90_Minutes_to_Live (11 page)

Every writer has a distinctive voice. If you are an avid reader, you know what I am talking about. You can read just a few paragraphs from the middle of a book and tell right away whether it was written by John Le Carre or Robert Ludlum. It’s not the context or even the plot. It is the voice.

This was not my voice. Not even close. More importantly, it didn’t all come together for me as I read. Instead, it seemed I heard this story for the very first time—there is no doubt in my mind about that. A lot of things I am telling you I have come to believe over time and to be fair, they are my interpretations of things I in no way understand, but this one thing is certain fact. I had never written, read, or thought up the story I was now reading—not in my entire life.

That thought chilled me as I sat there. When I closed the file,
“save changes?”
the computer asked me. “No thank-you” I answered with a click. The screen went black instead of flipping back over to the menu or even to my floating vanity of a screen saver. It just faded to black, like an old diode tube TV, flashing light for a moment, then rapidly disappearing to a single white dot in the middle. It hung there for a second then disappeared with a nearly audible
pop
. Lingering in the center was a red dot. Blood red.

I stared at it for a moment in surprise.

Fade to Black, right, man? Just like your second, crappy novel.

I pressed my eyes firmly into the palms of my hands, until white spots exploded in my vision like fireworks. When I opened them, the screen looked normal, back to the menu bar. Surprise made me shift backwards reflexively, nearly knocking over my chair. My hand darted out, grasping for the wall and I violently jerked the plug to the power-strip surge protector out of the socket. Without knowing why, I was suddenly terrified of my computer. I pulled the plug to kill it and the story written by some stranger, but it didn’t work.

The cord lay on the floor but the screen was the same, set to my menu bar. And then the screen changed. The mouse arrow moved slowly across the blank monitor—moved by an unseen force. I looked without thinking at the mouse sitting on the
Grateful Dead
pad beside the key board but it lay perfectly still. Yet the arrow continued until it arrived where I knew it was headed, paused a moment, then clicked on the big blue
W
for my word program. The screen fluttered, the way a road seems to flutter when the sun has been baking it all day and then a blank page appeared. A little black rectangle was blinking in the left upper corner. It was calling to me.

Come on and sit down. Let’s go again.

I ran from the room—all the way out of my fucking house, out the back door and onto the beach. Barefoot, which wasn’t weird where I live but in my boxers, not unheard of in my neighborhood but a little out of the ordinary. I didn’t give a shit. I just wanted to be as far away from the computer as possible and the creature who owned it. You should know, at this point I knew Chad was dead. Knew it in the calm way you know the sun will come up again tomorrow. Afraid of what his death meant, I am ashamed to admit feeling no
remorse
for my role in it, whatever the hell that was.

I sat on the beach for a long time. It started getting hot out and the glaring late morning sun reflecting off the water made me wish for my sunglasses. I don’t smoke but I would have smoked then. I needed
something
and really wanted a drink. But the drink was made less appealing by my haunting hope that this was all some sort of alcohol-induced hallucination.

Sitting on the hot sand, my knees hugged tightly to my chest, pulse still pounding in my temples, I could hear the phone ringing in my house through the open door. No fucking way I was going in there at that moment. It would ring and ring and then stop, then my cell-phone would chirp a while and stop, then my phone would start again. My mind groped desperately for any explanation that would make the terrible fear, the churning in my stomach, disappear. Sitting there, I slowly rationalized my way to a truce with my nagging terror. No more gin, I had decided. Time to clean my ass up and get back to work. That would keep this nightmare from recurring…right?

If only.

As I headed into the kitchen from my deck the cell phone chirped again and I looked at the caller ID. Jason Drake, the husband of one of Barb’s coworkers and probably the only one from that crowd I ever really liked. Jason was an ER doc at the big hospital in Tampa and his wife was gorgeous, but a lot like Barb.

Unlike me I suppose, Jason had done a good job at remaining content with his decision to trade a deep relationship for nightly access to her tight body. He and I would often hang out, off by ourselves, when the accounting gang would get together. He was a good guy. I flipped open my phone.

