The Three Dollar Phoenix by Walt Sautter (rooftoppers .txt) 📖

to help was Angie. Maybe there was something she had forgotten. He hesitated to call her again. Al had just been buried and Ed was reluctant to burden her with the prodding and probing that would be needed to get at the truth.
After minutes of self agonizing, he decided he must speak to her. She would understand, she’d have to.
He made the call. His apprehension evaporated with the congeniality of her greeting. She readily agreed to his suggestion that they sit down and hash through all the details of the past few days. She knew, that it was the only chance they had of making some sense of what had happened.
She was as eager as he was to find out what sinister force had torn her husband from her. Angie had always been taught that there was a reason for everything and not knowing the reason for Al’s death gnawed at her and allowed her little peace. She felt the knowledge would somehow make her loss more bearable.
Ed knocked at the front door. It opened almost immediately. Angie ushered him through the living room and dining room to the kitchen.
“Come in here” she said as he followed her.
“I’ve got all this stuff on the table and I don’t want the cat to knock it off. He’s always jumpin’ up on the table. I can’t keep him off” she added with a note of disgust.
The kitchen table was covered with dozens of snap shots.
“I was just lookin’ over pictures of Al. It’s funny, because they make me feel bad and good at the same time. Do you know what I mean?” she said with a tearful eye.
Ed nodded understandingly.
“These are all pictures of Al and the guys he worked with and a lot of the players. I bet I got a picture of Al with almost every player that ever played on the team, since he started there” she added boastfully.
Ed moved over to the table and began to look at the pictures.
“Who took all these?” he asked.
“Pete, Al’s friend Pete. He was a real camera nut. He’d take a picture of anything, just to take a picture. He used to even take pictures of clouds. He was real good at taking them too.
He bought all the good cameras and lenses, all the expensive stuff. Al said he won a couple of prizes even, you know, those photographic contests they run in magazines, sometimes.”
Ed studied the photographs, as Angie spoke at length of Pete’s picture taking skills.
Suddenly, he interrupted.
“Most of these are awfully dark. Some of them are even hard to see. If he spent all his money on equipment like you said and he really knew what he was doing, then how come they’re all over exposed?”
She paused for a minute to think.
“He always complained about that. Al said he tried a dozen different developers and all different kinds of film. He even took one of his expensive cameras back to the store where he bought it and they checked it out and there was nothing wrong with it. But, he still kept getting those bad pictures” replied Angie.
Ed continued to look over the photographs.
“Some of these look OK” he remarked as he picked out the dozen or so bright ones.
“It must be that you brighten the pictures” joked Ed and he pointed to her in each of the most vivid snapshots of the group.
Then his smile collapsed into a serious stare.
“This is funny. All the pictures taken at the stadium, the ones with the guys he worked with and the players are the dark ones. Where were the pictures of you taken”
“Some here and some over at Pete’s house and couple down at the beach” she answered.
“None at the stadium?” he thought out loud.
“Do you have Pete’s phone number?” asked Ed.
“Maybe I could talk to him about this.”
“It’s in here.” she said as she leafed through a small address book, taken from a nearby drawer.
“Here it is” she repeated as she wrote it down on a slip of paper and handed to him. He looked at it. folded it and slipped it into his pocket.
“Angie, let me ask about Al’s medicine when he came home. What kind of pills did he take?” he asked.
“I don’t know what they were. Doctor House said they were special medicine, like I told you, that’s all I know. They were about this big and yellow” and she held up her fingers showing a circle about the size of a large aspirin tablet.
“How often did he take them?”
“One at nine o’clock, one at. one o’clock and one at five” she replied.
“Oh, you mean three times a day” Ed corrected her.
“Maybe that’s the same, but Doctor House said the pill had to be taken exactly at those times. He made sure I understood that. He even wrote it down so I wouldn’t forget.. He said timing was very important for this medicine to work” she said and went to a kitchen drawer. She returned and handed a sheet of paper to Ed, with the times written on it.
“Here’s the note he gave me” she declared. It read just as she had said.
“You said that House came for the pills that weren’t used after Al died. How many were there?”
“Only two” she replied.
“Only two? How many pills did Al come home with?”
“Twelve.”
“Twelve. Is that all? Did he give you a prescription for more?”
“Doctor House said he would send more before we got low, down to two or so.”
”Did he send any?”
“No” she replied.
Ed wasn’t sure, but he thought that at long last, maybe found a clue that would begin bringing this all together. He’d have to sit down and really think it all over, but at least this time, he had an idea, a direction in which to channel his thinking.
As he drove away from Angie’s, he felt more confident than he had at any time since it all began. He headed back towards the Allbright. He drove instinctively through the back streets, down past the vacant factories and burned out buildings of the once prosperous city. He moved the pieces of information through his mind, as he rode, twisting and turning each, in the hope that he might successfully interlock one with another. He felt encouraged by the few small clusters of logic that began to appear from the disorder. All he had to do now was assemble them into the larger picture, from which they had come.
Suddenly, he was startled out of his semi hypnotic state by a gyrating thump and a sharp lurch forward. His car sprang three feet past the sign, at which he was stopped and into the intersection, under the impact from the rear. Dazed, he looked into the mirror, to see the front of a large, black car looming behind him.
With the shock of the collision over, he began to regain his senses and stepped out of the car. The other vehicle was operated by a round faced man, with dark hair and heavy, black eyebrows. He stuck his head out of his window and yelled.
“Pullover there and let’s see what the hell’s happened here.”
He waved towards a vacant lot off to the right, about twenty yards down a side street. Ed stepped back into his car and drove toward the spot. The other car followed. His first impulse was he’d better come up with a story quick. He had no registration, no insurance. Then he realized it wasn’t much of an accident and it was the other guy’s fault anyway, so he probably would be just as happy as not to forget the whole thing.
No problem. The cops wouldn’t be involved. By the time he reached the lot, he had convinced himself that everything was under control.
He calmly got out of his car walked to its rear and began to look over the damage. The bumper had a small crease and a little black paint was imbedded in a dent about the size of a quarter, on the deck lid. Ed didn’t care about the damage but he wanted to give the impression of normal concern. He heard the slam of the door of the other car and the footsteps of its driver approaching him. He continued to run his hand back and forth over the dent, without looking up, hoping to give the illusion of true concern.
The footsteps stopped and then what felt like a blunt stick was thrust into the middle of his spine.
“What’s a doctor doin’ drivin’ a piece of shit like this?” the voice said.
“You don’t even have no MD plates on it, schmuck!”
Ed started to turn.
“Don’t turn around. This ain’t my dick in your back. It’s a forty-five, so just walk over to my car like a good boy.”
Ed straightened up and carefully walked towards the black car. A second man, who must have ducked down at the scene of the accident, now appeared in the passenger’s seat. He got out of the car and opened the trunk.
“Get in. You’re ridin’ in the baggage compartment this flight” the man chuckled and nudged him forward with the barrel of the unseen gun. Ed reluctantly obeyed and the bright, sunlit sky disappeared with a resounding thud,as the trunk lid slammed shut.

