Free Noah's Turn by Ken Finkleman Page B

Patrick McEwen in A
Horrible Night.’
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    Noah sat there looking at McEwen’s back, listening to his distant voice read what Noah’s mother used to call “supercilious drivel.” It wasn’t until later in life that he had understood how she used the expression to refer with contempt to a conversation that bored her or was over her head or that she found self-serving. But when he was too young to know what “supercilious” meant, Noah still liked all of its s’s and syllables. It also sounded adult and sophisticated, and he imagined it had something to do with the brain or brainy people and he had a picture of their ideas as they slid from their brains, through their nasal passages, where theycollected mucus and continued down into the back of their throats, where this mixture combined with their words and formed a thick dribble called “drivel.” And at this moment, things all made sense to Noah. His life had recently felt to him like it was adrift across some featureless white plain lacking any points of reference. He had once driven across the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, where there was no road, nothing growing, just a flat white surface for miles on end in all directions. But he was now staring at a secret door that had miraculously appeared on that plain, a door beyond which lay something completely different and completely unknown and all he had to do was step through and he would change his life forever. He was sure no one had seen him enter the building and take the elevator up to McEwen’s office. It all seemed so easy. He simply had to open the door and step through. It was logistics, not the right or the wrong. He felt as if the decision had been made for him by someone else, someone he couldn’t see, a being or thing who was in the room with him. Noah took the T-shirt from his bundle of squash stuff and wrapped it around his right hand. McEwen kept reading aloud. Noah reached for the machete. It didn’t have the heft of his baseball bat and wouldn’t have themomentum, but he calculated that the blade would make up the difference. He knew where the jugular ran down the front right side of the neck from a biology class at university. He was surprised by his state of mind, a state quite foreign to him. He was capable of doing what was about to come. This wasn’t him, he thought. This was how cold-blooded killers think, how psychos think. Or was it how the highly trained Navy SEAL marksmen in the U.S. forces think when they are about to take down a target that is threatening the free world and its way of life? He had reached a point of style and had left morality far behind. He was exhilarated by his cool, by his lack of fear. He raised the machete to the level of his hip as McEwen continued to read aloud from his computer. Noah had focused on a point between the jaw and the base of the neck when McEwen raised his left hand and hooked it over his left shoulder to scratch the left side of his neck. Noah lowered the machete and waited for him to stop scratching, as if it was wrong to interrupt this attempt to satisfy an itch. McEwen finished scratching and continued reading, and Noah stood up and with an allarm tennis swing, not a squash swing from the wrist, brought the machete down hard across McEwen’s neckwith enough force to cut at least four inches into him. McEwen plunged forward and to his left, grabbing his neck with his right hand. The only sound he made was a muffled gag. The jugular had been cut and blood pumped out of him like a ruptured water main. Noah didn’t expect that much blood that quickly and almost vomited. He wanted to run and have someone else finish what he had started but he knew he had to keep going. The damage was done and to stop now would be insane. He swung again and again in the area of the first cut, slashing at McEwen’s neck until his body collapsed forward onto his desk, blood gushing onto his computer in