Carolyn, No
Janet texted: Miguel might not show up, And I have rehearsal.
Kit texted: Text me back. I’m a little drunk. ttyl.
…
Carolyn closes her laptop, finishes off her Tecate, and turns the lights off. She goes out on her balcony and eases onto the chaise lounge. So much for the celebration she planned to have, for getting a raise and a promotion; three friends and none of them coming over. Across the courtyard, past the arched entrance to her complex, she sees Vine Street, below Hollywood Boulevard. Wishing she still smoked, Carolyn bit her fingertip. Smoking would ease her frustration.
Miguel always had an excuse for not coming to her apartment and lately, he just didn’t bother with excuses. If she wanted to see him, she would go to his place or meet at some restaurant. Maybe she should call him and suggest his favorite taqueria.
He is supposed to be her boyfriend, but Miguel is as fussy about labeling their psychological drama as he is about aligning the forks and knives and spoons at the table. At every restaurant. Every time they go out to eat. Things need to be straight and parallel and just so, and somehow their relationship needs to be just as exact. Kit tells her that Miguel is not the one for her, that he is incapable of human interaction, preferring the company of his violin. But then Kit has been seeing a bassist for an obscure LA band who is a heroin addict.
A police car races past the entrance and she listens to the siren, following its whine as the car turns east on Hollywood Boulevard, and comes to a stop. Great, she thinks. Another one of those costumed idiots causing trouble. She hears voices, yelling. Staring out past the arch, she sees someone eluding the security lights. A movement in the bushes, someone sidling along the front building and ducking through the arch. A villain, she thinks. A bad guy has come to her courtyard.
When she moved to this apartment, her father helped bring a bed. He hated the place, said it wasn’t safe. He offered her a handgun. “Keep it nearby,” he said, but she refused. It had been years since she shot a gun at a shooting range. She was only fourteen the last time she went with him to practice gun safety. What would she do if she had that gun now?
She watches the supposed bad guy assess his surroundings. Where will he hide? Where can he go? He looks up and sees her watching. She almost waves. He dashes across the courtyard and opens her door down below her balcony. Of course, she remembers, she hadn’t locked it. She rarely did. The courtyard offered her false security, as if the archway had an invisible shield to keep out the Hollywood riff-raff.
…
“Come in here,” says a voice from her living room. She obeys and leaves the balcony. She does not close the sliding glass door. Briefly, she hears Miguel’s voice nagging her to close it.
Her villain is a short, stocky white guy who could be in his forties. He’s in jeans and a denim shirt, and a t‑shirt underneath for some heavy metal band. As far as she can tell, he does not have a gun. He tells her to sit down. He asks where her phone is.
“It’s on the table.” She nods to the coffee table and he takes it. Puts it in his pocket.
“I would like that back when you leave,” she says. “I have my life on there.”
He snorts and she thinks it is a disgusting sound.
“You can hide here until they are gone,” she offers. “But I want my phone back when you leave.”
He goes to the open sliding door and peers out. They can hear more police sirens, and they can hear squawking radio voices in staccato bursts. When he leans over to check the courtyard, she sees he has a gun in the back of his pants.
She wonders, what would Janet do? Janet — Miguel’s clever sister — has a great deal of self-defense training. She was attacked once, nearly raped, and she is determined never to let that happen again. Martial arts. Gun lessons. Mace. If this was Janet’s apartment, she would have the guy sprawled face down on the ground by now, crying from the mace and the dislocated shoulder Janet would have inflicted on him.
Carolyn has no such training. She wishes for a cigarette. She asks the intruder if he wants a beer. He comes in and looks at her.
“You some crazy cat lady?”
“Do you see any cats?” She gets up and goes to the refrigerator, takes out two Tecates. Pops the tops off and hands him one. He takes it. She sees he is reluctant. She wonders if she can hit him over the head with her bottle. She decides she is not strong enough nor is the bottle, so she drinks from it instead.
“Anyone else live here?”
“No. Just me.” Oh, she thinks. She should suggest that a man is coming home any minute. Too late. But even if Miguel did live with her, what would he do? The man would probably just shoot him as he came in the door. Besides, Miguel would never live here; there are too many things that need rearranging or straightening or just need to be tossed.
