chapter 7

malo

Cassidy Baker is gone for six months. She never comes back, police say, and they can’t explain why. Condolences to the family. There’s a lot that they say in newspapers and through announcements - the mayor swears justice, but they just can’t find her. And the worst part is - it's not that they can’t find her, it’s that they can’t disclose that I’m the one who killed her. If they do, the illusion of a little small town democracy with picket fences and barbecue grills with long khaki shorts starts to deteriorate. The American Dream is fumbled at the expense of a girl dying - and nobody really wants that, as right as it is to disclose her killer.

And the reason they won’t is not really just because of me, but rather, because of the men who found me first.

As I’m in the kitchen of Babe & Al’s in 2009, watching this petite barista make another mug of my coffee. I’m holding a pen in my right hand. I don’t realize it yet, but this is something I’ve wanted to do for months. She looks behind her shoulder and laughs at me -
"You ain’t supposed to be back here."

I tell her,
"I’ve made coffee before. I just wanna know the process."
"Not too much different than at home."
"I don’t know that."

Her shoulders tense. I watch her.

"You’re mighty tall."
"That I am."
"What’d they feed you?"
"Lots of things."
"You're making me nervous, sir."
"Well, I don't mean to."

I take a step towards her. She shrinks against the machine, keeping her eyes fixated on the coffee.

"What creamer, again..?"
"Hazelnut."

She swallows her breath.

I blink.

I'm holding the back of her limp head calmly against the tile flooring. There's a pen lodged in her throat, and she stopped breathing a while ago. From what I think I remember, she convulsed, held her neck, tried to gargle a few words out, flung her other hand around with the mug, but I took her wrist to take it from her. She moved around dancing like a drunken woman on a dance floor. I told her not to talk to me like that ever again. She blubbered something - that I think sounded like a semblance of a sentence, like;
"What the fuck is wrong with you?" and "They're gonna get you."

I don't really respond to that. I just think she's saying shit to me because she's dying.

She hasn't died before like I have - so I'd say she's coming from a place of unfamiliarity.

I'm not her savior and I don't want to be. I stare at her when she dies.

I want her to wake up in Hell with talons and vampire fangs.

And, well, after that - I begin trying to think about how I'm going to open the back of her head to check her suture. I'm sipping coffee and nobody's come in yet. I think about smoking inside this time around. It's been 12 minutes of pure silence. She convulsed for a little when she fell, but now she's fallen limp. I've never really looked at someone while they die before. This was a new for me - but I didn't hate it. Just didn't feel as fulfilling as I thought it'd be.

That's when two men walk through the backdoor of Babe & Al's, and tell me about how I've got no other choice. They have pistols on them. I take another drink - and I cross my legs on the floor.

The one on the left says - "You want a job? Take it up, all of this goes away."
I shrug and tap my fingers against the white mug. "You mean that? Seems like you don't."
"Don't take this up, you could serve the death penalty."
"Mmm. Don't mean nothin' to me."
"It should. They could kill you, you know."
"A lot of people can."

The one on the right starts talking, now -
"Doesn't ▇▇'s life mean anything t'you?"

I blink. The blood settles in.

I'm in a suit and tie. There's a little ID card with my face attached to it - and they're letting me keep my mask on. They said that uniform protocol doesn't matter so long as you stay true to the white suit and your black blazer. Otherwise, uniform doesn't matter to them that way (but it does in an abstract sense, they just won't tell you it does).

It's simple shit. If they tell me to do something, I do it. In the next coming years or so, I'll be under a lot of training, then I'll end up training a few little fuckers of my own. I say, well, I could do that. And they say, well, we know. That's why we got you. I start thinking of Chavez again in those moments (albeit fondly).

This is where I meet four or so people. They start trickling in around 2014.

Their names are