Murder Boy. Bryon Quertermous
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important character.”
“Me?”
“Farmington. I’m telling it, but he’s my mirror character. The one I’m supposed to learn through.”
Rickard stared dumbfounded at me and I didn’t really blame him. It sounded ludicrous out loud but made perfect sense to me. It put my entire life in perspective. I was meant to tell great stories, but before I could do that I needed to develop as a storyteller through life experiences. The universe’s first attempt had almost worked. Some of the most honest, disturbing, and brilliant writing I did was in the midst of my worst trials with Melissa. Then I squandered all of that honesty writing cheesy stories about hit men and strippers and self-congratulatory, navel gazing stories about writers.
“That look on your face,” Rickard said. “It’s like you’re playing with the dolls in your head.”
“Farmington was right. I was selling myself short with the stuff I was writing. It wasn’t the crime part that sucked, it was the sucking part that sucked.”
“Wow. Yeah. You’re great with the words.”
“I was almost married once,” I said. “She was pregnant and I dropped out of school and gave up writing and took an office job in a cubicle and thought that was going to be the rest of my life. I even went out and bought a briefcase.”
“Sucker.”
“She lost the baby then left me and I got a second chance at the life I was meant to have. I don’t ever want that other life. That is no life. I can’t do that. And Farmington holds the key to saving me from that.”
“Let’s go get him then.”
“First though, I’m hungry. I have low blood sugar and I feel myself starting to drag.”
I’d lost track of the time and emerged from my thought bubble unsure of how much real time had passed. I was tweaked about my self-realizations and excited to jump into my vision quest, but when my blood sugar drops, I lose focus easier than normal and my decision-making skills completely disintegrate.
“How about Taco Bell?” I said. “There’s one near here, isn’t there?”
“By the college. I got a burrito there once at like 2am after I stabbed a guy at a bar.”
I stared at him and knew my energy was already depleted because I didn’t jump out of the car right then.
“He didn’t die,” Rickard said. “Not from that. He asked me to stab him. He had a vest on.”
I nodded and thought about whether I wanted tacos or a burrito. Rickard tapped his fingers obnoxiously on the steering wheel navigating through the college area. Two blocks from the restaurant we noticed the police car following us. Rickard was the first to notice it was a campus police officer just before the cruiser rammed us from behind.
RICKARD PUT his knife on the dashboard and rummaged around in the glove box while we waited to see what the occupant of the police cruiser would do. I was expecting Rickard to pull a gun, so when he came out with a small pack of Elmo branded baby wipes I laughed out loud.
“It’s a woman,” Rickard said, still looking in the rear view mirror.
“Who, Elmo? His voice is actually done by a—”
“The cop. Behind us. Keep your hands in clear view.”
He used two separate wipes to clean off his hands before passing the pack over to me and placing both of his hands on the steering wheel. I held the wipes without doing much but watching Rickard waiting to see what his next move would be. I wondered if the wipes were part of the routine of his kills.
I was still confused by Rickard’s wipes as the officer made her stumbling way toward his side of the car. After a second or two keeping his hands on the steering wheel in plain sight, Rickard went back into his pockets and pulled out the gooey blood knife and put in on the dashboard in front of him. I waited for him to ask me for one of the wipes to clean off his knife as he’d done with his hands, but he didn’t.
Finally I said, “Does it always have to be Elmo wipes?”
He kept his eyes straight ahead, with the occasional detour to the rearview mirror to gauge the officer’s approach.
“What?”
“The wipes,” I said. “For your ritual. Do they always have to be Elmo wipes? And why don’t you use them to clean your knife? I saw the blood on it earlier when I was cutting the fence. Why do you just clean your hands?”
“Ritual? What are you talking about?”
I held the wipes up and shook the pack.
“You were cleansing your hands I assume. But why only your hands? You don’t strike me as the religious sort and I thought for a minute maybe you see your hands as weapons and want to keep them clean, but in that case why would you keep your knife dirty. Unless…”
“They were on sale at Target. I bought them yesterday because I knew I’d be going into some nasty places.”
“So you let the knife take the brunt of the nastiness,” I said. “Now I get it. Sort of like a sin eater.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“The knife is the tool but you can clean your hands before each kill to keep your soul clean.”
I put the wipes back in the glove box and leaned back in my seat to bask in the glow of my superior profiling skills.
“I want a shower after being at that storage facility,” Rickard said. “I’ve been there before and I always want a shower after I’m around Titus Fucking Wade. But this is Michigan in the middle of winter and I’ve got shit to do. Even if I had the time to shower after every fucking encounter I don’t like, my skin couldn’t handle it. I’d dry out like a fucking sponge. So I bought the Elmo wipes. Not only were they on sale, they have aloe in them. It turns out I like the aloe; it keeps my skin from splitting open. So keep your bullshit Dateline special theories inside your fucking head or I’ll rip your tongue out and wrap it in one of those wipes to keep it from bleeding on my upholstery. And Jesus Christ how long is it going to take that woman to get to my window?”
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