Crimes of Passion
10:47 PM
“Your dad is a cop?”
“Oh shit,” Sam whispers. “Oh fuck, shit, shit.”
The uniformed policeman knocks again.
“Don’t answer,” she hisses. “Just go!”
“What?” You look at her. “I can’t, just go. It’s the police.” You quickly move the remains of your milkshake and fries from your lap to the floor between your feet, then roll down your window.
“What are you doing here?” he demands.
“Well I, uh, we…”
Sam leans across you to peer up at the mustached officer. “Daddy, I’m sorry. I was just—”
“License and registration,” he says without looking at her.
“We weren’t doing anything.” She reaches for the milkshake in her lap. “Look, Matt brought me food.” She holds it out to him. “See?”
“License and registration,” he repeats, not taking his eyes off of you.
“Dad, please, we were only talking.”
“I uh, don’t have one.”
“One what?” he asks.
“A license.”
“Is this your vehicle?”
“Dad, you don’t have to do this.”
“Actually, no, it’s my—”
“No?” He reaches in, pulls up on your lock, and swings the door open. “Get out the car.”
You are only half way to your feet when he grabs you by the arm and yanks you the rest of the way out of the Volkswagen. “Turn around,” he says as he slams your door shut, spins you about, and shoves you face forward against the side of the car. “Hands behind your head.” Your arms are up and your fingers laced before he has a chance to do it for you.
“Stop it!” Sam is out of the car, standing at the front bumper in her t-shirt and sweatpants. “What are you doing?”
“You!” he snaps, acknowledging her for the first time. “Get your ass in the house right now.”
You plead at her with your eyes, Just do what he says, Sam!
But she’s not looking at you. “It’s not his fault, I asked him to wait for me.”
His hands slide roughly over your arms, around your chest, and down your sides.
“Are you arresting him?”
Now he’s checking the waistband of your jeans, patting the outsides of your pockets. “I said, get in the house.”
“Or what?” She takes a step closer, holds out her arms. “Are you going to arrest me too?”
“Don’t test me,” he growls, tossing your brown, Velcro wallet onto the hood of the car. Then he reaches into the front pocket of your Levi’s and pulls out the condom Erik slipped into your palm earlier this evening. “And this?” he demands, dangling it in front of your face as if it were a bag of weed.
“Shit,” you hear yourself say, “Th-that’s not mine.”
Sam is staring wide-eyed at the plastic square with the donut-like bulge pinched between her father’s thumb and forefinger.
Overwhelmed with embarrassment, you shut your eyes and let your forehead drop onto the roof of the car. Except you misjudge the distance because when your skull hits the metal dome of the Volkswagen white light explodes behind your eyes, the ground opens beneath you, and you go sliding sideways into the dark.
For a long while, there is nothing but night. It surrounds you, soft and spongey as potting soil, moist as freshly dug earth. There is a sound above and behind you, someone speaking, calling your name, but you make no attempt to move or even open your eyes, content to let the coolness sift into your nose and gradually fill your lungs.
The voice though, is persistent. “Matthew,” it repeats, gaining clarity and volume, and with it a pain in your forehead like the blade of a shovel pressing into your skull.
You open your eyes to find yourself sitting at a table, hands folded in front of you. A lone bulb swinging slowly from the ceiling casts rolling shadows across the empty tabletop and causes the walls to tip and tilt around you. The swaying of the room and the throbbing in your head are suddenly too much and you are about to be sick.
You attempt to cover your mouth but find you cannot lift your hands more than a few inches from the tabletop. You try again, yanking roughly, and with a clattering of iron and a biting pain in your wrists, you discover that you are handcuffed to a ring in the center of the metal table.
“Matthew Van Der Boot,” snaps a voice from behind. “I’m talking to you!”
“I…” You swallow dryly, attempt to clear your throat. “I hear you.”
“Then answer me.” He steps from the shadows on your left, a pair of dark sunglasses now hiding his eyes, drops the unopened condom on the table in front of you, and stabs at the package with the tip of his index finger. “Where did you get this?”
“I told you, my friend gave it to me.”
“Your friend?” He slams the palms of both hands hard against the tabletop. “Names! Van Der Boot! Give me names!”
“Eric!”
“Eric?” He leans even closer, so close you can make out the beads of saliva clinging to the bottom edge of his mustache. “Eric what?” he demands, stinging your eyes with his coffee breath.
“I…” You’ve said too much already. “I don’t know.”
“Liar!” he shouts, shoving away from the table. “You’re protecting him! It’s obvious!”
“No, I swear! Why would I—?”
The room comes alive with a burst of static, someone shouting names and numbers. He immediately reaches for the radio on his hip and lowers the noise to a whisper before you can decipher any of it. Then he simply stares at you, or seems to, from behind those dark glasses, his fists clenched at his sides and his chest rising and falling with unspent violence.
