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Rational Conduct

By Kevin Tatro (US)

Chapter Eight

First Kill

Chapter 8 – First Kill

The apartment building was not what it was supposed to be.  David envisioned some old warehouse type building with rickety fire escapes on the sides, peeling whitewash over bricks, and a front door ajar with the hinges broken, and a clearly marked corridor with a sleazy little apartment with a broken 3, and an ‘A’ that was nailed in only on one side, and swung upside down leaving a scratched circle on the old wooden door.  No, this building had a nice glass front door with clean and clear sidelights.  It was built in the early nineteen hundreds, and had a nice pleasant look to it.  The people who lived here had money.  They weren’t rich, but the apartments were nice and had curtains in the windows, and the front door had an intercom system that was working.  David was no spy, and couldn’t pick the lock on the door.  He couldn’t get in.

The ten minute wait sucked.  Ten minutes before somebody looked like they were going into the front door.  Ten minutes before he could casually slide up behind them and thank them for getting the door as he rolled in behind them to break into some stranger’s apartment.  It hadn’t occurred to him earlier, but maybe the Feds were right.  He was a fugitive.  He was the bad guy.   The kind who broke into peoples apartments.  A bad guy, but not really that bad, as he was going after a creep.  Maybe he was a superhero.

A woman in her forties stopped near the front door and never moved to go in as she took something out of her handbag.  David quietly slipped up behind her.  She pulled something from her bag and moved on without ever noticing him.   It would have been a really awkward moment if the somewhat attractive thirty-something woman behind him didn’t say excuse me, brush past David and unlock the door.  All David could do was say thank you as she held the door for a moment and rushed up the stairs away from the burglar, up to her room just as fast as she could.  The same way she moved everywhere.  She lived in New York.

Walking up the stairway, three flights to 3A, David wondered what he would do when he got there?  Would somebody be home?  What would he do then?  How would he get in?  The computer wasn’t on.  The guy obviously wasn’t home.  He’d have to bust the door down, and do it quietly so the neighbors wouldn’t hear.  The machine needed to run so Artie could check the hard drive for clues to David’s missing kid.  That’s why he was here.  David was tired, had a job to do, and didn’t really care any more.  He was crazy, and no one would blame him for anything he did at a moment like this.

The 3 and the ‘A’ were all in good shape, and there was no scrapped circular marks where the ‘A’ was supposed to swing loosely.  The hall was brightly lit, and there wasn’t any loud music coming from a neighbor’s apartment.  He would hurt his shoulder bad on the thick wood door, smashing against it two or three times until the metal door jam bent or the two inch think wooden door broke.  The neighbors would come out into the hallway, stare at the white trash fugitive burglar, and there would be twenty calls to the police.  Next plan.

The knock on the door was soft, but loud enough to be noticed by its occupant. Brian Tiernan was in fact home.  Artie said the PC wasn’t turned on, but he had no way of knowing if the home was occupied.  David assumed the apartment was vacant, but didn’t care one way or the other.  There was no alternative to going in now. He had knocked, never expecting a middle aged, fairly good looking, dark haired, well built, white guy to answer the door.  The guy was almost six feet tall, and seemed as though he towered over this ‘little, white trash, apartment-brake-in dude’.

 “Brian….. Brian Tiernan.”    

 “What do you want?”

            One thought came out on top of the snarl of ideas.  The simplest plan is usually the best plan.  He stepped around the man, into the apartment, and around again.  As the big white man followed him with his eyes David closed the door behind them.

            The outrage was evident in face of the taller white guy, with eyes bulging and tense hands moving up from his sides.  A big ugly vein stuck out in his head, and the fairly attractive guy was instantly ugly.  He now looked like a psycho, porno, kid stealin' slime bag.  The slime bag started to speak but was cut short by a voice that sounded more like a cop than a short punk who was breaking into some middle aged white guy’s house.

            “Do you own a computer?  Where is your computer?”

            The ugly vein continued to bulge but the face changed, the hands dropped, and the slime bag began to look like the fourth grade bully, who had just been picked right up off the ground by six foot two Mr. Jones, who admonished the little creep for picking on the smaller kids.   Mr. Jones had done this in a stern but not angry voice as he held the third grade bully a good eighteen inches off the ground, simply by grasping the front of his shirt and holding him out in front of him eye to eye. David had never forgotten this valuable lesson in life.  Raw power and when to use it.

