Looking Over Your Shoulder

  * * *

  “Where have you been?” the overseer asked Abe sharply. "You’ve missed two other days that you were scheduled for community service.”

  “I had jobs those days,” Abe explained. "I couldn’t make it.”

  “You have to schedule work around your community service. Or you’re going back to jail.”

  Abe clicked his tongue in irritation and looked away.

  “You think you’re better than everyone else here?” the supervisor demanded. "Everyone else here had to schedule around school and family and jobs too. But if you want to stay out of jail, that’s what you do. You don’t just blow it off. The judge isn’t going to accept that.”

  Abe shrugged and rolled his eyes.

  “What do you want me to do?” he questioned.

  “What is that you’re wearing?”

  Abe looked down at his uniform.

  “This is what I wear when I work.”

  “What are you, a dentist?”

  “No, I’m a chef and nutritionist,” Abe said, hardly able to believe that the man didn’t recognize a chef’s coat and apron when he saw them. What kind of a person can’t tell the difference between a chef and a dentist?

  “Well, go take those off and leave them with your other stuff. Here’s what you wear for your work today,” he handed Abe a bright orange smock and a pair of work gloves.

  Abe looked down at them and shrugged. He walked a few steps away and pulled the smock on over his other clothes, and pulled on the heavy protective gloves.

  “Hey Stupid!” the supervisor shouted. "I told you to take off your other stuff.”

  Abe shook his head.

  “I’m wearing your shirt. I’m not taking off mine,” he said evenly.

  “You are here to follow my rules.”

  “I’m wearing your shirt,” Abe repeated.

  The supervisor gave him a scowl, and continued working his way through the line of other men, who like Abe had agreed to the community service project instead of having to face a judge and actual prison time. Abe looked over the other workers suspiciously. Some, like him, did not look like they belonged there. Too fresh, too clean, too naive looking. Others looked like they had probably served plenty of prison time already, and maybe they had gotten out on work release, or probation or something. Abe folded his arms across his chest while he waited.

  “What’re you looking at?” one of the others, pulling on his orange smock, said aggressively to Abe. He was a big man, with tattoos on both of his biceps.

  Abe took half a step back and looked to the side.

  “I’m not looking at anything,” he said calmly.

  “You were looking at me. What’s your problem?”

  “I wasn’t looking at anyone. I’m sorry,” Abe said firmly, moving away a little further, trying to look like he wasn’t running away.

  The dragon of a supervisor yelled at everyone to gather close, and started giving instructions. People were handed various tools and chores to clean up the park. Abe was given a large wheelbarrow and ordered to fill it up with the wood that his friend with the tattooed biceps was going to be chopping up with a chainsaw.

  Abe followed him reluctantly, and stood watching for him to do his job. Tattoo squeezed the trigger on the chainsaw and it roared to life.

  “So much better than those damn gas powered models,” he approved. He waved it at Abe. “You’d better stay back, pretty boy, you wouldn’t want to get hurt.”

  Abe was happy to stand back and watch Tattoo hack at a dead tree that needed to be removed. He looked around for a minute at the other detainees, picking up garbage, painting fences, and digging flower beds. Most were not standing around like he was. But he couldn’t do his job until Tattoo did his.

  A few minutes later, the supervisor came over, scowling at him.

  “Get to work, you,” he snarled.

  “I’m just waiting until there’s wood for me to pick up,” Abe pointed out. The supervisor scowled.

  “Get a move on it, Malloy,” he ordered the tattooed man.

  “I’m doing my job,” Malloy growled.

  “Speed it up. We don’t have all day. Well, we do, but not all day to do one job. Let’s see some action.”

  “I’m doing just fine. Why don’t you have him scoop doggie doo while he’s waiting?”

  The supervisor glared at him and moved on to harass someone else. Malloy turned and looked at Abe.

  “It’s your job to keep him off my case. Make yourself look busy,” he ordered.

  Abe shrugged.

  “There’s nothing for me to do until you’re done,” he pointed out.

  “Do I look like I care? Make yourself look busy!”

  Abe just stood there, looking and waiting. Malloy brandished the chain saw at him and Abe didn’t move. Malloy turned back to his tree, wiping sweat from his forehead.

  “All you’re doing is standing around,” he muttered. "While I do all the work. Must be nice to be rich and pay off all the officials.”

  Abe growled.

  “I didn’t pay anyone off. I’m just waiting for you, then I’ll do my job.”

  “You think I don’t know what’s going on here?” Malloy demanded.

  “And people think I’m paranoid,” Abe muttered

  “What?” Malloy turned around, his face flushing dark red. “Paranoid? Who told you that?” he demanded.

  “I’m not paying anyone off. You think what you want,” Abe said.

  “You’re calling me names? Calling me crazy? I’ll show you crazy!”

  He brandished the chainsaw at Abe again. Abe stepped back, looking around for the supervisor and the other guards to intervene.

  “You take it back!” Malloy ordered, his eyes practically popping from his head, and his face a dusky purple.

  “I take it back,” Abe said. “You’re not crazy.”

  But he couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of his voice, and Malloy could hear it.

  “Think you’re a big man, do you?” he questioned. "You think you can fight a chainsaw?”

  Abe took another step backward, and ran into someone else. He didn’t turn to see who it was, too wrapped up in the drama to give his attention to anyone else. That was a mistake. The man that he had run into shoved him back violently, and Abe was propelled directly at the chainsaw-wielding maniac. He tried to stop himself, but the forward motion was too strong. Malloy moved forward with the chainsaw, as if to stop Abe with it, and Abe realized with horror that there was not going to be anything to stop the collision between himself and the roaring chainsaw. He screamed, but no sound came out of his mouth. He met the chainsaw with a crash. As he tried to step backward, the chain of the chainsaw was tugging him forward into the buzzing blade, caught on his clothing, yanking him almost off of his feet into an inexorable doom. Abe struggled to free himself in that split-second, but there was no escape. The orange smock tore off of him. The apron. The chef’s shirt. There was a grinding noise, and the noise of the chainsaw suddenly stopped.

