Free Dying Memories by Dave Zeltserman Page A

recreation of this very pink-faced man with his dead reptilian dot-sized eyes. She was struck with an impulse to show her painting to Bill so she could let him know that this man might’ve been following him, but the more she thought of doing this the more foolish she felt. The last thing she wanted was for Bill to think of her as a neurotic nut. A sudden resolve gripped her and she ripped her painting in half. She would start over, and this time she would play Chopin’s Nocturne , hoping that the moodiness of his music might provide better inspiration.
    And she would make sure she didn’t paint any more very pink-faced men.

Chapter 19

    Things did not go well with the police. Bill gave his story first to a desk sergeant who stared at him as if he had escaped from an asylum, then after waiting a half hour he was brought to a detective who he told the same story. The detective stared at him with disinterest. Stifling a yawn he interrupted Bill and informed him that there was no sign of an accident where Bill claimed that an SUV had hit the van.
    “We sent over a cruiser and there was no broken glass, no pieces of plastic, no blood, nothing,” the detective said. “No one saw nothing either. Same thing when we sent a patrolman to your apartment building. No one saw a van in the area, and no one saw you being pushed inside of one.”
    Bill straightened in his chair, a coldness pushing deep into the back of his skull. It didn’t surprise him that no one remembered seeing the van. These cleaning service vans were so ubiquitous that they’re close to invisible. “It’s what happened,” he heard himself insisting.
    The detective eyed him harshly. “You don’t look no worse for wear, other than your ear looking kind of beat-up. Doesn’t look to me like you were in the type of accident you claim you were. You haven’t been drinking now, have you?”
    “No, I haven’t been drinking.”
    “Because it would explain things,” the detective said. “Maybe you went into a bar and took a shot to the ear. Maybe it made you dizzy and think things happened that didn’t happen. Are you sure it wasn’t something like that?”
    “It wasn’t anything like that. I was abducted. It happened the way I said it did.”
    “Then how come no one saw nothing then?” the detective asked. “And what happened to those two smashed up vehicles? They just disappear into thin air?”
    “I don’t know.”
    The detective leaned closer, his harsh stare intensifying. “You haven’t been doing drugs now, have you?”
    The coldness pushed harder into Bill’s skull, making it feel like he had the mother of all ice cream headaches. At that moment he just wanted to get the hell out of there. “There’s no point in my filing a complaint, is there?” he asked.
    “I don’t know,” the detective deadpanned, his eyes glazing dully. “You could get yourself in a lot of trouble filing false police reports, especially if it’s only so that some dumbass reporter can try making a name for himself by making up a bullshit story. So you tell me.”
    Bill shook his head, more to shake out the iciness filling it than any other reason. “Could you have a police officer drive me to my car and make sure I get in it safely?” he asked.
    The detective reluctantly agreed to the request. Before leaving the police station Bill washed the blood from his ear and the side of his face. His damaged ear looked red and swollen, but the cut had already scabbed over and didn’t look bad enough for stitches, and outside of that and some shakiness he seemed to have escaped his ordeal intact. The thought that kept nagging at him was that the men who abducted him had to be tied to the government. That was the way it smelled from the very moment he was grabbed, and it explained how they were able to clean up the area as quickly as they did. He wondered whether they were able to influence the local police and whether there were witnesses who were being kept quiet.