Chapter 10
Sunday, April 25, 1999
The scarcely populated bus stopped at Benning Road, three blocks from the Phelps’s residence. The bus stop was across the street from one of Jim’s adolescent haunts, St. Peter’s cemetery.
As an only child and friendless loner, Jim had grown up befriending the graveyard. He saw graveyards, not as scary places, but as museums marking lives long passed.
The largest headstone in the graveyard bore the name Fred Kruger. Jim, a professed science fiction and horror movie buff couldn’t help but come to love that headstone, and in a very surreal sense, had come to use the headstone as a source of counseling, both spiritual and mundane.
Jim walked slowly across the street, aware that his dark clothes blended him into the night. As he walked through the rows of headstones, he caught glimpse of the new moon hanging over his head. An inexplicable sensation kept him from looking up at the moon and he didn’t know why. The giant orb tried to stifle him with an overpowering, frozen glare. Jim watched the ground as he made his way to the largest head stone he’d ever seen in person.
Fred Kruger’s headstone was eight feet tall and four feet wide. The minute Jim reached his marble friend, a wave of nostalgia ran over him. He realized he had not seen his good friend in several years and briefly wondered why.
“Long time, no see, Freddy,” he said as he pulled a small whisky flask (stolen from his father’s exorbitant liquor cabinet) from his left cargo pocket.
Jim sat on the ground and leaned up against the front of the headstone. He paid no more attention to the dampness of the ground than he had Steven Carter’s poem. For almost a half-hour he sat eyes to the ground, mouth in his father’s flask and quietly wept.
After the tears subsided and his head swam in whisky, he began to speak.
“The thing is, Fred. I never really thought of myself as a murderer, and I know that killing people for revenge is wrong, but you gotta—“ He choked on a sip of whisky, coughed into his bare arm, then spoke, “you gotta understand how they made me feel. Joe Corolla tore my pants down all through junior high. Every time I tried to fight him a googol of morons came and pounded on me. Joe, Derrick, Steve, Luke and Brian had been harassing me since grade school man: beating me up, bullying me, making fun of me, destroying school projects, hell—“ Jim paused and took another sip of the burning Wild Turkey and coughed. “And it wasn’t just all the bullying, all the people who thought I was a loser and an outcast because of the way I was treated, it was the way they made me feel about myself, as if they were the only people in the world and they had kicked me out, made me a servant of sorts who could only stand at attention and watch as they went on into their fun lives.”
Jim glanced up at the moon, then quickly looked away.
“You see, Fred, I feel, I don’t know, somehow right, more peaceful and content with the world now that they’re gone. Those silly bastards thought they’d just go through life grinning and sinning without a care in the world or a pimple on their worry-free faces. Well they were wrong, Freddy. What goes around comes around. They kicked me out of their world and I kicked them out of mine. It ain’t my fault I live on planet earth.”
Jim drank another long pull of whisky that went down surprisingly smooth. I guess whisky is an acquired taste, he thought.
“If you only knew Fred, what it felt like to get lured into an empty girl’s locker room by a beautiful woman only to have some bitch steal your clothes so all the popular people could get a decent laugh. If only you knew what it’s like to want to kiss and love so badly but—“ He sighed. “But I don’t. I don’t know what it’s like to be cool, to be invited to parties or respected for certain gifts. The majority of the people in that school see me as nothing more than, oh hell, they don’t even see me.”
He drained the glass flask of whisky and chucked it a good fifty yards onto Benning Road, where its shattering chorus pleased him mildly.
“But enough about the poor bastards, Freddy.” Jim stood, put his left hand on the cool stone and looked up at the moon. “Fuck you, moon.”
He gave the moon his middle finger.
“Fuck you for hushing me. It’s about time I was heard, motherfucker and I been heard. I spoke with seven painful exploding words and my will is done.”
He thought of Steven Carter.
“Hey, Freddy,” he said as streaking tears rushed down his face. “There’s a good guy up there with you that I killed. I had to kill him to get away clean, you know, survival of the fittest and all. It was mean and cruel but Steve lived a life in fear, anyway. Do me a favor, and well, make sure he never fears another thing again because, well, because, well, fear is what defeated him. He was spineless and full of animosity he could only put on paper. Take care of him though, he’s a good soul.”
