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Rational Conduct

By Kevin Tatro (US)

Chapter Fourteen

A Solid Work Ethic

Chapter 14 – A Solid Work Ethic

David was disappointed as the sunny trip through the Jersey suburbs ended with the sky turning gray as he entered Jersey City.  This was a city like Manhattan, but without any of the architecture, fancy Fifth Avenue stores, rich folks, busy businessmen, or Grand Central terminal.

As he followed the map to his destination, he glanced at the navigation system on the dash.  Artie said it was clean from prying eyes, but he didn’t use it.  He was operating outside the normal realm.  He was operating on cash, in an unmarked car, without a social security number or ID.  He would not use the laptop any more.  The old paper map bought with cash at the Cumberland Farms was bringing him into a pretty seedy part of town.  He wished he had a gun.

David considered a change of appearance again, but hell, he had only killed one guy in this getup and could easily go through a couple of the New Jersey creeps before ditching the car and changing the hairdo.  He still wished he had a gun. The neighborhood was creepy.  It was midday, and he had only killed one guy.  He would have to pick up the pace.  Tiernan was a challenge, the Staten Island guy killed himself, and so, he really had done so little damage compared to what he was capable of. He was barely a criminal in the history of serial killers.  He had better get hurrying.

The scumbag, child killer, pornographer, sleezeball lived on B Street.  Stupid name for a street.  It had no personality or reason for existing.  How unimaginative.  No wonder it held only old factory buildings.  Red brick.  Rusting metal framed windows.  Bumpy Streets with potholes, and if it had been sunny out, it would have held long shadows and little sunlight as the buildings were four or five stories tall.  The gray sky just added to the atmosphere.   No sunlight in this part of the world.  Just a gray day, in a gray place.  Nondescript.  A place that almost needs to exist, but nobody wants to be there.

It was hard to find any numbers on this street.  Steel doors sat randomly in little cutouts along the flat brick fronts, with truck loading bay doors in between.  If a guy lived in one of these things, it would be a bit spooky.  Maybe he had a loft like the ones on TV or a movie.  High ceilings, artsy sculptures, with ultra modern color schemes.  More likely he lived in a cramped little office with a manual typewriter where he punched out invoices for the shady work he performed.  Pasty gray skin.  Four days beard growth. Unwashed, mangy brown hair, and shuffling feet he could barley get off the ground due to his excess weight, lack of exercise, and general lack of caring one way or the other.

The building was easy to find.  No number on it, but 13 was on the door before it and number 17 after it.  Painted on the doors with bright white letters.  It was almost funny, as all the doors now seemed to have these big white letters.  As if it was the only way to tell one big, old, ugly, nondescript building from the other. 

He parked the Audi in front of the unlabeled door.  He was about to lock the car when he realized the little blink/blink sound of the electric locking would echo down the entire alley and alert the sleezeball inside.  Leaving the car seemed like a bad idea.  He imagined a fight in the upstairs loft,  gunshots, and a bad guy, killer, fugitive running down the stairs leaping off the steps, over the steel railing to jump in a car and not having one.  Running on foot down the brick walled street as the sirens drew closer.  Blue and white squad cars blocking his exits with doors open and uniformed policemen with guns drawn behind open doors with writing on them: ‘To serve and protect’.

He left the car door unlocked, and moved on up four steps to the industrial gray door of the old brick building.  David felt the cold metal handle in an otherwise seventy degree day.  Old gray metal. There was no latch to the door, and it opened smoothly though very heavy like metal doors are.  Faint light bulbs hanging from metal rafters over twenty foot ceilings provided dim lighting to the concrete floor room.  It was actually kind of small with empty gray metal shelves all through the room.  There were just enough shelves to prevent him from looking all the way through the room, but he had a feeling this one room was it for the first floor and that nobody was home.

A set of metal stairs were directly to his right, and he climbed them to a second floor that was much different.  Gray walls, rust colored linoleum flooring, fully equipped with cracks, scuffmarks, and whole sections missing, and two or three light bulbs in the long hallway of peeling paint and faded gray metal doors.   No lights from the doorways.  These were offices where clerks probably worked sending out the orders that were lifted and hauled to the trucks waiting below.  Some rooms still had old gray filing cabinets, and wooden desks with big deep scratches.  Gray wastebaskets sat in the corners.  Nothing moved. The rooms were lifeless.

On the desk of the third room on the left sat a computer.  A telephone line ran into it alongside a power cord.  It was a newer laptop, but nothing special. No chair in the room.  No wastebasket. Nothing.  David turned it on by hitting enter and typing TIMER OFF.

Gray walls.  An old gray round wastebasket with nothing in it but rust, and gum stuck to the bottom.  No desk. No chair.  The faint light from a single light bulb cast shadows in the hallway.  No sound.  No movement.  No windows.