She settles into her couch and watches him pace the small living room, going to the balcony and coming back again. He drinks his beer. She finds some odd satisfaction in that.
“What did you do?” she asks.
“Nothing. Shut up.” He paces. She bites her finger and finishes her beer.
“I’ve always wondered what it is like to be a criminal,” she says. He ignores her. “I’ve always followed rules. What is it like to toss all those rules away? Is there freedom in that?”
He keeps pacing and looks more agitated. That might not be a good thing.
“It’s like I used to think about being a hobo. Just traveling the country. Riding the rails. Maybe get a little work here and there, get some money to buy a hot meal. And moving on. Seems like you could see a lot of the country that way. Meet a lot of people.” She feels her body start to quiver. “My grandfather did that when he was young. He told all these stories about being a hobo. It sounds romantic. But I think I wouldn’t like it really. You get dirty, can’t take a shower every day. Besides, I don’t think there are hobos anymore. Just homeless people.” She rests her bottle on her leg to steady it as her hand shakes too much.
“Shut up. I’m tryin’ to hear.” He stands with his head at the edge of the door, listening to the radio voices.
She waits. He has his back turned. She could walk up behind him and hit him with something. She looks around her room. Nothing is hard or heavy. She has pillows. She has paperback books. She has one of Miguel’s lesser valuable violins that he loaned her to use for an illustration. In the kitchen, she has a big cast iron pan. That would do it. But the kitchen means she would have to walk past him, draw his attention to her. She could be getting another beer.
“Another one?” she says, standing up. She sees he has only had about half of his. “Well I want another one.”
He steps farther out onto the balcony. Carolyn makes out a few words from the radio: Armed. Last seen.
Last seen right here, she mentally telegraphs the police. Come around the corner, she tells them. Check our courtyard. Look up at my balcony.
He comes in.
“Go sit down,” he says.
“I was getting another beer.”
“Now you’re not.”
“Did you kill someone?”
He snorts again.
“Well, did you?”
“You’re one fucking odd chick.”
“My boyfriend says so.”
“Where is he? Is he coming here?”
She wonders what the best answer is. But lying seems wrong, it is wrong to lie to a man with a gun. “No. He hates coming here.”
“Sounds like a real winner.” The man sits down on the edge of a chair. His leg is pumping up and down with his nerves and he keeps looking out the sliding door.
“So. Why are they after you? The police?”
“Yeah. I killed someone. A total asshole. A loser. Guy would kill me if I didn’t kill him first.”
“Wow. You did kill someone. Have you ever done that before?”
“What are you, secret police? A lawyer? What?”
“No, I’m a graphic artist.” She wants to tell him that she just got a raise, that she is an excellent graphic artist; she wants someone to hear about her raise and promotion.
“I’ve killed seven people. Went to jail for one of them. Manslaughter. They was all murder though. I murdered them because I needed to. They all needed to be dead.”
“Oh. Do I need to be dead?” She leans back into the couch.
“Not if you shut up.”
By now Janet would have the police handcuffing this guy and taking him to the hospital. By now Janet would have called her, Carolyn, and told her in a triumphantly shaking voice that she foiled a would-be rapist. Carolyn did not think this man was a rapist. Are murderers also rapists? Or are they two different things, like two different callings or careers? She wonders what Kit would do. Then she remembers. She is supposed to text Kit. In fact, that annoying little pinging noise she keeps hearing is her cellphone, sending out tiny vibrations into the room from the man’s pocket. Kit. And if Kit doesn’t get an answer, Kit — who lives two blocks away — will show up at her door.
“My friend might come over,” she says. “If I don’t text her back, she might come here.”
The man looks at her. “Then I have to kill you.”
“Oh no,” she says. “No, no, no. If you let me text her, she won’t come.”
The man pulls his gun and points it at her. “You have a car?”
“Yes. In the alley.”
“Let’s go.”
She picks up the keys. “Here,” she says, “it’s a red Honda.”
“You’re driving.”
Janet said, never get in a car with a stranger. Fight back, yell or scream, lie down on the ground but never get in a car. Statistics are grim, she said. Once a victim gets in the car, she’s pretty much dead.
“I can’t get in the car,” says Carolyn. His gun is now pressed against her stomach.
“Really?”
