Say Goodbye

TWENTY-FIVE

BURGERMAN IS UP TO SOMETHING.

I can feel him studying me when he thinks I won’t notice. I’ll be watching TV and he’ll come in, standing in the doorway, staring, staring, staring. Then he’ll reach down, scratch his balls, and disappear.

Burgerman spends a lot of time alone these days. Out and about, locked in his room. Sometimes, I can feel the darkness of his moods. Sometimes, I can match ’em with my own. We are like father and son, mutually contemptuous.

He doesn’t touch me anymore; I’m too old. I can’t fetch like I used to, either. A pale-faced teenager is automatically suspect on most playgrounds. People think I might be trouble, maybe a drug dealer or petty gangster. Little do they suspect.

I’m still small. Burgerman doesn’t feed me much, a last-ditch effort to stave off puberty, I guess. After all, there’s still the money from the movies, but even that’s not what it used to be. In the world of porn, the big money is in kids, not gaunt, scrawny-chested teenagers.

Lately, he’s started talking about graduation. “Son, there comes a time in everyone’s life when you gotta start lookin’ ahead. You’re growin’ up, boy. Gettin ready to graduate.”

I don’t know what graduation means. Certainly no cap and gown ceremony, or one-way ticket to college. What does he think I’ll do? Go to trade school, get a job? Move into a trailer park with all the other perverts? Only one thing I know how to do. What’s the graduation ceremony like for that?

I know lately, when I come home, my hand stills after I put the key in the lock. I wonder when I turn it, if it’ll still work. And if my key does turn, I wonder when I push the door open, if the Burgerman will still be there.

Because I’m starting to get the picture, you see. Life has to have value. And I outgrew my value about two years ago. Now I’m like that old nag in the barn, can’t run, can’t breed, but costs a fortune in room and board. You know, the horse that’s ultimately sent to the glue factory.

Burgerman probably hopes I’ll run away. I’ve thought about it, believe me. But after all these years, I don’t know where I would go or what I would do. This is the only life I know; Burgerman the only family I have left.

Maybe he’ll dump me and disappear.

There are, of course, other possibilities.

Burgerman came into my room last night, stood at the foot of my bed. Staring, staring, staring.

I kept my breathing steady, but watched him beneath the narrow slits of my eyes. I wondered if he had a knife, a gun. I wondered what I would do if he attacked.

Burgerman is talking of graduation.

I must remain alert.

TWENTY-SIX

“A stinging sensation is usually followed by intense pain. The tissue affected locally by the venom is killed and gradually sloughs away, exposing the underlying muscles.”

FROM Biology of the Brown Recluse Spider,

BY JULIA MAXINE HITE, WILLIAM J. GLADNEY, J. L. LANCASTER, JR., AND W. H. WHITCOMB, DEPARTMENT OF ENTOMOLOGY, DIVISION OF AGRICULTURE, UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS, FAYETTEVILLE, MAY 1966

HAROLD LOVED THE BOOT.

“Holy crap! Do you know what this is?” he exclaimed. “Wow, a Limmer boot. Where did you get this? Do you know what this means?”

Kimberly didn’t know what a Limmer boot was, or what having one meant. That’s why she’d asked Harold to journey down from the high ground of Counterterrorism to VC’s tiny, third-floor sanctuary. The CT agents hated to travel. After all, they had an entire floor complete with half a dozen TVs blaring Fox News. In contrast, Violent Crimes had…cardboard boxes, some maps, a couple rolls of yellow crime scene tape strewn around for general aesthetics.

Fortunately, Harold had been intrigued by her request for help. He was a geek. It was one of the things Kimberly liked best about him.

Kimberly had commandeered an unused desk by a bank of windows. There, she had laid out the dark brown hiking boot on top of a sheet of butcher paper. To the side, she had spread her kit of stainless steel instruments: metal file, tweezers, scraper, a host of different-size metal picks. Sure, she could’ve gone with the Popsicle sticks favored by so many evidence technicians, but that wouldn’t have looked nearly as cool.

She’d completed an initial examination of the boot, noting size, color, brand name, tread pattern, and surface markings. She’d recorded that the boot was a men’s size 10, with a badly scuffed i

Then she’d started the process of chipping off caked mud, plant materials, and other debris from the bottom of the boot. Select samples were captured in glass vials to be sent to the FBI lab. The rest of the detritus would remain captured in the butcher paper, as it was folded up, slid inside a larger brown paper evidence bag, and stored in the evidence vault for future consideration. Finally, she would cast the boot’s tread pattern in tinted dental stone for possible match later with any impressions recovered from a crime scene.

The life of an evidence collector was all about painstaking methodology and practiced patience. You sorted, studied, and saved, all in the name of someday. Except Kimberly didn’t feel like waiting these days. She wanted answers now. Harold, former naturalist and U.S. Forestry Service employee, seemed her best bet.

“A Limmer boot is special?” she ventured, straightening up with a metal pick still clutched in her right hand.

“Sure. Limmers are a high-end hiker’s boot, made by a family-owned shop in New Hampshire. You’re not talking something you pick up at your nearest Wal-Mart. This is an enthusiast’s boot. A serious hiker for sure.”

This got Kimberly’s attention. “High-end? What does that mean? Limited quantities? Highly traceable?”

“Well,” Harold drawled now, taking the pick from her and starting to poke at the boot himself. “Back in my day, Limmers were custom fit. But if memory serves, they contracted with an outside company to manufacture a small line of ready-to-wear hiking boots. So I guess the real question is, what kind of boot do we have here? Handmade custom fit or mass-produced ready-to-wear?”

He snapped on a pair of latex gloves, hefting up the boot and rolling it between his hands. “Feel the weight of this sucker. That’s a good two pounds, easy. Full-length nylon shank, double-layer midsole, Vibram outsole. Nice.”

“If these boots are so special, why haven’t I ever heard of them? I’m a hiker.”

Harold gave her a look. “When’s the last time you did the AT?”

“AT?” she muttered, thinking hard. “Appalachian Trail? Ummm, it’s on my list.”

“Yeah, you’re a day hiker. These are boots for the pros.”

Kimberly murmured something low and disparaging under her breath, but couldn’t refute his point.

“So I could contact Limmer and they might be able to tell me who purchased this boot?”

“It’s possible. Especially if it was a custom job. May I?”

Harold still had the metal pick, waving it at the rubber insole. Kimberly shrugged and let him have at it. She’d been studying the boot for an hour now. All she had to show for it was a headache.

She wandered off for a glass of water. When she returned, Harold had pulled over a chair and was getting into it.

“Lotta minerals,” he reported, sifting through the crumbling bits of dried mud. “Quartz, feldspar, even some amethyst. Do you have a flashlight?”

Kimberly retrieved her field kit from beneath her desk, pulling out a flashlight.