A two inch pipe running the length of the ceiling was the most exciting thing in the room.  This was the most depressing spot in the world.  What had he come to?  Here to kill someone for what?  Anger?  Revenge? Satisfaction?  Pleasure?  What had he become?  This had to be hitting bottom.  If it were not for the Audi outside, he would have felt a totally different person from the one he was a day and a half ago.  The Audi he could relate to.  That and the constant regrets, daydreams and worries.  This he also recognized.

David needed a plan.  He had found himself in a hopeless cause with no other purpose than to turn on a computer.  It was on.  And nothing good had come of it.  He was not finding his daughter.  She was dead.   She was dead, and those who killed her would get away with it.  They were somehow allowed to kill a certain number of innocents each year before the feds would do anything about it.  There was no way David was going to stop it or do anything about it.  He was standing here feeling hopeless.  As despair set in, a bit of sanity did as well.  He would go home.   He would give up, go home, hold his wife, tolerate the cops as they filled out their forms and completed their files so they could close them.
 
He looked at the blank computer screen with no plan at all. He imagined sitting at home, days later.  He and his wife would stare at each other, as the two remaining children tried to get on with their lives with two washed out wasted parents.  In a week David would return to work, leaving his wife in the empty house to cry day after day.  What were the odds of her ever recovering?  What were the odds of him getting away with the murder of Brian Tiernan?  He would be escorted from work in handcuffs.  Kelly would get a call to bail him out.  They would waste the family resources on attorneys, and he would go to jail for the rest of his life, convicted of murder.  Kelly would sit in a cold home with graying walls as her two remaining children went out to make the best of what they had left of their lives.

Brrrrrrr……..

The sound of the vibration echoed through the gray lifeless cubicle.  The sound was so loud in the stillness of this dead space that the vibration in his pocket was a second thought.  He groped for the phone to quickly turn it off as somehow the humming was going to wake up all the bad guys in the world.

“Hello”

“Get out!”

“What?”

“Get out now!”   And the phone went dead.

Frozen in the gray dead cubicle, David suddenly had to think.  It was Artie.  Get out?

He turned quickly and bolted for the door.  The vintage converse all star high top basketball shoes griped poorly on the dusty, broken linoleum floor, and as he bolted through the office doorway with his right hand on the gray metal doorjamb.  He swung his body around the corner at maximum speed, feeling as though he would catch air all the way down the hallway.

As he flew round the corner, he hit hard into the chest of a huge man.  Black jacket.  Sunglasses.  Huge hands.  A huge man.  Flying backwards, as if bouncing off a tree at high speed, he fell, hitting his ass hard, and then cracking his head on the broken linoleum floor.  His head hurt and his ass would be bruised for months.  Quickly he pushed himself upward as he sat on his bruised ass with his palms on the broken linoleum behind him, staring up into the sunglasses of the huge man.

The hand moved from the jacket quickly, with the large black hole of the end of a gun pointing directly at David’s head.  He knew there was a noise but he didn’t hear it.  A blaze of fire erupted from the thick gun barrel obscuring most of the features of the large man in black, and David was sure he felt the heat of the fire burn his face before everything went black.

Slipping as he peddled the Converse All-Stars down the dull gray hallway, he hit the wall hard and jumped down the metal stairs four at a time.  The door ajar exposed the bright light coming from the gray day outside, and he broke into sunlight of the alleyway that earlier had appeared so dull and gray.  This daytime nightmare had not slowed him.

The Audi was where he had left it and he threw himself into it with ease.  This felt more like home.  With keys already in hand, it started quickly and made a large chirping noise as he slammed it reverse and pushed the petal to the floor.  The shift into drive with the right foot still all the way on the floor made an even louder squeal, with the stench of rubber already filling the car.  The car rocketed forward like only something Artie could have owned.  This was no average car, and under other circumstances David would have really enjoyed it.  Right now he just appreciated it with a bit of thanks to its owner.

As the car accelerated down the alley, now passing the fifty miles an hour mark, David looked in his mirror and saw a large silver car rolling up the alley behind him.  It could be his imagination as it did have a way of getting away from him, but the car seemed to be traveling much faster than someone looking for a door number in this desolate industrial zone.

Avenue B was a much wider roadway than the alleys that broke off on the left and the right.  It seemed so narrow due to the tall brick walls on both sides, but the alleys were even narrower.  A car or two were randomly parked along avenue B, and two cars would easily be able to pass each other on this street.  But the alleys were different.  A trash compactor or another car could easily block any through traffic.  Turning his head slightly to the right as he passed the alleys he could see light at the ends of the alleys where they connected with the much busier Avenue A.  David wanted to be on Avenue A without a big silver car behind him.

