Twisted Fate (Tales of Horror) (20 page)

I was up now. Even if I wanted to sleep, I couldn’t. This just went from bad to worse. I grabbed the phone and called my highway supervisor to tell him I was sick and wouldn’t be joining them today. I really was sick. I’m not a criminal or a thief. The money just happened to fall into my hands. At least that’s what I keep telling myself. I’m sure no one else will see it that way.

In ten minutes I’m dressed, car keys in one hand and garbage bag of money in the other. I decide to look outside first. No one in sight. When I open the front door, the phone rang.

I hesitated to hear if the caller would leave a message. I heard my brother’s voice again and the sound of an engine revving in the background.

“Hey, pick up. I need to know what’s going on. Pick up the phone. We just talked to the delivery guy. He said he remembered the house because the guy had a wad of hundreds in his pocket. I was told to visit the address. It’s your
house
, man. What’s going on? Pick up the phone!”

I bolted. I jumped in my car, threw the bag in the backseat and peeled out of my driveway. It took me less than fifteen minutes to get to where I was cleaning garbage yesterday.

Out of the car, down the little embankment and through the line of trees. Everything looked just like it did yesterday. I set the bag half in and half out of the back window like I’d found it. I turned away and started for the road. When I stepped out of the line of small trees there was a cop car parked behind my vehicle. I stopped in my tracks and watched my brother scan the area. He called my name.

I reached in my pocket and pulled my wallet out. Over handed, I tossed it as far as I could up the tree line. I saw where it landed and marked it mentally by a large rock sitting about ten feet to the right of the highway.

Then I stepped out and waved. My brother was watching me now. I wonder if he saw me throw my wallet.

“You won’t believe what I just found,” I yelled.

My brother cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted. “What are you doing down there? I called the community service guys. They said you called in sick. Then I spotted you racing out of town so I followed you. When you parked here, I saw you get out, but I was too far back to see which direction you ran.”

“I lost my wallet when we were working yesterday. I’m feeling sick, but I still needed to get my wallet.”

The branches rustled behind me and then I heard the distinctive sound a bag makes.

When I turned around and peeked through the line of small trees, I saw a man holding the garbage bag in one hand and a tall blond woman in the other. He looked injured, leaning to the side. I stepped through the trees toward them. I could hear my brother yelling for me to stop.

After pushing branches aside, I entered the clearing. The man and the woman were gone. Not ducked down behind the car, or hiding by a tree, gone as in completely gone.

I decided the only way to save myself was to find them. My story would be completely clean if I was a hero. I could even explain using the hundred-dollar bill for the pizza guy. I could say that I’d found a small bundle out here by the highway yesterday. Not thinking anything of it and subsequently losing my wallet, I used some of the money. It may still look bad, but who doesn’t spend the money they find?

I bolted down the line of trees away from where my brother would come after me. I knew running from a cop probably wasn’t a good idea, but he was my brother. He wouldn’t shoot me. And the guy with the woman was close by. I had to be the one to find them first.

Roughly ten yards down, I turned into the line of small trees and jumped through. Cars whizzed by on the highway. My car still sat on the shoulder, the cruiser behind it. My brother was nowhere in sight.

I bent over to look for my wallet. It had to be around here somewhere. I was within two yards of the rock I’d used as a marker. A loud rig raced by, blocking out sound momentarily.

In a flash, my left arm was wrenched behind me and I was thrust forward. I hit the ground hard. A knee jammed into my back while my right arm was wrenched farther back. Handcuffs hurt when they’re slapped on. After he secured me, he flipped me over and I lay on the hard ground, looking up at him.

“You really did it this time,” my brother said.

“I didn’t do anything,” I protested. A piece of grass had been sitting on the edge of my mouth from being pushed into the ground and I hadn’t felt it until I talked. “I just saw the guy who robbed the Brink’s truck and the girl he kidnapped. They took off with a garbage bag full of money.”

I have to admit there was a sense of loss thinking about how close all that money came to being mine.

My brother said police stuff into a lapel microphone. Then he turned back to face me. “There was no woman kidnapped. I only told you that to gauge your reaction. We had witnesses to the Brink’s holdup. They described a man of your hair color and weight. When I came over to your house last night, it was to see how you were doing. I told the chief that your case of severe split personality had been handled years ago with therapy and medication. I told him that there’s no way you were mixed up in this and he let me do an unofficial investigation. But we matched the blood on the windshield of the vehicle that rammed the Brink’s truck. Its type O negative, the same as yours and it’s on the windshield in exactly the same spot where your bandage is.”

I shook my head back and forth slowly. “How could I have done it and not known about it? No way, it wasn’t me.” I said this, but didn’t completely believe it.

“Remember when you were going for therapy years ago in Toronto. We learned that in one personality an individual can be allergic to cigarette smoke, but in another personality, the same individual is a smoker with no allergic reactions. Each personality is isolated from the other. I think they call it Dissociative Identity Disorder now, or DID. I specifically remember yours was accompanied by memory loss, or what your doctor called,
losing time
. I never forgot the actual term was Dissociative Amnesia.”

“But that couldn’t be …” I stopped talking because my brother stepped away from me. He mumbled into his lapel microphone again. A moment later, my stomach in knots, he turned back toward me, a grave look on his face.

“I’m gonna have to read you your rights.”

“Are you serious? You can’t arrest me. Where’s the proof?”

“When I followed you to the highway earlier, a judge signed a search warrant for your address based on the passing of that hundred-dollar bill last night. I was just notified of what they found there.”

