Star 69 ©1999 David Boyne Illustrations by Roz Damicog Please visit RozDamicog.com

I could see the luminous clock on the dashboard: it was two in the morning.

Scott kept drumming his knuckles on the steering wheel. He's a big guy, a catcher for the University's baseball team, and he made the small car feel crowded.

"This is insane," I said.

"It was your idea, girl." He didn't stop rapping on the steering wheel.

"And Erika's your girlfriend," I said. "You want her to be safe, don't you?"

"I'm here, right? I been sitting in this car with you every night for a week, right?"

"Will you stop that banging?"

He stared at me, but didn't stop.

I turned away, looking at the doorway of the Riverfront Restaurant, watching for Erika, but couldn't keep from saying, "This could be the night you have to prove you can beat up more than a steering wheel, Scott."

He grunted, and kept banging the wheel.

I was so nervous I started biting my nails, something I hadn't done since high school. I knew there was going to be violence.

But I never thought someone would get killed.

It had started six weeks ago, at the beginning of summer break. Erika stole a half-full bottle of cognac from her job at the restaurant. We sat in our apartment and got drunk on it. Then Erika had one of her irresistible ideas: we should play funny phone. Funny phone is an imbecilic game we had played together when pre-pubescent girls, dialing numbers randomly, then engaging the people who answered in bizarre conversations.

"But it's four in the morning!" I said.

"So-o?"

Erika did the first call, using the speaker phone so I could listen in.

On the second ring I heard a woman answer sleepily, "Hello?"

I felt a twinge of guilt for having awakened her, but Erika said in a fast, hard voice, "Is Bobby there?"

"Sorry? Wh--"

"You put my Bobby on the phone right now!" Erika was almost yelling, "Don't lie to me! I know Bobby's there. Bobby-- you hear me! I know you're there! Get your--"

The woman hung up. I couldn't help myself, I rolled on the floor, laughing until I almost threw up the expensive brandy I had drunk.

"Your turn, sweetheart!" Erika was cool, but I saw the grin on her lips. I dialed a number randomly, but when an old woman answered on the third ring I could not suppress my laughter. I spluttered something completely unintelligible, then hung up. My botched performance had Erika and I hyperventilating on hysterical laughter, clutching our aching stomachs like a couple of twelve year olds. I suppose that was the whole stupid point of the game.

Then Erika jumped up. "I know who we'll call!"

"Wait," I said. "Random." My tongue was thick; I slowed myself to speak clearly. "The rule is you have to call a number at random."

She took the phone and punched in a phone number from memory. She made a big smile at me and said, "Rules are made to--" She stopped; someone had picked up in the middle of the first ring.

"Yeah?" It was a male voice, but young. He sounded about our age. And he didn't sound groggy, didn't sound as if we'd wakened him from sleep at four in the morning.

Erika made her voice go husky, "Hello".

"You again," he said.

Erika looked straight at me. My eyes went wide and I mouthed the words, "You? Again?"

She grinned at me, then said into the phone, "Tell me what you're wearing."

There was no answer over the speaker, but I could hear that he had not hung up.

"I know you're naked," Erika said. I gasped, and had to cover my mouth with both hands.

"Yeah. So?" He said.

"Will you do something for me?"

There was no response. Erika glanced at me. For a second, I thought she looked angry. My mind was still sluggishly accepting the reality that Erika had made such strange calls to this guy before.

"Still there?" Erika prompted.

"Yeah. Still here. You know I never hang up on you."

I thought he sounded irritated. I waved at Erika to hang up. She turned away from me and hunched over the phone, getting a determined look.

"Will you do something for me?" she asked again.

"You want it pretty bad, don't you."

I was stunned. Erika wasn't phased. "What will you do for me?" she said.

The empty sound over the speaker of the phone made me nervous.

Erika cradled the phone on her shoulder and said, "Tell me that it's so hard it hurts."

We could hear him breathing, but still he said nothing.

Erika said, "You want to give it to me rough? You'd like to make me hurt a little, wouldn't you?"

That was when the nightmare began.

"What I want," he said, and I could hear him take a breath. "What I want is to take a razor and slice your throat open."