“Okay.” They walk down the back stairs to the alley. Her car, freshly washed, shines in the light of the motion detector. This brings tears to her eyes.
…
With the man crouched down in the passenger seat and his gun pointed at her, Carolyn drives the car out of the alley and onto Vine Street. She turns north. She turns east. She passes the police cars. She wants to wave to them but there’s the gun. Maybe she could crash the car. She continues driving.
“East L.A.” he says. “Drop down to Sunset and head east.”
“Okay.” She drives. “So tell me. Just tell me because I want to know. How does it feel to be free of rules? To not follow them. To do what you want.”
He does his snort. “Fucking great. That’s what it feels like. Except for when the cops are after you. Otherwise. I do what I want. Make my own world, you know? Make it my way. I don’t like somebody, I remove them. I do like somebody, I take care of them.”
“You do? Like, you have a girlfriend? Or a wife? How do you take care of them?” Carolyn makes a careful left onto Sunset, wishing that someone would run the red light and hit her car. On the passenger side.
“My chick, she’s in jail now. Shit’s bad, I tried to take care of her, but she blew it. But she didn’t bust me. That’s good, you know. Good she didn’t bust me.”
“I just want to understand. What do you mean, you take care of them?”
“I buy her shit. I spend money on her. She wanted a Lexus, I stole some shit from this idiot dealer I know, caught the money and bought her the Lexus. Paid for like everything is legal. Didn’t have to steal a car for her. Just bought it.”
“You are proud of that.” She thinks, but doesn’t say, that he was following the rules by actually buying the car and he was proud of that. Probably if he was rich and could do whatever he wanted, he would follow more rules; or maybe he would just be better at killing people and not getting caught.
“Damn right.”
“Would you really kill me?”
“Just drive. I haven’t made up my mind yet.”
Carolyn drives. She wonders, what will make up his mind? Should she keep talking to him? She thinks she remembers something Janet once told her, about making yourself more human and real to your attacker, so he feels like he knows you and can’t hurt you. What else can she ask this man?
“What’s it like to kill a person, watch him die?”
“You talk too much. Shut up and drive.”
“My boyfriend says I talk too much.” She thinks of Miguel. If she dies, how will he feel? Will he be upset? Will he cry? Or will he very conscientiously make arrangements for her funeral, invite her friends, express sympathy to her father, play the appropriate music at her service, and remember that she wants to be cremated not buried?
“Where are we?”
“We’re almost to Alvarado.”
“Echo Park Lake?”
“Yes. It’s up ahead.”
“Pull over there.”
She parks. They get out and walk down to the edge of the lake. Carolyn sighs. I’m going to be shot and drowned, she thinks. And my body will sink and no one will know where I am.
“This is not right,” she says to the man. “I don’t want to be in the lake.”
“Not your choice, is it?” He takes the keys from her, drops them in his pocket with her cell phone. Then he draws his hand back and whacks her on the side of her head with his gun. She falls down on the wet grass, clutching her head, the pain shooting stars across her eyes. He yanks her by her arms and hauls her into the lake, holding her head underwater.
She has a brief moment of clarity: the water makes the pain on the side of her head feel better. Relief. Until she passes out.
…
Carolyn wakes and there are lights and people all around her. The man is not far from her. He is on the ground. Blood trickles out of his mouth and his eyes are wide open as if he has seen the scariest sight of his life. Police radios squawk. Kit leans over her, as paramedics clean her temple.
“What are you doing here?” she asks Kit.
“You didn’t answer my texts. I saw you get in your car with that man. Police were everywhere. I told them. They followed your car. But they weren’t fast enough — assholes,” she looked around at the cops who paid her no attention, “to stop him from hurting you.”
“You’re amazing,” Carolyn says. “Like Sherlock Holmes or NCIS or something.”
They lift Carolyn onto a stretcher and start moving her across the rough grass, up a hill to a waiting ambulance. Kit walks alongside, holding her hand.
“Carolyn!” they hear. A voice, a man’s voice, shouting.
“It’s Miguel,” says Kit, and she points.
Carolyn turns her head and sees Miguel running to her with a look of terror on his face. Yellow lightning bolts shoot pain through her eyeballs when she laughs at his mismatched shoes.
—
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