Tripping on Tears (22 page)

I stared at it.

He hadn’t come out and said it, but Saif had hinted that this was the knife he had used to murder his sister. If so, didn’t I now have an important piece of the puzzle in my possession? I could take it to the police and no doubt they could link it to her murder; while I’m sure Saif had cleaned the knife, nothing is ever one hundred percent, and with forensics, maybe they could find enough trace blood or some shit like that and tie it to Safia’s murder; they’d have the smoking gun so to speak, and they’d have Saif dead to rights. And with Saif facing a long prison sentence, would he do the honorable thing and not implicate his parents in the crime? The way I figured it, anyone who would brutally murder their own sister was not a stand-up guy who could be counted on to do the right thing. Chances are when confronted by the police, with the knife and the loss of his freedom, he’d fold like a cheap tent.

At the same time, maybe it wasn’t the knife. Maybe he had just said that. And even if it was and it could be proven, what kind of sentence would he receive anyway? Sometimes these life sentences don’t really turn out to be life, but the culprit is out of jail after ten or twelve years, supposedly reformed. And who cares about the sentence, what about the trial to get there? Saif would be put on trial and he would use the honor killing logic as his defense. We wouldn’t be talking about out-and-out murder; no people would allow him to classify it as an honor killing, as if it set itself apart from any other regular killing. Honor killings meant nothing in this country, and as far as I’m concerned, we were heading in the wrong direction if we even dignify it by classifying it as such. It should merely be classified as murder.

No, a trial would also involve Saif and his family dragging Safia’s name through the mud. They would accuse her of all sorts of terrible things; dare to say what Saif had said, and call her a whore. A trial and the media coverage it would include would give her parents and Saif another opportunity to victimize Safia, and I just couldn’t allow that to happen.

What was I to do?

Oh, I guess I should mention that once I had regained my senses, I found myself in my living room with two very beaten up and bloodied South Asian boys – I’m not going to refer to them as men – on my living room floor. My fist was sore and bloodied, some of it mine – I wasn’t used to hitting something over and over again – but the majority of it was theirs. They were out, as I discovered; originally I thought I might have killed one or the other, and surprisingly, as I stood there looking at their limp bodies, that didn’t bother me as much as I thought it would.

I could call an ambulance, which one of them might have needed; but that would also bring the police; I didn’t like that prospect, even despite the fact they had barged into my own home and threatened me. I could claim self-defense, but the beating I had given them, might be considered excessive and nullify that claim. I definitely couldn’t leave the two of them lying on my living room floor. As far as I could tell, the fates had intervened and given them to me – or at least Saif; Farooq was just collateral damage; he should have been more careful in picking his friends.

Was this what I had been hoping for? I’d spent all that time watching Saif and his family; stalking them, and to what purpose? In the long run I had just decided to drive away and do nothing. Had I secretly been hoping for a confrontation? I hadn’t wanted to start it, but had I been putting myself in a position where a confrontation could find me? If so, I had given up my surveillance secretly disappointed, and unaware it had worked – that Saif was going to find me.

What would my parents think?

What would Safia think?

I’d dragged both Saif and Farooq down into the basement, where I had found two chairs and proceeded to tie them, with some rope and a whole lot of duct tape to two chairs. You have no idea how absurd something like that is. I’ve seen it a million times in the movies, but to actually be doing it, in my own home, that’s just not something you could ever imagine. Even as I was dragging them down the stairs, it was like I was watching someone else doing it – a movie. As I propped them up on the chairs and began tying and duct taping them in place, it was surreal. If you’d asked me a year or two ago if I thought I’d ever be doing something like that, I would have laughed in your face at the absurdity of it all.

As I was moving the two, I did get confirmation they were still alive; which I guess was a good thing. They were alive, but who knows, maybe I had beaten one or both of them so hard that that didn’t matter; maybe I’d beaten them senseless, a state they’d never come out of. Maybe if I didn’t get them immediate medical attention, they were going to die – or at least one of them. I didn’t know the extent of the damage and I really didn’t care. You see, as I was dragging them down the stairs and going about the business of securing them to the chairs, I had all ready decided that I was going to kill them. In Saif’s case it was the proverbial eye for an eye; in Farooq’s case, just dumb luck; he decided to join Saif and back him up, so he’d made a terrible decision and was going to pay the ultimate price for that decision.

I was going to kill the two of them.

