Queens Over Jacks King High

QUEENS OVER JACKS

KING HIGH

by

Ron Webb

Published by Ron Webb

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2014 Ron Webb

All rights reserved.

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This is a work of fiction. All characters, places and events in this book are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblances to real life counterparts are purely coincidental.

1

WHERE A KING OPENS THE GATES TO HEAVEN

The purple of her blood in the streetlight, the moonlight, I can't think which, pumping from her leg, the pool growing quickly in the grass, draining into the ground under the high stand of oleander. The chill of a California night in the spring, still air and stars, the sound of truck engines winding up on the freeway a mile away, all play a part in it and my surprise at feeling not much more than curiosity, wondering how long it would take her, knowing I had to high step it to my car and drive home. All that stays with me.

I imagine her lying on the grass watching me, the strong smell of her blood. The truth is she never saw me and no smell was more powerful than the rancid and sweet oleander.

I parked in front of our house a few minutes after midnight. The lights were on in the living room. Same turquoise foam and aluminum tube sofa, blond wood end tables, recliner chairs, wall heater, twenty-one inch Magnavox console TV, nothing had changed. The dog heard me come in the front door and was whimpering from behind the screen doors to the patio in the dining room. I told her it was just me and the whining stopped.

Dishes and pots clattered in the kitchen. My father was unloading the dishwasher, reaching into clouds of steam, snatching a hot plate, a coffee mug, a bowl and juggling it into a cupboard.

The man likes a challenge, I said, levering myself up with the heels of my hands to sit on the counter by the sink.

No reason to wait. Haven't broken anything yet, he said. Been out with Diane? Do anything interesting?

Nope, drove around. Checked some places. Nobody home. Went to Mel's, talked to people.

He glanced at the clock. You've been eighteen for ten minutes. Happy birthday. He had the look people get when they talk to you and think about themselves.

Thanks, I said. I went to my room and undressed, laid down on the bed and passed out, no problem.

The next morning I picked up Diane and drove across the Richmond-San Rafael bridge and up the coast to Stinson Beach. The trunk of my car was loaded with two cases of Coors, a box of dry firewood, two sleeping bags, a loaf of sourdough, a jar of Skippy peanut butter, some Philly cream cheese, a large ring of baloney, French's mustard and a half dozen packages of Oreos, the essentials. It was early summer Northern California, hot inland, cold and fog at the shore.

We hauled a case of beer and the food from the parking lot to the north end of the beach and rolled out the sleeping bags on a patch of weeds between two boulders fifteen yards from the high tide waterline. We had been there before. It was late morning and the fog was starting to lift. I told Diane I'd be back in a minute.

I walked farther north in the thick fog at the water to the end of an outcrop of rock extending into the ocean. I took out the straight razor I had used on the girl from the pocket of my jeans, unwrapped it from the latex glove, shattered the blade into small pieces by scraping it sideways on the rock, snapped the handle off and threw it and the remaining blade out into the fog, listening to the double splash in the sound of the waves. I picked up most of the small pieces and dropped them into the tide pools around the outcrop.

I rubbed the bloody glove into a tiny ball between the palms of my hands, flicked it into the water. The tide would carry it somewhere like Washington, I thought, or Japan. I rinsed my hands in a tide pool until they smelled like seaweed.

Diane was sitting up in a sleeping bag, leaning against a boulder. She asked me, smiling, if I felt better. I said that driving two hours after a pot of coffee caught up with you. I took off my shoes and slid into the other bag. We stayed there all night, eating, drinking beer. We must have talked about each other, what the future might hold. I cannot imagine what we said.

My favorite weapon had traveled to Stinson as dry wood in the box. It was a jerk suppressor made by sawing off seven inches of a #46 Louisville Slugger, the handle end, rounding the sawn edges and varnishing it in layers until it was rock hard. I called it Mickey, as in the knockout drug, and carried it wedged inside the sleeve of my jacket, under my armpit. I could retrieve it in less than two seconds.

A backward, loose wrist-snap was the most effective. I stopped a German Shepherd that charged me on the street with three quick hard whacks to the base of his skull. I was careful after that. The neck vertebrae on the dog had cracked. Mickey's life was over the moment I used it to drop the girl. The power jigsaw in the garage reduced the thing to quarter-inch coins.

We made a fire after dark with the wood from the car. When the fire was hot I tossed in Mickey. A Louisville Slugger is made of ash wood and does not want to burn. The ash coins barbecued for hours. I stomped the cinder coals into the sand as we were leaving.

Diane and I went together for the last two years of high school. She was perfect at the time, easy-going and clueless. We drifted apart when we went to different universities. She got a business degree, then a job with some agency in Sacramento. I ran into her at the Buena Vista in San Francisco three, four years ago. She does look years younger than her age.

I had spent weeks before that night playing where-do-you-find. Worn tennis shoes were easy. I found a huge box of them at the big St. Vincent de Paul charity store in Oakland and bought a pair of dark blue, low top boating shoes, size ten, and a pair of black Keds high tops, size ten and a half. The Keds had tread left and clear wear patterns. The boating shoes were treadless. Several inner soles in each pair, two pairs of jock socks on my feet and they fit tight enough. I could run in them if I had to and the prints they left were made by someone else. I wear a size nine.

Dark surgical gloves were impossible to find. Medical supply stores would only sell me packages of dozens and they came in one color, Johnson & Johnson Band-Aid flesh. On a long shot I tried a restaurant supply shop in South San Francisco. They sold them for food handling. The guy behind the counter was willing to bust open a package and sell me four pairs for a dollar. I painted them a cobalt blue hatching pattern, hard to see in the dark.

