In Autumn's Wake Page 7

  “She never drank alone. She wouldn’t.”

  “She wrote you and her parents each a note that she left in their home, not yours.” He hits me again. “That makes both notes their property. So don’t force that couple to relive their mistake.”

  “What mistake?”

  “Straighten out, Dylan.”

  “What mistake!”

  “Did you just tell him to straighten out?” A voice taut with anger comes from the Tahoe. “Why don’t you straighten out, Dorazio? Get off him, you scuzzy cop. If I tell—”

  “Shut up back there!”

  “Who’s that?” I look up, seeing the girl in the burgundy coat staring out the back window of Ed’s SUV. She’s here. She’s the reason why I smelled strawberries. I didn’t see her when we left the Andersons’, walking with my eyes cast down.

  Ed uses my head as a crutch to stand. “Dylan, give it a rest. They’ve been through enough.” The girl shrinks in her seat when she sees Ed coming. He twirls his baton as he walks. “Make sure you thank Sean for calling me. He saved your ass tonight.”

  “He called you?”

  A dark car turns onto the street and parks behind Ed’s SUV. Ed opens the back door of his Tahoe and motions at the girl to get out.

  “Come on, time to go.”

  “No,” she says.

  “I’m done babysitting. Get out.”

  “I’ll walk home, tell him to go away.” She glances at the car.

  Ed puts his hands in the air, palms up, signaling to the guy in the car that she’s not moving. The driver’s-side door swings open and a man built like a Mack truck steps out, just the opposite of Ed’s fat face and his middle-aged beer gut. He snaps his fingers at the Tahoe.

  “Step out of the vehicle,” he says, marching toward us, dressed in a white shirt and a black tie. He’s carrying a gun and wearing a badge—all business—this is no street cop. He must be a chief from another district, the guy Ed just called to meet us here.

  His focus is on the girl, still snapping his fingers and whistling at her to follow orders like she’s a dog. “Now,” he commands. “Autumn, get out of the SUV. I don’t have time for this.”

  Autumn. He called her Autumn.

  “No,” she says.

  “Get out!” He reaches inside and drags her out by her arm. “Who said you could do this?”

  “I can do whatever the hell I want.”

  That’s twice in one night. Two men have jostled her this way and that, but this time I’m at a loss, not about to step between her and this police chief when I don’t even know what’s going on.

  He forces her to his car and pushes her inside, fighting to get the seat belt across her chest.

  “Don’t touch me.” She slaps his hand away.

  He closes her door and gets behind the wheel. Ed follows suit, getting in his Tahoe. They flash their lights at one another before driving off, taillights fading to black, the sounds of the city muted by the snow.

  I’m left behind to sit in the cold as if I don’t even exist.

  I take out my smokes, crushed from the night, sensing deep frown lines wrinkling my forehead as I bend one back into shape. I flip it in my mouth and light it, the silence of the dead-end street somewhat soothing. Until my ass falls numb and I decide it’s time to call Sean for a ride.

  I finally make it home and crash in my bed without undressing, keeping the poem from Autumn locked in my hand, listening to the wind whistling through cracks in the window frames.

  9

  I spent a week in my routine of working and drinking at the bar. Work. Drink. Keep busy. Work. Drink. Emotional avoidance. There are only so many days I can repeat that behavior before needing an ASMR break to lessen my depression. Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, a method Heather often used to relax before an exam or when she had anxiety. She tried it on me when I couldn’t calm down after a bloody fight at a dealer’s house. I was skeptical at first; her description of it sounded like cult mind control, but when her whispering put me at peace within fifteen minutes, my skepticism turned to awe. I felt tingling in the back of my head that ran down my spine as if her soft fingertips were massaging my brain. My muscles loosened, and I was asleep within an hour—the most relaxed I’d been after one of Ed’s jobs in years.

