Authors: Lourdes Bernabe
She looked like shit. She rubbed her eyes furiously as
I moved aside and let her lead the way through the dimly-lit mustard yellow hallway that led to her apartment on the left hand side. I guess she hadn’t locked the door since she just pushed it and walked right through. I walked in and locked the door behind me. I wouldn’t want anyone just stopping by unannounced like me.
Olivia threw herself o
n a long couch and said, “What up?” I couldn’t immediately respond. I froze in utter disbelief at the mess. Her place was a dump. Though she did have expensive furniture in her home, it was much too cluttered to look like anything more than something from Goodwill. I took a seat on the couch opposite the one she had thrown herself on. A quick look at the large glass coffee table showed just how hard she’d been partying. Thick, long lines of smeared cocaine decorated the glass like snow flakes. And there were more than a few crushed Red Bull cans. “I see you’ve had your wheaties this morning,” I said still grimacing at the state of her apartment.
“Breakfast of champions,” she snapped.
She eyeballed me, daring me to pass judgment. She lit a joint and took a hit.
The
TV was on but muted and the apartment smelled like a mixture of sex, marijuana and body odor. An assortment of pink, blue, and white bongs thrown haphazardly throughout the room was Olivia’s signature décor. She didn’t like to decorate her apartment with useless things. At least the bongs she would use.
And they look so pretty.
That had been her argument when I told her bongs didn’t count as living room decoration and suggested she should get some throw pillows or picture frames. That had been my first and only attempt at getting her to fix things up here and there.
The door to one of the first bedrooms was open and I could see liquor bottles
laying on the floor and stuffed between pillows and blankets. There were empty beer bottles in every nook and cranny within eyesight. There were only a few in the living room but the bedroom had at least 10, maybe more. I couldn’t really count them all. Nor did I want to.
“Must have been some party last night,” I sai
d trying to open up a line of communication.
She walked on over to me and gave me the joint and sat back down. I took a hit as she unexpectedly put her face to the glass table and snorted a line of coke. The bitch just wouldn’t quit.
For her, there was no end in sight.
I continued to smoke the joint as I watched her face
transition itself from despair to a new found ecstasy.
It wasn’t long before she was good and happy. She shot up from the couch and
began to clean up in a frenzy. It was probably what I looked like when I knew my parents were on their way over for a visit. The panic forced you to clean faster than you ever thought possible. I watched her clean and continued to pull on the joint.
I felt the weed take its effect and I relaxed. I felt the blade of
the knife in the small of my back. The cold of the steel reminded me of why I was here. As if I could forget. I mentally prepared myself for what I had to do. I watched her as she moved around constantly walking right past me in different directions.
Olivia has one of those old railroad apartment typ
es. The ones where every room was basically connected through a virtual hallway that ran through from the kitchen to every subsequent room. You couldn’t get to the last bedroom until first going through the living room then 2 more bedrooms before finally reaching the final master bedroom. Not that it was masterful at all. Olivia’s bedroom was only a few feet larger than the rest of the ridiculously small bedrooms. Luckily for her, she lived alone and so it didn’t matter either way. The extra rooms were used for storage and such.
Olivia continued to clean, grabbing liquor bottles and beer cans off the floor quickly. The marijuana had slowed me down a bit and so it irritated me to watch her fret so viciously.
“Can you chill the fuck out!” I yelled without meaning to. “You’re freaking me out.”
“I can’t stand this mess,” she said.
“Well you didn’t seem to mind before I got here so can you just relax?” I pretended to channel surf while she continued to move around the apartment.
She stopped moving and dropped the heavy black trash bag on the
ground. “Why are you here?”
Good question. I hadn’t bothered to come up with a reason to stop by. Impulsivity had taken over and I just went with it.
“I, uh, wanted to talk about what happened the other day,” I blurted out. “You know, at the sauna?”
“Yeah what about it? I called you a hundred times and you can’t fucking pick up the phone.
Now you wanna talk?” she stood in front of me defensively.
“Yeah, I dunno
… I was feeling weird about it. Like we’d done something we weren’t supposed to do…I felt….off,” I said.
“Fuck you, Jo,” she started cleaning again. She was obviously hung over with her hair tied in a messy bun on her head. Her blond hair dangled loosely over her red blotchy face. I’d seen her like this a hundred times but only now did I
come to feel pity for her.
“You’re always thinking you’re better than me,” she went on. “But fuck you. That’s all I gotta say after all the shit you and me have done together. After all the times I fucked some nasty prick so we could get in somewhere or do something for free and now you wanna act stupid cuz you and I played around a lil bit. Man Fuck you!”
Clearly, Olivia harbored some resentment towards me. But her decision to fuck her way through life couldn’t be tossed on my shoulders as guilt. She’d made those decisions all by herself. I wasn’t sure how to proceed. I’d come here with the intention of killing her but that was before. Before she had become irate and yelling with tears swelling in her tear ducts. Her cheeks grew redder with every breath she took. She began to perspire and her hair matted up against her bright red face.
I sat there taking in all
of her emotions as if she poured them straight from her soul into mine. She had been my friend and I had come here with the intent to take away her life. Whatever was left of it, anyway.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I knew it wasn’t enough. Those two words would do nothing in this situation but other than
there, there,
it was all I had in my arsenal of consoling words. I had always been empathetically challenged and that wasn’t about to change now.
“I’m sorry? Really Jo? That’s all you got, right?” she stopped talking, jutted out her hip and looked right at me.