Jim Phelps, drunk for the third time in his eighteen years, kissed his stone counselor on the name and walked slowly home.
He could see the faint pink of a beginning day, and though adrenaline still rushed through his young body, the whisky had made him sleepy.
“God bless the warrior child,” he whispered to the looming moon before walking into the house and making his way toward dreamland.
What a good day, thought the young killer as he faded into a deep sleep.
When Ethan awoke, a tight bandage strapped to his leg, his head felt light, like he’d just shot clean, light, heroin (a drug he had only minimal experience with due to the excess of vomit it always incurred). In less than four seconds of consciousness, he saw the beautiful face of his love.
“Deborah,” he said.
She grabbed his hand.
“I’m here, babe, so are your parents.”
Ethan raised his head to see his parents sitting with their typical conservative manner (good posture, eyes straight) and sensed their woe.
“Hi, Dad, Mom.”
His mother came over to him and put her arms around him as Deborah stood back.
“I’m so damn glad you’re alive, baby,” said his mother.
“Mom, you never swear.”
“Oh, baby,” she burst into tears and sat next to her husband and sobbed into his chest.
“Way to come through, Tiger. I’m glad you’re alive.”
The images of the bonfire party rushed through Ethan’s head like a herd of charging bulls. He was overwhelmed with the memories of five dead students, two of whom were close friends.
“Oh, shit,” he said out loud. “The party.”
“Shhh,” said Deborah, back by his side. “Don’t think about it, Ethan. It was just a horrible nightmare.”
A tall, slender, bald doctor with a typical doctor’s white lab coat, clipboard and sterile expression walked through the open door of the hospital room.
“Ethan,” he said to the room.
“Yeah.”
“I just wanted to see how you were feeling.”
“I feel drunk,” Ethan coughed the words.
“That’s the morphine. It’ll wear off in time.” The doctor rubbed his bald head as he walked to the side of the bed opposite Deborah. “I know you’ve been through a lot, but I want you to know that you are a lucky man. The bullet was only a twenty-two caliber and did not come within three inches of bone. In three weeks time, we can take out your stitches and in another three weeks, you’ll be as good as new.”
“Can I still pitch. I need that leg to pitch.”
“Kid,” said the doctor. “In six weeks you could run a marathon if you wanted. As far as getting shot goes, you’ve done it better than anyone I’ve ever seen.”
No one laughed.
The doctor, perhaps sensing that he was unwanted said, “Well, I’ll leave you to your family. In case you’re curious, you can leave the hospital in a few hours and you can even go to school. However, I’m sending a nurse up with a cane and I recommend you use it for at least seven days, okay.”
“Hey, Doc,” said Ethan.
“Yes.”
“Thanks for taking out that bullet and sewing me up.”
“It’s a living,” said the doctor.
As the doctor exited, two plain-clothes detectives entered.
“Ethan Lee,” said the short, stocky dark-haired gentleman in an old brown suit and a coffee-stained olive tie.
“Yes.”
“I’m Detective Lamartina, this is Sergeant Davison. We need to ask you a few questions.”
Ethan, in a fit of middle class politeness, introduced his girlfriend and parents to the police officers.
“Were you at the party?” asked Sergeant Davison.
Deborah nodded slowly.
“We’ll need to ask you a few questions, too, afterwards.”
“What’s up?” asked Ethan. “Are all five dead?”
Both detectives shifted their eyes to the floor.
Ethan interpreted their mannerisms as a yes.
“Do you know one Steven Carter?” Lamartina asked.
“No,” said Ethan.
“Think hard,” said detective Lamartina. “According to my information, you’ve had a few classes with him. You’re an honors student, correct?”
“Yes sir.”
“Well, so was Steven Carter.”
Davison spoke, “little blond guy, blue eyes, glasses, wrote poetry?”
“Oh yeah, Squeaky,” said Ethan.
“Squeaky?” asked Lamartina.