            The bully in 3A looked scared.  The mastery of his size over his opponent and his aggressiveness had lost its edge, leaving the once formidable opponent looking a lot more scared than scary.  Clearly, the fight wasn’t out of him, but he was damaged.

            “What do you want with my computer?”  Came a voice that was still a bit scared but gaining strength.

            “Where the Fuck is it asshole?  Don’t waste my fuckin' time!  I’ve had enough bullshit for a day and I want to see the fuckin' thing now!”

Neither the scumbag, challenged bully, nor the small fugitive who broke into apartment, were really sure where to go with this.  Maybe a second or two passed, maybe only an instant, but it seemed like a long time.  The discussion had gone from one where the little guy was gaining the upper hand by asking a simple question, to one where the little guy had moved in for the kill.  If the bully was a blow-hard he would back down, and the uncalculated mismanagement of anger, which now put the two in direct conflict, would pay off.  If not, the little robber fugitive dude was about to take a serious beating, and worse yet, probably get turned over to the cops to face a whole series of charges.

The ugly vein thing nearly exploded as the creepy, bully kid evolved into a frothing mad man killer.  The Scum bag lunged at the burglar and nearly ripped the shirt right off him, as the little guy ducked and moved, allowing only a grasp at the slippery clothing.  The scumbag passed on the fugitive’s right side as the bully flew past him with the force of a small locomotive. 

Now ten feet from the psycho man, who was clearly going to kill him, the fugitive was a bit panicked.  Like he was about to be fried by high voltage lines, the explosion of electricity was racing toward him, and he would soon be blown to pieces.  The moment it took for the psycho killer to turn around, get the prey in his sight and lunge again, did not happen slowly, and there was no time to contemplate the next move.  Little fugitive guy would spend no time in a Federal prison, he would die right here and this creepy guy would probably call a couple of his creepy friends to dispose of the evidence, to avoid any attention towards his child brokerage operation.

The lunge was quick, quicker than the burglar had anticipated, but it made no difference.  The burglar had no plan and wouldn’t have devised a new one in twenty minutes. The monster’s huge hands hit high, smothering the fugitives face, bruising cheeks and bloodying his nose, slamming him across the room, to come down on the apartment floor with a backbreaking, crunch of two hundred and sixty pounds of anger on top of a much smaller fugitive guy, and as all this happened, a shot went off.

The shot was muffled as the gun stuck six inches into the monster’s gut before the fugitive pulled the trigger.  The neighbors probably never heard a gunshot, but certainly felt the large thud as the bodies came crashing down on the floor.  The dead weight of the psycho madman, average looking, probably just a normal guy and not a porno child rapist, came down hard on the fugitive murderer, who felt several ribs break as the already lifeless body smashed him into the carpet.

They laid there for a moment, lifeless, the fugitive scared and in pain, and the apartment owner quite dead, oozing a warm red liquid over the fugitive’s chest and arms.  Rolling the dead man off of him, David saw the blood on the far wall where parts of Brian Tiernan had been blow out of his gut, through his back, and splattered against the wall.  David hadn’t thought about it before, but this must be a pretty powerful gun.  The far wall of the entranceway was probably the bedroom wall, so a bullet was unlikely to have made it into the next apartment.   Maybe nobody would call the police. 

Blood was everywhere.  David was covered in blood.  Some from his own nose and face, that was incredibly painful just to become aware of, and all kinds of blood all over his shirt.  The blood was on his skin, on his hands, everywhere.  The corpse drained blood everywhere as a dark black stain spread through the carpet.  There were two holes in this guy.  One where the bullet went in and one where it came out.  The guy was dead.  Very dead, no doubt about it.  Like really dead.  The psycho, madman, child broker, bully was about as dead as he could get. 

Served him right the sicko, slimebag.   What a sick dude.  Surprising he hadn’t killed somebody sooner.  Probably has, and they just hadn’t caught him yet.  Probably killed a whole lot.  The news headline would read that he finally got what was coming to him and the neighbors would be interviewed stating, ‘He was such a nice neighbor. Quiet.  Kept to himself.

Scumbag.

