Because I'm Watching (2 page)

Oh, no.
She was trying her patented
Trust in God and family
routine and throwing in a food bribe. She didn't understand that the idea of being out in the sunshine with people would break him. She didn't understand he had lost his faith in God. He didn't care about his family. Food meant nothing to him. And he could never be healed.

How could she comprehend? She was his mother, she remembered the boy he had been, and she would love him and believe in him forever.

That boy would never return. He had drowned in an ocean of blood and come to life only to die again. Soon, he hoped.

Her tone of voice changed, and her rising temper crackled across the wires. “Jakie, if you don't pick up the telephone soon, I will come down there and break down the door of your pitiful little hiding place. Don't think I won't!” She ended the connection so violently she cut off her own voice.

He closed his eyes. He knew she would. Nothing his father could say would stop her. His mother was a force of nature.

So next time when she called, he would answer, and he would talk to her. To relieve her mind he would pretend he was fine, that he had been outside working on some unspecified and manly project and couldn't make it to the phone … for the last week …

His parents lived in Everson, up by the Canadian border, and he had deliberately moved here, to this location on the Olympic Peninsula, so he could feel at home and at the same time be far enough away from his large family to avoid their well-intentioned intrusions.

It worked … mostly.

He never knew when the sun rose or set; no light leaked through the blackout shades on the windows. He'd made sure of that. He hadn't eaten since … he didn't remember. Yesterday sometime. He should go into the kitchen and get something out of the refrigerator. A piece of pizza. A sandwich. Whatever he had in there.

How long had it been since he'd had a grocery delivery?

He groped for the lamp on the end table, found the switch, and turned it on. Even the pitiful amount of light the twenty-five-watt bulb produced made him blink. When his vision cleared, he looked at the marks he had scratched on the wall.

Five days since the boy rang the doorbell, took the check Jacob had taped to the window, and left two grocery bags of canned soup, prepared food, and milk.

That meant every bit of food in this house was stale or rotting, or needed a can opener, a clean pan, and the will and energy to prepare it for consumption.

Only two more days until he received groceries again.

He turned off the light.

He could wait.

At the camp, he had learned to wait for the right moment. He had learned …

He pushed his spine hard against the chair, braced himself for the wave of pain—

And with a high screech of jagged wood against paint and metal, a gray Subaru Forester shot up the concrete steps of his front porch and exploded through the wall of his house, front wheels in the air, headed right for the heavens—and then, as it tilted toward earth, at him.

 

CHAPTER THREE

Jacob blinked and squinted against the assault of sunshine. He lifted his arm to protect his eyes while around him the house disintegrated. Brittle glass blew out of the old single-hung windows. Lath and plaster from the walls blasted into a dry, choking dust. Rock wool insulation dropped from the jutting ruptures in the ceiling.

The front of the small SUV slammed down hard onto the hardwood floor, ate the old TV, the decrepit wooden stand, and the low coffee table. With the roar of a revved-up engine, at last death had come for him.

About damned time.

He sat unmoving, waiting to be obliterated.

Then snap, boom! The left front tire from the small SUV broke through the hardwood floor. With a screech, the vehicle stopped abruptly … three feet from his knees.

He said the first unrehearsed words he had said in three months: “Oh, come on!” The car couldn't have driven another six feet and flattened him?

The house creaked and moaned, distressed by the violence.

The engine idled and died.

A hush fell over the surreal wreckage of his home.

The car sat tilted forward and to the side, with the left side of the bumper resting on the old braided rug. A white-painted, splintered rail from the front porch pierced the hood. Wood shards and dust covered the windshield, but the glass was miraculously unbroken. A white air bag filled the driver's side of the car … slowly it deflated, revealing a wide-eyed young woman in her twenties.

She stared at him in horror and disbelief.

He stared back.

She had black hair tucked into a messy bun and startled blue eyes. Her skin was the color of parchment. Blood trickled from her lower lip. She groped around and opened her door. The edge slammed into the splintered remains of the hardwood floor, leaving a gap of only inches.

