Page 6 of The End of the World As We Know It

Kip Blanchard got himself killed.

The poor bastard was in the Safeway parking lot and the colder guys on the job were right.What kind of an idiot brings a gun to a knife fight and loses?

Kip Blanchard, apparently.

Three days after the funeral, Abel put two suitcases in the trunk of his car, one for him, one for her, for Amelie. He stashed Kip’s handkerchief in his back pocket. Not in a serial-killer-with-a-trophy kinda way. More like a cat who kills the mouse for its humans. And he wasn’t dumb. He wasn’t gonnashowit to Amelie. He also didn’t expect things would get physical right away. It was just there to remind him of what he did, what he was.

A man.

He picked up fresh flowers and he drove slowly. There was no rush, not today. When you find the one, you want to savor every step of the beautiful ladder, each one aBridgeleading to someplace better, higher. Closer.

He popped a breath mint after he parked in front of her house.

It was quiet here, which said a lot about Amelie’s life, about her friends. A dead husband and no one’s here to help?

“Excuse me! Officer!”

It was her.Rona.And it was him. Stupid.

She froze up on her front lawn. He looked down at the bandanna in his hand. White and blood-soaked.Off.Abel was not a man, not fully. He was a boy clinging to an unlucky rabbit’s foot and Rona was backing up, looking this way and that way. A bird going cuckoo.

He slipped the handkerchief in his back pocket.

Abel needed a minute.

Rona was old. Elderly kind of old. And Amelie was right. She was paranoid, sickly. While the house looked pert and quaint on the outside, it was a different story inside. Sticky notes everywhere, pink and green and blue.TapeMurder, She Wrote!Milk! Kool-Aid!It broke Abel’s heart to think of a woman living like this, shit-stained granny panties and no grandchildren. He’d been smart about things, taming her the way you do a snake, holding her tight, telling her it was okay, leading her to the bathroom and helping her out of her clothes, running the water like a home health aide, making sure it wasn’t too hot or too cold.

Eventually Rona submitted, as if she wanted this samaritan to send her to a better place. Protect and serve. Or maybe she just passed out from the stress.

In any case, she died before he could kill her, and if the cops did investigate—they wouldn’t—they’d conclude that a shut-in died in her own tub. People don’t like that kind of thing. They don’t like it when lonely old people die alone.

Abel drank the last of Rona’s tea. It was safer this way, taking a piece of her that he couldn’t carry around in his back pocket. Thebandanna.Stupid, yes. But stupid only matters if you refuse to getsmart. He was kind, a chip off the old block, visiting Rona one last time, kneeling by her side. He was starting to see that his father was wrong about a lot, but right, too. Turned out Abel really wasoff.Anyone who kills two people and keeps his tea down is missing a piece or two. A heart. A conscience. Abel heard a siren and remembered the virus. Maybe the bad in him was in him all along. His mother used to paint her eyelids blue to bring out the blue in her God-given eyes. Maybe the virus was like the eyelid paint, drawing the truth out of Abel. It was good to sit here, though. Proof that his goodness was also true, same as the bad.

The dead don’t die all at once. A soul goes slowly, in stages. Steeping tea.

And Abel was really doing it, wasn’t he? Getting away with two murders.

Okay, one and a half, but still. It was something.

Room 24 hadn’t changed much over the past twenty years, not that Abel told Amelie.

She looked around. She sniffed. “It’s bleach,” she said. “I hate bleach.”

“At least it’s clean,” he said, like a husband. Not yet. Soon, though.

Things hadn’t goneexactlyas planned. When he rang Amelie’s bell, she slammed the door on him. She said she was fine. She wasmourningand she said Abel had no idea what that was like because he wasn’t married, he didn’t know that love and hate are in lockstep, that passion is ugly, that she didn’t wantthe father of her childto die, that it wasn’t even about Randy, that love was love. It hurt, the way she didn’t invite him in, the way she said he had no business being here, as if he was in uniform, as if he wasn’t hers.

Eventually, she opened the door.

“Okay,” she’d said. “Okay.”

Abel went into the house. Again… not the stuff of dreams. Papers everywhere. She was in those jeans, jeans and a sweater that belonged to him.Kip.She was frustrated with liens and mortgages. All of it was so ugly, more proof that what Abel had done was noble. Kip had been a secretive prick, and the house was underwater. Her life was underwater.

Abel sat at the table.

“Any leads?”

“Any what?”