Joe (13 page)

Chapter
Twenty-one

Joe

Christ,
there are a lot of people here.

I was sitting on a bench that was
half-shaded by a maple tree, my sketch of the impending disaster tucked firmly
under the flap of my notebook, folded in half. I couldn’t risk someone walking
by and seeing it, and though it would have been nice to take out the drawing
and hold it up to the scene in front of me, I didn’t really need to. I’d stayed
up until four in the morning last night staring at the picture I’d drawn,
trying to concoct some sort of ingenious, James-Bond-type plan, and succeeding
in only losing sleep and staring at a horrible possibility. Nice work, Joey,
ole girl.

It was noonday, and the sun overhead was
strong but gentle. The wide circles of shade that the old oaks and maples threw
across the soft green lawn made for perfect resting places. The temperature was
just right there, surrounded by the heat of the day counteracted by the cool
place that lives under the hoods of all trees. The sound that filled the place
was of bird callings and human interactions. I sighed as I stared out at them
all. There were just so many. Too many

(sitting ducks)

people here. This was where it was going
to happen. My drawing had at least shown me that. The Quad, its four buildings
to the north, east, south and west, was always stunning to see, but it occurred
to me now that the architect that had thought this place up had made the
perfect box with sturdy buildings as its sides, the hard earth as its bottom,
and the endless sky as its lid. And boxes were meant to store

(bodies)

things, to keep things in. I felt the moisture
round up in my eyes as I stared out at all of them. What would happen when the
shooting started? What would these poor, unsuspecting people do when those
first shots rang out across the Quad? I thought I knew. The blasts would
rebound off of the stone buildings, bouncing up and down on their eardrums, and
they would flinch right before the horror dawned on them. And then they would
run, and they would scream, they would clog up the narrow walkways that led
between the buildings, they would run into the buildings and bar the doors, and
some of them wouldn’t make it. If my premonition had its play,
a lot
of
them wouldn’t make it. Why? Because there were too many damn people put in one
fairly large box.
Yeah, dude, let’s go check out the Quad
.
Hey, meet
me at the Quad. Where you at? The Quad.
Hi-ho. Hi-ho.

Unless I could find a way to stop it.

But, can I? Haven’t done much good in
the past. Can I?

I wiped my watery eyes. My thoughts were
just too awful and depressing. And yes, I was scared. I let my hair fall over
my face for a moment, not that anyone was paying attention to me.

A chill ran up my spine as a thought
occurred to me: the killer could very well be here
now. Watching.
At
this very moment he could be sitting somewhere amongst the people, the
prey
,
as I was sitting here watching them. There had to be over a thousand students
passing through the Quad at this particular moment, and I felt like a shepherd
that senses a wolf creeping over the hill, a shepherd with no means of
defending the flock. I rubbed my arms; goose bumps had hatched there.

The image of my grim sketch flashed in
front of my eyes and I had to shut them, blink hard and take a deep breath. The
problem was that although I had memorized the scene in my drawing down to the
pencil strokes, the only thing I could focus on, the only thing I kept seeing
and remembering, was all of the bodies. All of the bodies, and all of the
blood.

And that shadowed figure.

Yes, that shadowed figure. My adversary.
I let out a humorless laugh. Thank you foresight, for painting that problem so
clearly. From the drawing I couldn’t even be entirely sure if the shooter was a
male or a female with a hood and loose clothes. I didn’t have anything to
narrow down the candidates. So I sat and sat under the tree for almost two
hours waiting to pick something up, waiting for my Sherlock muse to make an
appearance. It didn’t show up.

I would have to come back when no one
was around so I could hold up my sketch and wander around with it open in my
hand. I had some studying to do, too. Just a little research on what I was up
against. One of the only good pieces of advice that my mother ever gave me was
know
thy enemy
, and if I was going to keep drawing blanks at the pre-scene of
the crime, I might as well go home and study the case. There was a lot of
disturbing reading ahead of me this evening, but it beat sitting here. I was
going to burst into tears or throw up or something if I didn’t get out of the
Quad. And I would figure something out. I would just
have
to.

