Unexpected Caller

“Tonight she dies,” the voice said. I looked at the receiver in my hand, confused. I didn’t recognize who was speaking or why someone had to die. Nor did I know why someone had to die. It seemed silly. “The plan proceeds as we discussed.”

“What plan?” I asked. If someone were going to make me an accessory to murder, I wanted to know what they were going to do. It was only right. “Where are we meeting?”

“Son of a….” the voice cursed into the phone. “Who is this? I don’t want to hurt you, but you know too much….”

This poor unfortunate soul thought that I knew too much about his plan, but I knew even less about it than I did math. Simple stuff I could do but start with multiplication, and I was lost. Did I dare tell him that? No.

“Who are you?” The voice growled into the phone again. I thought about responding in kind but thought better of it and went to disconnect. As if he knew what I was going to do, “if you think about going to the cops, you are dead. The pigs are hungry tonight.”

It sucked that I knew what he meant. One of the ways that serial killers and other criminal types hid bodies was to feed them to the cute farm animals because their razor sharp teeth would ensure that nobody was able to find them.

And while I would make for a filling meal for the pigs, I wasn’t in the mood to die. Call me crazy, but I actually enjoyed living. Which meant that I needed to find out who the man on the other end of the phone was and who he was going to kill before I became his next victim.

After placing the receiver of my phone on the cradle, I grabbed my keys and started to head out. Where was I going? The police station seemed like a good choice, but what would they be able to do?

I decided to get a cup of coffee from a local diner. That would help clear my head, and there would be officers there. I could speak to them and find out if going to the station would be the best course of action.

As I walked down the dark street, it wasn’t difficult to notice that a car was following me. Whoever was driving was not good at being stealth or stalking. Then again, I considered that maybe they weren’t concerned about that.

I was dead meat.

Luckily, the diner was in sight. If I ran to it, I could be there in 2 minutes. I would be breathless and sweaty but alive. I would also be wishing I was dead. Perhaps letting them run me over was the right choice to make.

Somehow my flight or fight instinct kicked in and I ran to the diner. This whole survival instinct was not for me. Who wanted to run before having a plate of chili cheese fries?

My thoughts were interrupted when I ran into a brick wall of a man. I looked up at him from the ground, he was grinning. “You ok there? I’ve never seen someone fall for me so fast.”

I looked up at him and noted that he was in a cop uniform, that was one saving grace. It took me a few seconds longer than it should have to pull myself up off the ground. When I did, I shot him a smile, “if I’d known you were with me falling for you…” the screeching tires reminded me that I wasn’t there to flirt. “Someone’s going to be murdered, and I think the murderer is following me.”

“That’s a lot…” he was cut off by bullets flying over our heads. We both fell to the ground, him on top of me. Once the shooting stopped, we stood up and walked inside. He asked the waitress to use the phone. Into the receiver, he said, “yeah, there was a drive by at Main and Fourth Street. I have a witness here who believes that he was the target.”

After spilling my story thrice, I was tired. There was also a sense that people thought that I was crazy.

Scott, the cop I ran into, and another officer escorted me home. They were going to try tracing the call. Once we were inside my house, they looked around to make sure that no one was there.

After they got to work, I looked out the window and noticed that the car that followed me was waiting outside. Which made Scott’s words even more shocking to me.

“The call came from within the house.”

I turned to him, expecting to see him holding a gun or something, but his face showed his confusion. “H-h-how is that possible?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“The answer is simple,” his partner answered, walking into the room, this time with a gun drawn. “I made the call. I tapped your line or thought I did and was trying to get rid of my wife, ex-wife. She broke my heart because I made a little mistake.”

In the movies and books, I never understood why the main character kept the villain talking, but it made sense now that I was in the situation. “What mistake did you make?”

“I had an affair with her sister. Can you believe that she got upset over that?” he said, not noticing that Scott was easing out of the room. “She’s all ‘Luke, you’re a jerk’ or ‘how could you do that?’ and the answer is simple, I’m a man and needed some attention. You know how it is.”

Before I could answer, the police burst into my house and arrested him.

As Scott was leaving, he wrote his phone number down. I asked, “Is there another way we can talk? I don’t want to use the phone right now.”