Her jaw swiveled back and forth and she licked her gums. My expressionless face must have hit a nerve. She had always hated it when I couldn’t meet her level of anger in an argument. It would only serve to infuriate her more. She spun around to face the couch and bent down to pick up all the empty bottles and trash from the ground.
“Of course it’s all you have cuz your’re fucking empty
. You’ve always been empty and you’ll always be fucking empty…..” She went on but I couldn’t hear.
The words continued to pour out from her but all I coul
d see was red. The blood pumped through my veins felt like an internal shower of pure fire. My head felt like a pressured balloon and my tongue dried out like a desert. I tried to swallow but my mouth was too fucking dry. I tried to hear the words as they came from her but my ears felt as if I’d plugged in cotton. All I could hear were the muted sounds of Olivia’s voice as I crept closer and closer behind her.
She went on and on and on but I couldn’t hear a word.
All my senses felt muted as if I was submerged in a pool. I breathed deeper and deeper but my lungs burned and I felt the strange and unusual sensation as I wielded the small blade from my back.
I had to do it b
ut that one tear urged me to pause. All of the different pains in my body pleaded with me not to, but as she rose before me still facing away, I grabbed her dirty, matted blonde hair, brought the gleaming knife up and slit her throat. Her hands instinctively flew to cover her throat but she fell instantly face first into the couch and never moved again.
I lo
oked down at the knife. It was so beautiful. I thought back to the day I received that big black box. I couldn’t wait to open it. And then I couldn’t wait to use it. I had often wondered who it would claim as its first victim. I never once thought it would be Olivia. That was true until today of course.
I held
the knife in my open palm and watched the blood drip from its shiny tip. I knew it was Olivia’s, my best friend’s, but the blood still glistened beautifully. I let the currently unoccupied fingers of my left hand spread the blood around the knife so I could get an intimate feel of her blood on my hands. God it felt so good just to rub the blood in between my fingers. Then my eyes darted around the room wildly scanning from left to right. Still, I didn’t even so much as shift my weight as I eyed every minute detail of the entire room.
Sure, there’d
be some forensic evidence left, I reasoned. But what useful evidence could they possibly find? How many people had been here just last night, fucking and drinking and getting high? There had to be countless hairs, fibers, finger prints, and other trace amounts of DNA. Not to mention the fact that Olivia tended to associate with a multitude of criminals. Even if they did find my DNA, I probably wouldn’t even be a suspect. I pitied the schmuck who would have to sit here and investigate Olivia’s life piece by piece.
And with that thought
, I hurriedly cleaned off the knife on the back of Olivia’s sweater and used a towel in my back pocket to clean off my hands. Then I quietly shut the door behind me.
I darted out of the building both slowly and quickly.
It’s one of the first things you learn how to do when you’re a serial killer like myself. I jumped into my Jeep and used a wetnap on my hands as I drove off. I let the wetnap fly in the wind once I was on the highway. Littering. Yup, I was breaking a lot of laws today. It was probably the least of my problems though and I continued to speed on the Garden State Parkway.
Only, I wished I hadn’t driven so fast. Because just as I reached my apartment complex, I couldn’t help but notice the bright shining lights of two police cruisers and my mother’s green mini van parked out front.
Chapter 27
Police cruisers were
the scariest vehicles. To someone like me, they were more frightful than a U.F.O. As a child, I’d always assumed the police were there to assist those in need and if you were irritated or fearful of their presence it was because you were doing something you shouldn’t. It turns out I was right. So, considering I had just killed yet again, and still with the murder weapon in my possession, you could say I was a tiny bit apprehensive. But I was much more irritated. Their presence in my home was a most unwelcome surprise.
I hated surprises as by their very nature they were unexpected. And when you live like I do, you learn to loathe the unexpected
and welcome the routine. Such was the way of a killer.
They were like a swarm of bees in front of my apartment building. Official heads and more heads moved back and forth, with grim looks on their faces and writing quick tiny notes on metal clipboards. My mother sat weeping on a stoop, her long
salt and peppered hair had fallen over her face and I went straight for her with open arms.
“Mom? What’s going on mom? What’s happening?”
“Miss, step back. I’m gunna have to ask you to step back, miss,” a young, black male officer in uniform held out his left arm shielding me from my mother.
“Excuse me? That’s my mother and I would like to go talk to her,” I had lost all niceties as I tried to push through him. But he held me
back like a brick wall. He wouldn’t budge.
“I want to talk to my mother!”
“Are you Jolene Hedon?” asked a voice behind me.
I
spun around and there was a woman standing behind the open door of a plain black police vehicle. She didn’t look like a cop. No. She was of a higher rank
“Ye
s. I’m Jolene Hedon,” I replied. “And you are?”
“We’ve been looking for you all day,” she said. “I’m Detective Ma
ria Velez and I’m afraid we need to have a talk.”
“What is this about?
Why can’t I speak to my mother” But I already knew the answer. I didn’t need her to tell me that the inevitable had finally occurred. She said she’d been looking for me all day but she meant she’d been looking for me for a long time. There were deep lines and wrinkles where there shouldn’t have been for a woman of her age. She was stressed out.
“W
hy don’t we head down to the station and have a chat,” she said politely. She spoke just like a cop would speak to a suspect. She was looking me down from head to toe trying to figure out all the pieces and how each and every one formed to create the entire picture that was me. She was…doing her job. No other real way to put it.
She walked towards me slowly and held out a hand.
I shook it involuntarily without ever taking my eyes off of her face. She was beautiful but looked like the type of woman that didn’t need or want any reminding. Her features exuded mimicked kindness that tried to cover up the harshness of her face.