  Everyone stood there, frozen. Abe was shirtless, bare chested, staring at Malloy. Malloy was looking at the chainsaw, with the shirts jamming the chain, and then looked at Abe, his eyes wide and formerly flushed face pale as death. There were suddenly yells from the various guards and the supervisor and they all ran to Malloy. They pulled the now-dead chainsaw from Malloy’s numb hands, yelling and swearing and putting him in cuffs. He accepted the treatment as gently as a lamb.

  “Are you okay?” the supervisor demanded, manhandling Abe. “Are you injured?”

  Abe looked down at his body, slowly evaluating the question. He was sore from the collision, but must have hit the body of the chainsaw rather than the blade initially. He still had all of his fingers, the full use of his limbs; his belly and chest, as he ran his hands over them, seemed to be intact and uninjured.

  “Talk about lucky!” someone said. "He was pushed straight into the chainsaw!”

  Malloy had been taken away to one of the waitin
g police vehicles, and everybody else was being rounded up as well.

  “Is that it, then?” Abe questioned, looking around. "Aren’t we going to stay here and finish the job?”

  “No way,” the supervisor said, looking shocked. "Any incidents and we have to go straight back to the jail to report it and sort everything else. No more work for today.”

  Abe pursed his lips.

  “Does it still count as a full work day?” he questioned. "I have to get my time checked off.”

  “You’re lucky to be getting out of here alive! I wouldn’t be worrying about your hours at this point!”

  “But will it?” Abe questioned. "Will it still count toward my hours?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh. Good.” Abe rubbed his arms. "Can I go back to my car to get another shirt?”

  “No! I’ll get you another smock, that will have to do until we finish sorting this out at the jail.”

  Abe looked in dismay at the orange smock that the supervisor retrieved for him, and pulled it on over his head.

  Abe and Ursula worked to load Abe’s boxes of stuff from the storage unit to a rented van.

  “I really think you’ll like this place,” Ursula said. "A friend of mine owns the house and is looking for a tenant in the basement. It’s a nice little suite, good sized kitchen, bedroom, and living area. Full bath - most basement suites only have a shower stall. The rent is reasonable. She likes the idea of having a man around the house so that she’s not a woman living all by herself, becoming a target, you know?”

  Abe was mostly ignoring Ursula’s chatter. But he agreed that it was time for him to be getting a place of his own. He needed to accept that she wasn’t going to take him back in. He had to start sleeping in a bed again. A bed would be really nice. He’d slept a few nights at the homeless shelters, when he couldn’t stand sleeping in the car any more, but it was always noisy, crowded, and smelled. The comfort of actually sleeping on a mattress, however thin and lumpy it was, was matched by the discomfort of having to sleep around so many other people, cots crowded together so that you had no privacy and no personal space.

  “Did you see that?” Abe questioned, as he loaded a couple of boxes into the van.

  “What?” Ursula questioned, turning back around.

  “That black van. It’s the second time that it’s driven by here.”

  “It’s probably security for the storage company,” Ursula dismissed it.

  “I think it was Theo. Do you think it could have been Theo? He drives a van.”

  “Not one like that, though. He’s a delivery driver, he wouldn’t be driving around here.”

  “Well, if he was, he would have to change to a different van so he wouldn’t be so obvious,” Abe asserted.

  “How many vans do you think he has? Theo only has the one.”

  “He could have a lot of them. He has a lot of money, he and the other jewel thieves. They stole millions of dollars worth of gems.”

  “He only has one. He’s not part of the gang of jewel thieves,” Ursula sighed impatiently.

  “You are too trusting. You don’t understand what is really going on.”

  “I don’t understand what’s going on,” Ursula agreed. “Life has just gone crazy since that day. You can’t settle down, and there’s bodies showing up in my back yard, the police are around all the time. I don’t get it. I want my life to go back to normal.”

  “So do I,” Abe agreed, “but that’s not going to happen if we ignore what’s going on, and pretend that nothing is happening. We’re caught up in the middle of it. You can’t just ignore it.”

  He heaved another box into the truck, and stared at the back wall of the administration office, where he’d just noticed several pieces of graffiti.

  “And where has your investigation gotten you so far?” Ursula demanded, heaving another box into the van and settling it into position. She wiped sweat from her face. “You say that you’ve been kidnapped. Chased. Attacked. Your family is in a constant uproar. And a dead body was in my back yard!”

  “I didn’t put it there,” Abe said tentatively.

  “I know you didn’t. I told the cops that before they got around to figuring out you had an alibi. But then why was it there? A coincidence? If you stir up a hornet’s nest, you’re going to get stung. So stop it. Live a quiet life, and don’t try to find out who did it.”

  Abe stood there for a moment in silence, considering, looking tired and drawn. His head turned, and Ursula followed his gaze and saw the black van go by again.

  “They’re part of the gang,” Abe said lowly. “I can’t do this. Finding me somewhere to live was a nice idea, Urs, but I can’t. Anywhere I go, they’re going to follow me. I have to keep on the move, keep a low profile. Anywhere I settle, other people are going to be in danger as well as me. I just can’t do that to your friend, or to anyone else. I have to keep moving.”

  “Abe!” Ursula called as he headed for his car, abandoning the moving project. “Abe! You can’t leave me here with all of this!”

  He shook his head, got into the car, and pulled out. He gunned the engine, taking off quickly in the direction opposite to what the black van had taken. Ursula stood there with a box getting heavier in her arms, mouth open, trying to process what had just happened.