Public Enemy Zero (3 page)

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Authors: Andrew Mayne

BOOK: Public Enemy Zero
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“
You Belong with Me” began to play.
“
I love you, Mitch.” Click.
 
Mitchell sat back and exhaled. His knee was shaking. His stomach was ready to bail out its contents.
The girl sounded like she was still in shock. What was going to happen when her mother came to pick her up and saw what a bloody mess she was? He began drumming his finger on the table and then realized he still had an open microphone.
He raced through the hypotheticals. What if they called the police?
Could she remember his license plate? What he looked like?
She sounded disoriented on the phone. She seemed confused. He was pretty sure she couldn’t remember enough to directly finger him. Pretty sure.
He thought for a moment, if she called the police, the first thing they’d want to do is run a rape kit on her. That’d of course come back negative. At least for him.
So then they’d be dealing with possible assault.
There was a fax machine in the radio station that was dedicated to police reports. Mitchell would sometimes read them. He tried to think of anything relevant.
If he went to the police right now, it’d scream to them like he was guilty and feeling remorseful about it.
He knew there was no way he could convince them of the hysteria, the blood lust in her eyes or the panic he felt. They’d just see the scared girl who asks for a Taylor Swift song when she cried.
He had wanted to pry for more information but knew that would have been a bad idea over the air.
On the caller ID, he could still see her number. Should he call her back off the air and talk to her?
Mitchell loaded up the track list. He turned off his microphone and reached for his iPhone. He was about to type the number into the keypad when he realized that would put his contact information right on her phone.
He put his phone away. What about the station phone?
He didn’t know how much attention he could pay toward her without looking guilty or callus.
Fuck it. He picked it up and dialed. It went to voicemail.
Mitchell didn’t know what to do next. He heard the beep.
He hung up.
He rationalized that by at least calling back he could justify that he tried to make an effort to follow up. If the station manager asked, he did his due diligence.
This girl was confused, probably bipolar and a fan. If he just let it go, it’d probably go away.
Mitchell began to relax. He leaned back in the chair and looked at the ceiling.
If she couldn’t remember anything specific about him, then it’d never trace back to him. There was nothing connecting him to what happened.
He ran his fingers through his hair and tried to think of something to say when the song ended.
“
Hey everyone, it’s your pal Mad Mitch here in the late-night hour.” He thought about saying a white lie about being dropped off by a friend or having showed up at the studio an hour earlier. Then he realized the stupidity of that.
He tried to think of a question to throw out to callers. Everything he could think of sounded like it would point directly back at him.
Favorite song to do it to.
Attempted rapist.
Weirdest thing that happened.
Attacked a girl.
Biggest fear.
Getting caught.
Biggest wish.
Getting away with it.
“
Fuck! The blood on my car!”
Mitchell looked at the display. The microphone was live. He felt all the blood drain out of his body. He was lightheaded. His cheeks burned with fire.
He looked down at his right finger. He didn’t remember doing it. But it was there. It was pure instinct that made him click the drop button when he heard the word “fuck.”
He counted off the syllables of “The blood on my car.” He was well under the seven-second delay.
Mitch threw to commercial and queued up his play list. No more audience interaction tonight. At least for now.
 
He set the timer on his iPhone and ran out of the studio. Mitchell grabbed a bunch of paper towels from the break room and ran out the backdoor to the parking lot. He’d parked it under a bright light so it wouldn’t have made as big of a target. Now it just looked like a bright neon sign pointing to his guilt.
His guilt.
Why did he feel guilty about this? Was it because she was a woman?
Mitchell looked at the driver’s side window. Her forehead, cheek and part of her nose were imprinted with her blood. He could even see the ridges where her knuckles struck the window.
For a fleeting moment he thought about taking a photo to prove his case later on. To whom and what would he prove?
A bloody, angry girl tried to smash and claw her way into his car? Or did it look like he ran her face-first into the window? He was sure a clever forensics person could tell the difference. If they wanted to.
Screw it. He began wiping down the window. The blood just smeared around, covering it in a red film.
“
For fuck sake, can’t I get a break?” he screamed under his breath.
He dampened a paper towel in a puddle and used that to wipe the window.
He looked around the parking lot. His was the only car.
The blood finally began to come off. He used the entire handful of towels to get the rest of it.
His alarm rang. He almost pissed himself.
Mitchell gave the car another look. The window looked OK. He was sure the police could find it if they looked. But at that point he’d tell them everything anyway.
His door was still kicked in, but oddly, that made him look like the victim. A kicked-in door showed, at least in Mitchell’s mind, that he was the target of aggression. He knew other people may not see it that way. But for him it was physical proof that what happened had happened the way he remembered it. The door was physical proof of her violent rage. That made him feel better.
He ran back to the station.
He flushed the paper towels down the toilet. He waited to make sure they went down and then jumped back into the booth as the playlist ended. He flipped on the microphone.
“
All right gang, here’s your question. I want to know what superhero you wanted to be when you were a kid? Besides the holy trinity of Spider-Man, Batman or Superman.”
The Invisible Woman came immediately to his mind.
 

