Dark Luck (A Suspense Thriller) (7 page)

Okay, enough talking: he and Zack had some work to do.

After
becoming friends with a mysterious entity named Jeremy, Zack, a skinny
fifteen-year-old nerd suffering from polydactyly, acquires a taste for killing.

Sixtus

1.

“Are you going to just lie there and waste the precious
time?” Jeremy asked. “Get up and get the fuck out of here, man.”

And Zack did get up and jump off the gurney and walk
out of the room, which meant that this was not the end of his life’s voyage.
That’s right, it was not his time to fade away and his best days were still
ahead of him.

Right now, Zack was in the middle of his journey to
greatness. He suspected he was the youngest serial killer in American history,
but he didn’t really care if this record belonged to someone else.

When did he make the first step? How did it all happen?
How in the world did a fifteen-year-old boy end up killing half a dozen people,
which included his own parents? And mind you, they were his biological mother
and father, not some stepparent bullshit.

It was a unique story. Unique and amazing.

2.

If you look into the root of things, Zack’s journey to
glory probably began the day he was born as that was the time when he first got
to know Jeremy. You see, the whole reason he murdered his parents was their
desire to take Jeremy, his best friend forever, away from him. They wanted
Jeremy to disappear from Zack’s life just because they didn’t like the way he
looked, which Zack found outrageous. He had tried to get his folks to change
their minds, but they wouldn’t listen, perhaps because a kid’s opinion didn’t
matter. And the fact that he
allegedly
talked to himself didn’t help at
all.

Zack cherished his best buddy since he didn’t have that
many friends to begin with. Unpopular kids tend to suffer from lack of friends,
you know, and Zack, unfortunately, was one of those kids. In addition, he was a
peculiar
kid: he had six fingers on his right hand, which didn’t help
things at all.

The extra digit was located on Zack’s right hand
between the pinkie and the ring finger and would probably prove useful to a
person with a penchant for jewelry. The good news was the finger blended pretty
smoothly with the rest of the gang and didn’t look repulsive unlike most cases
of polydactyly—yes, they have a scientific term for this—in which additional
fingers are misshapen and stick out from the sides of the hand at weird angles.
Speaking of congenital disorders, a sixth toe would have definitely been more
tolerable since no one would have seen it most of the time, but Mother Nature
didn’t let you choose when she set out to play a joke on you. Interestingly,
had he been born in some backwater village in India, he would have probably
been considered sacred, just like that girl with four legs and four arms he had
read about on the internet.

Zack’s parents were not big fans of the sixth finger
and had started talking about corrective surgery the day they had first seen
it. They must have realized that such a defect would surely turn their son into
a social outcast, a target of mockery and, possibly, abuse. Or maybe they
simply didn’t want to be known as parents of a six-fingered freak. Anyway, his
folks were so motivated that they went through with the plan without dragging
their feet.

3.

Zack remembered very well the day he
had finally given up on Mom and Dad. He was chatting with Jeremy about the
upcoming surgery when his mother dropped by his room to check on him.

“Are you talking to your imaginary friend, honey?” she
asked after realizing she had again caught her son speaking to himself (it must
have been the fifth or sixth time it had happened in the preceding two months).

“I’m talking to Jeremy. And he’s not imaginary, I’ve
already told you that.”

“Oh, okay,” she replied, stretching the words out.
There was a tinge of panic in her voice, as if she was afraid she would cause
him to explode by saying something insensitive. Yeah, you didn’t have to be a
genius to figure out that his mother took him for a mentally unstable lunatic
who heard voices: you see, for some reason, Zack was the only person Jeremy
could—or would—communicate with, so he had no way of proving Jeremy’s existence
to her (or anyone else for that matter). But Zack didn’t care what she or Dad
thought of him as long as they left him alone.

A week later, he woke up at five in the morning,
sweaty, tired, and extremely thirsty, and headed to the kitchen to grab a soda from
the fridge. As he walked to the door, it suddenly occurred to him that he had
somehow fallen asleep in his parents’ bedroom. Then he glanced at the bed and
saw his mother: her stomach appeared to have been ripped open and there was no
chance in hell the woman could have survived a wound like this. His father was
lying on the floor between the bed and the window, with a slit throat—also
dead. 

With a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, Zack
looked at his hands and froze: they were both covered in blood. For a moment,
he considered the possibility that he had stained his hands while trying to
staunch the bleeding from his parents’ wounds. Then he heard Jeremy’s voice,
“Are you going to stand there like a pole and waste the precious time? You have
to get rid of the evidence ASAP.”

“What evidence?” Zack asked.

“Evidence of you murdering your parents, silly. You
need to clean it up unless you want to end up in jail or, God forbid, on the
death row. They still have death penalty in Connecticut, you know.”

“What do I do?”

“Well, you could move the bodies out of the house and
dump them on the other side of the town. However, it’s going to be really tough
to get rid of all the blood in the room, and chances are the cops will figure
out that something fishy is going on.”

“All right. Tell me what I should do.”

“First, you have to wipe your fingerprints off the
knife.”

As Zack carried out his command, Jeremy went on, “Now
go wash your hands with hair bleach.”

“I don’t think we have hair bleach in the house. My Mom
doesn’t use it.”

“I already took care of that, buddy. The bleach is
under your bed; you bought it two days ago, you just don’t remember that.”

“Oh, cool.”

Jeremy was right: Zack indeed found a can of hair
bleach under his bed.

“What about the knife?” Zack asked Jeremy while washing
his hands in the bathroom. “Shouldn’t I throw it out or hide?”

