What He Wrote

Chapter 14

"Excuse me, could you help me find a size four in these pants?" I looked up from the rack of white blouses I was lazily sorting. A pretty woman in a black pantsuit was holding out a pair of hideously fashionable green and yellow printed pants that had somehow been flying off of the shelves.

"Of course, let me look on the table and if there are no more fours I'll check in the back." I said, adapting the confident but comfortable tone of voice necessary to keep a job at Black Ivory Boutique.

"Sound confident, but not overpowering. The people shopping at this store probably own your ass or owned it at some point, so don't mouth off to them." Rick, the classy yet rough-and-tumble store manager had told me during training.

The lady nodded, not bothering to say thank you before inspecting a nearby shelf of pumps.

I found no fours on the table of horrid pants, so I had to look in the stockroom. The stockroom had a tendency of becoming more of a break room than a place for clothes dues to it's 'cupboard under the stair' size. Lucky for me, Rick was in the back smoking what smelled suspiciously like weed.

"Hey, are there any more of the green and yellow jeans?" Rick jumped at the sound of my voice, dropping what remained of his joint.

"I wasn't smoking!" He pretended to busy himelf with a few collared shirts that were somehow in the bin of sweaters.

"I never said you were. I just need a four in those pants."

"You know what, don't tell anyone about what you saw, and I'll take care of the customer. You can just go right ahead to your lunch break."

"Whatever you say." Technically, my lunch break was not supposed to start for another thirty minutes, and I really had no intentions of telling on Rick, but there was no way I was going to tell him that.

The only reason I was given the job in the first place was because Josephine overheard me talking to Cleo and claimed to know a person. The people I had to help at Black Ivory were complete megalomaniacs, but it paid much better than Mason's job at a gritty chicken joint.

I figured that I would just spend my break at the food court, but something in the display case of an unusual used book store caught my eye. The purchase was very prompt and impersonal, the scripted "how are you"s resounding from my mouth and the cashier's. I was in and out of the store in no more than five minutes. I spent a good fifteen minutes walking aimlessly around Catalina's dangerously perfect indoor mall, occasionally stopping to peak at prices of T shirts that I had no intentions of buying.

But then there was a noise.

It was the very type of sound that could make your blood freeze and spike with heat at the exact same time. It was one of the few noises that which it mattered more so of what came afterwards than during; the glowing suspense that distinguished the fine line that danced amongst life and death.

Silence unsued.

I was not sure if that was a good thing. I nearly hoped for another angular crack to echo throughout the fake-marble mall, because even the implied death sentence was better than a breathtaking silence. That silence terrified me. It beckoned with curling tendrils of invisible silver, swirling with chaos and the deafening emptiness that drifted through out. I followed it.

I smelled the blood before I saw it. A man was laying face-down in it, another standing near him. The second man was holding a gun, pointing it with shaky hands at the very same woman who had asked for the size four pants. I wanted to run, but the curious part of me overcame the fearful part. I hid behind a corner before the woman could see me and alert the gunman.