  After I lost her, I did a Google search for ASMR and found it was an online movement with thousands of people creating videos as a full-time job. Channels have hundreds of thousands of subscribers, the best videos with over a million views. Not every trigger works, a few make me restless, like the tapping, or typing, or other repetitive sounds that make me want to punch the wall. But the personal attention videos, the ones based more on roleplay, are gold. My favorite go-to woman has twenty of them. I open her channel on my laptop and click the Tingly, Relaxing Massage video. She smiles and whispers, hello.

  “Hey.” I lean back on my bed and close my eyes, visualizing the glitter on her cheeks and her tat-covered arms. She’s pretty, but this isn’t sexual in any way, it’s not porn. I use her only for the calm.

  “Welcome back to the family,” she says. “My channel is a safe place. I won’t do anything without asking you first. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay.” She inhales. “Breathe with me and relaaax … relaaax … relaaax…”

  “Dylan, wake up!” Sean pounds on my bedroom door. “Yo, let’s go. We gotta get a move on if we’re gonna eat before the job.”

  “Give me five.” My voice is high-pitched, sounding like it did when I was a kid masturbating in the bathroom and my mom knocked on the door. “Five minutes,” I say, more composed. “I’m getting dressed.”

  He tramples down the stairs of our small two-story house, mumbling as he goes.

  I close my laptop and roll on my side. After the long nap I took earlier, I must still be clearing a heavy-headed haze, losing track of time. Did I fall asleep to the ASMR? Maybe I was restarting the video after already running through it. Or was all that in a dream?

  I rub my jawline and push away thoughts of the ASMR to turn to thoughts of Autumn. Cracking her clever poem and fantasizing about her in my bed occasionally flared me back to life this week. I’ve kept her close, using her gorgeous face as a visual each night to stroke myself to sleep. Like now, picturing her killer rack rocking under me as I loosen up to start the night.

  I want you, Autumn.

  I suck in a breath, craving to taste her on my tongue, wanting to spend an hour playing under her shirt, and a full night with my hand down her jeans. I turn and bury my face in my pillow to muffle my moans, my hand slowing to feel each pulsating surge.

  “Dylan, get up!”

  I roll on my back with a hard exhale, holding a hand over my heart. “I’m coming!” I grin and look down my chest. That’s accurate.

  “I’ll warm up your truck. Don’t fall back asleep!” he yells.

  I use a dirty towel from the laundry basket to wipe off, then dress for the party. Long underwear, a gray hoodie, black jeans … black boots, black coat, and of course, my knife. Forgetting to take it back from Sean before driving into the unknown with Autumn was boneheaded. Somehow, a girl I know nothing about has me whipped.

  • • •

  Sean sips his Coke while gazing out his window, fat snowflakes melting down the glass. I owe Ed a favor for saving my ass from the Andersons, which translates into doing a snitch job tonight. Should be a quick stop at a college party in a rental house that Ed’s department is convinced has cocaine flowing out of it. Then we can head to the bar, and I can call Autumn.

  I take her poem out of my coat pocket and drop it in his lap.

  “This damn thing again?” He unfolds it and reads the first three lines aloud.

  I’m just about as tall as he

  I must tell the world

  That I’ve found my tree

  “Who talks like that?” he asks.

  “Women do.”

  “Nah.” He sip
s his Coke. “Y’know, if you haven’t figured it out yet, you never will. Just give up and move on.” He crumbles the paper into a ball and tosses it on the dash. “You’ve been a grump all week over it.”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Yesss,” he hisses. “Go find a new girl and get laid.”

  “7-5-5,” I say, glancing at him. “The lines you just read are the numbers 7-5-5.”

  He takes the paper off the dash and rereads it. “Where do you see that?” He holds it a few inches from his face.

  “Does looking at it up close magically reveal a secret? If so, you should’ve told me that last weekend. It would’ve helped.”

  He looks at me funny. “You’re lying.” He lobs the paper into the back. “Last night at the bar, I saw you staring at it. I know you haven’t figured it out.”

  “7-5-5.”

  “Wrong. Admit it. You’re obsessed with that chick and her poem.”

  “Nope.” My fast-food bag crinkles as I take out a second burrito, the first one wolfed down in under a minute.

  “You like her.”