“That’s too risky and not particularly helpful, Zack.
Just leave it in your parents’ bedroom. Police find murder weapons at the crime
scenes all the time, there’s nothing unusual about it. Your fingerprints are
not on the knife, so you should be okay. Besides, this knife is not from your
kitchen, I hope you noticed that. It’s a brand new knife, you bought it three
days ago.”

“Did you tell me to do that?”

“I just gave you the idea, buddy. And you obviously
liked it.”

“Okay, cool.”

“Now let’s talk about the story you tell the cops. You
were asleep all night. You saw nothing, you heard nothing. And try to blame it
on burglars. It’s a perfectly plausible theory. Burglars, especially junkies,
have been known to kill. Meth heads would rape their own mothers to get the
money to buy drugs, Zack. Please don’t forget to mess the house up so it will
look like it just got robbed.”

 “Sure, Jeremy. By the way, you said I’d bought the
knife three days ago. Does it mean I decided to kill Mom and Dad three days
ago?”

“
We
began thinking about it way before that,
buddy. Maybe a couple of months back. But it doesn’t really matter now anyway,
does it?”

Just before calling the police, Zack did what,
according to Jeremy, was going to divert suspicions away from him and send the
cops on a wild-goose chase: he pressed his sixth finger against the knife
blade.

“Don’t worry, buddy,” Jeremy said. “I have total
control over this particular fingerprint. The print you’ll leave on the knife
will be completely different from the one you’re going to give to the cops.”

One of the first things the crime scene investigators
did upon arrival was take Zack’s fingerprints. They told him they were trying
to separate his parents’ and his fingerprints from those of the perpetrator—or
perpetrators. However, Zack had a feeling that deep in their hearts the
investigators were hoping to pin this double murder on him.

Was he concerned that Jeremy might have exaggerated his
ability to change his print? Just a little bit. Zack saw no reason to mistrust
Jeremy, so he decided not to dwell on this issue. He was going to find out the
outcome pretty soon, anyway.

While they waited at the police station for Aunt
Clarisse to come pick Zack up, Jeremy shared great news. “Your father was smart
enough to insure his life for half a million bucks,” he said. “Your mother was
the beneficiary of that policy, but since she’s dead, too, that money is
yours.”

“Half a million? Holy shit!”

“Yeah. But there’s a wrinkle: you won’t be able to lay
your hands on that cash until you turn eighteen.”

“I have to wait for almost two years even though it’s
my money?”

“Yeah, buddy. That’s one of the disadvantages of being
too young. The judge will appoint a guardian to keep an eye on that money, I
reckon it’s going to be your Aunt Clarisse, so you will see some of that cash
pretty soon after all. Not much, of course, but better than nothing.”

4.

Aunt Clarisse turned out to be not so bad.

“I’m going to hire the best lawyer in town if they try
to hang these murders on you,” she told Zack. “I’m not letting them get away
with anything.”

He was happy to learn that Aunt Clarisse wouldn’t trust
the cops as far as she could throw them. One of her favorite police stories was
the previous summer’s incident at the Calf Pasture Beach in Norwalk when a cop
had ticketed her for an empty beer bottle sitting in the sand a feet away from
her folding chair.

“I kept telling him it was not my bottle, but this
idiot wouldn’t listen,” she said. “He was one of those bicycle cops, so it
doesn’t surprise me at all he was so dumb and stubborn. And I bet the rest of
these guys, including their chiefs, are not much smarter.”

His aunt’s fears were not unreasonable; there was no doubt
the cops had Zack’s name on the suspect list. A year or two ago, he had read
about a teenage boy in Chicago who had hired a couple of his schoolmates to
murder his parents. What was the reason for such wrath, you ask? His folks had
not allowed him to smoke and grow weed. Pretty stupid, right?

5.

Two days after butchering his parents, Zack had to face
another test of character—an interview with a detective at the police station.

Detective Roger Hall appeared bored. To be fair, he was
probably tired, not bored, but who the hell cared anyway? He was leaning back
on the chair, his hands on his thighs, staring at Zack silently with his
unblinking eyes. Mister Hall must have thought he had a penetrating look that
could scare a suspect into spilling the beans. Well, even though his drilling
gaze might have worked on other teenagers, it did nothing for Zack.

“You’re staying with your aunt, right?” Hall asked
after a brief introduction. He exchanged glances with Aunt Clarisse, who was
sitting by her nephew’s side, intently listening to their conversation.

Zack nodded. “Yes, Sir.” He’d been making sure to keep
from smiling and to look very somber: according to Jeremy, it was very
important to seem genuinely grieved in the presence of police and relatives.

“Just humor them,” Jeremy had advised him early on.
“It’s not the right time to be arrogant, buddy. This will save you a lot of
headache down the road, I promise.”

Zack had agreed with his suggestion wholeheartedly.

“Have you been back to your house yet?” the detective
asked

“No, Sir, I haven’t.”

What a stupid question: the place was still a crime a
scene, and Zack had no idea when it was going to be cleaned up.

“What do you think the burglars stole? Did you notice
if anything valuable is missing from your house?”

Zack shrugged his shoulders. “I really don’t know,
Sir.”

“Did your parents keep significant amounts of cash at
home? Was there expensive jewelry in the house?”

Zack immediately smelled a trap in the question and
decided to play ignorant just in case. “I don’t know, Sir. I guess it’s
possible.” His answer was surely going to please Jeremy, who had instructed him
to volunteer no information to the police and be as vague as he could.

Judging by the puzzled expression that flashed across
his face and the direction of his stare, the detective had just noticed Zack
had six fingers on his right hand. It was obvious Zack’s extra finger had
piqued his interest, but, out of politeness, Hall made no comment on it.