I picked up a nylon shell suit at an Army Surplus store in Alameda, front-zipper, navy blue, easy find. It covered my whole body, elastic bands at the ankles and wrists, a hood with a tie front. The straight razor had been my grandfather's. It was in an old fishing tackle box in the garage.

Diane liked taking long drives at night. We drove miles and miles, Danville to Martinez, San Mateo, down to Carmel and all over the East Bay. I looked for somewhere to do it, chosen as close to random as possible, where nobody knew me and I would have no reason to ever return again. I had no idea what I was looking for, but I trusted I would know when I saw it.

Ten o'clock one night, we had been on the road less than an hour. Across the old highway from an outdoor shopping mall near a freeway on-ramp, between Concord and Clayton, I saw a complex of medical offices. A high hedge ran around the parking lot. It felt like the place was pulling at me.

Later that night I went back there without Diane, driving into the parking lot. There was an alleyway formed by the hedge and the back of the buildings. I stopped the car by a gap in the hedge and stepped through it into a large stand of oleander extending the entire length of the hedge. The live oleander was woven with dead branches and parasite vines. A strip of grass and then a road ran parallel to the oleander. A track of dry grass next to the curb indicated a lightly used footpath. The road was at the edge of a housing tract, one streetlight at the corner thirty yards away.

I moved into a large pocket next to the path cutting through both hedge and oleander between the parking lot and the road. Checking all the angles, I was invisible. Little light, dark shadows, a path leading to houses from the mall across the highway, I had a kind of vision while I stood there getting the feel of the place. A girl appeared at the corner under the streetlight and walked down the path. She reached the spot where I stood in the oleander. She started to pass me and disappeared.

Two, three days later, mid-week, ten at night, I parked my car among the clunkers in a used car lot on the highway east of the medical building, walking there through fields and on frontage roads carrying my stuff in a gym bag. In the alley behind the building I climbed into the shell suit, zipped it up, covered my head with the hood, put the high top Keds on, lacing them tight. I slid my hands into a pair of latex gloves, grabbed Mickey and put the razor in the shell suit pocket. I stepped through the opening in the hedge, edging forward and a few feet to the right into the pocket in the oleander. I placed the gym bag on the ground next to me and began to wait.

The thick leaves damped the engine sounds from the highway and the parking lot of the mall, no lights in the tract houses across the street. My lips started tickling. I brushed off whatever was sticking to my face. The heartbeat thud in my left ear tightened the muscles in my neck.

My knees got stiff. I squatted. I stood. A four-door Ford pulled into the driveway of the house opposite me. Mom, Dad, three kids got out and went into the house, lights came on, drapes closed. The traffic hum got lighter. A few cars drove by, nobody on foot appeared. Eleven-thirty, my head aching, I left.

The next week I tried again. People came and went from the houses on the other side of the street. Two, three guys at a time walked on the strip of grass in front of me, once a group of high school girls. I could have touched most of them through the leaves. A boy about freshman age was tempting. I was that close to jumping him, then it felt wrong. There were three nights like that over two weeks. I stayed patient, even remembering to take a couple aspirin to stop the tension headaches.

Third week, fifth night, it was becoming a routine. Park the car, walk to the alley in the high top Keds, put on the shell suit and gloves, through the hedge and into the oleander. Two hours plus or minus watching the path and the street, then reverse the process and drive home. I started wondering why I seemed committed to this goofy ritual. Until the night before my birthday, at around eleven, when I heard a rustling behind me in the gap in the hedge.

Within a breath she was standing just to the left of me in the dark. She leaned through the opening in the oleander, checking the road to the right and left. The streetlight touched her face. In profile, short hair, high cheek bones, pretty, young like I was.

A moment to find the strength inside me, no doubts. She moved one foot onto the grass. I reached across with my right arm and snapped Mickey twice, quick, into her temple.

She brought her hand to the side of her head, froze a moment, crumpled to the ground. I looked up and down the road, nobody in sight. The lights in the house opposite were out, no sounds of footsteps or cars. She was wearing Bermuda shorts, the left leg riding up. I flipped open the razor and sliced through the inside of her thigh, back to front, at the hem of her bermudas. Her leg felt creamy, no bump, the razor missing the bone. Her shorts were staining upward from the hem.

Another vivid memory, her hand responding to some internal signal, groping toward the cut. I tapped her on the side of the head and she was still. The pool of blood expanded in the grass, oily in the dim light. I checked the street. There was no one.

Back in the alley I held the razor closed in one hand, pulling the glove over it with the other. That encased the thing in latex, stopping any blood from getting on my stuff. I turned the shell suit inside out for the same reason, changed from the Keds to the size ten boating shoes and walked to the car, eyes wide open. Childhood and playtime over, my commitment to the business of adult life affirmed.

No witnesses I ever heard about, no evidence. The razor, the gloves and Mickey went at Stinson beach. With the house to myself one afternoon, I dissolved the nylon shell suit over a burning can of Sterno. I threw the Sterno can and shell suit zipper in the garbage.

I cut the Keds and the boating shoes into half inch squares with the power jigsaw and put them in a grocery bag underneath the spare tire in the trunk of my car. Late night, I drove to the Berkeley pier and carried the grocery bag a half mile out, nearly to the end. I threw handfuls of chopped shoes from the bag over the water. It looked like I was feeding the fish.

The Contra Costa County rag was published weekly in the 1960s. On the following Wednesday the headline was, Concord Teen Murder. I scanned the story at the newspaper and magazine rack in