“Yeah, he always seems so rat like and small, as if he’s waiting to be stepped on or something. I remember him, why?”
Officers Lamartina and Davison shot each other dismissive glances before Lamartina asked, “did he have any enemies? Was there a reason why he would kill those boys?”
“None I can think of. I’ve never seen him react violently in my life. He always seemed like the type who would cry if he stepped on a frog. Why do you ask?”
“Never mind that,” said Davison, who had removed his thin, circular shaped eye glasses from over his light blue eyes. He chewed the ear piece end of his spectacles and sighed. “We just need to know what kind of person Steven Carter was.”
“Well, all I know about Steve is that he’s a small, sober guy who writes real well. Oh, and once he threw up when we were dissecting pig fetuses in biology.”
Officer Lamartina laughed. Officer Davison shot an offending glance toward his partner, who stopped chuckling and forced his pudgy face back into an expression of stone seriousness.
“We have every reason to believe that Steven Carter was the murderer. We found his dead body with the weapon, his prints on the gun and a poem in his pocket describing all the jocks and socialites at his school as, to paraphrase, unworthy maggots who deserve death. What we really need to know is weather or not Steve was prone to violence. His parents tell us that he never fought, boxed or even played a full contact sport. They say this is not in his character. Would you agree?”
Ethan felt very grown up and official when he said, “based on what I know about Squeaky, I’d say he couldn’t kill a dog with two legs.”
“Miss,” said Detective Lamartina. “Did you know Steven Carter?”
“I just moved here a month ago. I don’t even know what he looks like.”
Sergeant Davison looked to Ethan for confirmation, found it in his eyes and said, “Just one more question.” This killer had remarkable aim. I cannot believe this was the first time he or she ever fired a gun. We have witnesses saying that you walked towards the gunfire. Why did you do that?”
“I don’t know,” said Ethan. “After Joe and Steve went down, I got really angry and I just did it. I didn’t even think.”
“Your damn right you didn’t” said Lamartina.
“Jerry,” said Davison to his partner.
“Sorry,” Jerry Lamartina said to the room.
“Why, why do you think he spared you?” asked Sergeant Davison with a careful tone.
“I don’t know,” said Ethan after some thought. “Maybe he missed.”
“No,” said Davison. “This guy hit exactly what he wanted to with every shot from almost a hundred yards in fifteen mile an hour wind. Few people could shoot that well, that quickly. Mr. Lee, it is our belief that the killer knew you, and that perhaps, when you walked towards him, he spared your life deliberately, which points to a specific motive for these killings.”
“I don’t know,” said Ethan. “I’m a jock and a socialite.”
“Well,” Davison flipped his leather notebook shut and put away his pen. “Rest up, and if you have any more information.” Davison slid a business card onto the stand next to Ethan’s bed. “Please give us a call. Odds are, if the killer is not Steven Carter, he or she may express their guilt to you.”
“Sure,” said Ethan, as the two polyester clad civil servants exited his hospital room.
“Sure.”
Deborah kissed him on his forehead.
“Thanks for coming, Babe. Thanks for taking me to the hospital. Thanks for loving me.”
“Well,” said Robert Lee. “I guess we’ll leave you two alone. I’ll see you at home, Ethan, and if you need to talk, we’re here for you.”
“Thanks for coming guys,” Ethan said to his parents.
“Call your parents if you haven’t yet Deborah,” said Mr. Lee, handing a few quarters to Deborah.
“Thanks,” she said meekly.
When the two were alone, Deborah asked Ethan, “what do you think?”
“I think you need to go to sleep, Miss Van Klein, you look tired.”
She laughed, caressed his face with her fingertips and said, “I love you.”
“I love you.”
Deborah and Ethan laid on his hospital bed, watching television, when the six o’clock news came on.
Ethan was depressed to learn that the deaths of his friends and classmates was the top “story” as if it were nothing more than the concoction of some twisted horror writer. He saw a few classmates, anxious to grab their shot of the spotlight, describing all the blood and carnage.
Ethan thought of Columbine.
Deborah thought of Ethan.
