I stopped then, my heart pounding. I was feeling a touch of hysteria. I needed to calm myself. I had to act deliberately, think things through — although I’d made my plans hours earlier and I knew what I had to do.
All those books! My breath caught in my throat as I considered my plan for them. The air was full of dust now. I’d never thought of myself as a book burner.
I went to the front door. When I was only two steps away, it silently unlatched and stood ajar a few inches. Okay. I’d needed to know that, be sure of that. I couldn’t allow myself to be trapped in Jones’s apartment. As I’d hoped, his remote worked automatically for doors, and, I assumed, the elevator.
I went back to the pile of books. Some of them had fallen on and around Jones. That gave me an idea, and I stacked more of them on him. “Because you really loved books,” I muttered at him. Was there anything he hadn’t lied about?
I used my lighter to start the fire, near the base of the books. It would be his funeral pyre, I figured.
I waited until the fire was well established and it was getting smoky, making me cough and my eyes tear up. I wanted to stay longer and see the fire grow, but I knew I shouldn’t.
A drop of water hit me on my head. Startled, I looked up. In the center of the high ceiling was some kind of a knob. Water was dripping from it. I suddenly realized what it was — a sprinkler, activated by the fire. But water wasn’t spraying out. It was dribbling. More drops fell on me and I caught one in my hand. It was dark-colored, and when I let it run off my hand it left behind tiny flakes of rust. The sprinkler head must have been clogged up. It served Jones right, I thought, for living in such an old building.
I couldn’t wait any longer. I went out into the hallway and pulled the door shut. I could still smell the smoke when I got to the elevators, but then the elevator door opened and I escaped that floor.
The remote got me back to the lobby and out the doors without incident. I saw two women in the lobby, coming in. One of them gave me an odd look, but they continued past me. I looked like some street kid, but I was leaving. I was no threat.
Out on the street, I crossed the avenue and looked back and up. I was facing west and the late-morning sun gleamed brightly in reflections from the building’s glass outer walls, which seemed to ripple. The building was over a hundred floors tall. I had no idea where to look, but just then I heard a faint explosion and then the much closer sounds of glass hitting the pavement and high up I saw a thin plume of black smoke which got bigger as I watched. I didn’t watch long.
I still had unfinished business.
Big Lou was lounging in Jonny’s place when he let me in. She took one look at me and got up and left.
“Hey, girl,” Jonny said when I came in. “How’d it go? Ya do good?”
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
“That Doc is somethin’ else, ain’t he?”
“He is now,” I said.
“I knew’choo comin’ back to me,” Jonny said, purring. “That Doc, he showed ya the error of ya ways, now he broke ya in, made’choo a woman.”
“That what you wanted, Jonny? For him to — how’d you put it? — break me in?”
He grinned, full of himself. “I knew, once ya broke yer cherry, ya’d get over being like that. I got big plans for ya. This yer new home, li’l Shiv.”
“I’d like that,” I said, cuddling up to him. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the remote. “Of course, I could live uptown.”
Jonny’s eyes narrowed. “Wassat? Where ya get it?”
“This?” I gave Jonny one of my rare smiles. “Oh, this is just a little thing I picked up. Jones called it his remote. You ever see one before?”
“A remote? Sure. But the Doc? Don’t he need it—?”
I watched the expressions chase themselves across his face as I said, “Not anymore, he doesn’t.”
His expression settled into anguish. “You didn’t—”
“What did you think I’d do? The bastard raped me. Drugged and raped me. No man does that.”
“You did him?”
“And set his place on fire. Poetic justice. Burned him out.”
“Gawd,” Jonny said. “I never thought—”
I interrupted him. I slid the blade of my knife — which I’d taken out while distracting him with the remote — into his side, just under his rib cage. He didn’t have his protective vest on, relaxed in his own place. The knife is very sharp and I don’t think he even felt it at first. Then I twisted it viciously, rotating it and scrambling his insides.
Jonny gave me a look of disbelief and great disappointment, opened his mouth and coughed out blood. He tried to pull away from me, but he didn’t hit me or try to attack me.
I told him I was sorry, and I really was. We’d shared a lot together, grown up together. “I knew you got money from Jones for me, for connecting us up. But you shouldn’t have sold me out, Jonny. You knew what he was going to do. You wanted him to. You betrayed me.”
I’m not sure he heard that last. His eyes got a glassy look and he folded over on himself, clutching his gut, doubled up.
He didn’t make much of a mess. I got it cleaned up. Then I thoroughly searched his place and found his money stash. I used very little of it to pay two juiceheads to take his body out and dump it in an alleyway. I knew it would be found first by the locals, and what it would tell them.
I’ve taken over his place. I live there now. It’s better than my old place — there’s electricity for one thing — but he had no books. I’m going to have to start a new collection.
He did have a newscreen. I turned it on and watched a report on the fire and murder uptown. Tiny surveillance holos of me with Jones in the big lobby, and me by myself leaving. I looked like a boy, and that’s who they think it was. Apparently Jones had brought boys up to his apartment before. Both boys and girls. I was far from his first victim, but I didn’t find that news reassuring.
I’m running Jonny’s girls now. Big Lou has been a real help. It’s not the life I wanted for myself, but you take what you can get and I need to survive.
I guess I’m really grown up now. Next week I turn fifteen.
Contributors’ Notes
Robert Hinderliter’s short stories have appeared in Columbia Journal, Sycamore Review, New Ohio Review, Fugue, and other places. He grew up in Haviland, Kansas (population 600), and now lives in Gwangju, South Korea, where he teaches English literature at Chosun University.
• “Coach O” is one of many stories I’ve written set in Haskerville, Kansas, a fictionalized version of my hometown, Haviland. Haskerville is like Haviland in many respects, although home to slightly more weirdos, degenerates, and unfathomable mysteries.
The idea for “Coach O” came when my wife and I were having drinks and brainstorming story ideas. I wanted to write about a football coach in the biggest game of his life, but my wife suggested a more unique angle: a sports story in which no actual sporting occurs. So the setting switched from the game to the pep rally, and I started to think of all the ways Coach Oberman’s life could be unraveling, and how it might all come to a head. One aspect of small-town life that interests me is the impossibility of keeping secrets. The answer to the question “Who knows what?” is usually: “Everyone, everything.” In a half-square-mile town with six hundred people, there’s nowhere to hide. So I wanted Oberman to feel that all his secrets and failures would soon be on public display. He’s surrounded, boxed in, and therefore increasingly desperate.