3 a.m. (Henry Bins 1) (2 page)

Twenty-one minutes.

I turn and face the house. It is silent, as
if the wrought iron gate surrounding it protects it from all
threats, even sound. I pull my hand into my shirt sleeve and fiddle
with the lock atop the gate. It unlatches and the gate swings open
with a soft creak. I know what I'm about to do is wrong, both
ethically and legally, but what if there is a woman in the house
that needs help? It had been nearly twenty-four hours since the
scream; she could feasibly still be alive. Right? Either way, you
might be asking yourself, why wasn't I calling the police to come
check it out?

Simple.

This was the most exciting thing to happen
in my 14,000 hours of being awake.

I slide through the opening in the
gate, then tiptoe up the steps. There are two narrow
panes of glass running vertically along the door and I lean forward
and peer into the house. My eyes are still pinging with the light
from the streetlamp and I can't make out a single shape. I lift my
hand, still covered by my sleeve – I have no plans of leaving any
fingerprints – and push down on the wrought iron handle. It gives
and the door pushes inward.

I wiggle my foot in the space and push
inward until I can fully slip my body through. The door eases shut
behind me. I pull out my cellphone and click on the flashlight app.
The room brightens.

Breaking and entering. Check and
check.

From the shape of the house, I know the
garage is left and the kitchen, living room, and bedrooms are to
the right. I take a deep breath and whisper, “Hello.”

No one answers.

I begin moving slowly through the house. It
is bigger than it appears from the outside, stretching back nearly
double what I would have predicted. The house smells clean and tidy
and it is. The kitchen is spotless, save for two dishes in the
sink, which I deduce once held grilled cheese and tomato soup. The
refrigerator is full. Some healthy items. Some not
so. There is a large sectional in the living room adjacent to
a flat screen TV that I assume, by the 3D glasses next to the
remote, is one of the newer models. There are two small bedrooms
and one master. The master is the only one that appears lived in.
Trinkets, mostly of elephants, fill every imaginable surface.

The bed is made. The pillows perfectly
plump and arranged.

My phone vibrates and I realize it is the
alarm I set. Knowing full well there was a good chance I might end
up inside the house next door, I'd set the alarm to go off at
3:50.

I start back towards the front door and pull
it open. Giving the foyer one last survey, I decide that if Connor
Sullivan had in fact hurt the woman – who might or might not be the
owner of the house –then she wasn't here. So, he'd either come back
to clean up his mess or there had never been a mess to start with,
ergo, the woman wasn't hurt. Regardless if it was A, B, C, or
otherwise, she wasn't here.

A shadow.

I flick my head around, which sends a bolt
of lightning through my neck. The two Advil and
the IcyHot I applied had markedly alleviated the pain,
but the wrenching of my neck has overpowered the drugs.

I groan at the cat.

He is tan and black and his eyes are orange
against the light from my cellphone. He comes forward and rubs
against my leg.

“
Hey cat.”

He doesn't respond.

I reach down to pet him, but before I touch
him, he darts away and slinks down the hallway. I shine my light
after him. He meows at a door. I walk toward him and pull the door
open.

The smell is overpowering.

I can smell it in my eyes.

I can hear the smell.

The woman is on the hood of the car. She's
wearing a blue tank top and plaid pajama bottoms. The woman's neck
is swollen and is a tie-dye of red, purple, and
blue. IcyHot and Advil will not help this woman.

The cat bounces up and begins meowing at the
woman. Below the neck, the woman's body is drained of color, a
pastel white. The cat curls up on the woman's chest and lies
down.

I take a couple steps forward. By my best
guess the woman is in her early twenties. Blond hair and
petite. Eyes that were once electric blue are dull and rimmed
in blood. She’s still attractive in death and I wonder how many
necks she’d turned in life.   

There is a chiming and I look down at my
phone. I've been standing over the woman's body for seven
minutes.

Shit.

