Saturday night

I didn’t think of police at all on the way home, my mind was too peaceful. I turned into the driveway with a quick jerk and saw her in the pool, just her nose and eyes above the water line. Walking through the gate I noticed she had set up camp. There were bags of chips and half-finished drinks with a cooler of ice at the pool’s edge. I asked her how long she had been in there. She let me know that it had been all day, she was looking for relief from the heat. I told her that it must’ve been boring to sit in water all day. She told me that she had been counting cars to pass the time, I asked her how many she was up to in the count. She said, “Two.” I walked in through the kitchen, tossed the keys on the counter and headed for the shower. It was difficult to operate without humming a tune. I hadn’t felt this good in over a year. Step one was completed now, it went off without a hitch. We set up in the den for a meal that I had made, that was after all, why I went out, to get food to cook. We played a couple of games after we ate then settled in for a good movie. During the course of the night I began to wonder why I had not heard anything about this afternoon. It was then that I made the decision that I would suffer from my own thoughts if I took time between phases. I must act accordingly to rectify this, so I made a call. It wasn’t hard to set it up; I played to his weakness. I arrived at the car wash fifteen minutes before the set time. I pulled into the stall and began to wash the car. He pulled in the parking lot just as I was finishing up. He sat in the car looking at me as if I had lost my mind. He liked to think of himself as an international spy, or at least as cool as he thought one was. Hot headed is how I thought of him. I motioned for him to drive into the stall next to me. He was angry, but that was all right, he wouldn’t be emotional in just a few minutes. When the car was settled in place he let the window down and began motioning me over. There was nobody around at all, no cameras or live bodies, that’s why we used the place. I leaned into the window and he asked me what I had for him. I couldn’t stop myself from feeling the anger press up from my gut as I looked into his watery eyes. I could smell the weed wafting from the car through the window to flow over me like woodsmoke. His impatient grin just made the situation that much more gratifying. I stepped back from the car, took a deep breath and said, “Two.” The first one made him jerk quickly to his right as he slumped over. I noticed that the passenger seat was quite messy as I stepped to the window. The second one in his side made him move just a little. I thought about the difference in movement as I drove away.