  “Nope,” I lie, my mouth full of food. “I have a zillion questions for her, and I wanna fuck her.”

  “Exactly.” He swats my leg. “You wanna fuck her and no one else. That says a lot.”

  He slides his Coke straw through the hole of the plastic lid, causing a grating noise. Fwwwp. He knows my hatred of repetitive sounds. Fwwwp. Clicking of pens, tapping on hard surfaces, hearing people chew. Fwwwp-fwwwp. It makes my blood boil. Like Ed’s boots crunching the snow, the guy in the alley flicking his lighter, and the creaky wooden floors in the Andersons’ home.

  Fwwwp.

  “Sean, sit still for once.”

  He ignores me and slides it faster like he’s cooking up a tune.

  I clench the wheel. “Stop!” With my fist in front of his face, I repeat the first line of the poem, raising one finger for every word. “I’m … just … about … as…” I continue to count through the words. “Seven. Seven in the first line, then five in the second line, and so on.”

  He puts his Coke in the cup holder, and I finally get some peace.

  “How’d you figure that out?” He counts on his fingers, whispering numbers to himself.

  “I didn’t. My dad did.”

  He laughs. “Of course. Leave it to Pete Marzniak to save the day. Your parents are the best.”

  That’s true, my parents are amazing. My mom brings pounds of her homemade Polish sausage to the bar each week to stock our fridge, and my dad is a saint to put up with my moodiness. Sean’s mom, on the other hand, doesn’t cook, or show affection, or have any motherly traits. She only cares about one thing—money. An uptight bank manager by day, political blogger by night, she never has time for him.

  “Autumn said men aren’t intelligent. Remember? We have peanut-sized brains. You proved her right by letting your dad figure it out.”

  “Pea-sized,” I correct. “And Autumn won’t find out.”

  “Well, how’d Pete solve it?”

  “Subtraction.”

  “What?”

  “When he taught me subtraction in first grade, he’d lay out four playing cards, take two away, and ask how many were left. I’d count the numbers on the cards, instead of the number of cards in front of me. Like five diamonds, and two spades. I’d say seven. The answer was two.”

  “See, a peanut.”

  “Would you let me finish?”

  He stuffs his mouth with a burrito and waves his hand to go on.

  “He said things aren’t as complicated as I make them out to be. Once he flipped the cards over, I saw each one as a single object, no numbers showing. The poem is the same. Autumn distracted me with her words. It was a trick. My dad scanned her poem and turned it upside down, around, and flipped it over and back. He said to stop focusing on the meaning of the words and try to see each one as a single shape. Puzzle solved.”

  “See, I love your dad. My mom would’ve told me to get a life.”

  “Or a better job.” I laugh.

  Sean’s mom gets on his case about being a finance manager for auto loans, saying it doesn’t count as real employment, that working at a car dealership is sleazy, and he’d be better off working at a bank, like her.

  “You ever find anything out about the guy from the alley?” he asks.

  “I wish. Ed took his wallet that night, and I haven’t seen anything on the news. It’s another reason I want to talk to Autumn.”

  “And to find out why she was in his SUV.”

  “Right. Ed won’t tell me jack about her. The only thing I figured out was the other guy he called that night is a chief in another district. I saw his photo online.”

  “Dylan?” He licks his fingers clean.

  “Huh?”

  “You’ve got a lot of problems.” He smiles wide, finishing his food and sweeping the crumbs off his pricey wool sweatpants. “So where’s this party?”

  “West Linwood area, near Campus Avenue.”

  “Pretty close to the bar.”

  “About five minutes west.”

  I check the time on my cell. Nine o’clock. I expect a packed house by now.