Then he heard a student say, “and my boy Ethan Lee, he walked right toward the killer like he was gonna’ take care of the whole situation with his bare hands, and man, he got shot, but they couldn’t kill him.”
Ethan didn’t recognize the classmate.
“Hey, Ethan. Get well man. You are one brave dude,” the kid said flashing a two-fingered V at Ethan through the television.
“Shit,” said Ethan, shutting off the story before more details presented themselves.
As if I don’t have enough problems, he thought, before an elderly, African American Nurse with short hair and a scar on her left cheek arrived with his cane and wheelchair.
“All ready to go home, young man.”
“You bet,” he said.
As Ethan, making full use of a white, plastic cane with rubber stoppers, limped onto the parking lot, a flock of cameramen and television reporters descended on him and Deborah.
“Don’t say a thing,” he told her as they came up. “Run to the car and start it.”
He watched as they closed in on him. As Ethan saw it, reporters and cameramen were coming from the visitor’s entrance, about three hundred feet away from the doors Deborah and Ethan had used to exit the hospital.
“Come pick me up when you’re done,” he yelled to his love as he limped quickly behind her. The pain in his injured right leg was just a slight throbbing, but felt as if it couldn’t sustain Ethan’s weight. Their voices were all deliberately pinched shouts.
“Ethan, Ethan.”
“Mr. Lee.”
“Do you have a statement?”
Before Ethan could think, about thirty people surrounded him, not letting him walk. He tried to push them aside, but they hardly yielded.
They asked question after question and he stared at them frozen faced.
“Are you all right?”
“How do you feel after all that?”
“Were you friends with the victims?”
Ethan looked deep into the parking lot and saw Deborah get into her car.
“What can you tell us about the incident Mr. Lee? Are you in shock?”
As Deborah’s car pulled up to the crowd, he pushed a middle age, bald cameraman aside and limped to the passenger side of Deborah’s car.
As the crowd moved around her Honda Civic, Ethan turned to them and said, “Listen vultures, I just lost a lot of close fucking friends, so if your looking for as goddam movie of the week you can take a flying fuck to Littleton.”
His leg hurt like hell as he entered the car.
That night, as Deborah lovingly applied oral sex to her injured love, he thought of the power of friendship, the loyalty of a teammate and he wondered how he could ever be complete again.
When he came, he felt as if he’d let loose some kind of emotional explosion.
“God, I love you,” he looked up at the ceiling as he spoke.
As Deborah slept on his chest like a worn down angel, Ethan wondered why anyone would kill a group of people and then commit suicide. There was a lot of it going around and it didn’t make sense.
Jim Phelps spent the night masturbating to some of his favorite adult videos. After a shower and a shave, he felt like a million dollars. He had not seen television since his revenge, and thus had no idea how well his cover up had worked.
He looked at his naked body in the mirror and gazed over his pimply face.
“God, I need a girlfriend,” he said to the mirror.
This was not the first time Jim Phelps told his reflection that he needed a woman to love. It was however, the first time he ever had the confidence to believe that a woman might be coming his way, and soon. He felt the morose confidence one can only feel after successfully committing murder. He felt strong and sad. Every act he had once considered stressful and overbearing, like asking a girl out or fighting a bully, waned.
Nothing was like murder. Nothing was as empowering or as ensuring of one’s confidence as taking another human being’s life deliberately and getting away with it.
That night, Jim Phelps dreamt he was cleaning up a red, sticky mess from the floor of the men’s locker room at Gold’s Gym. When he finished, he wiped his hands and washed them.
In the mirror, he looked just like Ethan Lee, all blonde and virile.
“Missed a spot,” said a familiar voice behind him.
Jim turned around and saw Steven Carter holding a Winchester .30/06 to his jaw.
“No, Steve,” said Jim, but it was too late.
The gun went off and Steven Carter fell to the floor, bloody and limp.
“Well, it looks like you still have one more mess to clean,” said Ethan Lee, who had appeared in the doorway with two beautiful, blonde women at his side. “Before you clean up yourself, that is.”
Jim Phelps did not sleep well.