Felix Hale & The Honest Mistake; By Andrew Harrell

 

 

 Part I

 

    It was the drops of water coming from the tap more so than the ring of the cell phone that stirred me from my sleep. Not the outside pouring hail of quarter sized beads of precipitation falling to the pavement, but the small bits of steady drips coming from the leaky faucet head in patterns of three. A trio of taps upon porcelain keeping a tempo inside the kitchenette sink. The sound would have gone unnoticed as anything audible if not for the all encompassing quiet that overtook my apartment, my sanctuary nestled in the smack dab center of Ivar Avenue.

 

    I was dreaming earlier. Not of flight or falling, just images. The usual still frames and flashes of fur, raw meat, and gnashing teeth. The glazed gaze of dead eyed dolls, arcane symbols upon yellowed paper, rusty pick-up trucks, and dusty bed sheets. My usual sort of conjurings. The imprints of past experiences.

 

     I’m four hours passed the point of delirious, and my cell phone chimes a little tune to mark an incoming call. An unholy aria that should never be heard at four in the morning. The name of the band playing as the ring tone escapes my mush dwindled mind at the moment, but the sung words of don’t look at me that way, it was an honest mistake clues me on my caller’s identity. I’m laying flat on my belly in nothing but boxers, sheets tangled wild vine like around my torso and through my legs, my face mashed into the middle of a pillow. I reach an arm up to the nightstand for the cell as it dances centimeter by centimeter across the wood from its vibrate function. My eyes are glued together, connected at the seams with remnants of my sleep, only twenty of my forty some odd winks having been met in quota. Despite being about as blind as a newborn puppy, I’m able to trace the sound and retrieve the phone after feeling around the nightstand’s surface with a flimsy outstretched hand.

 

    Rolling over to my side and holding it up to my face in the pitch thicket of palpable dark, I faintly spy the azure glow beaming from the screen through closed eyes. I slowly try unsealing my lids to make out the number, but as already stated the ring tone clued me in not six seconds prior. I hit the green button to the left of the keypad that represents “accept”. After swiping a wet trail of slobber from my mouth, I hold the phone up to my ear.

 

    “Someone better be dead, or what you’re about to say needs to be breathtakingly interesting,” I say with a drowsily aggravated goloss.

 

 After a moment or two of silence paired with quick bit of shotty reception, a jittery voice breathes into the phone. 

 

    “Well…you might have both on your hands then asshole” says the voice on the other end in a faint, wispy breath. 

 

    His voice isn’t chaotic per say, but it holds a certain quality of repressed terror that’s flirting with the edge of sheer panic. A faint exhalation of air type language that reminds me of ghosts trying to subtly garner attention. Of someone who is forcing himself to speak quietly, librarian like, for the sole purpose of suppressing the urge to completely lose his shit. 

    “Yeah, well make it fast, because I don’t get a discount on minutes for deaths on my phone plan” I say, now coming somewhat into grips with the concept of being awake. 

    “I’m fucked man. I’m really fucked. I fucked up major this time” says the voice. 

    “Your breed of fucked, or proper fucked?” I ask not really expecting an answer. 

    “I mean life-ending fucked. I’m neck deep in trouble.”

    “Hardly a new development” I say whilst falling back into a comfortable lull of brief silence.“Not that this isn’t fun and everything, but if that’s all I’m gonna go back to-“

    “I’m fucking serious Felix”, he whisper yells into the phone. “I really think I’m in deep shit this time.”

 

     In the background I can begin to hear sounds. What I must have misinterpreted as a growl from some sort of dog turned into the faint ululation of a human voice. Exclamations of a strange, oddly sharp accent that didn’t quite register as English echoed from some place outside the breadth of clarity. Some rustling, the sound of the caller shifting his weight on the inside of what may be a closet or pantry. 

 

    “What’s going on?” I say, dropping the argot of jokes and playful sarcasm.

 

Another few moments go by, more of the strange sounds before, 

 

    “I think they’re debating whether or not they’re gonna kill me”, he says.

    “Who is gonna kill you?” I ask.

    “Her husband…er… her brother, I don’t fucking know which, but he’s pissed. 

    “Wait, which one, the brother or the husband?”

 

He ignores me and continues with,

 

     “He and his suits were talking in their weird ass language so I couldn’t know, but I could tell, they want to put me away dude. They’re not fucking around” 

   “Slow down man, you’re at the end already. Start from the top.

   ”More rustling and a few more sparse breaths into the phone. 

    “Shit…ok ok. This chick, I met her at Drowsey’s.”

 

    All of his stories begin with I met this chick at Drowsey’s. They usually lead to a perversely detailed account of how he finessed, charmed, and swaggered his way back to her place, and eventually traversed a path leading into her bed for a game of equally detailed horizontal twister.

 

    “Russian…or Romanian… or some such shit, I dunno, but she asked me if I wanted to have a drink with her. She was way hot, so I was like yeah sure. We had a few drinks and…

 

He pauses as if checking the coast to make sure there are no outside parties listening in. Two more sounds, this time identifying clearly as human, but with a strange undertone about them. 

 

    “We had a few drinks, and then she asked me if I wanted to go back to her place. I was like yeah sure.”

    “Yeah, I see how that could merit stark terror”, I say scratching at my tangled forest of hair and almost wanting to fall back to sleep.

 

     I start thinking that perhaps this isn’t as serious as he’s mapping it out to be. The story as it goes thus far hints to me that he simply found himself in the bed of yet another spoken for woman and hubby came arrived his business trip a night too early to witness the spectacle. The solution is about as simple as him explaining he didn’t know, bidding his deepest apologies, shock, surprise, and farewells whilst waltzing out the front door. One phone call to a taxi later and he’d be home, safe, sound, and ready to giggle at the whole drama the next day over coffee with me at work, which by my clock is only a few hours away. I want to think it’s this simple, this easy, this logical, but the voices in the background, the ones that keep inching increasingly closer to hostile hold my listening ear, and keeps nudging at my ribs with notions of otherwise.