That’s a very powerful concept; and as I sat there in the kitchen thinking about it, it both frightened and delighted me. Never in my life had I thought I’d be responsible for the death of another human being; once, while driving, I had accidentally run over a cat crossing the road and that had left me feeling guilty for a long time. I had never wanted to be responsible for the death of any of God’s creatures, but now, I was thrilled to be the instrument of Saif’s demise. I didn’t feel guilty at the thought of taking his life; actually, as I sat there thinking about it, and staring at the knife that supposedly murdered Safia, I wonder what it would feel like to be plunging it into him; would he understand the justice of that?

I sat there, my hands shaking; I was scaring myself with how easily I could embrace the thought of murder; how much I really wanted to commit it.

What would Safia think?

That was the one thought that kept coming back and nagging me. She had been special – wonderful. Would she approve of what I was contemplating?
Of course not.
Actually, she’d probably be outraged. She’d be the first to tell me to remove those thoughts from my head. I’d lose her respect. I knew in my heart that what I was contemplating would disturb her, but I couldn’t help it. When I met Safia and really got to know her, I knew she would make me a better man than I had ever hoped to be; that with her I really stood a chance, but she was gone. She had been taken from me too soon; she was still in the process of turning me into that better man, and now that she wasn’t here, I was lost. I was left to turn into a beast. I knew that without her, I was going to become something I loathed, because I wasn’t prepared to become that better man anymore, but determined to give in to darker thoughts and actions that wanted to claim me.

I was letting her down, again. I should have been there that night to stop Saif. I should have put my foot down and kept her clear of her family unless I was included. I’d sent her off to her death; encouraged her to head off to her death, mistakenly believing her family was going to accept her back into the fold and love her. I’d let her down, so what did it matter if I did so again by plunging a knife into her brother’s heart?

She’d be disappointed if she knew, but she’d have to get over it, because I knew, as I sat there staring at the knife, what I had to do. I just didn’t know when.

CHAPTER
Nineteen

“IF
You
know what’s good for you, you better untie us,” said Saif, a defiant look on his face. Sitting beside him (I guess he had no choice, as I tied and duct taped him to the chair) was Farooq, silent, observing, and no doubt scared.

I just stared at Saif. You’d be surprised, silence in this situation was a lot more effective than engaging him in a verbal confrontation; silence contained mystery – the unknown; an opponent was more intimidating and deadlier when you weren’t sure what he was going to do, as opposed to fully understanding all of his intentions. It was a psychological game, but an effective one.

“This is kidnapping! You’re going to jail! For a long time!” Saif screamed at me.

He was right, I’d give him that; I was now the perpetrator of forcible confinement, which I believe under the law, was a big no-no. Murder was a bigger no-no, and as I was intending to commit that, I figured I wouldn’t worry myself too much about kidnapping.

I just stared at Saif, saying nothing. I could tell it was getting under his skin.

“Let us go you BASTARD!” he screamed.

“Yell as loud as you like,” I finally said. “The house is big; my neighbors won’t hear, or if it gets out of control, I’ll just slit your throat; tough to yell when your head’s hanging on by a thread, wouldn’t you say?”

Saif just looked at me; anger in his eyes. I think I detected a slight whimper escaping Farooq’s lips. The poor bastard, he thought he was helping a friend – an unwise move as that friend had asked him to help with something illegal, namely robbing my home and possibly even taking care of me if I got in the way – and this is where it got him.

“People are going to come looking. Then you’re in trouble,” Saif said in a calmer tone, but still with defiance in his voice.

“They can come,” I said. “They’ll even find you. The question is in what state? Will you be leaving this basement on an ambulance gurney or in a body bag?”

Farooq looked up at me. He was definitely terrified; you could see it on his face.

“I want to go home,” whimpered Farooq. “Please.”

“I gave you two a chance to leave last night, on the porch. This was your call.”

Farooq lowered his head defeated.

It was almost the evening of the next day. Saif and Farooq had been in the basement, unconscious for quite some time; I hadn’t been sure if either one of them would ever wake up, but they did. I guess that’s why I wasn’t panicked or intimidated by Saif’s threat that people would come looking. Both of them had been missing overnight, in what I suspected were close-knit families who wouldn’t normally put up with them being gone that long. The families were no doubt worried and may have even all ready called the police. I don’t know what police procedure was in this case; how long the two had to be missing before they’d take it seriously; in the movies and on TV they always said twenty-four hours had to pass before they could do anything, but I didn’t know if that was right or just bullshit; if I went by TV as my source of information, I’d have to believe that as a cop, every day you went to work you found yourself in a gun fight, or something equally dangerous. I guess you’d also have to determine with your partner who was the star of the day and who was the supporting character because the supporting character didn’t always fair that well; he or she often suffered the fate of the unknown security officer who went down to the new planet in Star Trek.