The sight was ugly.  The body lay still.   No movement.  No sound.  No ringing in the ear like a normal gunshot, or like one on TV.  Just quiet. Actually the whole thing hadn’t been very loud, and it was unlikely any neighbor would have even noticed.  Even the thud on the carpet had been quiet.  It was really creepy quiet, with the sounds of the cars passing on the street below the only real noise in the room.  Brian didn’t make any noise.  He was dead.

The room was very quiet.  There was no rush to do anything.  Brian wasn’t going to be making any demands on David.  It was like TV.  You get to watch it all and it expects nothing from you.  This was real as it gets, but the scene had no human reality to it.  There was no longer anyone in the room.  A pretty strange feeling.  David savored the feeling for a moment.  The stillness of it all.  He didn’t know Brian, and was glad he didn’t.  David didn’t feel bad.  He didn’t even think about the guy.  He didn’t like him, and was pretty sure the world was better off without this guy around.  He really didn’t have the option of thinking differently.  That would make the fugitive a murderer.  The faint muffled sound of the neighbors TV, and the soft almost ocean like sound of the waves of cars passing on the streets below gave the slightest of sound to the room where no one was really truly alive right now.

The vibration of the cell phone in David’s pocket made a noise that seemed to radiate throughout out the apartment louder than the gunshot had been.  David had killed this guy.  He had brought in the gun Joe had given him.  Joe was now sitting in a bar getting drunk, while his gun put a hole in some guy who’s biggest crime may have been not calling his mom enough.  Nice guy Joe, hiding all this from his wife who he loved dearly. He’d be booked for accessory to murder and be in huge deep shit because he had lied to everyone since meeting the fugitive this afternoon.

The cell phone vibrated again. 

“David.  Are you in the apartment?”

“Yeah.   I’m here.”

“Everything OK?  Did you find the computer?”

“I’m looking for it now.”  Artie would now get life in prison as well.  He gave the address and a car to a fugitive, and now as on the phone to him, in the apartment where the dude was murdered, at exactly the time of the murder.  This is fucking great.

“Do ya see it yet?”

“Yeah, I got it.”

“Don’t touch it!  It’s on some kind of timer that assures it’s only on for a few minutes at a time and then destroys the memory of the connection.  It won’t be on for another fifteen minutes.  When it comes on again, ya need to tell me what it says so I can get into it.  Some info ought to come onto the monitor, so make sure the monitor is on, but don’t touch anything else.”

“You want me to wait here for fifteen minutes?  In an apartment I just broke into?  It’s bad here Artie.  I can’t stay here fifteen minutes.  No it’s not a slum or anything, but I can’t stay here.  Can’t I just unplug it and bring it to you?  Understood.  OK.  Talk to you in fifteen.  Bye.”

“This sucks.”  He definitely said it out loud.  So he said it again “This really sucks.”  I just killed a guy whose blood is already drying all over me.  I don’t even know the guy.  He may have been a bit creepy, but I killed some guy who probably works at the local deli.  Oh fuck.

David wandered the apartment for fifteen minutes.  There were a few books on the shelves, normal clothing in the closets and dresser, a few DVD’s of James Bond and Jackie Chan flicks, and a video tape of Braveheart, with Mel Gibson on the front with war paint on his face.  The painted face looked a lot like the blood on the dead man on the floor.  Looked more like the fugitive’s face with blood all over it.  Normal apartment David thought, except the most personal thing in it was a toothbrush.  No letters.  No mail.  No pictures.  No address book.  No telephone.

The vibration startled David as he faded out on the couch. He was looking at good old dead Brian, lying on the floor with the spongy carpet that had soaked up gallons of blood.  Lovely he thought as his eyes tried to close with the crusted blood on his cheeks pulling at his skin like some kind of age reducing skin cream.  He had faded in and out, imagining the kidnapping of his daughter, better times at the swing set, and occasionally opening his heavy eyelids enough to look at good old dead Brian Tiernan laying face down on the carpet.  The vibration of the cell phone was an unpleasant distraction.

“Are you in?  Good. Get ready, it’s coming on any second.”

“What am I looking for?  What do you mean you don’t know!  Alright!”

“I’m telling you it didn’t do a thing.  I watched it the whole time and it didn’t do a thing.  Yes the monitor is on.”

Following directions of the expert, David hit the enter key and typed TIMER OFF in the word box that had appeared on the screen.  That was it.  The computer geek, genius needed David to break into an apartment, kill a crazed monster guy, and type TIMER OFF.  That was it.  David sat for twenty minutes while the computer flashed nonsense on the screen while the hard drive whirled like crazy. 