I could not believe what I had heard. Before I could think, or move, he was speaking again.

"Then I want to peel back your skin. Starting at your throat. And keep peeling it off as you scream your lungs out. Then I'll cut a hunk of it off and stuff it in your mouth. Then while your gagging on it—"

Erika slammed the phone down. Her tan face was drained of color.

My ears were ringing. It seemed so silent inside the apartment.

"I can't believe what he said," Erika whispered. "I can't believe."

I couldn't speak. I felt very drunk.

Then the phone rang. I flinched. Erika reached out to pick it up, but stopped. She didn't look at me, but stared at the phone. My mind was reeling. Erika picked up on the second ring. She said nothing, holding the phone two inches from her ear.

Erika reached over and pressed the button for the speaker and I noticed her hand was shaking.

I heard his voice. "Wait until I finish. Don't be so squeamish. There's so much more I'm going to do to you." I heard him breathing hard. "What's the matter, cat got your tongue?"

And then he laughed. It was a scratchy, feeble laugh. I sat hunched over, hugging my stomach. How could he be calling us?

Erika was thinking the same thing. "How do you know my number."

"I've known it all along. Haven't you heard of star sixty-nine?"

Erika and I looked at each other; we had a caller i.d. blocker on our phone. How could he have—

He was laughing again, and the laugh was ugly. "Information is power, " he said. "And I have power, because I know who you are. I know where you live. I know where you work. I know all about you— Erika!"

At the sound of her own name Erika slammed the phone down. I heard her swearing in whispers, but she wouldn't look at me.

Then the phone rang.

I ran to the bathroom, throwing up before I could reach the toilet. Later, I sat on my bed, pale and shaking from retching my stomach empty of the brandy I had drunk. Erika sat with me and told me everything. Just before summer break she had noticed a guy at the University. He was thin, with long, long brown hair that he pulled back in a ponytail, and she had been attracted to him. When she asked around, she learned his name. She also found out he was a graduate student, in something like molecular physics. He had won national awards and scholarships and was intensely brilliant. Erika has been my best friend since we were in grade school. She isn't stupid and she has a reckless sense of play and a friendly kind of humor that draws people to her. But I understood what she meant when she told me, simply, that this guy was way out of her class. Brawny, non-verbal guys like Scott, who would drop anything he was doing if she asked him to, were the type who went for Erika, with her black hair and dark tan, her long legs and easy humor. She had not even tried to meet the guy with the pony tail.

Yet, just before summer break began, when I was at my parent's house for the weekend, and Erika was a little drunk and couldn't sleep, she had looked up his number and called him.

She didn't know how it happened, but it had gotten dirty right away. She did not tell him her name, or admit that she knew his. She didn't expect me to understand this, but he wasn't threatening. He was actually sweet. It was a kind of game, and on the very first time, she had brought herself off while talking with him. She thought he had done the same, but he didn't say. It excited her that she knew him, but he did not know her. Her anonymity made it easy to say wild, outrageous things.

She had called him two or three, sometimes four nights a week after that, waiting until I had gone to sleep. The talk had been explicit, graphic, but not until recently had it become abusive. Erika tried to explain that even when it became rough, it was only words, a fantasy, unreal. And it had never been anything like what I had heard that night.

"Why did you call him tonight?" I asked.

"God, I don't know why. It was like an impulse. I just wanted to see your reaction."

"Well my reaction is I puked."

"It was never like this," she whispered. "He never said much. I did most of the talking. He would ask questions, make me talk. He was good at making me talk, making me say anything that came into my mind." She looked at me, and I thought she might cry. "You have to believe me. What happened tonight, it was never, never like that at all!"

She was shaking, trembling. I put my arms around her. Knowing this secret about Erika did not make me feel anything like disgust. In fact, after she explained things, I felt closer to her than ever. As I hugged her I told her how I thought this guy had been so violent, so repulsively graphic, just to shock her, as a way to end their secret calls.

Then the telephone rang.

Erika jumped up from the bed. She strode out of my bedroom.

"Don't answer it!" I said.

"If it's him I'm going to tell him off." The phone rang a second time. "He knows who I am, big deal! I know who he is!"

