sunny day, and we became instant friends—that's how it seemed then, anyway.
“Home room,” Andrew said, “what did you think of it?”
He had a funny way of talking for a twelve year old: brusque and confident.
“Fine,” I said, not looking at him, just walking straight ahead, “I like the teacher.”
He shook his head with great regret.
“Weak.”