 

     “When him and his boys came in and caught her riding me to jam, he went fucking berserk. He started cussing up a storm in some weird Euro language, and then he said in English, We can’t let him leave now, not after this ! “

    “The hell?” I say, thinking that maybe there was misquote on his end.

    “Yeah dude, I swear on Christ that’s what he said. He’s on some serious you’ve seen too much shit”. 

    “Well did you see anything?” 

    “Plenty if he’s talking about his wife…er...sister or whatever. He’s freaking irate. It only made it worse that she just fuckin scoffed and started laughing at him. Talking crazy shit about flesh and how she was bored. I dunno what the hells going on dude, but it’s bad. They look like they’re rolling with the mob or something.”

 

My attention is fish-hooked, and my heart for some reason starts beating half a pace passed normal in its chest when I hear him say,

 

    “When they were arguing, their eyes and faces turned all… weird.”

    “…Define weird.” I say, not noticing that my eyes are now fully open and looking up at the water stains, and what may be the silhouettes of roaches crawling along my ceiling.

    “I dunno, its hard to describe. All yellow and black shit. Their faces like…turned all freaky, like they were changing shape or something. And when they spoke, their jaws got all…got all…”

 

    Silence, the sort where you can envision him wiping tears away from his eyes as they start welling in his sockets. 

 

    “I’m really fucking scared dude, you gotta help me” he says, not even trying to hold back the tears, snot sniffles and sobs at this point. 

    “You gotta get me out of here Felix, please. Somethings really wrong with them. They’re gonna kill me, I know it”

 

Sympathy swells in my center.

 

    "Ok, ok, keep your cool” I respond after a moment.”

    “Where are you?” “Hiding in the closet…”

    “No, I mean where in the city are you?”

 

A pause, as if he is trying to recollect exactly where he is.

 

    “Some fancy joint near Fountain.”

 

I groan a little on the inside. 

 

    “Anything in particular I could use to narrow that down?”

 

He pauses another moment, perhaps thinking back to sites he passed that may be of use. 

 

    “Well…we passed High Voltage on the way.”

    “The tattoo joint?”

    “Yeah, we passed it not five minutes before we got here.”

 

     Gnawing at the details I deduce that five minutes after High Voltage falls somewhere in the vicinity of Detroit, Formosa, and Lexington. I ask him if any of the three streets ring a bell. 

 

    “The third one, Lexington” he says as if answering the million dollar trivia question.

   “Three houses or apartments after we passed there.” 

 

Just as this escapes his lips, his previous statement perhaps louder than he should have been, I hear a large boom erupt from some indiscernible place elsewhere in the room, most likely the sound of the closet door being swung open with brutish force. 

 

     “Oh shit!” he yells. “Felix, you gotta come get me man, they’re gonna-NO, don’t touch me, NO!” 

 

I can hear a small scuffle of skin and bearish grunts. Whatever his captors were gonna do remains a mystery to me, for before he had a chance to finish his sentence, his voice curls up into a frightened shriek as I hear him get dragged off somewhere by an angry growl of a voice that says,

 

    “You come NOW!”

 

A crash or two, a squirm, the flat clunk of the cell as it hits the ground. Off in the fading distance, amidst the static I can hear him shriek.

 

    “I didn’t know man, I swear. Felix, the brown place, it’s the brown place!”

 

Another crash, and then a series of three flat beeps on the other end to convey that the call has been dropped.  

 

       “Dean!? Dean, you there!?”

 

    Before I have a moment to realize how stupid that question is I’m bolting upright in bed, and wiping the night crust from my eyes. I jump up and into my pair of black, most likely unwashed jeans, hastily sling on a random white t-shirt, and shove my two bare feet into my checkered slip-on shoes. Before stepping to the threshold of my front door, I aburbtly stop and glance to my left. Its sitting atop of the desk, situated left of the entrance. Just sitting there, a recular mesh of leather, steel edgings and white sheets of paper, which I of course know isn't intended for writing feelings or jotting down academic notes. Dusty and mercifully unused underneath a small mound of novels, bills, and manga that have accumulated over the last few weeks it sits, the inaudible pulse of the thing gently throbbing with my heartbeat as I'm now in close quarters with it. A surge, a quick spike of awareness. Nausea peaks, starts churning in my gut with the slivers of meal scraps I called supper as I consider grabbing it.

 

     Innate thinking, training, and all the trauma invokes me to take it with me on what may very well be a simple retrieval mission of my less than sagacious ally. I ask myself if this whole thing is truly so serious that it merits bringing it of all things with me. Imagining it on my person puts me in a fouler mood and more ill at ease than if I roamed the streets with a loaded glock and a kilo of coke Then I click back several minutes prior to the background sounds on Dean’s end of the phone. Those sharp, cruel slews of accents that seemed to inch closer and closer to snarls at certain punctuations near the end of particular sentences. After another moment of hesitation that I admit is far too long considering the circumstance, I forgo the feeling of aversion swelling in my stomach, and grab the 6x5 object from underneath the debris, along with my hooded jacket, the black and brown faux-fur hoodie that I can’t stand, but wear anyway because Donna gave it to me. And in a breath I’m out the door, and racing down the flight of stairs into the fray of rain to the parking lot towards my black Vespa, all the while hoping that that breath didn’t coincide with Dean’s last. 

 

To Be Continued...