The big question was had Saif told anyone where he was headed last night? Had he confided in his father that he was coming to my place to collect Safia’s things? Or had he just simply hoped to arrive home with them, the conquering hero; yet another incident where he made his parents proud. He was the only son after all; the golden one in the eyes of their skewed culture. The way I figured it, he had said nothing. If he had, I would have expected to see Saif’s Father on my doorstep this morning asking after his son. I would have still pleaded ignorance, but I’m sure he would have shown up, worried and confident that I knew something. He hadn’t. No one knew Saif and Farooq were here and no one would know as I’d taken the only precaution I figured I needed to take.

Late last night, after I had secured the two, and before my time of reflection in the kitchen, I had taken Farooq’s car keys and driven his car to a, let’s say seedier part of town. I’d parked it in a lot across the street from one of the city’s more questionable men’s entertainment lounges, or strip clubs if you will. I’d taken precautions and worn gloves so as not to leave any fingerprints when it was eventually discovered. It sounds cool, but the gloves I wore were the only ones I had, those plastic yellow ones you wear when doing the dishes or scrubbing the floor. It didn’t look so cool, but I’m sure it was effective. I left the car in the lot with the windows rolled down and the keys in the ignition. The way I figured it, even though it looked too good to be true, in that part of the city, someone was bound to jump at the bait and steal the car from the parking lot – a criminal way of say, paying it forward. If I got lucky, the car would either disappear or bounce around so many criminals that by the time it was recovered it’d be a DNA smorgasbord and totally useless to the cops in their search for Saif and Farooq. Even when they did catch up with the latest criminal driving it, if it was indeed taken from the strip club parking lot, they’d end up telling the authorities where they got it and it all would be tied back to the strip club. As far as the police would be concerned, two nineteen-year-old Teens had hit the town and snuck into a strip club for some adult entertainment, probably ran into some dangerous characters and had gone missing. It seemed ideal for the time being, and would keep the police from showing up at my place, although I didn’t know why they would anyway – after Safia’s death I had no contact with her family for the most part; hell, when Safia was alive I’d had no contact with her family.

A lot of time had gone by since the two of them had shown up at my door, so I figured no one was going to think of looking for them here; I was in the clear for now.

“What the hell do you want?” asked Saif.

He seemed calmer – still defiant, but calmer. I guess he could see that his yelling hadn’t rattled me; it wasn’t as effective as he’d hoped.

“I need a doctor,” uttered Farooq, “I’m hurting.”

“Suck it up,” said Saif. “Be a man.”

Farooq just fell quiet.

“How long you going to keep us here?” asked Saif.

“Who says I’m ever letting you go?”

Another whimper from Farooq.

“You’re going to kill us, is that it, motherfucker?” asked Saif.

“I’d thought about it,” I said, casually.

“Then why don’t you FUCKING DO IT!”

I’m sure Farooq must have whimpered although I didn’t hear it. I was concentrating too intently on Saif, the defiant little fuck. He had been trying to see if he could rattle me, find a chink in my armor, and I had been doing my best to try and rattle him, but he was having none of it. I had all ready decided that I was going to kill him; avenge Safia’s murder, so what the hell was I doing? I should just kill him and be over with it, but it just didn’t seem right. He was too damned defiant. If I killed him now, he’d think he was going out a hero; paying the ultimate sacrifice for doing what needed to be done. He’d consider himself a martyr to his cause; he’d still think he was right, and I couldn’t have that. I couldn’t let him die without realizing the truth of what he had done; without him having suffered for his actions. I wanted him to feel regret, and die knowing he was wrong and that his parents were wrong; I wanted him to die knowing that his next stop had to be Hell because he had taken the life of such a wonderful woman. He wasn’t ready to die yet.

“You really think you’re a tough guy, don’t you, you little prick,” I said.

Saif just laughed at me; with clear contempt.

“You’re a fucking coward or I’d be dead all ready,” said Saif. “Do you want some tips, asshole? Do you want to know what it feels like to slide that blade into someone’s flesh? What to expect? Say maybe the flesh of a whore!”

I was out of my chair in an instance and had the knife to his throat. Farooq merely looked up for a second, whimpered in fear and lowered his head. I guess he didn’t want to watch.

“You deserve to die, you prick!” I said as I held the knife to his throat.

