Authors: Alan Weisz
I wasn’t able to see Rogers as he lay on the pavement, but with the Public Safety officer now a mere ten feet from the Rolls Royce, it was all but over. It didn’t matter what Rogers had taken from Quinn’s bag, his efforts had been for not. Quinn, now screaming at the officer, pointed to Rogers’s location. The poor bastard was about to be taken away, and I was soon likely to follow.
It’s difficult to explain what happened next because it all happened so fast. It was like witnessing a magic trick and being unable to comprehend how it happened despite the feat transpiring right in front of my eyes. There were simply no words.
The once gorgeously golden Rolls Royce was now a pile of scrap metal engulfed in flames. The whole event came about so quickly, I was unable to fathom how mere moments ago, Rogers and Quinn had been jostling for her purse before Quinn’s beautiful car jettisoned up into the air wrapped in a fiery sheath. The teacher and her most despised pupil were nowhere to be seen. Like a skilled magician, they had disappeared through an unobservable trap door and were now invisible to the naked eye. My best guess was that under the mound of blazing metal, two burned carcasses sat engulfed in the inferno.
Honestly, I wasn’t too keen on locating the bodies because it meant I’d have to come to terms with the act. Thanks to my devious plotting I was responsible for killing two more, and maybe another since I had yet to locate the Public Safety officer. Technically, Rogers was the one who had denoted the bomb (likely by pressing the unlock door button on her car remote), but I was the mastermind behind the scheme. If I hadn’t called him to initiate a meeting he would still be alive, contently living out his life in a worriless bubble eating pancakes. Quinn would still be harshly grading papers, but there were far worse things in life than doling out unfair grades. There were genocides in Africa, incurable diseases, and Snooki was still running rabid. In the end, whether or not I thought Quinn was a bad teacher didn’t mean a thing. She still didn’t deserve to die.
I was frozen in place, content to just watch as students, professors and Public Safety officers rushed onto the lot to see what all the commotion was about. I knew I should hurry down as well, at least to find out if the overweight officer was okay, but I was incapable of moving. My feet were glued to this spot.
I didn’t have it in me to pretend like I was fine with everything that I had witnessed and stroll nonchalantly toward the existing anarchy. If anything, I wanted to dig myself a hole, crawl in, and hide out like Saddam. That’d be the opportune place to cry my eyes out like a hormonal teenage girl, and after unintentionally killing two, maybe three people, I deserved a good sob. For a cold-blooded killer, my emotions were finally beginning to get the best of me. The gut-wrenching pain deep within was agonizing; it was something I had rarely experienced. It was the feeling of complete and utter remorse.
Yet, as attractive as the idea of hiding myself from the world sounded, I couldn’t do it. One, I didn’t have a shovel and two, like any master of deception, I needed to keep up my facade. I certainly didn’t want to, but I was Wayne York, senior finance major and assistant editor-in-chief of
The Gazette.
Being a reporter the logical move was to head down to the action to collect information on a potential story. I took a few deep breaths as I closed my eyes trying to stop my hands from trembling. I asked the darkness to hide my insecurities and fear.
With every ounce of willpower I possessed, I forced myself out of the Buckley Center towards the pandemonium.
Chapter Twenty-Two
U
pon entering the parking lot, I felt as though I was living out a scene from
Law and Order
or
CSI.
There was a fire truck hosing down the destroyed Rolls as members of the police department created a perimeter around the demolished car. Students were gathered nearby attempting to catch a glimpse of the action while faculty members were busy trying to find answers to their many questions.
An ambulance had appeared near the far end of the parking lot. From the looks of it, several people were caring for the overweight Public Safety officer who had risked his life assisting Quinn. I felt a tiny bit better seeing that my fat friend was okay. It would have been awful if the man had died on my account. I mean, I still felt like shit that he had been injured, but at least he wasn’t roasting under a pile of hot metal like Rogers and Quinn.
I tried getting closer to the action, but it was apparent the police were pushing the masses back like cattle. Most of the students followed in suit after the police demanded they get back. The only one holding firm was a vivacious black girl I knew only too well. She continued pushing forward yelling horrendous insults at the police as if she were a drunken parent screaming at the referee during a little league softball game.
“
What’s going on?” I said, as I fought my way towards Vickie’s side.
“
Wayne, where the fuck have you been? You fucking missed this!” she bellowed, pointing to the destroyed Rolls, which was now almost entirely flame-free.
“
I know!” I screamed back at her, pretending as if I truly had. “I’m asking you, what the hell happened?”
“
All I know is that some old bitch’s car got blown up, but I don’t know who it was or if she was the only one involved,” Vickie said, keeping her eyes forward, hoping to make eye contact with one of the many police officers scurrying over and under the yellow crime scene tape.
“
I would know more if one of these cockblocks would answer a question!” Vickie shouted loudly.
“
Ma’am if I have to ask you one more time to step back, you will be forcibly removed,” an officer said to Vickie with disdain. He was clearly not a fan of such coarse language.
“
Who you calling ma’am?” Vickie
bit
back
.
“Do I look like an eighty
-year-
old grandma hobbling around here with a cane
?
I’ll tell you one thing Wayne
, if
I did have a cane, I’d shove it right in this guy’s—”
“
That’s it, you two are outta here!” Officer Cockblock said, grabbing each of us with a muscular arm as he dragged us back to where the other students were located.
“
I see how it is, the white kids can stay but you have to pull the black girl back,” Vickie said, struggling to get her arm loose from the officer’s ninja grip. “You know, I’m tight with Mr. Dunn. I’m sure he wouldn’t be happy to hear about how you treated me or how you wouldn’t tell me anything about what’s going on here.”