Because if I didn’t. If I didn’t dig
deep down in my thinker and pull the magic stop-the-shit-from-happening key out
of it, God, or Whoever is in charge, would dangle the solution in front of me,
as clear and cold as first light on a winter morning. The winter morning
after
the fire was gone.
And there’s nothing cold as ashes…

I stood up, shrugged my backpack over my
shoulders and double-checked that my sketch was still neatly folded in my
notebook. I would go home and study, and maybe, just maybe, find that key and
lock the door good and tight against disaster. The biggest question on my
non-hero mind was whether or not I would get out of the building on time before
the door trapped me on the inside, where the key would do me no good.

What’s that old saying?

God takes care of drunks and fools.

Well, I certainly had the latter going
for me.

Chapter
Twenty-two

The
Decider

It
was foolish of him to have stayed up so late the night before. Once he had
finally fallen asleep–he figured it must have been sometime around four-thirty
in the morning–he had had a terrible dream about a raven. In the dream–or he
supposed
nightmare
would have been a more appropriate word–he was
standing in the area known as the Quad on the main campus of UMMS, the place he
was currently. But unlike now, there had been no people around. Not a single
person. The birds that frequented the area had been absent as well, as if they
all had gotten their internal migration clocks messed up and decided to take
wing at once. Except for the raven, Danny had been utterly alone in this
dream-Quad. Alone and surrounded by such silence that only could be experienced
in a dead world.

The raven sat watching him from atop the
statue of a giant jaguar, the school’s mascot and the proud centerpiece of the
Quad. Underneath the bird’s yellow claws the jaguar glistened silver in the
sun’s light, gleaming and fierce, its head bent low between its shoulder blades
and its deadly metal teeth flashing behind its eternally pulled-back lips.
Whoever had built the statue had taken time with his task. Every detail was
visible (at least in his dream, but as Danny sat looking at it now–awake–he saw
that his dream had been oddly accurate). The muscles in the jaguar’s back were
as well defined as a Roman god’s abdomen. The whiskers on its face were fine
and delicate. There was even a gleam in its eyes. Danny wasn’t sure how he knew
it, or how the artist had accomplished it, but there was a certain…
trait
that was captured in the jaguar’s eyes. It was one Danny knew well and had come
to respect. It was the look of a true predator, an indifferent killer.

He just didn’t like it so much when it
was directed at him.

That hadn’t bothered him so much. That
part, the jaguar statue directing its frozen fury at Daniel, hadn’t been the
part of the dream that had unsettled Danny’s mind since he woke from it at
seven o’clock this morning. It had been that raven perched on the jaguar’s
head. He couldn’t seem to rationalize it–it
was
just a senseless
dream–but that fucking raven had freaked him out a little bit.

He’d had dreams in the past that had
left him a little shaken. Everyone has those dreams, he assured himself, over
and over. But this one had been different somehow, more…
real.
Too
fucking real, if you asked him, and it didn’t help that he could remember the
details so clearly. Especially that disgusting raven.

The bird was large, more the size of an
eagle than a raven. Its feathers were such a deep black, so shiny and deep,
that if you looked close enough into them Danny figured you might be able to
see your own reflection. Its beak was sharp and curved and black. It’s eyes
round and sharp and black and…something else, too. In the dream, Danny couldn’t
help approaching the raven, even though he was admittedly frightened of it,
unable to stop his curiosity about what else he thought he’d glimpsed in the
bird’s beady eyes. His feet trudged forward nonetheless, the soles of his
sneakers making a
scuff-scuff
noise as they slid across the concrete.
Scuff-
scuff. Scuff-scuff.
And silence. Not even a breeze. Just deep, dead
silence.

And it had been
looking at him.
Yes,
that’s the part he remembered so hideously clearly. That freaky fuck of a raven
had been
looking at him.

This morning, in the cold, soft light of
the new day, sitting in his tiny apartment kitchen, clutching a mug of steaming
coffee between his numb hands, staring blankly at the clean white wall above
his stove, Danny had tried to convince himself that no, no, even though it was
dream, no, the raven had
not
been looking at him.

He could
almost
convince himself
that that was true, but he could not deny the worst part of the nightmare—to
call a spade a spade—though Danny kept referring to it as a dream. The worst
part of it had been when dream-Danny had stopped walking—the world becoming
silent without the
scuff-scuff
of his shuffling shoes because he had
reached the base of the great jaguar statue that was elevated on a stone
platform. The platform stood as high as Danny’s head. He looked up. The jaguar
stood atop that stone perch, and the raven at perch on its head, staring down
at him. Both of them.
One hunter and one scavenger,
Danny thought,
quite
the team.