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. Everything in me said slit his throat, you’d be doing the world a favor, but there was also something holding me back; maybe a deeply ingrained knowledge that slitting someone’s throat was frowned upon by society. God, how I wanted to do it, but I didn’t.

Saif knew from last night that referring to his sister as a whore was going to set me off. It had gotten him unexpectedly into the position he was in now. He was taunting me; maybe he figured he was all ready dead so he might as well get it over with; or maybe he was a gambling man; see if I actually had the balls to pull the trigger so to speak.

“Do it,” he said.

It was only upon reflection later that I developed another theory for his taunting me; for why he was so recklessly toying with his own immortality. Maybe he wanted to die; to pay for his sins. His parents had requested that he take care of his sister, and he had, but maybe his actions weighed heavily on him; maybe underneath all his cocky bravado he was hurting, trying to come to terms with what he had done; had he not looked into his dying sister’s face as he had stabbed her? Had he not witnessed firsthand her shock, fear, horror and disappointment? Maybe deep down within him, he was hurting and hurting badly. Like I said, I realized that later, it wasn’t that realization that stayed my hand at that moment, however.

I pulled the knife back from Saif’s throat and made my way back to the chair I had been sitting on. He just looked at me with even more contempt.

“Just what I thought, a coward,” he spat at me. “No wonder you couldn’t save my sister. Fucking coward!”

I didn’t take the bait this time; in many ways I was lost in my own head. I had come that close to actually doing what I had set out to do, taking another human being’s life. I had almost done it; I knew that’s what I planned to do, but until I actually committed the act, it was also a foreign concept in my mind – something that wasn’t real or concrete. I needed a drink.

“Where you going asshole?!” he asked as I got up from my chair and headed towards the stairs. “Come back here and finish the job, you coward! Do it or let us go, goddamn you!”

I just ignored him and headed upstairs. I believe I had a bottle of bourbon stashed away somewhere in my kitchen. One of those generic Christmas – sorry, Happy Holiday - gifts you get from someone who doesn’t really know you. I’d often thought about re-gifting it, but hadn’t, how’s that for a spot of good luck?

I found myself sitting in the guest bedroom. When Safia and I had finally consummated our relationship, she had moved into the master bedroom and brought along a lot of her things, but she hadn’t gotten around to moving most of her stuff out of the guest bedroom. She still used the closet in there and the room was decorated as it had been when she first moved in. I know that at the time of her death we had been talking about redecorating a lot of the rooms in the house; they had initially been decorated to reflect my tastes, but seeing as how we were building a life together, it only seemed right that we redecorate it to incorporate a little bit from both of our tastes. That was going to be our first big project together, and while at the time I dreaded the prospect of looking over paint and carpet samples, being dragged to furniture stores and checking out different pieces, it suddenly seemed more appealing to me, as I’d be doing it with Safia.

I sat there for quite some time, surrounded by her stuff. I had to do something; I had two guys tied up in my basement. Why does life have to be so cruel? We were happy together; does anything else really matter? What does the human race have against happiness?

I cried; I broke down, and not just regular tears, but deep down, sobbing tears of sorrow. This had only happened once before, an incident between me and my Father when he was battling cancer and had to go for his first radiation test. He was frail at the time, many different tubes sticking out of him, especially from his kidneys. I’m not going to go into detail here, but as a once proud man who liked to be in control, something happened while he was getting ready for that test, and the look I saw in his eyes on that day, at that moment, rocked me to my very soul. I kept up a brave face, but when the nurse came and took him away for the test, one I couldn’t accompany him on, I sat down in that room and just lost it, my body rocking itself with my sobbing; I didn’t know how long my Father was going to be gone for, so I also had to pull myself together and make sure I had a smile on my face when he returned from the test. It would do him no good to see that I was as torn up about what was going on as I really was; I had to put on a brave face for him, even if we both knew I was lying to him and myself about what I really felt – or the fact that I was as scared shitless about everything as he was. Here in Safia’s room, there was no reason to hold back. Nobody was going to show up that I had to maintain a brave face for; it was just me and months and months of deep-rooted pain making its presence known.

At some point I fell asleep.

Surprisingly, in all this time, I hadn’t heard a peep from the basement; I figured initially that both Saif and Farooq would be screaming up a storm, hoping to attract attention to save themselves. They weren’t. Possibly, Saif wanted to die for his sins, and as for Farooq, well, he was defeated; he’d lost his will to fight pretty quickly and was just a mass of fear, waiting for the inevitable.