I stood in my bedroom door. She picked up the phone, "Yeah?"

She paused, then started talking loudly, "Listen, bastard. I know who you are, too. If you don't stop calling me I'm going straight to the police and filing a harassment charge--"

Something he said made her stop. I saw her back stiffen. She crossed one arm over her chest. Still, she said nothing, listening. Finally, not yelling, she said, "Why don't you crawl back in your hole and die." She hung up.

But when she turned to face me, she was crying. "He's taped my calls. He says if I go to the police he'll send tapes to my parents, to where I work, to everyone who knows me. He says he'll put it on an internet porn site. He says he can get records from the phone company proving that I've been calling him, late at night. He'll tell the police that I've been harassing him."

The phone was ringing before she had finished speaking. I ran over and yanked the line out of the wall. We left the phone disconnected and the next day Erika applied for an unlisted phone number. Fall term was still four weeks off; we decided to look for a new apartment.

Then he showed up where Erika works, at the Riverfront Restaurant. He waited for a table in Erika's section. She thought of asking someone else to switch tables, but she worried that he would tell anyone who waited on him about the phone calls. He said nothing to her beyond placing his order, but he would not stop staring at her, smirking when she could not meet his eyes. She told me how all she could think of was that he would take out a tape player and start playing recordings of her phone calls, there, in the restaurant. She avoided talking to her co-workers, afraid he would pick out her friends, would approach them, tell them. She put the bill on the table when she brought out his food, but he didn't eat anything. He stared at Erika as she worked.

She was carrying a huge tray of food and drinks to a table when he walked in front of her, standing in her way, making her face him. "Skin makes a funny sound when you rip it off a human carcass." He made a popping noise with his mouth, then left the restaurant.

Incredibly, he had left fifty dollars for a tip. Erika told me how, at the end of her shift, she had taken the money and stuffed it in the bartender's tip glass when no one was looking. She left the restaurant and was crossing the parking lot, digging her keys out of her purse, when she looked up and saw him leaning on her car. She froze, ready to scream if he moved toward her. But he only opened the door, the interior light coming on, and walked off into the night.

"Nothing he did freaked me out like that. Knowing he can pick the lock to my car. What's to keep him from breaking in here, while we sleep?" She sat on the edge of my bed, rocking herself back and forth.

"There must be some way to make him stop," I said.

"Yeah, sure," Erika made one of her crooked smiles. "We could kill him."

The fear I saw in her face, affecting her whole body, made me desperate to protect her. It was my idea to use Scott. He was big, strong, and, despite his puppy-like trailing after Erika, I knew he had a capacity for violence. I worked out the simple plan. When Erika went to the restaurant, Scott and I would arrive an hour before she got off, and wait in Scott's car. If the creep with the pony tail hadn't come to the restaurant that night, Erika would walk to her car. We would just watch. We'd drive behind her all the way home. If the creep had come, and might be in the parking lot waiting for her, she would walk along the tarred footpath that went into the trees down close to the river. Scott and I would wait, and then follow. Scott gave up drumming on the steering wheel and rested his head on his thick arm in the open window. I muttered for the hundredth time, "This is insane."

Then I saw Erika come out of the restaurant. She turned and started walking down the path to the river, fast.

"Scott!" I grabbed his shoulder. He looked up in time to see the dark figure come out from the far end of the parking lot and follow Erika along the unlighted path.

When Scott instantly got out of the car and set off in a silent lope, across the parking lot, I felt a surge of confidence. My plan was going to work. I ran hard to catch up with him.

We ran to the very end of the path where it stops beneath some trees on the small hill overlooking the river. No one was there.

"What the--" Scott looked all around us, actually turning in a tight circle.

I could make out the blacker, oily surface of the river past the high bank, but the closer darkness around us was impenetrable.

My voice almost croaked. "They couldn't have doubled back!"

Working fast, I reasoned that if Erika had been cornered here before we arrived, she would have set out across the scrappy fields of tall grass and rocks that separated the restaurant from the nearby industrial warehouses.

I pointed into the fields, "They had to go that way!"

Scott didn't move. "They could be down there."

I could barely see him pointing at the river that snaked around the small hill we stood on.

