Free The Wrong Man by Matthew Louis Page B

blindfolded man with a pistol might nail the bull’s eye on a shooting range. Now they were squeezing off random shots in every direction, not even sure, evidently, where the target was anymore. The movie afforded us possibly two real laughs in two hours, for twenty dollars. Afterward we drove out to the cliffs overhanging the Pacific and parked and had sex in the backseat of my Fairlane to the static-crashing of waves. Jill was lively and horny, determined that our sex be good, and she managed to banish all ghosts of her rape from the inside of the car. The windows fogged over and after a while she pushed me down so I lay on my back and then climbed on and grounded me deep into her until she reached orgasm. Then she lay down and pulled me over her and I began that last sprint to the top of the mountain, where you finally run up and jump off and freefall for a moment and then land back in your skin again, gasping. She let me come inside her because she was pregnant anyway and she clung to me as I did, groaning with me and stroking the back of my head while I convulsed against her damp, lithe body.
    I left her at her mother’s at two in the morning, and she told me that whatever I was doing with whatever was in my pockets I had better be careful. I had better remember how much she needed me.
     
    I had turned off my cell phone in the movie theater and didn’t turn it back on until I was driving home. There was one message from a number I had never seen before. No name. I dialed in and played the message and the Brando voice said, “You’re dead, motherfucker,” followed by a click.
    My heart exploded to a gallop. The terror was back and shutting down my body. The black freeway slipped by outside and I flew along in hurtling and surreal motion but if I had been standing on my own two feet I would have been groping for support. My evening with Jill, getting out of Blackmer, had made the lunatic violence of the morning like something I had dreamed. Our normalcy, our sex, had made the rape feel insignificant. A mere speedbump, already behind us and forgotten. But that was a fiction. It was a spell cast by Jill’s cleverness and female instincts. I was crossing back over now as if my car was passing through some force field that surrounded Blackmer, and fear began burning in my stomach as I reentered the world of dirt and gangsters where I felt the need to weigh myself down with brass knuckles and the mean little revolver.
     
    My mind was leaping ahead, and I had the foresight to leave my car across the street from my building in the parking lot of a darkened shopping center. I crossed Murdock Avenue , went down the walkway, and crept up the cement steps with my back to the wall. I felt like a fool, imitating the hundred thousand cops & robbers programs I’d seen, but I took the thirty-eight from my pocket and cocked it, held it up next to my shoulder, at the ready, just like my TV had taught me.
    There was no sign of anyone as I reached the landing. I thought ahead once more and saw myself maybe finally sleeping. I would put the door chime in place again and there would be no way anyone could get the drop on me so tonight, finally, I would relax.
    I passed the gun to my left hand and fished out my keys. I slid the correct one into the slot and turned it, but felt looseness, realizing with disgust that I had left the thing unlocked. But would I do something that stupid? I frowned, feeling amused, even, as I tried to remember if I had remembered to rock the knob, to check that the lock was set when I left this evening. But the black dizzying horror rose up behind my eyes. I heard or felt or sensed the presence on the other side of that dense door—as if, I thought, my key snicking in the slot had stirred someone to action. A noise reached my ears—a male voice— “He’s here! He’s here!” —and I was already flinging myself away.
    Later I would berate myself in the vilest language. Where had all my fantasies of