It was a pathetic plea but the officer was young and white enough to let her desperate attempt at pulling out the race card work. Once we were far enough back alongside our fellow students, the officer leaned in close to Vickie. “Listen, I don’t know anything, alright? This elderly woman got in a fight with
a student
moments before her car blew up. That’s all we know. Now please stay back.”
Watching as the policeman walked away, I knew the fellow
Gazette
writer alongside me was dying to know the identities of the deceased but thankfully, at least for the moment, she was out of the loop and I was temporarily safe.
“
Fuck!” she said disappointingly, putting her tape recorder back in her purse. “I’m never going to break a big story am I, Wayne?”
Putting my arm around her shoulder, I gave it a friendly squeeze. “Don’t worry, one of these days it will happen. Sometimes things just don’t work out as well as you had planned.”
Boy, did I know how that felt.
Chapter Twenty-Three
U
nfortunately for Vickie, Claudia Eames, a reporter for
The Oregonian
, was the first to report on St. Elizabeth’s third tragic occurrence this year.
This surely wasn’t Claudia’s first rodeo because the information she gathered in such a small timeframe was incredible, and slightly worrisome.
Eames described the scene in picture perfect detail following the aftermath of the car bomb. She went on to state that the car bomb resulted in two causalities, Cheryl Quinn and Gordon Rogers. Like me, the reporter was able to discover Quinn’s restraining order against Rogers, which led to some rational speculation on her part as to the motive behind the crime.
The article could have ended there, and personally, I would have preferred it, but Eames then went on to discuss Rogers’s mental condition. Unbeknownst to yours truly, from the time of Rogers’s “physical altercation” as Eames described the incident involving Rogers damaging Quinn’s car with his textbooks, Rogers went from living from one rehabilitation center to next until very recently. According to Rogers’s therapist, Dr. Portman, who had been seeing Rogers for several years, this “disturbed young man had only just been granted permission to live by himself five months ago.” However, Rogers still attended weekly group therapy meetings and frequent counseling sessions with the good doctor.
I was already feeling sick to my stomach reading about the disaster I had instigated, but my queasiness intensified when Portman addressed the likelihood of patient relapse. “Individuals with mental health afflictions are no different from those with alcohol or gambling problems,” Dr. Portman began. “One drink or one bet can cause a backslide on an individual’s progress. The same can be said for a person such as Gordon. If that individual begins to digress back to the old way he behaved in certain social circumstances, the progress made up to that point is essentially lost. It can be as simple as a phone call from an old friend giving advice, a lucid opinion, or a forceful suggestion from someone that the patient admires or respects. Any of these happenings can lead to atavism.”
Eames ended the piece with a typical unsolved mystery conclusion, stating that the police were looking to gather more evidence linking Rogers to the bomb before ruling the case closed.
Father Beci, the university president, gave a small excerpt as well saying that university life would continue despite this unforeseen tragedy as he prayed for the families involved in this awful misfortune.
Incidentally, the following day the president sent out a rather long-winded email going into further detail about the tragedy and the university’s plans to continue the course, and that the immediate plan was to carry on with finals and the graduation ceremony. Although the event did happen a mere week and a half before finals, Beci’s decision wasn’t surprising considering he was one hardnosed Italian son of a bitch. He constantly preached hard work, determination and relentless fortitude and given the fact that as a child he had to walk uphill both ways to get to school, the thought of him canceling or postponing finals due to Quinn’s death was unimaginable.
How was I managing to cope after this series of adverse events, you ask? I was teetering on the fucking brink. If a reporter had found all of that information in one day, how were the police not
supposed
to find evidence linking me to Rogers and the car bomb? Suppose Rogers wrote my name down on a piece of paper and had it sitting around in his apartment or what if someone saw us at IHOP? What if a student or a professor overheard my argument with Quinn and told the cops about it?
There were too many questions, too many ways of uncovering my identity, and far too many possibilities of being caught. I was a sitting duck waiting to be blown to smithereens. I was done, finished, game over,
hasta la vista,
baby. My life was over.
For days, I sulked around the house, venturing out only to attend class. I told everyone I was feeling under the weather, but I really just wasn’t in the mood to talk. Hell, I was depressed. The death count was up to four and not only was the crushing Catholic guilt starting to eat away at my insides, the odds of being captured seemed all but a guarantee. What was there to live for anymore? I was a goner simply waiting until the long arm of the law barged into my room and tossed me in the slammer.
As I moped on my bed, face down in the pillows, I weighed my options. To me, there were three viable choices. The first was to give up. This was the quitter’s route. I would be accepting defeat. I was benching my starters for my second stringers in the belief that victory was unreachable. The one pro in selecting this option was that my worrying would stop. I’d be behind bars, and at least I’d have a chance to finally read and work out. Then again, I wasn’t fond of ass play, nor was I one hundred percent sure I was going to get busted. The odds were not in my favor, but why throw in the towel when a thread of hope remained?
Since I wasn’t quite at the point of handing myself over to the authorities, I went on to my next alternative: hop in the Honda and peace out. At least I’d have a head start on the coppers if I decided to hit the open road. Nevertheless, I didn’t have the black market essentials to make it very far. I didn’t have a fake passport or even a fake ID. I had no cash, and the cops could easily trace any of my credit cards. This option again assumed the police found out about my involvement with Rogers, and if for some reason they didn’t know, this decision was bound to put me on their radar. The only way this plan was ever going to succeed was if I completely gave myself to the dark side. Sure, I was a murdering sociopath, but thanks to my facade I still had parents who loved me and wonderful friends. I’d have to give that all up if I wanted to make it to Mexico or Canada.