That was when we heard Erika. "Get away from me bastard!"

Scott was running into the dark fields. I ran as fast as I could, barely able to see rocks in time to jump over them. I fell once, in a hole I never saw, then was up and running before I even understood that I had fallen. In the wide, open fields, away from the trees beside the river, I could see a little better. I could see Scott's broad back ahead of me. When he began angling across the field, I knew he had spotted them. "Get him, Scott!" I yelled. "Get him! Get him! Get him!"

I saw Scott's dark form run into the smaller figure near Erika. I reached them when Scott was standing over him, picking him up with both hands. I slowed, and moved in a circle toward Erika, dumbly watching, counting, as Scott punched him in the face five times. I saw the other one crumple, disappearing in the tall grass at Scott's feet. Scott lifted him with one hand, pulling him up by the pony tail. He yanked the smaller guy around so they were face to face.

"You so much as look at her again. I'll come for you. I'll kill you." Then Scott spat in his face. He spun him around and kicked him hard in the back, sending him sprawling into the coarse grass. As Scott stood, ready to attack again, I saw the other guy getting up. He stumbled a few steps away then straightened up, his hands wiping blood and spit from his face. He began walking away. Scott watched him until he had crossed the field and disappeared in the darkness. But even after Scott had turned and come over to stand with Erika, I peered into the distant darkness. It bothered me that he had walked away, even if injured. How could he be so controlled? Why hadn't he run to escape?

What happened next I can't explain. It was so stupid, but even as it was happening, it seemed to make perfect sense, seemed to be inevitable.

Scott and Erika had an argument.

I was still shaking. I heard Scott almost whining, "What's your problem?"

"Don't touch me." Erika's voice was sharp.

"You'd rather I left you alone with your pony-tail boyfriend? Were you liking it with him? Did I interrupt something?"

Erika slapped his face. Her hand smacking on his cheek made a sound like a firecracker exploding.

I thought Scott would punch her, but he just stood there. Erika picked up her shoulder bag from the ground and strode away, toward the river.

"What is her problem?" Scott appealed to me.

"You just don't get it, do you?" I couldn't begin to explain where all my anger was coming from. "This isn't a joke. That creep said he was going to kill her, going to skin her alive!"

"I took care of him."

I could not see Scott's expression in the darkness, but I heard his perplexity. I had no patience for him. I turned and walked toward the river, peering ahead to see where Erika had gone. I found her sitting at the end of a long pile of big rocks jutting into the black oily water. I sat next to her, aware that the flat river was moving fast by the sucking sound it made as it passed the rocks. From her shoulder bag, Erika took out a heavy round bottle. I actually laughed; she had stolen more cognac from the restaurant.

"It's only half-full," she said. "Help me drink it?"

"Sure. I need a drink."

I took a big swallow from the bottle and the deep rushing warmth of the brandy made me feel, for the first time in weeks, that everything would be all right.

"Scott's an idiot," I said, passing the bottle to her.

Erika snorted. "Tell me about it."

"But he's not bad." I hesitated, then said what I was thinking. "He's not evil."

"No."

The soft way she said the word made me realize that only now was she starting to slip out from the grip of fear that had held her for weeks. She passed me the bottle, and watched me as I drank.

"Scott didn't save me. You did."

I didn't know what to say. I stuttered, "N-no. I did the thinking, just the thinking. Scott did the hero stuff."

Erika leaned over to me, her hand going behind my neck. I could smell the brandy on her breath just before her warm lips pressed into mine.

We sat there for a long time, drinking the cognac a little too fast, talking quietly about the coming school term, about looking for jobs in the 'real world' when we graduated, about how precious it felt to be sitting there beside the black river in the still, quiet night. I was thinking that our lives were back in our own hands. I was even beginning to think how the whole wretched, scary experience had made me appreciate all the good things I had.

That was how I was feeling when I heard something behind us. I lazily turned around and looked back along the pile of rocks.

"Erika!" I only whispered, but Erika spun around. She saw him then, saw his dark form coming along the rocks. She made a sound in her throat that made me think everything, everything good was lost to us forever.

