Cold Hands

Jethro

       

"Whoa, whoa man, chill."

I heard it like I was underwater, a distorted mumble. Sensation was slowly returning to my fuzzy brain, blurry shapes blossoming in my eyes from blackness. I blinked, and the shapes started to take recognizable form.

There was a guy leaning over me, angular, sculpted, latte-color, with shiny black curls and gray-brown eyes. He had on a newsboy cap and a handkerchief scarf. I recognized his face from somewhere, but I wasn't sure where. My mind was hazy.

"Are you okay?" His brow was creased.

I knew where I had seen him before. In a mold-blackened picture frame, in the shack on the river that first day I met Chelsea. Finding it difficult to nod, I instead said, "I think so?"

"How on earth did you manage this? What were you thinking? Let's get you out," he said. He had a husky kind of voice. He rolled up his sleeves and started moving the broken rubble and moth-eaten coats off my useless legs. He was tall and broad, strongly built. A lot stronger than me, if it came to defending myself. His big arms curled around the broken chunks of armoire with ease. His shirt was a loose smock and his pants were patched up. I hadn't seen anybody dressed like that outside of pirate movies.

"You had to try to get yourself killed now," he grumbled. "Not that I didn't want to meet you eventually. But I was asleep."

"It's the middle of the day," I pointed out.

"Is it? I can't really tell those kinds of things."

That was a weird thing to say. "Am I dead?" I wondered.

"No," he grunted as he hefted the broken doors off me.

I thought about that for a minute. "Are you dead?"

"Yeah," he said.

I was scared out of my wits, but he seemed friendly enough, for now. He wasn't wailing or rattling any chains or covered in blood. He straightened up and dusted his hands off on his pants. "Can you move now?"

I sat up and took some experimental scoots without any trouble.

I wouldn't be able to get far, I knew he would be quicker than me, but it was worth a shot. I flipped over and ran; well, sort of. I slithered, at a moderate pace, toward the door.

He made no attempt at pursuit. "Wait..." he said, sounding surprisingly pathetic. "Don't go..."

I'm not sure why, but I stopped. My heart was pounding out of my chest and every inch of my body was screaming at me to leave. I propped up against the wall. "Who are you?"

"Jethro," he said. "Jethro Greene."

I nodded, slowly. "That makes sense." It did, for some reason. Clicked right into place.

"And you're Zeff Plaza." he said.

I wasn't at all surprised he knew that, either. "Why did you kill Jerry Summers?" I demanded, sounding a lot braver than I felt.

He frowned. "Who?"

"The old guy. You totaled his car and hung him from a tree."

Jethro shook his head, looking puzzled. "I have no idea what you're talking about."

I blinked. I hadn't been expecting that answer at all. He could be lying, of course.

Jethro shuffled uncomfortably, and his foot slipped in something. He looked at his shoe, then at me, and his eyes went wide. "Hold on...what happened to your leg?"