“Hello?”

“Hey guy. Where have you been? I’ve been trying to catch you for over an hour.” The heaviness in his voice bothered me. Something was definitely wrong and of course, I knew what it was.

“Out running,” I lied. “What’s up?”

“It’s Chad, man. Did you hear?” his voice was tense.

I felt my stomach flip and my heart renewed its pounding. I reached a trembling hand out towards the blue bottle of Sapphire on the counter, then thought better of it and pushed it away. I closed my eyes and steadied myself on the counter.

“No, what happened?”

There was a long pause. Then he spoke calmly, as if putting on his doctor hat.

“It’s bad, man. Hit by a car. He is really fucked up.”

“Dead?” I asked, trembling.

“Not yet, but he won’t make it. Bad closed head injury, spinal injury. He’s on a ventilator in the ICU. No way he’s going to make it. I was on duty in the ER,” he paused again, maybe waiting for me to say something. I said nothing, and after an awkward moment, he continued.

“I’ve never seen anything like it. Hit and run. Whatever the guy was driving it tore him apart. Bad…I’ve never seen anything like it,” his voice had a tremor in it.

Terrified, I didn’t answer but thought of my nightmares, of Chad torn apart in the shadows by some unseen creature. I thought of those horrible visceral screams and of the presence felt in my room. I said nothing.

“Are you there?” Jason asked; his voice more controlled.

“Yeah, I uh….” not knowing what the hell to say. “I just don’t know what the hell to say. I don’t know how to feel about this.”

“I hear you man,” he seemed satisfied with my answer.

Then the doorbell rang, which nearly made me shit myself.

“Someone at the door, Jase. Can I call you later?”

“Sure, sure—call any time,” and he was gone. I went to the door with some trepidation, imagining some other person from my life with Barb coming to give me the bad news.

It wasn’t.

Two officers stood uncomfortably on my doorstep, no doubt hot in their dark uniforms. Their eyes scanned my porch and yard as I watched them through the peephole. I don’t know what made me panic,
shit
, I didn’t really do anything wrong…right? I only wrote a fucking story. I had even deleted it from my desktop. Then I thought of something else—the wastebasket on my computer, a repository of discarded files. I had not emptied it, so the story would still be there.

My pulse quickened and my mouth became drier than my moderate hangover had already left it. I don’t know what the hell made me think these two cops were gonna search through my computer or what it would mean to them to find that story.

Ah Ha! A story about a car accident! Just as we thought! Place your hands on top of your head, palms up sir, and drop to your knees!

Ridiculous, right? Yeah, well, I was still nervous as hell but I opened the door.

“Mr. Reynolds?”

“Yes,” as casually as possible.

“May we come in sir?” I could feel their eyes dissecting me and felt my right knee shaking. I tried to stop it, certain they would notice. They were sizing me up but why? What the hell would bring them here? No way I was going to let them in the house. They would see right through my anxiety and guilt and they would be sure I had killed Chad. No fucking way they could come in.

“Sure, come on in,” I opened the door further for them.

They stepped into my foyer and stood politely as I closed the door behind them, hand convulsing. I jammed my hands into my pockets, knowing they would notice. That was when I realized I was standing in my foyer in my fucking underwear, with two of St. Petersburg’s finest.

Perfect.

“Uh, you guys mind if I pull on some clothes?”

“Not at all, sir. We’ll wait right here.”

I started for the stairs but stopped. I couldn’t possibly go up there. That was the scene of the crime, wasn’t it? Plus, in spite of my rationalization on the beach, I still had the terrifying feeling something really horrible hid in the corner of my room—a creature who, even as I spoke to these fine officers, dozed and quietly digested Chad’s flesh. It would probably be getting hungry for breakfast. I turned abruptly and headed to my laundry room where I grabbed a clean T-shirt and some marginally clean running shorts.

“Late night sir?” asked one of the officers. Loaded question?

