Chapter Nineteen

My stress levels had never been so high for such an extended period of time. Howard’s simple yet devious plan was working. I took his bait and checked into all those things he said about running a business. He wasn’t bluffing; small business management is complicated, and my strategy of fake it ‘til ya make it wasn’t working out nearly as well as I’d hoped. Of course, things might have gone a lot smoother if I didn’t have so many other crazy distractions to worry about. Like all those people who wanted to kill me. Or the sudden appearance of a dinosaurian raccoon monster. Or Jerry.

I basically lived at the gas station now, my own personal human terrarium, only ever leaving to go home for a couple hours a day to shower, change, and restock my medicine. I didn’t bother keeping track of my work hours. It wasn't like I was getting paid anymore, and seeing all that overtime would only make me sadder.

I'd just stepped out of the shower and into a fresh set of clothes when I heard the knock at my front door. Unless time had unexpectedly fast-forwarded on me again, I knew I had another hour before O’Brien arrived to take me to work. But even then, she wouldn’t have knocked. Someone or something else was outside my door.

My gut reaction was to pretend I wasn’t home. As usual, I overthought my gut reaction in a matter of seconds. Whoever’s here, they’re visiting me in the middle of the day and knocking on the front door. In my experience, killers do neither of those things. Plus, I’m a business owner now. I have to answer. What if it’s a customer?

Just to be safe, I left the deadbolts in place and yelled out from my side of the door, “Who is it?”

The knocker yelled back, “I got a package delivery for Jack Townsend.”

I unlocked and cracked the door, but left the security chain in place. The guy on my doorstep looked legit, a deliveryman’s uniform, a tall package resting on the ground by his feet, a clipboard in his hands. But appearances can be deceiving.

“Who’s it from?”

“Don’t know.”

“What is it?”

“You know, we’re actually not allowed to look inside the packages anymore before we deliver them.” His sarcasm game was on point.

“Just leave it there.”

“Can’t. I need you to sign for it. I’ve been trying to deliver this package to you for weeks now, but I’m not allowed to leave it without a signature.”

“Yeah, likely story.”

“Dude, just sign this thing so I can go home.”

He slid the clipboard through the door crack. I skimmed the document attached to make sure it wasn’t secretly a contract for sale of the gas station or transference of my soul or anything like that (one can never be too careful). Once I was sure it was, in fact, a notice of delivery, I scribbled my name onto the line marked “recipient” and passed it back. The delivery man tipped his hat, hocked a loogie onto the ground, then walked away. After I heard him drive away, I opened the door and dragged the package inside.

It was rectangular, three feet by two feet, covered in stamps and writing in several languages I couldn't understand or even recognize. This thing must have bounced around every country in the world before hitting my doorstep.

I left it on the coffee table while I went to find a cutting utensil from the kitchen, rolling every bad theory around in my head and trying to decide which one would be worst.

It could be full of bees. Or explosives. Or hot lava! Or whatever was inside the ark of the covenant that made everyone's faces melt!

By the time I got back to the living room with my box cutter, I'd already come to terms with how ridiculous I was being. If someone was going to assassinate me, there were easier (though less creative) ways to do it than sending me a box full of exploding bees.

Soon, I had the box open and the contents strewn across my living room floor. I couldn’t believe it. The creepy man on the phone had actually come through. I was sitting here, staring at a brand-new, high-end prosthetic leg. My new leg.

There was an instruction book along with it, thicker than the bible and more complicated than a Japanese VCR instructional book. I took a minute to skim through. The manual recommended I take things slow at first, but it also recommended a few months of physical therapy, and a guy like me just doesn’t have that kind of time on his hands. I spent thirty minutes checking it for bugs, traps, or tracking devices (all clear!), then the next thirty minutes testing it out.

It was a perfect fit.

I walked all around my house. Up and down the stairs. With my crutch at first, and then without. I only lost my balance and fell over six times, and I only hit my face against the wall twice. I don’t know what the average is, but those numbers aren’t too bad if you ask me. Sadly, I had to cut playtime with my new toy short. Just as I was getting into the swing of things, I heard O’Brien honking outside. It was time to get back to work.

 

***

 

My daily chores went a lot smoother with both hands free. Whenever the store was empty, I’d take a lap or two around the building. Before long, I was physically exhausted from all the light cardio, a truly humbling reminder of how out of shape I’d let myself become.