Chapter X

Rita wasn’t eager to make the trip to town, after the last time. Ever since that night, she felt watched, and spent increasing amounts of time looking over her shoulder and through the cracks of the blinds. She wasn’t quite sure if her response was reasonable or unjustified paranoia, but she couldn’t control it in either case. At times, she told herself it was an isolated incident, maybe a crackpot townie and at other times she faced somber reality, the possibility of her true identity having been discovered.
She hadn’t called Mike for three days now, partially because there was little to add to what she had already told him and partially because of her own fear. If she continued to procrastinate, he might begin to think something had happened to her, she thought. She’d have to call him, in spite of her anxiety.
Rite left Caramore around six-thirty that evening and drove to town. Her eyes darted incessantly from the rear view mirror to the road ahead and back again over and over as she rode The drive seemed twice as long as usual and she found herself increasingly uneasy as the trip progressed. By the time she reached the Wedgewood she was close to a state of complete panic.
She stopped the car and sat there looking carefully about for several minutes. No sign of the car that had followed her last time. She was sure she would have recognized it, of that, there was no doubt. Leaving the car, she half walked, half ran to the cafeteria, glancing side to side as she did so. If no one followed her this time, she would write the whole thing off to a vivid imagination.
She entered the phone booth and nervously began to fumble for change, while she continuously peered out through the finger print smudged glass towards the front door of the restaurant. It was almost as if she was awaiting an inevitable arrival. She hurriedly dialed the phone. It started to ring. Once, twice, ten