  Two years back, we showed up at a house with only ten people inside: guys in muscle shirts, arms and necks covered with tats. We stood out like two wussies wearing white figure skates at an ice rink. It wasn’t a college party like Ed had said, they weren’t kids from the streets; these guys were in their forties and wondering what the hell we were doing at their house. After two steps inside, we apologized and said we were at the wrong address, asked them if they knew so-and-so, a random made-up name, and left. That night was a total bust, a job for a plain-clothes cop, not us. We’re better at blending in with high school and college kids. Older cops—notably Ed—don’t stand a chance getting close to an eighteen-year-old dealing for a heavyweight supplier. When we hang with them, we know the language, the trends, the music, and we gain enough trust to scrounge up the information to pinpoint the house the drugs are coming from, handing Ed and his friends the recognition for the bust. For a few years, Ed’s used us specifically to rid the area of the suppliers to the college crowd, which takes us closer to the drugs and the key distributors. We have to be quick about it. The threat of being found out and killed goes up a notch inside a supplier’s house compared to talking to lowlifes dealing junk out on the streets. There’s no escape inside, like getting your head caught in a beaver trap. It’s lights out, which is why I want out.

  “We’re too old to be doing this,” Sean says.

  “I don’t disagree.”

  “Soon we’ll be known as old townies hanging around these parties to score a handjob from the incoming freshmen chicks.” He points at a parking spot that’s just a block from the house.

  “We dress too well to be seen as townies. I’d say we’re starting to look like undercover cops because of the short haircuts.”

  “Cops? That’s even worse.” He buttons his wool coat and lowers his black Nike cap to hide his eyes. “I thought I was doing you a favor last weekend by calling Ed when you didn’t answer my text. Now I wish I hadn’t.”

  “I know. Me too. We’re stuck again.”

  Ed has no plans to let us walk away. He can quickly get word on the streets that Sean and I are narcs. We’d be dead in a day. Or worse. Since we’ve dumped a lot of bodies for him, he could pin that on us or arrest us for murder, and we’d end up in prison.

  “Ready?” he asks.

  “Ready.” We knock fists. I lock the truck, and we trudge through the deep tire tracks along the street. “This won’t take long. I’ll get you a beer when it’s over.”

  “Two beers … no, I want a pitcher.”

  “Deal.”

  We climb the front steps of the classic two-story Northland home, the porch heaving with people smoking clove cigarettes, an old wooden door propped open with a brick.

  “It’s packed,” S
ean shouts, walking inside.

  I nod and take a quick look around. We know this floor plan by heart. A living room in the front opens to a dining room, and behind that is the kitchen. A flight of stairs by the front door leads to bedrooms and a bath. There should be an attic and a dank basement, and house parties like this always have a band cranking out cover songs in one of the two. With the floor vibrating under my feet and a bass guitar overpowering the voices in the room, I know the band is directly below us, likely surrounded by groupies smoking pot, crouched low due to the ceiling height. Basements in the city are spider infested and stink of mold. I can only handle going down there when I’m drunk.

  I’m pushed aside by a girl who can’t be older than eighteen. She catches Sean’s arm and rubs her hand over the front of his pants.

  “Hi, handsome. Find me later if you want to be inside a warm body.” She pats his nose and sways into the dining room, spilling beer on everyone she passes. She laughs and swipes her hand down a guy’s chest … lower … lower … bingo, right to his crotch.

  “She’s a winner.” Sean lifts his voice over the band. We elbow our way into the dining room on a quest for beer. “You see any cups?” he asks.

  “Nope. It’s shoulder to shoulder in here.”

  “Nipple to nipple,” he says.

  We move inches at a time. Grabbed and shoved, stroked and snubbed.

  I used to bring Jake to some of these parties, the ones not connected to Ed, nights when our group was out just to have a good time. Jake was an expert at weeding through the rooms. He’d find the guy handing out the beer cups, locate the kegs that weren’t kicked, and spent the night trying to pick up college women. They thought he was cute and innocent. Sly is more like it. With ruddy cheeks and his crooked bottom tooth showing, he’d lean in and whisper God-knows-what to them. He got it from watching Heather and me—the skim of fingers over shoulders, the brush of lips over an ear—we touched like we couldn’t get enough of one another. Jake figured out it drives women wild. Plus his threatening black hair and squinty gray eyes, like mine, gave him a bad boy look, an irresistible combination that women couldn’t resist.