I had just fallen back into my seat behind the register when a new visitor came into the store—one I’ll never be able to forget. He looked like a man disconnected with time. From his dread-hawk hairstyle to the blue-corduroy slippers, this man’s fashion choices were on an entirely elevated level. He wore steampunk-style round sunglasses, an actual life vest, and a necklace that was just a Sherlock-style smoking pipe attached to a gold chain. The mere act of witnessing him felt overwhelming, and yet I couldn’t look away. He was, in a word, unignorable. I felt like there was another perfect word to describe him, but I couldn’t quite find it.

I’d experienced enough by now to know that I was in danger. Tom’s gentle warning that I couldn’t keep hoping for someone else to save me was at the front of my mind. I needed to be on my guard for people (or more likely, non-human entities) like this individual right here. Super defense mode was engaged, but I had no weapon. Not that it mattered. Something told me this being wasn’t the sort that could be harmed by mortal weapons.

He’s just so… what’s the word I’m looking for?

I watched from the paper-thin facade of safety on the other side of my counter as the “man” browsed the aisles, on the hunt for something special (or at least, putting on the show). He inspected several of our food items and eventually settled on a tube roll of Los Poco Debitas Donutinies™—powdered pastries shaped like tiny buttholes with a consistency between stale cake and sawdust. Not the worst thing on the shelf, but grossly overpriced at ninety-nine cents.

He looked at the foodish item in his hand and let out a defeated sigh as he peeled back the plastic packaging. He popped the first donutinie into his mouth and meandered back in my direction. The fact alone that he managed to choke it down with neither chaser nor coughing fit proved he was more than human. When he reached the counter, he set what was left of the halfway eaten pack in front of me and held up a pointer finger like I was supposed to know what that gesture meant. Maybe he was just trying to say, “Hi.” 

I held up my own finger and waved back. He made a face like he’d been bitten by the snake in his boot. Clearly, I’d misjudged intent. I tried to play it off.

“Will this be all for you today?”

“I suppose it is. For now.” His voice was charming. Smooth. Not what I expected. The kind of voice that could carry from one end of a room to the other without losing anything along the way. “I couldn’t find exactly what I was looking for.” It was a handsome sort of voice. The kind of voice that had its own credit score of eight hundred. The only kind you want delivering bad news, with a non-regional accent and crisp syllabic enunciation that might make any one of us dumb southerners feel threatened by its perfection. My first thought was that this chaos god standing before me must have pulled a Little Mermaid and stolen some poor unfortunate soul’s voice as part of a deal with the devil.

As I rang up his order, he continued to speak. But it didn’t feel like he was talking to me so much as narrating to the room.

“These snack cakes contain ‘Levorotatory-Cysteine’ as one of the ingredients. Says so right on the package. Do you know what that means?”

“I can’t say that I do.”

“It’s an amino acid used in nearly all processed carbohydrates. Pasta, bread, even baby formula. There are several sources of L-Cysteine. Chicken feathers, cow horn, pig bristles, and in some rare cases even recycled plastic. But the cheapest and most widely used source is human hair.” He popped another whole donutinie into his mouth, swallowed, and continued, “See, the major supplier of this ‘flour additive’ (as they like to call it) is a company in China. They pay for hair trimmings from temples and barber shops. They clean it, grind it down, and sell it to North American food processing plants. It’s in everything now. And companies aren’t even required to include it on their ingredients list. I wonder if people would even care if they knew. This country is full of accidental cannibals. Gross, isn’t it?”

Gross, yes. But also… what’s the word?! It was right there on the tip of my tongue.

He put another donutinie in his mouth and offered me the last one. I graciously declined. When he was finally done, he handed me a twenty and changed the subject. “I was hoping you might be able to help me find an old friend who used to work here. He went by the name of ‘Jerry.’ His family is extremely worried about him.”

That’s what this is about?! Oh thank God.

“Sorry friend,” I said, relaxing into the familiar territory. “Jerry hasn’t been to work in a long time.”

“Is that so? Does Jerry not work here anymore?” he asked.

“He does not.”

“No offense, but you might be biased, which is why I wasn’t asking you.” He looked over my shoulder and repeated the question. “Does Jerry not work here anymore?”

The man behind me spoke in a completely nondescript voice, “According to this, he’s telling the truth.”

I yipped, launched out of my seat fast enough to hit the counter, and spun around to see the unforgettably forgettable generic man holding our weekly work schedule. He’d actually managed to come into the store unnoticed, walk right past me, circle around behind the counter, and pull down our schedule without me even realizing. How could I have been so completely out of touch with my surroundings?

And then it hit me. The word I was trying to pinpoint. The word to describe the man with the life vest and diamond-studded belt buckle. He was distracting. Perfectly distracting. Every bit as noticeable as his partner wasn’t. Of course! It made perfect sense that these two would be working together.

