Public Enemy Zero

4

The rest of the night was mostly panic-free until he remembered Rookman. He used the same parking lot as he did. He had to have seen his car and the blood. What did he think?

Crazy for sure, but Rookman was a perceptive man. Mitchell once wore the same shirt two days in a row and got a call from Rookman congratulating him for getting laid.

When Rachel broke up with him and he wore a shirt two days in a row again out of depression, Rookman called him up and said let it go and move on.

It was the same shirt.

Rookman knew something happened. Mitchell tried to think whether there was any kind of clue in his phone call. That’s how he would have told him he knew.

Maybe he didn’t notice. Or if he did, he was keeping his mouth shut.

Mitchell had to resist the urge to run outside and look under his windshield wiper for a note. Rookman’s style would have been to leave the business card for a lawyer or bail bondsman.

Guys who talk tough have a habit of being the first to fold. He thought Rookman was pretty genuine. It wasn’t all an act, was it?

No. Rookman was a sincere guy. He was a ball-buster, for sure. But he had character. If Rookman noticed the car, he probably decided it wasn’t any of his business.

Mitchell thought about the crazy stuff he probably heard from students every day. This was minor in comparison, he was sure.

If Rookman mentioned it, Mitchell would tell him everything. He was pretty sure Rookman of all people would believe him.

He opened up the phone lines again for requests. He kept his finger on the drop button, fearful that he was going to get another call from the girl. Only this time she was going to call him out and publicly accuse him of trying to rape and murder her.

Every time he heard a female voice, he clinched up a little bit.

When a man called in and said he wanted to be Daredevil, all Mitchell could think about was the fact that his day job was being an attorney. Guilty!

He also got the usual amount of insults. People invited him to do all sort of lewd acts to himself or family members. The interesting thing was always that the later it got, the more they sounded like some kind of Freudian expression.

“Whore.”

“Junky.”

“Faggot,” of course.

The most disturbing calls were the rambling ones from drunk people. They always had something important to say. They just never could get around to saying it. If you cut them short, they’d call you any or all of the previous insults.

The last hour felt pretty normal. He screwed around on his iPad during the playlists and just did what he did on a normal night.

A calendar reminder popped up and he felt sick to his stomach for a much more mundane reason than being accused of attempted rape.

That was the day he’d promised to drop off his ex-girlfriend’s keys. He’d wanted to just send them, but he didn’t want to look like a coward. He was pretty sure there was a new guy living with Rachel. He hadn’t known that when he agreed to drop them off.

A three-week turnaround from Mitchell to that guy. It was probably faster than that. It just made his gut hurt even more. The last thing he wanted to do was to see her or him, worst of all her and him together.

Thinking about it was like having every negative emotion in the world explode inside of him like a grenade. Jealousy, sadness, anger, inadequacy, impotency and a million others he could describe if he took the time.

By agreeing to drop them off, he told himself he was outwardly doing what a person who feels none of those things feels. Another part of him felt that he was only justifying her actions by going along with her nonchalant attitude about the situation.

Whatever, he thought. He’d drop the keys and the whole thing would be done with. He didn’t want to spend any more time dwelling on it. He had other things to worry about.

Christ, the other thing. He couldn’t decide which was worse to worry about.

He watched the minutes tick down on the station clock. He’d go drop the keys off and then go home and sleep through the rest of the nightmare while everyone else went to work.

Damn. He realized that she wouldn’t be up for another two hours. That meant he couldn’t go home and crash. Mitchell would have to sleep in his car while he waited for her to get up.

Fine, he thought. Whatever it takes.

The last hour passed uneventfully. He saw the alarm pad light up by the door as the early morning shift host was coming in.

Bonnie walked by the window and gave him a wave. Mitchell felt it wasn’t an unfriendly wave, but it had the feeling like she was kind of just waving at him and the station furniture alike. Waving to him was just one part of the ritual she had for realizing that life hadn’t turned out like she wanted. Hello, Mitch. Hello, fern.

She was in her late forties and was probably pretty once. She had that deep voice too many late nights and too much alcohol gave women. Mitchell and his friends used to call that a “boozer” voice.

Someone had told him she’d been an MTV veejay for a little while back when kids knew that term as someone who announced music videos and not as slang for vagina.

Mitchell could believe it. She was good at what she did and acted like a pro. You always got a sense that she felt she was too good for the place, and she probably was.

Mitchell wondered what it was like to go from MTV celebrity to obscure early morning host. Was it a gradual slide? Or an overnight thing you never recovered from?

He looked around the tiny booth he was in and wondered if he’d be grateful in twenty years to even have the job he had there. That scared him.

He’d struggled to find a job in broadcasting. The current job came about because a friend from college was leaving the station and pushed hard for him.

The station really never let you know if you were doing good or bad, so there was never any security. He didn’t have a gimmick like Rookman, so he really didn’t have a following. People knew him, but he wasn’t known for anything other than being on the radio.

He’d gotten a date with Rachel because she was fascinated by the idea of a radio personality. When she realized that was the only interesting thing about him, her interest began to wane.

He couldn’t blame her. He had an audience and nothing to say to them.

Mitchell played his out music, flipped a switch and turned the station over to Bonnie.

It was still dark outside. As he walked toward his car, he contemplated sleeping in the parking lot, but then the kicked-in door made him decide to put some distance between himself and the station.

He’d decided to park a few blocks from Rachel’s house and nap there. He’d then give her the key and his life could go back to its pathetic trajectory to nowhere.