The silver car was behind him. Way back, but still there.  David had let up on the accelerator, and was cruising a seventy when a noise cracked in front and behind him.  The windshield of the Audi shattered.  A look in the rear view mirror revealed a shattered rear window as well.  As he drew his attention to the front windshield again, he watched a another round hole appear a foot to left of a round hole dead even with where a passenger would have been sitting.  Another foot to the left, and the round hole would be lined with his face.  A slam on the brakes, and a hard cut to the right sent the Audi down an alley towards Avenue A. 

The light of Avenue A, and the traffic flying by was obvious at the end of the alley.  Just as obvious as the large green dumpster blocking more than half the alley.  The alley was blocked. There was no way out.

 The shift into reverse occurred while the car was still rocketing forward.  The driver had considered pulling up to the dumpster and putting the Converse All Stars to work, but made the quick decision to back it up, and had the tires smoking with the gas petal on the floor and the vehicle jammed into reverse. 

The pilot estimated the Audi’s speed at better than forty in reverse by the time it hit the intersection with Avenue B.  There was no alley on the other side of Avenue B.  If the Audi went too fast, he’d be hitting the brick wall on the other side.  He’d cut hard coming out of the alley and he would hit the Silver car ass first, with the Audi at fifty miles an hour making a mess of his pursuers.  That was the plan.

The Audi flew out of the alley directly in front of the silver four-door.  David didn’t see the driver, but it was obvious the silver car was not heading down the alley the Audi came from.  That the two cars didn’t hit was a bit of a miracle.  David had gone from the alley into Avenue B, without hitting a thing.  The fugitive slime bag killer was nearly out of control as the silver four-door swerved right to avoid the Audi, catching the corner of the alley and Avenue B.

At high speed, that mass of silver metal came to a complete stop literally, hitting a brick wall.  An explosion of steam and hot liquids erupted from what was left of the large silver sedan. 

With the Audi now stopped, David simply watched.

He was sure he just killed some businessman on the way home to his kids?  Looking through the shattered glass of the rear window he saw no one else in the Avenue.  He looked at the roofs, the doorways, the parked cars.  No one.  The holes in the Audi’s front windshield were real.  The ones in the rear window were just as real.  And the holes all lined up.  Someone had tried to kill him, and if it wasn’t from the Silver car, he was in big trouble.

The Audi inched forward toward the steaming mass of crushed metal in the alley.  There was one dead in the driver’s seat, and not much else was obvious.  David got out of the Audi with the engine still running.  He left the door open as he crossed the front of the car looking back at the Audi with the spider-webbed windshield with two obvious bullet holes.  He walked toward the wreck, scanning the street.  He saw no one else.  This was not a commonly used street, and it might be a while before anyone else showed up.

The slow approach to the silver steaming mass was just a bit more than uncomfortable.  David hoped to see a huge guy in a black suit and black sunglasses.  He didn’t.  He couldn’t make out who the guy was, but he was quite dead.  His head no longer looked much like a head, and had the familiar dark red paint all over him, just like Brian Tiernan.  David backed away from the car and moved around to the passenger side.  He stepped over puddles of liquids, and the stench of the radiator fluid and burning oil was pungent.  There was another guy there, just as dead.  He didn’t have a black coat or sunglasses either.

That was it.  Two dead guys in a smoking mass of twisted metal, broken glass, and steaming liquids.  Again David worried about some poor kid who wouldn’t see his dad that night.  He had to know.  Approaching the passenger side, he gripped the tall thin corpse by the neck, and pulled him backward to reveal a bloodied mangled face.  The airbag had spared him from the shattered glass of the windshield, but nonetheless, this guy had seen his days on earth. 

The serial killer fugitive was about to reach for the inside jacket pocket to check for a wallet when something caught his eye.  Wrapped into the airbag, on the mangled dash, was a gun.  A big black one with an impossibly big barrel.  The tall thin corpse had a skinny hand still attached to it.  Fingers broken and bloodied, he must have braced himself against the dash right before impact.

The jacket unzippered easily.  There was no wallet in the top pocket.  Running to the driver’s side he pushed back the corpse of the young blond haired corpse with blood all over the hair and face.  The jacket was opened but there was no wallet here either.  There was another handgun.  A black one slightly smaller than the first.  David went back to the passenger side and pushed the corpse away from the glove box, revealing a compartment that it was busted open, and obviously empty.  No registration.   There was no wallet in the pants pockets either.  No ID’s.  Obviously bad guys.  The killing ratio had improved dramatically.

David dialed.  “So what’s up Artie?”

“You OK?  Anyone following you”

“I’m fine.” And… Not anymore.”

“What do you mean not anymore.” 

“I appreciate the phone call.  If I had stayed there another minute or two, you probably would have had to find someone else to do favors for.  Although that might be a blessing for you.  I trashed another one of your cars.”

“Are you ok?  What happened?”

“ A couple of guys actually took some shots at me.  They were really lousy drivers and had an accident.  Hey…Is this phone safe?”