“They couldn’t have found anything.” I said this with a clean conscience. I know for a fact that I didn’t ram a Brink’s truck and steal money. My only possible involvement is if this DID stuff was real.

“They found half the money in your basement along with a journal. The first few pages they’ve examined so far detail all your plans for the robbery. Now come on, tell me where the rest of the money is?”

“I thought you said you guys got all the money on the phone last night?”

“I planted that in your head to watch your response.”

“But I saw a woman and a man back by the car with the garbage bag,” I said.

“Has to be your imagination, your DID. You saw them because I told you they were real.”

I recalled the therapy years ago. I thought I was cured. This couldn’t be. I banged my head two days ago on the cement when I tripped, that’s why I have a bandage.

My brother was talking. “You have the right to remain silent …”

We made our way to his cruiser. We stopped at the back door. Another cop car was pulling up behind my brother’s. I felt lost. Could I really have this other personality?

“I just hope they don’t try too hard to match the hand writing in that journal,” my brother whispered.

“What are you talking about?” I asked. “Handwriting?”

“I would hate for them to realize that the evidence was planted. No one is going to believe you over me, especially with your history of psychological disorders. This was the best thing for the both of us. I get a lot of money quick and I get to keep it because everyone thinks someone else took it. Don’t you think I deserve it after all I’ve done for this little shit town? No one would believe in a million years that I, a recognized police officer, would frame my own brother. This helps you, too. My plan was genius. You can continue to get help for your problems and have a place to stay and eat for free.”

He shoved me by my head into the backseat of the cruiser and slammed the door on my life, my fate.

Don't Shoot

The knocking in the wall came again.

Jim Bower sat in his basement apartment and listened to the knocking in the walls. It was impossible for anyone to be behind the wall. The knocking, the noises, and the talking at all hours of the night, permeated the wall of his apartment. The noises drove Jim to obsess over who tormented him. He wanted to learn their methods. Maybe whatever was alive in the walls was evil. Or maybe they were nice and only wanted a companion. He just needed to figure out how to get to where they were.

Jim removed the oversized headphones from his ears. No sound emitted from them. He wore the headphones to keep sounds out. But the knocking always got in.

“Go away,” he shouted at the wall. “Go away or I’ll come in after you.”

The wall knocked again. He replaced the headphones on his ears to remove the noise, but they weren’t soundproof. The knocking always got in.

“Stop it. Don’t come back. Don’t stay here. Don’t shoot.”

A sense of peace and comfort always pervaded him when he said,
don’t shoot
. It’d been his axiom since he was a child. Those words had kept him alive.

Someone whispered something.

“No, no whispering.” He grabbed the headphones. “La, la, la, la, la, la …” he chanted, in a quest to silence the voices.

He closed his mouth and listened. When he heard nothing, he picked up the hammer that sat on the floor by his foot. The table beside him had magazines and books scattered on its surface. With a sweep of his arm, they all fell to the floor but he barely heard them land as his headphones were doing their job.

Jim dropped the head of the hammer onto the table, tapping it in rhythm. He maintained a tempo that soothed him.

The clock on the wall said it was 4:44 a.m. They always came in the middle of the night.

When was the last time I ate?

He couldn’t remember.

“Don’t shoot,” he whispered to the empty basement.

The wall always looked so innocent. He walked over to the wall that had turned his life into a living hell. The hammer swung in his hand like he was practicing with a baton.

Thumb tacks held up a poster of Rita Hayworth. Out of respect for a book Jim had read many years ago, he’d chosen it to conceal his digging. At the bottom of the poster he’d affixed a small clip so when it was lifted out of the way the clip would hook onto a nail at the top.

His phone rang. He frowned.

“But I don’t have a phone.”

The ringing stopped.

Jim lifted Rita and clipped her into place. The hole he had made was magnificent. He loved the hole he had bored into the ground. Screw what the landlord thought. He needed the hole. Whoever kept knocking on the walls in the middle of the night was in there somewhere. He’d dig until he found them. He needed to get back to work. Being a member of society was fun. It felt good to buy things. They wouldn’t put him back in the Amy Greg Asylum if he performed well in the community.

If only he could get rid of the whispering and the knocking, he would be okay.

His favorite World War II era, RAF Aviator goggles sat dangling around his neck. He eased them up to cover his eyes. The hammer smacking into bits of concrete and rock maintained a muffled existence to his headphone-covered ears. He shuffled the excess dirt to the floor of the apartment where he’d sweep it into a pile and remove it on garbage day.

Two weeks into digging and the hole was big enough for him to crawl completely in and be covered when the poster of Rita Hayworth dropped back into place. He knew buried power lines and gas lines were close by, but since he was digging slowly and with the claw of a hammer, he felt he’d have ample warning before puncturing one.

An hour passed in a daze. Another pile of dirt. Another few feet gained.

The knocking started up.

Someone was at his door. He lifted the headphones off and listened.

“I know you’re in there,” someone yelled. “Open up!”

The landlord
.

If he stayed quiet long enough, the landlord would go away.

Another knock. “Come on. I need the rent money. You’re a week late.” He knocked again. “Come on, Jim, I know you lost your job. Let’s talk about it or I will have to call your brother. You know how he likes to keep tabs on you.”

Yeah, and makes me do stupid things like eat and shower
, Jim thought.
No way. If you come through that door I won’t let you leave
.
I’ve got a hammer.