“You got to believe me. I never would have…”
“It’s too late for tears, Van Der Boot,” he says, retrieving the condom from the tabletop and slipping it into a pocket on the front of his uniform shirt. “You crossed a line, son. The line. Now there’s no going back.”
You hang your head in defeat. A moment later, the sound of the door opening and closing causes you to look up. The officer is gone and a woman with dark, pixie-short hair and wearing a glittery black, spandex top is standing in his place. She has large wide-spaced eyes and lips as red as the Dolphin shorts nestled high on her hips. She leans on the table with one hand, reaches out with the other to grasp you firmly by the chin, and says in a throaty whisper, “You think you’re such a tough cookie, don’t you?”
You can only stare back at her.
Her upper lip quivers, then curls into a snarl. “Little heart breaker, right? Hearts, like the one in me?”
“I, I don’t…”
She scrapes the nail of her thumb along the side of your jaw as she pulls her hand away. Then she slips two fingers beneath the waistband of her shorts, takes out a small key, and uses it to remove the restraints from your wrists. “Knock me down,” she says, as the handcuffs clatter to the table top. “I’ll just get back up again.”
You push your chair back and stand. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do Matt,” she says, tracing the fingers of one hand along the edge of the stainless-steel table as she moves toward you. “You know what I’m talking about.” Her hands are on your chest, then sliding up the sides of your neck, through your hair, and around the back of your head. “Take your best shot,” she says, pulling you toward her. “Hit me with it. Fire away.” Then her mouth, soft and wet, is covering yours.
But your lips remain frozen, unable to return the kiss.
She pulls her head back to look at you, brown eyes beneath blue eyelids. “Come on, you don’t fight fair,” she says, continuing to press against you with her chest and hips. “That’s okay, see if I—”
A chime, as loud as a church bell, goes off just outside the room.
“Oh, shit,” she says. “What time is it?”
“Time?”
She pushes away from you, her gaze darting about the dimly lit space. “I told you, I have to be home by eleven.” She kisses you quickly on the mouth. “Call me,” she says, then turns and hurries out the door, the patter and scrape of high heels over cement echoing behind her.
“You know who that is, don’t you?”
You look over your shoulder to find Eric standing in the shadows just behind you.
“Dude,” you say, turning back toward the open door. “I’m not stupid. My brother has her albums.”
“Had,” he corrects. “He had her albums.”
You take a step toward the exit, then stop to look back at Eric. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
“Well then,” He lifts the front of his shirt, pulls a black pistol from the waistband of his brown cords, and holds it out to you grip first. “You better take this.”
You start to reach for it, then immediately withdraw your hand. You know you should leave, now, while the door is still open, while you still can. “I don’t want that,” you say. “Her dad’s a cop.”
“Yeah, but you don’t know that.”
You look toward the door, then back at Eric. “I don’t?”
“Not yet. You don’t find out till later.”
“Later?”
“When it’s too late.” He steps closer. “Besides,” he says, with that confident smirk of his. “You know what they say about cops’ daughters, right?”
“No, what? What do they say?”
“Never mind, here.” He presses the weapon into your palm. “Just in case.”
“Is it loaded?” you ask, feeling the crosshatch texture on the grip, the metal weight of it in your hand.
“Of course, it’s loaded. Look, here’s the safety and—”
With a deafening pop, the gun recoils in your grasp.
He stumbles away from you, hands over his stomach, and backs into the wall.
“Eric, no…” You set the gun on the table and reach him just as he slides to a sitting position on the floor. A darkness is quickly spreading from beneath his hands, soaking the front of his shirt and pants. You drop to your knees beside him. “I’m sorry, Eric, I—” But when you look at him again, it’s not Eric at all. It’s your brother.
“Robert?”
“It’s okay, Matt,” he says, looking up at you from beneath two perfectly feathered waves of brown hair. “It’s not your fault.”
“It is. I did it, Robert. I’m responsible.”
“It just happened, Matt. Things just happen.”
“Then take me with you.”
“Matt,” he says, then clutches at his stomach, wincing in pain. “You don’t understand.”
“It’s not fair,” you whimper. “I washed your car and everything.”
He shakes his head slowly back and forth. “It’s not up to me.”
Suddenly, you are angry. “You just decided that right now, to keep me from going.”
He’s no longer looking at you, his chin sinking to his chest. “No, I swear.”
“Fuck you, Robert,” you say, getting to your feet and backing toward the door.
“Matthew David!” snaps your mother from the other side of the table. You turn to find her wiping down the gun with a white dishtowel. “Come back here this moment!”
“Let him go, Mom,” your brother says. “He doesn’t understand.”
Shaking her head in utter disappointment, she returns her attention to the weapon.
You turn and run.
To be continued…
This story is a work in progress — I’m writing it as fast as I can! More episodes in this thread coming soon. While you are waiting, feel free to return to the beginning: if you make different choices you will get a different story.
I would love to hear from you!
THE MISADVENTURES OF MATTHEW VAN DER BOOT is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and places are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental … no matter how many times you ask.