Page 15

15

Kill Bill

Jake

I borrow one of Grant’s cars to get to the airport. I take a key fob at random and click it repeatedly in the basement parking until I find the car it belongs to: red, and fast-looking. Dodi will like it. There’s an accident on the way to her apartment building, and after crawling only two blocks in fifteen minutes, I turn onto a side street and coast down a residential road, hang a left, and then drive parallel to the main road.

But then on autopilot, I turn right, past the dog park, the running path that leads to the beach, the weird, artsy private school for the posh kids—and there it is: his street.

I have plenty of time. I can indulge myself. I prowl down the quiet lane, all massive chestnut trees and narrow concrete sidewalks shifted around by the roots underneath. In the summer this street is a tunnel, the sky closed off by the branches above, the sunlight sifting through the leaves like green gold. The houses are big and old, brick and cedar shingle and deep verandas and massive shrub roses. The house in question is shabbier than the others. It’s been years since he was able to get up on a ladder and strip the creeping ivy off the porch.

I come down here sometimes, just to check. Just to make sure he’s still—

I slam the brakes in time to avoid killing the elderly man who has stepped out onto the road from behind an SUV with tinted windows.

“For fuck’s sake!” I shout at no one. The old man turns, and it’s him, of course. Stooped, white-haired, craggy-faced. He’d have a grandfatherly look if he ever smiled, but I don’t think he has much to smile about these days.

“What are you doing out here?” I say through my lowered window. He’s not dressed for the weather—a thin bathrobe and slippers. You have to be fucking kidding me.

“My bin’s making off,” he says, scowling, pointing to where a garbage can is rolling down the road ahead of a strong wind. I park the car and jog after it. When I return with it, he’s staring at me, confused, like he recognizes me, but not where from. It’s unsettling. I avert my face.

“Where do you want this?”

He opens the tall gate at the side of the house, ushers me in, and I deposit the can next to a recycling bin.

“I have to go,” I mutter, still not looking at him. The gate has swung shut, so I push it, but it won’t budge. I grip the handle and rattle it. Then I notice the padlock.

I turn, and the old man is staring me down with a grim face. He’s eighty if he’s a day, frail and shaky. One bare leg is swollen, and his back is stooped, but somehow in his expression I can see him as he was when he was a younger man. Scrappy, bold. Not afraid to get in a fight. One hand is balled into a fist at his side.

“What do you want?” he asks.

“What do I want? I want you to unlock this gate.”

He shakes his head at me. “I recognize you from the video.”

He’s not making any sense. Dementia? But then he raises one gnarled hand and points, and I follow his gaze to a camera on the corner of the neighbor’s house.

That’s new.

“They showed me.” He speaks slowly, like he has all the time in the world, although at his age, he really doesn’t. “Snooping through my mailbox, prowling around my yard, peering in my windows. Three times in the past two weeks since they set them up. Gave me your plate number, too.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Burglars and murderers case out their targets before striking. Which are you? Might as well make it easy for you. Here’s my house, doors unlocked. And here I am, a lonely, doddering old senior with no family. If you kill me, it would be good timing. It will be at least a week before anyone notices that I didn’t take my recycling out for pickup.”

“You’re confused. I don’t have time for this.” I consider the height of the fence. Six feet at least, but with a foot on top of the weedy flower planter, I could get over.

“Neighbors have a German shepherd,” he says, as if reading my mind. “Not a smart idea.”

No fence-jumping, then. He and I consider each other, then he stumps up the steps to his side door and points his cane inside. “May as well make a proper visit of this.”

A good serial killer has the good manners to keep it personal, and it’s an invitation I can’t turn down. I follow him inside the house—the house I’ve been so curious about. A TV is playing somewhere I can’t see, and canned laughter erupts as the door closes behind me. It looks different from inside, the clutter and dust more apparent. It hasn’t been properly cleaned in a very long time.

Down a little doglegged hall with creaky floors, past an open door—there it is, the TV, in a room that looks like a nest. There’s a pillow and a blanket on the armchair, a stack of old books on a table to one side, dirty mugs and plates, a little space heater in lieu of a properly functioning furnace. No wellness checks here.

At the back of the house is the kitchen, and there he heaves himself down into a chair by the table, where there’s a new coffee maker fresh out of its Amazon box. He pokes it contemptuously with the handle of his cane.

“Neighbors ordered this for me. I’d offer you coffee before you murder me, but I can’t figure it out.” The old, battered coffee maker on the counter is from the nineties and has one toggle switch. This one has as many buttons as a graphing calculator.

Next to it a finished crossword rests on the table. A small plate freckled with toast crumbs sits nearby. I bet he uses that same plate every day. I pan around a little, trying to steal just a bit more from this moment while I can. Bottles of medicine in a jumble by the sink. A pair of broken reading glasses on the counter, held together by tape. Is anyone helping him from day to day?

“Help yourself, kid. It’s just stuff. It’s all going to a landfill when I croak. They’ll scrape my remains off the linoleum, and then they’ll toss everything into a bin and take it away. I have no family, so the house will revert to the city. In a few years the neighbors won’t remember the name of the stooped old wanker who lived by himself and forgot to tie the front of his bathrobe when the postman rang.”

He swivels a little in his chair and points through the doorway.

“My TV is twenty years old, and I haven’t seen the remote in two years. It’s been on this whole time. Mary’s jewelry and silverware went to her nieces in the States, so there’s none of that here. I have about a hundred dollars cash in that drawer right there. I don’t remember if there’s anything good upstairs—haven’t set foot up there since my knee surgery. So when you’re ready, one swift crack to the back of the head, right here—and make it count, please—and then have fun rifling through my stuff.”

It’s not his stuff I want to rifle through. There are probably boxes shoved into an old childhood room, upstairs. My eyes fall onto a yellowed newspaper clipping stuck to the fridge. A picture of a smiling, handsome man with dark hair and glasses, and two paragraphs of text below it: an obituary. He catches me staring.

“That’s my son. He was only a little older than you when he died. A bludgeoning on the back of the head would beat how he went. Degenerative neurological condition. It was awful, once it started. Numbness.” He raises one gnarled hand and waggles his fingers at me to show where the numbness started. “And then he lost function bit by bit, until he was trapped in his own body. A terrible way to die. You young men think you’re indestructible, but you’re not—unless you get to my age, and you realize you’re one of the unlucky few who are. Hereditary. It’s a good thing he never had kids.”

On cue, the sitcom audience laughs uproariously in the next room.

He twists his head like an old vulture and peers at the photo. “I wish I had more photos. I never thought I’d live so long I’d forget the color of my son’s eyes, but there you go.”

“What time do you drink your coffee?”

I press buttons until the coffee maker is programmed to run at the time he tells me. When I look up, he’s staring at me with a bemused expression.

“Change out the grounds when you’re done and it’ll be ready the next morning for you,” I tell him.

“You’re a very helpful murderer.” He squints his eyes shut and scratches his hairy ear. “Hazel. They were hazel.”

Applause erupts from the TV in the next room.

“What are you really here for?” he asks.

I’ve stayed too long. Dodi will be wondering where I am.

“I have to go, Bill,” I say, and he raises his bushy eyebrows when I use his name. He never told it to me.

I walk out of the kitchen, down the dim hallway. There are faded family photos on the walls—many of them of that young man with the glasses, from babyhood to adulthood—and I let myself out the front door. I lock it from the inside before I close it.