Assault with a Deadly Lie by Lev Raphael

Author:Lev Raphael [Raphael, Lev]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press

12

Feeling shaky, I left him alone, went down to the kitchen, called Marco and sat outside on the patio, trying to relax and enjoy the garden. Marco sat by my feet and I closed my eyes, leaned back in the zero gravity recliner I’d come to rely on for stress management. I listened to the breeze stirring the leaves high above us. You couldn’t hear much traffic where we lived, but it was a noisy day in the trees and hedges: chickadees, mourning doves, cardinals, finches, and sparrows. I welcomed the soft cacophony in our half acre of heaven.

But though I was physically comfortable, my mind was tormented by the gross scene of discovering roadkill in our bed, and the dread of further outrages. I kept coming back to the fear that whoever was behind all this had planted subtler little bombs in other rooms. I couldn’t even imagine what they could be, but sensed their menace. I was starting to feel as if I were living in a haunted house. The ordinary had turned threatening, even malevolent.

Marco suddenly bolted for the far side of the yard and I hurried after him. I wasn’t in the mood to clean up after him if he caught a rabbit; he thankfully didn’t chew on them, just broke their necks, but sometimes there was blood. Luckily, when I caught up to him, he was just sniffing idly along the fence; whatever he’d seen or thought he’d seen was gone. Mr. Kurtz was digging on the other side (of course!), and now he stood up and glared at me, looking like the farmer in Grant Wood’s American Gothic.

“What the hell is going on at your place? The police are there every single day,” he snarled. “I don’t like it. Nobody likes it. People like you don’t belong here. This is a decent neighborhood.”

I was gobsmacked, since he almost never spoke to me or Stefan.

“What the hell are you doing over there, running some kind of meth lab?” he asked, and since the fence was only four feet high, I could have easily reached across and belted him. But I turned, clapped my hands for Marco, who followed me back inside.

“My son-in-law is a cop!” he called. As if that meant anything.

In the kitchen I felt as angry and frustrated as a bullied, fat adolescent, and I wanted to stuff my face and stuff down every last feeling, but I couldn’t figure out what to eat, so I just stood there, helpless. And then the image of the polluted bed upstairs triggered another image: a larger bed in a far more magnificent room. From a movie: The Godfather. There was a studio executive in that film who didn’t want to give an Italian singer a big part, so the singer asked the Godfather for help, and the exec was punished by finding the head of his prize horse in his king-size bed.

Lucky Bitterman, I thought. He was steeped in films; someone like that would be bound to recreate moments from movies, whether he was conscious of it or not.

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