The mad scientist, Artie, hiding in his mountain getaway was running the computer remotely.  He broke every encrypted password and apparently tapped into computer data bases of every twisted pervert on the planet.  This room was like sicko central with the little PC on the desk acting as gatekeeper to a world of criminals hooked into every demented thing the humanity had to offer.  There were no pictures on the screen, only numbers and letters and computer geek language that only the genius could understand.  Artie had been explaining what he found until the fugitive got tired of listening.   David didn’t seem to notice Artie was mumbling gibberish, and Artie never noticed when David walked away from the phone.

As David walked away from the computer, the drying blood stuck his shirt to his chest.  The dried blood on his arms and fingers cracked as he pushed himself up from the chair.  The caked blood on his forearms was particularly annoying, pulling on his arm hair as he moved his arms, examining the crust on his skin.  As he formed a disgusted look on his face for the audience that wasn’t there, the splattered blood on his face cracked and peeled, causing him some discomfort like an itch, or minor annoyance.  He was uncomfortable like the time in second grade when he wet his pants.  He began to feel a little bad for himself, when out of the corner of his eye, he saw the dead man laying in a pool of blood in his own living room. 

It was a bit strange how black the blood looked in the carpet.  His mind raced back to a science fiction movie where the evil creatures leaked black blood, they were evil and the blackness oozed from them.  The good guys sometimes got hurt, and the bright red blood trickled a little from the corners of their mouths.  It was almost comforting to think that the thick black substance that flowed from the monster was evil ooze, but David realized, that’s probably just what it looks like when so much comes out all at once, from deep inside.

David contemplated his current predicament.  Feeling disgusted and dirty was not much fun, but decidedly better than being dead.  He looked at the body for an instant and then turned away emotionless.  The normal emotions of life were gone.  He was way past tired.  Way past freaked out.  His daughter was gone.  Probably dead.  He just killed some guy.   And he felt nothing.  Well, the crusty blood was a bit uncomfortable.

The fugitive showered in the sicko, psycho’s shower, with psycho soap and sicko shampoo.  The sicko's towels smelled nice.  Obviously he was good at doing laundry or had a fine cleaner. After drying himself, the towel became the new doormat, so when the fugitive eventually left, he wouldn’t track that black, black, blood down the hallways. 

The psycho’s shirt fit the fugitive nicely, and he had no problem taking that from the closet of the dead man who laid face down in the carpet.  It was a bit surprising, but the fugitive no longer felt remorse about the dead man.  Not that he had much remorse to start with.  No matter what, this dude was ugly, and downright evil.  The sight started to make him sick, as if he was beginning to return to reality with feeling and emotions.  This was a bad idea right now, and so he left while Artie continued to download from this computer.  The phone had gone dead, and David now placed it in his pocket. 

David dislodged the lead bullet from the wall with a butter knife from the sick dudes’ kitchen, carved it into tiny pieces and flushed the little pieces down the toilet.  He had wiped his fingerprints from every surface he had touched, and rolled the bloody old cloths up in a plastic bag and slung over his shoulder to deposit in some dumpster.  He had checked the house and hallways to assure there were no cameras or anything else that might connect him to the corpse.  The weapon was cleaned and back in his belt, and the killer, fugitive, father of kidnapped child guy was cleaned up, and looking like an average guy on the street.  He would buy fresh cloths, ditch the old ones and get on with his job.  He would search for his daughter.  The hunted fugitive had now become the hunter.  A creepy incompetent a amateur hunter.

David wasn’t big on TV, but he had watched a few cop shows.  He pictured the detectives poking through the garbage can, vacuuming the carpet for fibers, pulling traces of the killer’s blood from the dead man and his towels.  Even taking copies of footprints off the carpet where the killer tracked his size 10 shoes through the blood.  The cops would be able to connect him to the scene.  He was as good as convicted.  If Joe cracked, they’d even connect him to the right weapon.  Oh yeah.  He was as good as dead.  Artie would probably hire Johnny Cochran for him, but hell, David was an average middle class white guy, and he’d probably be convicted.  He’d argue temporary insanity and all that, but he was going down.