Then the raven’s head titled down at him
in the abrupt way that birds have, just a half-snap, half-jerk, and one of its
black eyes had settled on him. It seemed to be smiling at him, as if uncaring
of the fact that beaks did not hold the ability of lips to move and mold. And,
Danny felt a hateful, ugly fear settle over him then.

Even in his dream, and even though he
was scared–
Had the panther’s tail been positioned that low just a moment
ago?–
he puffed out his chest in defiance. A scavenger and a hunter, eh?
Well, fuck you.

“Do you know who I am, you numb-fuck
bird?” he’d asked it. “I’m the goddam
Decider!
”

And at this, the raven’s beak-smile had
grown. A grin. That stupid, mindless, fucking raven had
grinned
at him,
as if to say,
I know something you don’t know!

Real fear, then. Danny, who used most of
his mojo to concentrate on his hatred, had felt his emotional needle swing from
the hot-red hate, deep into the ugly black of fear.

Warmth and wetness had spread down his
legs, seemingly streams of it that moved swiftly from his thighs down to his
shins. And then he’d screamed,
“I’m the Decider! You don’t know shit! You
hear me you fucking ugly bird? I DECIDE!”

That was when he’d come awake, sitting
bolt upright on his twin bed, his hands clenched at his temples into hard
fists. Salty sweat rolled down to his jawline. When he’d ripped off his covers,
he had discovered that he’d pissed his bed.

His heartbeat slowed eventually; soon
the fact that it had only been a dream had worked its way into his disturbed
mind. He’d climbed out of bed and tossed his sheets and his nightclothes into
the washer, holding them away from his body in angry disgust.

Just a dream, he told himself, a wet
dream. And this made him laugh hard, until his eyes were watering and his
breath ran out. And then he had sat at his kitchen table, both hands wrapped
too tightly around a steaming cup of joe, until it had been time to leave for
school.

Now, it was noonday, and he was once
again in the Quad—for real this time—on a bench drenched in an old oak’s
shadows. The statue of the jaguar stood on its stone platform twenty feet
directly in front of him, silently growling down at anyone who passed by. And a
lot of people were passing by. Danny sat there unnoticed by all of them,
staring intently at the jaguar’s shiny metal head, as if the raven from his
dream would swoop down at any minute and land there. And grin.

After a while—while the thought was
striking a raven-haired girl named Joe that the person of interest might be in
the Quad at this very moment—Danny turned his attention back to the people
going about their day. He watched them as a—
jaguar?—
might watch his
unsuspecting prey from the shadows of the jungle.

Would you just look at all these
worthless fools
, he
thought.
They have no idea. They don’t know shit.

So, why then had the bird been grinning
at him, taunting him?

I know something you don’t know.

Because it was just a dream, that’s why.

He smiled then, and stood from his spot
on the bench, straightening his neatly ironed button-up shirt and his pressed
slacks. He
grinned,
actually, because Monday was coming quickly and it
would be all right. He walked toward the Blue building, where his next class
would begin in half an hour. As Danny neared the Blue, a male student bumped
Danny’s shoulder hard as they passed each other on the walkway. The student–his
name was Michael, not that Danny knew or gave a shit–had been looking the other
way and had turned abruptly on his heels. Danny stumbled back a few steps when
their shoulders made impact, feeling the hot breath of his hate breathing down
his neck.
Jock
, Danny’s mind flashed, growling silently in disgust.

Michael said, “Oh, my bad dude. Sorry.”

Danny gave a large grin and waved a
hand. “Hey, no problem,” he replied.

Jock-boy gave an uneasy smile and
continued on his way.

Yeah, no problem
, Danny thought, staring after the boy
for a moment so as to commit his face to memory.
No problem at all, you
fucking fool. I hope I see you on Monday, because you’ll be sorry then. You
don’t know shit. You’ll be sorry. I Decide, and all of you don’t know shit!

Why then, when he looked back at the
jaguar, had he glimpsed an image of the raven sitting there? Grinning at him.
And in his head a childlike voice sang,
I know something you don’t know.

He shook his head, and when he looked
again the dream-raven was gone. Just a silly dream. He glanced around at all
the people going about their days, and grinned, but it was a little forced.

They didn’t know shit.