An Apple for the Creature

Abrams lay still beneath him.

Ramsey rolled over onto his back, stared up at his hands, sobbed. He didn’t cry long, though. After a couple minutes, he stumbled to the kitchen in a daze and got one of his own beers from the fridge. One slurp sobered him up. By the time he was taking his second, he knew what he had to do.

SATURDAY, 12:01 A.M.

There was a knock on Robert Ramsey’s door. It was loud, insistent. Maybe it started off soft, but if so Ramsey hadn’t heard it over the sound of running water.

He was in the bathroom washing the dirt from his hands. He turned the water off and waited for the knocking to stop.

It didn’t.

He thought he’d been careful. Karen’s old flower bed was around back, flush against the house, blocked from view by bushes and the tall wooden fence around the yard. He’d worked by the light of the moon, though it was a cloudy night and the world around him had been little more than gray blurs in blackness.

But maybe the neighbors had heard him. There’s not much you can do to muffle the sound of a shovel biting into earth.

Ramsey crept into the hall and peeped at the picture window in the living room, thinking he might see red and blue lights flashing through the blinds. The police would need a warrant, wouldn’t they? They couldn’t just come barging in, no matter what someone had seen or heard . . . right?

But there were no flashing lights, and when Ramsey sneaked to the window and peeked at the street all he saw out front was the old Corolla he’d have to move soon with the key he’d taken from Andy Abrams’s pocket. The porch was out of his line of sight.

And still the knocking didn’t stop.

He had no choice. Whoever it was—nosy neighbors, stoned students trying to get into the wrong house, his former tenants dropping by to tell him what a tool he was for kicking them out—he’d have to shoo them away, fast. He couldn’t let anyone draw attention to his house or the car parked out front.

It occurred to him as he walked to the door that it might be Karen. Perhaps she’d found out that Andy was coming to see him. What a nightmare that would be. Or what an opportunity . . .

The knocking got louder.

“All right! I’m coming!” Ramsey faked a yawn as he reached for the doorknob. “You woke me up in the middle of the most beautiful drAHHHH!”

“Hi, Bob,” Andy Abrams said.

His clothes were dirty and disheveled, and there were clumps of sod in his dark, curly hair. But there were no marks around his throat, and his face had lost the purple-blue hue it had the last time Ramsey had seen it. Which had been, of course, the last time Ramsey had expected to see it.

“Mind if I come in?” Abrams asked. His tone was relaxed, his expression pleasant.

“Uhhhhhh . . . sure.”

“Thanks.”

Ramsey let Abrams move past him into the house. Then he leaned out and scanned the street and the neighboring homes. No one seemed to have noticed the freshly exhumed man standing on his porch.

Ramsey closed the door and joined him in the living room.

“Andy, I . . . I don’t know what to say.”

“I know.” Abrams smiled blandly. “Awk-ward!”

“Yeah. Look. I wonder . . . Do you know . . . Is it clear to you that . . . I mean . . . What do you think happened?”

“Oh, I remember everything, if that’s what you’re trying to ask. It’s not like I woke up in the flower bed thinking, ‘Golly, what am I doing here?’ But don’t worry. I’m not mad.”

“You’re not?” Ramsey said.

Abrams gave him an “awww, pshaw” swipe of the hand. Pebbles and dirt slid from his sleeve.

“Perish the thought. I was prodding you, Bob. Testing you. And you simply reacted according to your nature . . . which I think we’ve established pretty solidly now is ‘psychopath.’”

Ramsey gritted his teeth. “I am not a psycho.”

Abrams shrugged. “The proof is in the pudding, Bob. And up until ten minutes ago, it was in your backyard. But as I said—no hard feelings. Just pack up, get out of town, and we’ll forget the whole thing.”

“You really expect me to believe that you wouldn’t tell the cops I . . . You know. Lost my temper?”

“Sure. Don’t look a gift mitzvah in the mouth, Bob. And anyway, what choice do you have?”

Ramsey had been moving across the room as Abrams spoke, pretending to pace nervously. He stopped when his feet began crunching over silvery slivers on the floor—remnants of the frame glass he’d shattered earlier in the evening. He crouched down and picked up part of the beer bottle he’d smashed it with.

The neck.

The edges were jagged, sharp.

“What choice do I have, Andy? What choice do I have? Why don’t I show you?”

Abrams put up his hands and took a step back. “Please. No. Not like that. The strangling, Bob! The strangling wasn’t so bad!”

Ramsey rushed him.

It was a lot messier this time. And louder. But it was more definitive, too. No one was going to wake up from that. And there was an advantage to murdering a man twice in the same night, Ramsey discovered.

You only had to dig the grave once.

SATURDAY, 2:24 A.M.