She looked puzzled, started the car again. The motor gasped. Then, because she was damned lucky, it turned over. She rolled down the window.

Coolant and oil blew past that porch rail like blood from a perforated artery. The motor died.

She watched until the gusher dwindled, then crawled out.

She was short, he realized, and thin. Too thin. Was he wrong in his assessment of her age? Was she a skinny adolescent, someone who had recently learned to drive?

Then she scrambled to her feet and faced him, and he knew his first impression was right. She was in her midtwenties, maybe a little older, dressed in a blue short-sleeve T-shirt, yellow cropped sweatpants, and one flip-flop. Damp brown stains splattered her shirt and sweatpants.

Made sense. If he'd driven his car into someone's house, he'd have brown stains in his sweatpants, too.

Somehow, since he'd moved to Virtue Falls, winter had turned to summer. A bright, sunshiny, contemptuous summer, glaring down on the concrete sidewalks, the narrow asphalt road, the neighborhood of cheap houses built in the 1920s; all appeared through the gaping hole in his living room wall.

He looked at her again.

Her.
This person who had ripped off the fifteen-foot-wide front wall of his house, exposing him, in his boxer shorts and T-shirt, to the sight of the world—and was apparently oblivious to her mistake.

She stuck out her hand. “Hi, I'm your neighbor Maddie Hewitson.”

He stared at her outstretched fingers.

“I live across the street.”

He glared at her.

She smiled, winced when her lip split wider, and touched the trickle of blood. “Ow!” She stared at the red on her fingers and looked confused, surprised to find herself here. At the sound of sirens, she glanced around, saw the neighbors gathering, peering in, and in a tone of despair said, “Oh, God. Not again.”

Not again?
“Do you make a habit of driving into people's houses?” His voice was rusty with disuse.

“No. Of course not! This is my first time.”

The way she said it, she didn't sound sure it would be her last.

“I'm … I'm sorry,” she said. “I didn't mean to … um…”

The sirens were getting louder.

She stopped stammering out her feeble apology. She bent and scrutinized his face. Going back to the car, she wriggled through the window until only her feet stuck out, and hung almost upside down to get something off the passenger's side floor.

He couldn't remember the last time he'd noticed a woman's ass.

But …
nice ass.

She hand-walked herself back out of the vehicle, returned to him, and offered a brown cardboard to-go box, tied with a sparkly blue ribbon. A plastic fork was stuck into the bow.

What the hell?

“Go ahead,” she said. “I bought it for my lunch, but you look like you need it worse than I do.”

Nice ass or not, he was suddenly and completely sick and tired of her. Leaning his hands on the arms of the chair, he pushed himself to his feet.

She watched him rise, her eyes widening in alarm, and as if realizing he could be hostile, she stepped backward—toward the jagged hole her tire had ripped in his floor.

He caught her upper arm and half-lifted her to safety.

She squeaked.

Three vehicles pulled up to the curb, lights flashing, two from the county sheriff's department and one from the Virtue Falls city police force. A fire marshal and a fire truck arrived and parked by the hydrant.

Jacob's gaze shifted to Maddie's alarmed face, to the cops, and back to her. “You started a circus.”

“I'm really sorry.” She glanced toward his crotch and lowered her voice. “Do you think you ought to go put on some pants?”

He wanted to tell her he would, but only if she managed not to create another disaster. But he'd already said three sentences today.

He looked out at the law enforcement officers facing off on the sidewalk. City cops vs. the sheriff's department, fighting over what was probably the spring's most interesting mishap.

With all this going on, it seemed inevitable he would have to say more. Turning on his bare heel, he started across the kitchen's warped old linoleum floor.

“Be careful of the glass!” Maddie said. “Watch where you step; you don't want to have to go to the hospital.”

No. He did not.

He watched where he stepped.