Time off for good behavior.  Maybe he’d see his kids graduate college. His cellmates might treat him ok.  After all, he’d killed a child molester.  Not only was the little white guy a killer, he’d killed a genuine bad guy.  He might have some actual status in the pen.  Then again, Brian may have been a butcher at the local deli.  The deli was probably owned by some guy who runs a smuggling ring with a hundred of his best friends serving time in exactly the same prison David was going to.  David wondered if life insurance was more expensive for a guy that was in jail with a roommate name Bubba D. Slicer.

The future convict looked around the room one last time.  The computer was running, and the room was empty with the exception of some dead guy whose blood soaked the carpet and was starting to get crusty on his pale white face.  The signs obviously weren’t there yet, but he saw big detective notices pointing to his fingerprints on the keyboard, on the doorknobs, in the shower, the walls, the body.  Hair samples on the big jerk’s tacky sweater-vest, blood samples in the shower and on the dead man’s hands where he had punched the little fugitive, killer, break-into-the-apartment guy.  Yes the killer gained entry without force (probably known to the deceased), operated the computer, killed him, took a shower, and then fled.  Checking the dead man’s computer files reveals the two were likely involved in illegal child trafficking, and all kinds of other crazy shit that the old Connecticut neighbors would love to hear.  Mr. Slicer in Sing Sing prison would kill this guy for it.  Beautiful.  As David closed the door to 3A, the picture of that room burned in his mind.

The hunter was about to get into the high tech Audi killer getaway car when he freaked.  The thought of everything that had just happened flew into him like he had been instantly inflated with a pump full of worries, fears, and emotions.  He couldn’t move or he might explode.  He imagined himself fumbling with the keys at the door lock, dropping them on the ground.  The car alarm was going off and the typically disinterested New Yorkers were now looking out their windows at a car thief, or worse yet, a killer that had just left his first victim dead in a pool of blood.  He looked up and saw faces staring down at him.  The young woman on third floor was staring him right in the eye.  She could identify the car, and its driver.  She may have even seen the face of the fugitive on the evening news.  Fugitive, killer, and definitely the type who would have kidnapped his own kid.  The neighbors would be interviewed.  ‘He seemed like a nice family guy.  Always said hello.’‘Seemed to work a lot, if that really is what he was doing.’

Yeah, the old flight or fight response of his Neanderthal  heritage had kicked in, and David’s body was just about to explode.  The surge of adrenalin had caused every muscle to tighten, his stomach to churn, and his neck to tighten so hard he was certain he heard a disk fracture.  The only thing was, he hadn’t moved a bit.  He was frozen at the door leading from the dead man’s house.   Here he was wired freaked out, pumped with adrenalin, and he couldn’t move.  How long had he been here?  He had been lost in the image of fleeing.  Did it really happen?  He was still here.  The fumbling with the keys was so real. The woman was not in the window looking at him.  One freak out was fading as a new one began.  Did any of this really just happen?  Had he ever entered the apartment?  Had the car alarm ever gone off?

The psycho, split personality, killer, fugitive, child kidnapper, car thief, generally screwed in the head dude, was fumbling with the keys at the killer’s door.  He had taken the keys on the way out, just to assure he could get back in if he forgot something.  Though he had the keys in his hand, he still doubted his own story, and was going back into the apartment to assure his own story was true, and to clear his head.  Yeah.  That seemed like a good idea.  Go into the apartment, and sit on the couch looking down at some dead guy to clear your head.  Psycho.

            Oh yeah.  Brian Tiernan was dead.  Really dead.  No heavy stench yet, but really dead.  Just like the psycho remembered.  David tried to feel guilty about killing the guy, but it didn’t work.  It was almost as if he was stuck in some kind of video, artificial reality game that just wasn’t complex enough to include that emotion.  For that matter, he lacked the ability to even explain or interpret his own lack of emotion.  Forget that, and get on with the game.

 He went from room to room in the apartment, dusting what may have been prints, rinsing the shower to assure he didn’t leave and hair there.  Going over Brian’s blood stained cloths to assure there was no hair on him.  TV cop shows floating through his head, he was trying to remove every bit of evidence and maybe plant something to lead them cops in the wrong direction.  The computer was whirling away now, with the fugitive’s only friend on the other end.  Artie was getting all the info he could to help his friend.  Artie didn’t know his good buddy, who had needed his help, was a murderer who stood emotionless looking down at his victim.