 

4
The rest of the night was mostly panic-free until he remembered Rookman. He used the same parking lot as he did. He had to have seen his car and the blood. What did he think?
Crazy for sure, but Rookman was a perceptive man. Mitchell once wore the same shirt two days in a row and got a call from Rookman congratulating him for getting laid.
When Rachel broke up with him and he wore a shirt two days in a row again out of depression, Rookman called him up and said let it go and move on.
It was the same shirt.
Rookman knew something happened. Mitchell tried to think whether there was any kind of clue in his phone call. That’s how he would have told him he knew.
Maybe he didn’t notice. Or if he did, he was keeping his mouth shut.
Mitchell had to resist the urge to run outside and look under his windshield wiper for a note. Rookman’s style would have been to leave the business card for a lawyer or bail bondsman.
Guys who talk tough have a habit of being the first to fold. He thought Rookman was pretty genuine. It wasn’t all an act, was it?
No. Rookman was a sincere guy. He was a ball-buster, for sure. But he had character. If Rookman noticed the car, he probably decided it wasn’t any of his business.
Mitchell thought about the crazy stuff he probably heard from students every day. This was minor in comparison, he was sure.
If Rookman mentioned it, Mitchell would tell him everything. He was pretty sure Rookman of all people would believe him.
 
He opened up the phone lines again for requests. He kept his finger on the drop button, fearful that he was going to get another call from the girl. Only this time she was going to call him out and publicly accuse him of trying to rape and murder her.
Every time he heard a female voice, he clinched up a little bit.
When a man called in and said he wanted to be Daredevil, all Mitchell could think about was the fact that his day job was being an attorney.
Guilty!
He also got the usual amount of insults. People invited him to do all sort of lewd acts to himself or family members. The interesting thing was always that the later it got, the more they sounded like some kind of Freudian expression.
“
Whore.”
“
Junky.”
“
Faggot,” of course.
The most disturbing calls were the rambling ones from drunk people. They always had something important to say. They just never could get around to saying it. If you cut them short, they’d call you any or all of the previous insults.
 
The last hour felt pretty normal. He screwed around on his iPad during the playlists and just did what he did on a normal night.
A calendar reminder popped up and he felt sick to his stomach for a much more mundane reason than being accused of attempted rape.
That was the day he’d promised to drop off his ex-girlfriend’s keys. He’d wanted to just send them, but he didn’t want to look like a coward. He was pretty sure there was a new guy living with Rachel. He hadn’t known that when he agreed to drop them off.
A three-week turnaround from Mitchell to that guy. It was probably faster than that. It just made his gut hurt even more. The last thing he wanted to do was to see her or him, worst of all her and him together.
Thinking about it was like having every negative emotion in the world explode inside of him like a grenade. Jealousy, sadness, anger, inadequacy, impotency and a million others he could describe if he took the time.
By agreeing to drop them off, he told himself he was outwardly doing what a person who feels none of those things feels. Another part of him felt that he was only justifying her actions by going along with her nonchalant attitude about the situation.
Whatever, he thought. He’d drop the keys and the whole thing would be done with. He didn’t want to spend any more time dwelling on it. He had other things to worry about.
Christ, the other thing. He couldn’t decide which was worse to worry about.
He watched the minutes tick down on the station clock. He’d go drop the keys off and then go home and sleep through the rest of the nightmare while everyone else went to work.
Damn. He realized that she wouldn’t be up for another two hours. That meant he couldn’t go home and crash. Mitchell would have to sleep in his car while he waited for her to get up.
Fine, he thought. Whatever it takes.
 
The last hour passed uneventfully. He saw the alarm pad light up by the door as the early morning shift host was coming in.
Bonnie walked by the window and gave him a wave. Mitchell felt it wasn’t an unfriendly wave, but it had the feeling like she was kind of just waving at him and the station furniture alike. Waving to him was just one part of the ritual she had for realizing that life hadn’t turned out like she wanted.
Hello, Mitch. Hello, fern.
She was in her late forties and was probably pretty once. She had that deep voice too many late nights and too much alcohol gave women. Mitchell and his friends used to call that a “boozer” voice.
Someone had told him she’d been an MTV veejay for a little while back when kids knew that term as someone who announced music videos and not as slang for vagina.
Mitchell could believe it. She was good at what she did and acted like a pro. You always got a sense that she felt she was too good for the place, and she probably was.
Mitchell wondered what it was like to go from MTV celebrity to obscure early morning host. Was it a gradual slide? Or an overnight thing you never recovered from?
He looked around the tiny booth he was in and wondered if he’d be grateful in twenty years to even have the job he had there. That scared him.
He’d struggled to find a job in broadcasting. The current job came about because a friend from college was leaving the station and pushed hard for him.
The station really never let you know if you were doing good or bad, so there was never any security. He didn’t have a gimmick like Rookman, so he really didn’t have a following. People knew him, but he wasn’t known for anything other than being on the radio.
He’d gotten a date with Rachel because she was fascinated by the idea of a radio personality. When she realized that was the only interesting thing about him, her interest began to wane.

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