As with about half the houses in the neighborhood, Jacob's one-bedroom shotgun house was stacked, room by room, on a narrow lot: the living room and the tiny kitchen in one big room. Then the bathroom, with a door into the kitchen and one into the bedroom. The bedroom faced onto the back porch, which faced into a weedy, overgrown backyard, which led to the alley.

He shuffled into the bathroom and shut the door behind him. He used the toilet, washed the dust off his hands and face, stared into the mirror.

He looked like shit: pasty white, sunken eyes that looked like two piss holes in the snow, three months' worth of dark hair curling wildly around his neck and ears, and five-day-old thick, black beard stubbling his chin. If his drill sergeant could see him now, he would feed him his balls on a shingle.

Jacob had a razor. He needed to shave his head.

No time.

He had a situation out there.

In the bedroom, he pulled on a worn pair of jeans and his athletic shoes with no socks, and headed back out to the scene of the crime. As soon as he opened the door, he flinched at the brilliant sunshine thundering into what remained of his sanctuary. Brilliant light, where before there had been deep, black, comforting darkness.

He didn't want to do this. He didn't want to face these people. He didn't want to talk.

He had come here to hide. To die.

Goddamn Maddie Hewitson. Goddamn her all to hell.

 

CHAPTER FOUR

Three cops, one city and two county, had climbed up broken steps and over and around piles of splintered and shattered lumber, all that remained of the railing of Jacob's porch. They stepped onto the broken remains of Jacob's floor.

Firemen in full gear stood arguing over a cluster of broken electrical wires. One of them, the fire marshal, looked at Jacob. “Mr. Denisov, this is a dangerous situation and we've turned off your power.”

“Okay.”

“You realize you're not going to have lights or electricity to run your refrigerator or water heater.”

Jacob shrugged.

The firemen exchanged glances.

Clearly, they thought he didn't understand the gravity of the situation.

Clearly, they didn't know his refrigerator was mostly empty and he never showered. Although, if they got close enough, they would be in no doubt about the shower.

Three more cops were on the sidewalk, interviewing the gawking witnesses. Those gawking witnesses were Jacob's neighbors, he supposed, although he could see a few people standing around in exercise clothes and running shoes, and a sunburned couple who looked as if they'd come up from the beach.

All these people, staring at him as if they knew what he had done.

A Virtue Falls policeman and a deputy sheriff were talking—and scowling—at Maddie Hewitson.

The county sheriff was standing, hands on her hips, examining the car that had invaded his sanctuary. When he picked his way across the rubble on the floor, she turned to face him. “Mr. Denisov? Mr. Jacob Denisov?”

He nodded.

“I'm Sheriff Kateri Kwinault.”

He could see that from the name on her pocket.

She continued, “May I ask you some questions?”

He wanted to ask her some questions, too, like how a Native American in western Washington had managed to win the election to become sheriff. Prejudice in this part of the state was quiet and pervasive. But any inquiries would indicate curiosity on his part, and he didn't care that much, so he nodded again.

She flipped open a worn notebook, opened her mouth, looked around at the wreck of his home, and shook her head as if she didn't know where to start.

“She drove into my house,” he said.

“I see that. You own this home?”

“Yes.”

“Did you previously know Miss Hewitson?”

“No.”

“You've never met her before?”

“No.”

“She lives across the street.”

He shrugged. He knew Sheriff Kwinault had seen the aluminum foil at the one remaining living room window. He didn't know what conclusions she had drawn. He didn't care.

“So she has no grudge against you?” Sheriff Kwinault asked.

He was beginning to get irritated. “I've never laid eyes on her before.”

“Then why did she drive into your house?”

He was becoming even more irritated and was already fed up. “Woman driver.”

Sheriff Kwinault gave a laugh. “Of course. What other reason could there be?”

The more he observed Sheriff Kwinault, the more of an oddity she was. Native American. Female. Pretty woman, early thirties. But twisted, like a tree that had been warped by a great wind. One shoulder was higher than the other. Thin white scars covered her hands. Her brown eyes looked like those of some of the guys he'd met overseas, like she'd looked death in the face.