As I turn to leave, I realize the sound
isn't coming from my phone. It is coming from another
phone. Possibly the woman's. The phone rings a third
time. It is under the car. I get down on my hands and knees. I drop
to my belly. I army crawl until my torso is halfway beneath the low
hanging Audi. My fingers touch the outside of the phone's pink
casing. I groan, edge forward, try and flip the phone back over on
itself. It takes me seven tries. I grab the phone, push myself
painfully from beneath the car and get to my feet.

I am huffing and puffing.

I look down at the phone. It is a white
Samsung Galaxy S4 in a pink case. The call has expired. The time is
3:59.

I sprint out of the garage and to the front
door. Can I get home in time? It's a hundred yards then
up three flights of stairs. What if I fall over in the middle of
the road? What if I only make it to the front yard? What if someone
finds me, then comes and finds the woman's body?

I will wake up in jail.

I decide there's no way I can make it.

I have to hide.

I run to one of the small bedrooms, open the
closet, and lie down. I'm still looking for a way to extend my legs
when I fall asleep.

~Three~

He's on my stomach. The cat.

“
Yo.”

Cat lifts his head, stares at me with his
orange eyes, then rests his head back down on my chest.
The events of the past night come flooding back. The woman's
body. The phone under the car. The fact that I am hiding
in a closet with a cat on my chest.

I push myself up on my haunches, sending Cat
fleeing to places unknown. This time it isn't my
neck, it's my back. It is screaming. I run my hand over my
lower oblique and feel a quarter-inch depression that is sore to
the touch. Gentle moonlight cascades through an
open window, softly illuminating the plastic hanger I
have slept on.

Ugh.

Once on my feet, I find my phone.

It is 3:02 a.m.

I feel around in my opposite pocket and find
the other phone. The pink Samsung. A picture, a
narrow white obelisk, the Washington Monument, fills the screen.
The woman has been dead for going on forty-eight hours and I expect
to see a barrage of texts, but there is only the missed call from
the night before. Did this woman have any friends? Co-workers? Did
anyone even know she was missing? I want to see what the number is
that called, but the four boxes centering the phone screen lead me
to believe the phone is locked. It is. I try 1234, but
surprisingly, it doesn't work. I make a mental note to put the
Samsung back under the car for the police to find. I wipe any
prints I might have left on the phone with my sleeve and put it in
the pocket of my sweat pants.

As for the police, obviously, they hadn't
come in the last day, or if they had, they were a shoddy bunch. I'd
been asleep in an open closet. Surely, they would have stumbled
upon me and I would have awoken in jail, possibly already having
undergone my first round of sodomy. So, I wasn't altogether
surprised to find the woman in the same place I'd last seen her. As
for the state of her, that was an entirely different story. The
condition of the body was a far cry from what I'd seen just a day
earlier. Beneath a steady swarm of insects, the woman's body is
decomposing. It smells of sulfur and it is intolerable. The smell
twenty-four hours earlier was of fresh linen comparatively.

I gag and retreat back into the main
house.

It is 3:04.

I make my way into the kitchen and once
again slink my hand into my sweatshirt and open the refrigerator.
Grabbing two string cheeses, I open one and slowly begin checking
drawers. I am looking for mail. Or something with the woman's
name on it. But there are no electric bills, no catalogs, not
a single trace of her identity. No wallet, no White House press
pass, no steamy letters from Connor Sullivan.

I spend another five minutes poking
around, then decide I've already pushed my luck and head
for the front door. Thinking better of it, I make my way through
the living room and to a sliding glass door that leads to a small
back patio. Sliding the door closed, I give one last glance behind
me.

Cat is staring at me through the glass
door.

Meow. 

"What?"

Meow.

"Sorry, I'm more of dog guy."

Meow.

"I don't know, go drink out of the
toilet."

Meow.

"There's plenty of string cheese in the
fridge."

Meow.

"Fine."

I quickly open the door and Cat jumps into
my arms.

It is 3:13 when we get back to my
place. 

