“What’s the story up there?”
“One dead.”
“How’d it happen?”
“Honestly. I have no idea. No
apparent wounds or trauma. No drugs. Too young for a heart attack. Some underlying
illness is my best guess.”
“We’ll have to wait for the autopsy
I guess.”
A siren swells as an ambulance pulls
up to the scene, its lights dancing in time with the other emergency vehicles
already there. A small crowd of people has gathered around the area. Some waiting
to get their cars from the garage, others just overly curious passersby.
As he walks into the garage, the
woman is just stepping out of her car. “Hey!” he shouts. The woman jumps,
startled. Clearly, she wasn’t expecting him to approach her. She probably didn’t
even think he’d noticed her following him. He begins toward her, but she quickly
takes off toward the stairwell in the corner of the garage. He bursts into a
sprint and follows after her. He gains on her at first, but as he reaches the
stairwell, she turns to look at him. It then dawns on him that he still has no
idea what she wants, or for that matter what she is capable of doing. This specter
that has inhabited the dark corners of his life for the past two years. Clearly,
if she had wanted him dead, he would be by now. Hell, she even saved his life.
But why? She takes off again up the stairs. He must know. After a brief pause
he climbs the stairs after her, albeit more cautiously than he had pursued her
before.
The woman continues to the top floor
of the garage and makes her way to the far end of the roof. The garage is only
about half full, and there isn’t a single car up on the roof. He walks across
the empty parking spaces, not quickly, but deliberately. The woman turns to
face him and calls out in a cracking voice, “What do you want?”
What do I want, he thinks. What do I want? This is not exactly how he saw
this encounter playing out. Then again, he really didn’t think about how this
would play out at all. He just knew he had to put an end to it, one way or
another. “Why have you been stalking me?” He asks, finally.
“I don’t know what you’re talking
about.”
“Don’t pull that shit on me. I know
its you. You have been stalking me for two years. Everywhere I go, everything I
do. You are always there, watching my every move. Now I want to know why.”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told
you. You would just say I’m crazy.”
“Funny, that’s what everyone has
been saying about me lately. So come on, try me,” he says continuing toward her
again.
“I have to… to keep you alive,” she stammers.
“What are you talking about? Keep me
alive. Was I in danger?”
“No, but… I just couldn’t… risk it. The
fear was driving me insane. Always worrying, always wondering, if today was gonna
be the day. Wondering when it would happen. Knowing any moment could be the
last.”
“And why would you care what
happened to me,” he asks, now stepping within arm’s reach of her.
She tries to take a step back, but
there is nowhere to step and her foot hits against the foot-high lip of the
roof. “I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.”
Without warning, he reaches out and
grabs her by the arm. “I’m getting real sick of you saying that.”
She jerks back in surprise and
almost loses her balance. She quickly throws her weight to the side to keep herself
from toppling backwards. As she does he loses his grip and stumbles forward.
His foot catches the concrete rim that runs the perimeter of the roof and his
knee buckles sending him toppling over the roof. The woman screams and
scrambles toward him. She reaches her hand out over the roof in vain, but he is
already beyond reach and speeding toward the asphalt below.
Sirens blare as emergency vehicles
make there way down ninth avenue toward the parking garage. A panicked caller
explained to the 911 operator that he saw a man fall from the ninth avenue garage.
Another caller was in hysterics after a man fell from the sky and almost landed
on top of her. The police arrived and quickly secured the scene. “We got a name?”
one of the officers ask.
“Michael Sorrows,” another answers, pulling
out the victim’s license.
The first officer radios the name and
details of the scene back to the station. A little while later they respond and
inform him that Michael Sorrows recently left a hospital against medical advice,
and before he could be questioned for a possible suicide attempt. Well that
would certainly explain the situation, the officer thought.
Not a minute after the station responded, the
radio crackles back to life. This time it is one of the other officers on the
scene. “I’ve got another body on the roof. A young woman.”
To be continued…
-AMS
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