Distracting man asked his partner, “You’re certain he’s not on there? No ‘Jerry’s, ‘Jeremy’s, ‘Quattro’s, ‘J-Bomb’s?”

“None of his aliases,” lamented the generic man. “Looks like we missed him again.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you all along,” I said. What they didn’t know, of course, was that Jerry had asked me to start referring to him on the schedule as “Leroy.” It was a simple request and took so little effort to oblige. I had no idea it would end up saving his bacon one day. “Go tell his family, or whoever you work for, that Jerry isn’t here anymore.”

They both laughed. The one with the forgettable face said, “We don’t really work for his family, kid. That’s just the cover story. We represent a higher authority. Your old coworker did some very bad things before he disappeared.”

The one with a belly full of human hair donuts spoke next, “Would you like to know what he did? Do you want to know why he’s really in trouble?”

Either this was a trick, or it wasn’t. Either way, my answer was the same. “I don’t care. Now get out of my gas station. Please and thank you.”

 

***

 

I was on my computer, hard at work trying to figure out how to set up an account to pay sales taxes online (spoiler alert: I never figured it out) when Jerry came waltzing in through the front door, calling out in a loud voice “Hey nerds!” He had sunglasses on his face, a card in his hand, and a black leather backpack over one shoulder. He bounced over to me and dropped the card onto the counter. I could hear the words before they ever left his mouth, “Y’all sign this card I made for Guillermo.”

“Oh,” I said. “We’re doing this again? Okay. Just let me switch gears.” I put the laptop away, picked up the card covered in hot glue and googly eyes, and said, “You made Guillermo a card?”

We stood in silence.

This was the part where Rosa was supposed to say “That’s so sweet,” before reading it aloud and commenting on the artwork.

Jerry pulled off his sunglasses and scanned the room.

“Hey. Where’s Rosa?”

“She, uh… Doesn’t work here anymore.”

Jerry slammed both of his hands onto the counter hard enough for one of the googly eyes to dislodge from the card and land on the floor. “She what?!”

“I was going to tell you earlier, but I thought it would be better in person.”

“You’re telling me the new owner of the gas station fired her, and you let this happen?”

“In a way, yes, both of those things are true.”

“Have you tried talking to him? What’s the appeals process?”

“There isn’t one.”

“Well what are you doing sitting around here? Let’s get Amy-O to look up this guy’s address so we can go talk to him. Or better yet, I have a new recipe for itching powder that I’ve been dying to use.”

I stood up, wobbled momentarily until I found my balance, and walked around to meet Jerry on the other side of the counter.

“It’s me, Jerry. I’m the new owner.” His face froze in a look of confusion. “I fired Rosa because Doc Howard declared war and I don’t want her getting caught in the crossfire. I would have fired you, too, if I thought you’d actually stay away. You can be mad at me all you want, but this was a judgment call, and I’m the one who had to make it.”

The moments when Jerry was speechless were few and far between. It felt strange, actually having to wait for him to say something. When he finally did, it had nothing to do with Rosa.

“Did you get a haircut or something? You look taller.”

“No. I got this.” I gestured at my new fancy-pants leg, hidden beneath my old, not-so-fancy-pants pants. “I have two feet again!”

“Oh yeah. How is it? Can you dance?”

“I couldn’t dance before, so no. I’ve pretty much mastered the art of walking around the gas station, though.”

“Around the whole building? Wow. Impressive.”

My sarcasm detector has always been defective. I genuinely couldn’t understand what Jerry was trying to say, and as gas station manager, I didn’t have the time to overanalyze everything to death anymore. “What’s happening? Are you mad at me? Because if not, why aren’t you mad at me?”

He looked down, pulled out his pack of cigarettes, stared at them, then put them back. When he looked up at me again, his face was solemn.

“I understand. You were put into a bad situation, right? You had to make a decision, right? You didn’t consult me because this is your burden to bear, right?”

I didn’t like the way he was saying whatever he was saying.

“Jerry, why are you being weird?”

“I’m not. I’m commiserating. I’m saying that I understand better than you think. Someone’s using psychological warfare on us. They’re counting on us to turn on one another. Getting angry over things that, let’s face it, aren’t really in our control. And I hope you’ll remember this when I tell you what I’m about to tell you.” He took off his backpack and put it onto the counter. “Now, don’t be mad…”

“You’re starting to scare me. What did you do?!”

“Well,” he checked to make sure we were alone, then pulled a toolbox-sized metal device out of the pack. He set it down on the counter with a loud thunk. “Before you freak out, let me assure you, it’s not that big of a deal.”

“Is that what I think it is?”

“Yeah,” he said, staring out the window. “It’s the Russian radio.”