Loose Ends

CHAPTER 3: ADAM

  Now I see. I can’t, but I do. Zeke’s now in color, no longer a grainy black and white shade.

  Lieutenant Marner told me to watch. That was his order. Watch and learn. I couldn’t have watched any better. My nose was an inch from the black and white monitor, my ears wrapped in the headphones. The learning, though, that’s what I botched, that’s why I’m dying.

  Digit skimmed a surfing magazine. His shirt read, “I Got Lucky in Kentucky.” I wore my short sleeve powder blue button up and creased khakis.

  I don’t want to remember this. Why can’t I spend the last of my life holding on to the first time I kissed Brenda? Try.

  Zeke image swelled on the monitor as he approached the camera. He picked up the clock and his image jiggled.

  Can’t control it. It is before my eyes, like they said. But it’s not my whole life? Just this week? The worst week of my life?

  Zeke brought the camera close to his mouth and spoke. I couldn’t hear a word. I asked Digit what was wrong. He closed the magazine and tapped his headphones. He cranked the dial on the receiver. Hiss roared, but I still couldn’t anything from the other room. Digit fiddled with the wires, then banged on the receiver. I banged also. He batted my hand away.

  “Don’t do that.”

  “Sorry.”

  Bit I didn’t turn from the monitor, didn’t stray from my orders.

  Zeke seemed to be repeating the same words, the same sentence. I asked Digit to decipher Zeke’s message.

  Digit pulled a cord from the back of the receiver and plugged it back in. “I don’t read lips dude.”

  “Want to take a shot?”

  Digit, easily exasperated like most people his age and younger, sighed, but donated a moment of his time to carefully study the monitor anyway. “I don’t know. Eye fawned Euro wave?”

  “I fought your wife?”

  “I fucked or weighed?”

  I still have no good idea. My idea is not good.

  I turned to Digit for a second, just a second, and asked if I should go over. He shrugged. I looked back.

  “Gotcha.” Zeke’s laugh, loud and distorted, exploded in my ears. My hands cupped the headphones. The image shook.

  Digit adjusted the receiver. “Bastard.”

  “So everything’s working?”

  “Yeah. Everything but his brain.” Digit picked up his magazine and leaned out of my periphery. “I’m not laughing. Are you?”

  Zeke set down the clock and the image stabilized. It pointed toward the curtains.

  “Look. It’s all wrong. What do we do?”

  Hard knocks from Zeke’s room thwarted Digit from answering.

  I pulled closer to the screen. My nose brushed against the glass. The door opened. A young voice: “Cop!” I felt the vibrations from a thud through my shoes.

  Then, nothing.

  I watched the curtains. “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  I tapped my thumb against my thigh. The end had begun, and I tapped my thumb against my thigh.

  Watch and learn. Lieutenant Marner was explicit. He gave an order. I had to obey orders. If I dismissed them, I could expect punishment.

  And then, I asked myself the most side-splitting question I had ever put forth in my life, possibly the most riotous question ever posed by anyone. “What if Zeke needs my help?”

  I threw off the headphones and launched from my seat. In the hallway, I heard the first gunshot. In the lobby, the second. Past the front door, in the middle of the street, the splayed body of a young man, face down, a black duffle bag by his right hand, a wet crimson circle on the back of his white t-shirt. It looked like a stop light.

  Zeke stood over the body. He pointed his smoking gun to the motel and yelled at me to call it in.

  The old man emerged from behind the front desk as I passed and asked me, “Is everything okay?”