I am just as thirsty as Cat and I drink
three glasses of water. I grab a sandwich and shake for me and open
a can of tuna for Cat. He takes another couple laps of water from
the bowl I set down then makes his way to the food and starts lick
eating it, like they do. I lean down and check his neck, but he
doesn't have a collar.

"Well, I can't be calling you Cat, now can
I?"

I think back to how he'd directed me to the
garage door and said, "Just like when Timmy fell in the well."

Lassie.

He looks up and nods, almost if to
say, works for me. 

"Well, Lassie, I hate to tell you this
because I know you are a staunch, right wing conservative, but your
mom was killed by the President of the United States. This is what
happens when we elect Republicans."

He licks himself in response.

I toss my clothes on the couch and take a
two-minute shower. After rubbing IcyHot into my lower
back, I throw on some fresh sweats, a fresh hoodie, wrangle my cell
out of the pocket of my sweat pants on the couch and look at the
time.

3:22 a.m.

I have a lot to accomplish in thirty-eight
minutes.

Fifteen minutes later, I am holding the pay
phone in my hand. It is the only pay phone I know of and it happens
to be at Summer Park. I'm not overly concerned with anyone seeing
me, but I pull the beanie down and flap up the hood of my
sweatshirt, which I'm guessing makes me look all that more
suspicious. The 911 call is simple and short, there is a
dead woman at 1561 Sycamore.

There is a squad car parked in front of the
house when I return and I take the back entrance to my condo.

Peeking through the curtains, Lassie on my
lap, busily licking his hind paws, I watch as three more squad cars
arrive, followed fittingly by a van with Alexandria Crime Scene
Unit inscribed on the side.

With one minute left, I give one last glance
out the window at the dancing red and blue
lights, then lie down on my pillow. Lassie snuggles up
next to me. 

After sleeping on the ground two nights in a
row, I'm quite happy to have made it back to my bed, but as I close
my eyes, I can't shake the feeling I've forgotten something.

Something important.

...

I'm surprised to find Lassie still curled up
next to me twenty-three hours later. He bats his eyes at me and he
still looks tired. I think he would happily have slept for another
twenty-three. But I don't have a litter box and I'm guessing he has
to take care of business.

I open the door to a small third-story
balcony. I have a long dead plant and I rip it from the planter and
scatter the remaining dirt in a heaping mound.

Lassie is still on the bed and I tell him,
"Go pee and poop on that mound of dirt."

To my absolute amazement, he does.

Holy shit.

"Good dog."

I head to the opposite window and peer out.
There are still two police cars parked in front of the house. Crime
scene tape has been strung around the perimeter of the wrought iron
fence.

I plop down in front of my laptop and pull
up the local news.

Young Woman Slain.

Being that Alexandria is only fifteen
minutes from the White House and is home to a huge percentage of
bigwigs, I expect a bigger story, but the report is just the
basics. No name. No age. Simply that a woman was found strangled in
the garage of her home in Alexandria. No suspects.

Once Lassie and I have eaten, I call my dad.
Knowing he is coming two nights later to play cards, we only chat
for a couple minutes. I wait for him to ask about the murder, but
he doesn't. I will tell him in person in two days. His face will be
priceless.

As for the murder, I wonder if the police
have connected the woman to the most powerful man in the world yet.
Was she one of Connor Sullivan's aides? An intern?

And what about the President? Who should I
tell? Should I write an anonymous email and send it to the
Alexandria police? I wasn't so naive that I thought I could accuse
the President of the United States of murder and not face some sort
of repercussions. No matter how sure I was that it
was him – and I was unwaveringly positive – there would
be backlash. Not to mention how unbelievable the idea was. First,
where was the President's Secret Service? Did they know? Had they
arranged the tryst? Did the President somehow sneak from the White
House unknown? Could it happen? I wasn't sure. What I did know was
that when the President should have been asleep in his bedroom at
the White House, he was in the house across the street from me
strangling a woman to death.

I'm about to start crafting said email when
I notice a small rectangular card near my front door.