As I watched her, she swallowed hard then spoke again. “You know… This will never be over until you stop feeling sorry for yourself.”
With that, she was gone.
I was still brooding when the dogs began barking at the heavy noises on the front porch. I shushed them as I glanced away from the television to quickly check the clock. Only a little over an hour had passed since Felicity had left, so it didn’t seem likely that she was already returning.
I muted the sound on the television and listened closely, wondering if the noise had simply been one of the cats leaping down from the ledge and thudding on the decking of the porch. It wouldn’t be the first time such a thing had set off what we affectionately called the ‘dog alarm’.
There was nothing but ambient sound for a moment, and I was just about to up the volume again when a scrape and thud sounded. The new thump was followed by the creak of the screen door levering open. The canines stood their ground and renewed their vocal attempt to keep the intruder at bay, our English setter emitting a dangerous sounding growl that was echoed by a throaty rumble from the Australian cattle dog.
A moment later the doorbell rang, sending its harsh tone echoing through the house. The dogs immediately exploded once again into angry barks meant to repel the invader.
I wasn’t expecting anyone, and I couldn’t imagine who would be dropping in unannounced this late in the evening. Even Ben normally called, albeit at times while he was already standing on the porch, but he called nonetheless.
A paranoid thought raced through my head, and my heart seemed to stop as an artificial hollowness filled my stomach. My subconscious assumed control, and I was gripped by a sudden fear that something was wrong. Given the situation, the first thing that came to mind was that Felicity had been afflicted with another seizure while behind the wheel of her Jeep and that she had been in an accident.
I jumped up from the chair and strode quickly to the door, not even bothering to look through the peephole before unbolting the lock and swinging it open.
The sudden impact of a massive fist against my shoulder was pretty much the last thing I had been expecting.
CHAPTER 11:
I stumbled backward and let out a yelp of pain as I reached for my shoulder. The force of the impact had caused me to spin a quarter turn away from the door. My primal gut reaction was to keep that momentum going until I reached the ninety-degree point and then run as fast as I could in the opposite direction of the threat. However, my socially ingrained, testosterone-induced reaction was to defend my castle.
I quickly recovered my balance and twisted back toward the open door, certain that whomever it was attacking me would be only a hair’s breadth from landing another punch. Out of instinct, I brought my arm up to block the expected blow and braced myself against its onslaught. I was already clenching my fists into hard balls, determined that even if I took the first two punches, I was going to give the next three.
I shot a guarded look past my arm in an attempt to see my attacker, expecting to come face to face with some brazen home invader. Instead, I found Ben holding up the doorframe with his shoulder. He stared back at me with a tired grin.
“Howth’hell’are’ya’?” he bellowed, creating a single word from an entire sentence.
“That depends on if you’re going to hit me again,” I answered, slightly miffed.
“Sorry ‘bout that, whyman,” he mumbled. “Didn’t mean ta’ hitcha’ that hard. Was jes’ s’posed ta’ be a frenly punch ya’know.”
I rotated my shoulder as I rubbed it with my hand. There was still a good deal of dull pain working its way through the joint, and I winced as it popped. I suppose it didn’t help any that he had connected with my left shoulder which was the one Eldon Porter had driven an ice pick into the first time he’d tried to kill me. I’d had surgery to repair the damage that had occurred from both that and the subsequent struggle, but to this day, it still bothered me. I guessed it probably always would.
“I’ll live,” I told him, my voice still a bit edgy. “Just don’t do it again, please.”
“Yeah, no prob, Kemonas… Kesomob… Kenomos…”
“Kemosabe?” I offered.
“Yeah, that.”
The glazed look in his eyes and the slurred speech were the first two indicators to grab my attention, so I didn’t actually need to smell the brewery riding along on his breath to know he was all but obliterated. However, there was no avoiding it. I could only recall having seen him this far gone once before, and that was very early on in his career as a police officer. He was a young, far from streetwise uniform, and he had been the first to respond to a particularly heinous murder-suicide. It had affected him deeply then, and as seasoned-almost even jaded- as he had become now, I was certain that it still did to some extent. Evidence that the old adage about never forgetting your first time applied to just about anything, good or bad.
“Tell me you didn’t drive yourself over here,” I said, refraining from making any drunken Indian jokes. Sober, I knew he would laugh. In this condition, well, let’s just say I didn’t want to test any theories.
“‘Kay, I won’t.” He pushed away from the doorframe and stepped in, stumbling over the threshold in the process. “Ya’oughta have somon fis that.”
“Gods, you’re even more cliche when you’re drunk,” I muttered.
“Whassat?”
“Nothing.” I shook my head and pushed the door open wider as I motioned him in. “Get in here and sit down, Tonto. I’ll go put some coffee on.”
“I’ll hava’beer,” he told me as he dropped himself onto the sofa with a heavy thump.
“Don’t have any,” I lied.
I stepped forward and looked out into the driveway. His van was nosed in diagonally across the double lane of concrete, effectively blocking any entry or exit. I had already made a mental note to at some point get his keys away from him. I appended it to include repositioning the vehicle so Felicity would be able to pull in when she got home.
“Scosh then,” he announced.
“Don’t have any of that either.” I continued down the path of untruthfulness as I closed the door and bolted it.
“Burrbahn?”
“Nope.” I was heading for the kitchen now, letting him run down whatever list he could come up with.
“Vokka.”
“Can’t say as that I have any of that either,” I called out.
“How’bout killya?”
I poked my head back out of the kitchen to look at him with a furrowed brow. “What?”
“Killya,” he repeated. “Ya’know, killya. Iss Messican.”
“No,” I replied as I made the connection. “I don’t have any Tequila. But I do have coffee.”
“Shit,” he mumbled.
I stepped back into the kitchen and started the coffeemaker’s carafe filling from the filtered tap. While the water was rising, I reached into the cabinet and retrieved the coffee grinder and a bag of beans labeled ‘breakfast blend’. I poured a measure of the roasted coffee into the bowl of the grinder, thought about it for a moment and then added an extra handful. I wasn’t going to be able to duplicate Ben’s ‘cop coffee’, but I could at least make it a little stronger than usual.
“Yo whyman,” Ben’s voice boomed through the house. “Wheresa squaw?”
“Coven meeting,” I called back.
“Spooky,” I heard him say, then pause. “Why you ain’t there?”
“Long story,” I answered.
“Tell me a shtory.”
“Some other time,” I said.
After adding the fresh grounds along with a small pinch of coarse salt to the filter basket, I poured in the water and switched the device on. I started to return the grinder and bag of beans to the cabinet but decided against it and left them where they were. I had a feeling it was going to be a long night.
My own earlier introspection was still floating around in the back of my head, but I consciously put it aside for the time being. I had my suspicions about why my friend was currently parked on my couch in a state of advanced inebriation, but my brain was also developing new theories with each passing second. The only way I was going to know for sure was to hear it directly from him.