We were on our feet just before he reached us. There was a dark smear of blood across his face. I heard his strained breathing, and knew that Scott had broken his nose. He was carrying a board, maybe three or four feet long.

That was when I betrayed Erika.

I pushed her away from me and said, "Go on that side!"

I started moving along the opposite side of the long pile of rocks, having calculated that he would attack Erika, and I would have time to get away. Yet I felt no regret, no guilt. I wanted only to get away.

I could not understand it when he came straight at me, never turning toward Erika. He held the board behind his back as if it were a baseball bat he would swing forward at me. My arm went up instinctively. If I had not slipped at that moment, the board would have smashed into my head. But I stumbled and the board hit my shoulder. I heard a wet ripping sound but felt no pain. I fell. Warm blood soaked into the sleeve of my tee shirt and flowed down my bare arm.

I looked up and saw he was cocking the board again, stepping closer to me. When the board was raised behind him I could see it clearly in the lighter sky; could see the two long nails sticking out of its end. I had the strange, calm thought that the nails explained how I could have bled so much: they had ripped open the flesh of my shoulder.

Then I saw Erika come up behind him. She was swinging the heavy bottle with both hands. I saw the bottle bang into his head, saw him lurch forward, saw his hands drop the board and grab at the back of his head even as the bottle was bouncing off, spinning wildly as it arced away. He grunted. The board fell in front of my face. I heard the bottle smash on the rocks. He regained his footing, turned, and grappled onto Erika with both hands, using all his weight to push her down onto her knees.

He was trying to push her all the way down into the rocks, face first, but she struggled, managed to fall onto her side. She kicked his shin. He dropped onto his knees but his hands went to Erika's throat. I heard the wind puff out of her mouth as he squeezed hard.

I was standing then, and the board was in both my hands. I swung it at him. It glanced off his shoulders. I didn't even hear a sound from the impact. But he let go of Erika.

I could have stepped forward and hit him again, just as he got to his feet. But I knew what I had to do: I stepped backward, and looked at the end of the board. I turned it so the two long nails faced outward. I heard Erika gagging, curled up on the rocks. I felt him closing on me. Then I swung the board in a wide arc on a level with my own eyes. He was lunging at me when the board struck his face.

He stumbled forward, missing me, but not loosing his footing. I thought that I had failed: there had been no loud smack of impact when I struck him. Only a wet slapping sound. He rocked on his feet, inches from me, then turned slightly to face me. With the lighter darkness of the sky silhouetting him, I saw that his right eye was wide open and staring at me. The board was stuck into the left side of his head.

He fell backward. He hit hard on the rocks and never moved again. It seemed a long time before I stepped across the gap in the rocks where he had fallen and looked down at his body. His legs were bent backward beneath him. His head was wedged between two rocks, the board still stuck in his head, the two nails having punched through into his brain.

Erika lay down on the rocks near his contorted body, reached into the back pocket of his jeans and took out his wallet. I stared dumbly as she took money out of the wallet, then rubbed the wallet with her tee shirt to remove her fingerprints, then dropped the wallet onto the rocks.

"It'll look like a robbery," she said.

Erika got me moving, and once I was moving I kept going, not conscious of a single step of the long walk to her car. I can't remember the drive back to our apartment.

My eyes ached from the bright light in the bathroom as Erika washed my arm, and used one of her bandanas to bind up the torn flesh of my shoulder. She took a brown plastic bottle out of the medicine cabinet and shook two pills into her hand.

"Take these," she said.

When I only stared at the two pills Erika got impatient. "They're pain killers. They're prescription." She filled a glass with water and put it in my hand. "Scott broke a rib sliding into base in Spring training. He gave me some of the pills he didn't use. Really, it's okay."
I swallowed the pills.

"If you wake up later and need more I'll give them to you. Okay?" She looked carefully into my eyes. "When's the last time you had a tetanus shot?"

I said I didn't know. I lay across the bed and Erika stroked my forehead for a time.

Then she went into the living room, leaving my bedroom door half-open. I began shivering. I felt more than just cold. I felt exposed, opened up, as if the sheets and blanket and even my own skin could not keep my body's heat from escaping.

>>Back to top<<