“I can’t tell you things that are going to send you spiraling into a depression. I mean, just what I’m saying now, I feel like that’s enough to do it.”
“I’m sorry if I give that impression. But come on, if I told you, ‘Amy, there are really important things that I withhold from you,’ you’d drive yourself crazy trying to find out what it was. There’s nothing I could say that would be worse than what you’d guess. Give me an example, that’s all.”
She sighed, rubbed her eyes, and said, “We didn’t have enough to make rent in February. I had to borrow it from John.”
I felt a black ooze of shame bubble up from a drain in my skull.
Hey, she was right!
I tried to formulate the perfect response, one that would reassure her, one that would convince her that she was being silly, that I wasn’t so fragile. Twenty minutes later, I was still trying to formulate that response and by then Amy was snoring softly, like she does. I quietly got up and closed the bedroom door.
I went to the bathroom, stood over the sink, just staring at myself in the mirror.
Then it hit me.
There is no drip.
It was still pouring outside, but the ceiling was dry. Wait, did the David doppelganger actually fix the roof?
I shuffled back through the kitchen. The breakfast plates in the sink, the syrup. I tried to picture Amy eating breakfast with a functioning copy of me, having a casual conversation with it. The junk had been cleared from the card table—the last round of crap I’d been mailed, the Rodman book and the demon marble, all of it was gone and I didn’t see it on the floor. I went to the junk room and, sure enough, the stuff had been stashed away, presumably by my doppelganger. It was now arranged neatly on a shelf right next to the one-armed concrete snowman we always kept in there.
My phone rang. It was John.
I answered, “Fuck you and all the child slaves who manufactured your phone.”
“Shit just got real. Turns out there are more.”
“More what?”
“Maggie wasn’t the only kid to go missing last night. There was at least one more.”
“Oooooh, fuck.”
“Kid belongs to a single mom, report didn’t get taken seriously by police dispatch because she sounded out of her mind. Hers got taken around the same time, they think.”
“What the hell, John?”
“I got in touch with her, name is Chastity Payton. She’s willing to talk to us.”
“Of course she is.”
“She lives at Camelot Terrace.”
“All right. You want to come pick me up?”
“I’m downstairs, in the parking lot.”
“Of course you are. Give me a minute.”
“One more thing.”
“It can’t wait thirty seconds until I come downstairs?”
“No. I was getting ready to leave, and I go to grab my keys, but I couldn’t remember where I left them. Then I said to myself, ‘Oh, I know where they are.’ You want to guess where I thought they were?”
“I’ve totally lost track of the story.”
“I was convinced my keys were in the closet, in the pitcher. I could vaguely remember sealing them in there for no reason whatsoever. It was the fuckroach, trying to get me to come let it out.”
“Holy shit, that’s weird. You can’t keep that thing at the house, it’s going to mess with your brain.”
“What else can I do with it?”
“Yeah, one of these days we should establish some kind of procedure for that. For all of this.”
“Anyway, I buried it in the backyard, we’ll see if that helps.”
I hung up and headed down. John urgently met me at the bottom stair, grabbing my arm and hustling me around the front of the building and through the entrance of the dildo store.
“What the—”
“Ted Knoll just pulled in.”
I turned and saw the red Impala slide into a parking space. I assumed he wasn’t here for a pair of edible panties. We pushed our way toward the back of the store and hid behind a shelf. Behind us was a huge wall of life-size silicone butts.
“Jesus Christ, John, he couldn’t wait one day to go on a vigilante rampage? He should be home with his daughter.”
“How long would you wait?”
I glanced back at the butts. “What are those for?”
“Dave, I can’t emphasize enough how growing up in this town has stunted your worldview.”
Ted stepped out of the car, striding through the rain and looking for an entrance to the upstairs apartment. No sign he’d seen us.
John said, “What are we going to do if he goes upstairs? Amy’s up there.”
“Yeah, we need a plan.”
“How about we just go out there and tell him the truth?”
I said, “We don’t even know what the truth is. There’s another missing kid, so for all we know he has already come across somebody’s cell phone video of me mutilating a small—”
A sales clerk walked by and John loudly said, “YES DAVID I AGREE WE SHOULD COVER OUR FLOOR IN RUBBER ASSES.”
The front door dinged and in walked Ted. The store was tiny and hiding from him was a ridiculous notion. He made eye contact and strode up to us, saying, “Why don’t y’all step outside with me.”
I said, “I’m fine right here.”
“Suit yourself.”
“And you need to think hard about what you’re about to do. About whether you really want to do it.”
“You a mind reader, now? See, I been busy. Spent all afternoon catching up, reading about you. About this town.”
“Ted, you want my advice? Move. There can’t be anything tying you down here.”
“You tellin’ me how to live my life now?”
“Think. What’s happening, Ted, is exactly what we told you to expect when this all started. Mind games. That’s all it is. They’re framing me for the crime because that’s the sort of shit They do for fun.”
“Uh-huh. You know, I started lookin’ close at my alarm system, I couldn’t get past the fact that nothing tripped it, that the cameras went dark at just the right time. I even called Littleton, the company I bought it from, they say everything looked just fine and dandy on their end. But then I talk to that detective, the one that was there this morning, and he tells me offhand that your girl works in the Littleton call center. Really interesting how you never brought that up.”
Thanks, Detective.
I said, “You’ve got to be shitting me. You think, what, I had Amy shut off your alarm? She couldn’t even do that if she wanted to.” As far as I know. “She didn’t even know about Maggie until I told her. But I’m not gonna convince you, am I? You’re not here to find the truth, you’re here to get revenge.”
“I’m here because I wanted to look you in the eye. See, in a movie, the tough guy goes on the warpath, he’s always got one thing you never get in real life—certainty. Batman stands on a roof and he sees a mugging happen down on the street, always right in front of him. Real convenient, doesn’t have to wrestle with doubt, or findin’ out he did harm to an innocent person by mistake. No, I’m not doing nothin’ until I know for sure. But I will know for sure, one way or another. And soon.”
“Then what? You kill me, you go to jail, and your little girl doesn’t have a father in her life?” I pushed past him and went out the front door. He followed. “I’m telling you, Ted—walk away. Pack up and go, and I mean tonight. For your sake. And your little girl’s. Loretta, too.”
Ted grabbed my shoulder and spun me around. He stared at me and said, “Is that a threat?”
John
Lightning flashed across the sky and John saw the rage illuminated on both men’s faces. In that moment, John was sure that one of the two—Dave or Ted—wasn’t going home alive.