“Up late working,” I answered, rejoining them in the foyer. “I’m a writer,” I said, then immediately regretted it for some reason.

“Yes sir,” the older cop opened a notebook. Then he looked at me again and I felt his gaze boring through me, inside to where my guilt lay smoldering. His younger partner just looked bored. “Where were you last night, sir?”

“Right here,” I answered uncomfortably, glad I finally had some pockets to shove my hands in. “What is this all about?” I already knew of course.

“There’s been an accident sir,” the younger cop said.

“Do you know a guy named Chad Keller?” the older cop asked.

“Oh, yeah,” I said and rolled my eyes. “He’s shacking up with my wife.” My knee quivered again.

The older cop looked at me for a moment, his lips pursed.

“Ex-wife, right?”

“Yeah, right,” I agreed. “Ex-wife.”

“May we have a look at your car sir?” The younger cop again.

“Sure,” I tried to appear nonchalant. “Can you tell me what the hell is going on?”

“Hit and run sir,” the older cop said. He watched me carefully, looking for my reaction. I tried to give him none. “Mr. Keller is dead.”

“That’s horrible,” I said and tried to appear genuinely surprised. “What does it have to do with me?”

“Well,” the older cop put his little notebook back in his shirt pocket. I hadn’t seen him actually write anything in it. “We’re just trying to piece everything together. Just need a quick look at your vehicle. You haven’t been involved in any accidents recently, have you sir?”

“No,” but now my mind really started to screw with me. What if my car was in the garage, banged to shit and covered in blood? What might it mean—other than I was completely crazy? Hell, I couldn’t remember writing that damned story, even after I read it in my office, in my home, on my computer. What else didn’t I remember? I was a gnat’s hymen away from telling those guys to piss off and get a warrant and then going in the garage for a preview by myself. But the script was kind of written by that point, so I figured well, might as well see the show. Plus, if my car was the weapon used in Chad’s execution, I think at that moment I would have preferred to be in a jail cell and away from the bloated thing in the corner of my room.

It didn’t occur to me I might just be nuts (not at that point). If the car was beat up and glistening with ol’ Chad’s blood and gray matter, it might just mean I had murdered him. Nothing from one of my books; no hidden creatures or supernatural forces—just a depressed and angry guy, screwed up on expensive gin, running that dipshit down with his M3 BMW convertible.

It didn’t seem possible to me that I could have such rage. Hell, I live in Clearwater Florida and I don’t even fish. Feel too bad for the damned fish—brains the size of a cashew. No way it would have occurred to me that I could run a guy down in cold blood and then back over him a time or two, from what Jason had described on the phone. Then drive home, write a quick short story for
Weird Tales
and crawl into bed. To me, it was still about something more evil and powerful and the feeling I was just a witless pawn. Only one way to get some answers and I had become a little fatalistic at that point, so, my hand already on the knob, I twisted it and opened the door to the garage.

We went in together, down the two short steps, the light coming on automatically when it sensed our movement. I stopped and the younger cop bumped into me. Larry, Moe, and Curly. He grunted an apology and we all stood there, looking at it together.

A pristine, charcoal gray M3 BMW convertible with tan leather seats, the top down, was beckoning us.
Let’s cruise!
Well, not pristine. I don’t wash it like I should, especially since the bitch who made me buy it had left me. So there was dust and dirt around the wheel wells and a few of the billion Florida bugs stuck to the trophy wall the fancy grill had become. But no dents. No blood or brains. Nothing suggesting my car had knocked Chad down on a Tampa street and then somehow torn him apart alive. Just an infrequently cleaned, poorly maintained yuppie’s status mobile.

Crockett and Tubbs walked around it for a few moments and the older guy looked underneath for some damned reason (Maybe I had just dropped my car on top of poor Chad?) then stepped back over to me by the door. This time he really did scribble something in his little book, then slipped it back into his pocket. They looked at each other and nodded, the younger cop apparently disappointed I wasn’t a killer.