Neighbors: A gripping serial killer mystery with a brilliant twist

  NEIGHBORS

  JEREMY BATES

  Copyright © 2015 by Jeremy Bates

  FIRST EDITION

  The right of Jeremy Bates to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-0-9940960-8-1

  For a limited time, visit www.jeremybatesbooks.com to receive a free copy of both Black Canyon and The Taste of Fear.

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  ONE DAY EARLIER

  EPILOGUE

  NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  Buddy saw the smoke from half a block away. It streamed up into the morning sky lazily in thick black billows. A siren wailed in the distance, punctuated by the deep blast of an air horn.

  Buddy broke into a sprint, only slowing when he reached the crowd gathered in front of the burning apartment building. “Move!” he shouted, elbowing through the rubberneckers. “Move! Outta my way!” People cursed, a few cried out. Then he was at the front of the throng, next to a fire truck studded with a dozen flashing auxiliary lights. An American flag affixed to the back of it flapped in the warm air.

  The building’s double front doors were wide open, likely left that way when the residents fled. Beyond them a furnace blazed, nothing visible except a wall of blustering flames. A firefighter in a tan Nomex suit with reflective stripes—“Boomer” written across the back of the jacket—was attacking the fire with a thick hose spraying a jet of water.

  Buddy charged toward the building. Two burly cops blocked his way and seized him by the arms.

  “Get back!” one of them snapped.

  “My ma’s in there!” Buddy said. “She’s in a wheelchair!”

  “You can’t go in,” the other one said.

  “My ma’s in there!” he repeated, trying to twist free.

  The cops led him away through the crowd, stopping at the rear of an ambulance. The cop on the right said, “Now take it easy, okay? You gonna be all right?” The ambulance’s cherry tops flashed rotating red light across his face. Grainy chatter from two-way radios seemed to originate from everywhere. A second fire truck rumbled to the scene, and someone on a bullhorn ordered everyone to move to the far side of the street.

  “My ma’s in there,” Buddy said numbly. “She’s in a wheelchair. She’s trapped. She’s—” The words died on his lips. He was staring into the cargo area of the ambulance, where his neighbor, Dil Lakshmi, lay on a stretcher, an oxygen mask covering her nose and mouth. “No…” he mumbled, barely a whisper.

  In the same moment Dil opened her eyes. For a second she stared at nothing, then her eyes fell on him. Something shifted in them, and she screamed.

  The cops jumped. Buddy stumbled backward a step.

  Dil tore off the mask and pointed a shaking finger at Buddy. “Him!” she said. “Him! Him! Him!”

  “Miss, calm down,” one of the cops said, going to her.

  “He kills people!” she wailed. “He kills them in his apartment! He tried to kill me!”

  Both cops whirled to stare at Buddy. Their hands went to their holstered pistols.

  Buddy was shaking his head. “Me?” he said, and his shock at seeing Dil gave way to anger. “Me? She’s a psychopath! She killed her boyfriend in Kentucky. That’s why she moved to New York. She did this! She killed my mother!”

  Buddy lunged forward, to get to her.

  The cops wrestled him to the ground, flipping him onto his chest and pinning him in place with their knees. The cold, sharp metal of handcuffs locked around his wrists.

  “Not me, you fuckers!” Buddy shouted, his mouth squashed against the asphalt. “Her! Arrest her!”

  The cops heaved him to his feet and shoved him into the back of a nearby patrol car.

  ONE DAY EARLIER

  Holding back the blinds with one hand, Buddy Smith peered out the window at the yellow moving truck parked at the curb below. A wide ramp extended from the back of it to the road. Two men wearing matching red shirts were carrying a dresser between them up the path to the apartment building’s front entrance.

  “What’s going on, dear?” his mother asked him. She was plunked in her wheelchair in front of the TV as usual, watching old movie reruns. When she was in her twenties, before Buddy was born, she’d starred in a few small budget movies herself. Critics had compared her to Kathryn Hepburn—her looks, not her acting. Her acting stank. Buddy had watched her old films. But he agreed that in her prime she’d resembled Kathryn Hepburn with her androgynous face, razor sharp cheekbones, and perfectly coiffed curls. She held onto her looks well into her fifties, but went downhill, fast, after her stroke at fifty-nine, which aged her decades in a month. Now, two years post stroke, she was a shrunken, wrinkled, decrepit old woman.

  “Someone’s moving in,” he told her.

  “Into Mrs. McGrady’s?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  Buddy dropped the blinds and turned away from the window. He glanced at his wristwatch. 7:15 a.m. He had to get a move on if he didn’t want to be late for work.

  In the kitchenette he opened the space-saver refrigerator and retrieved his lunch. It was packed in two Tupperware containers, which in turn were wrapped in a plastic bag from the dingy C-Town supermarket a block over. There were plenty of cafés and fast food joints near the bank where he worked. But Buddy was a simple guy, he preferred simple food, and he ate the same thing every day. A sandwich with meat, tomatoes, and mayonnaise; a raw carrot; a banana; a handful of almonds; and a hard-boiled egg. He would have been content with only the sandwich, but he wanted to make sure he checked off all the ticks of a well-balanced diet. The carrot was great for vitamin A, the banana for potassium, the almonds for vitamin E, and the egg because, the way he saw it, if it had all the ingredients inside it to make life, it had to be good for you. Yeah, some argued it was high in cholesterol, but he was twenty-five and in perfect shape. Fuck cholesterol.

  Buddy stuffed his lunch into his leather attaché and returned to the living room. He stopped in front of the mirror hanging on the wall to study his reflection. He looked good, professional. His chestnut hair was cut short and combed smartly. His blue eyes were clear and bright. His skin was blemish free. He perfected the knot of his yellow tie. Then he leaned closer to the mirror, pulling his lips into a grimace to make sure there was nothing from breakfast stuck between his teeth.

  “Today’s a big day, Ma,” he said, shifting his gaze in the mirror from himself to his mother. Faced away from him as she was, he could only see her sagging shoulders and the back of her head, all white curls. Romancing the Stone was playing on the tube. “I think I’m going to be getting that promotion.”

  “You think?” she said.

  “I can’t read minds, Ma. But Gino’s told me I’ve been doing a good job. Everyone thinks I’m doing a good job.” Also, though Buddy didn’t say this, only one other employee at the bank had applied for the position, an asshole named Fernando, which gave him a fifty-fifty shot.

  “I’m proud of you, dear. You work hard. You deserve a promotion.”

  “I do, don’t I?” He glanced at his wristwatch again. “Okay, I
gotta get going. Can’t be late, especially today.”

  He secured a button on his single-breasted suit and went to the door.

  “What time will you be home?” his mother asked.

  “The usual,” he told her. “Love you, Ma.”

  “Love you too, dear. Good luck today.”

  Buddy stepped into the hallway, pulled the door closed behind him, and jogged the handle, to make sure it had locked securely.

  ***

  The door to what used to be Mrs. McGrady’s unit stood ajar. Buddy stopped before it, noting the triangular block of wood wedged beneath the sweep to prop it open. He looked inside. A mattress leaned against one wall. Several cardboard boxes formed a rough pyramid in the center of the living room. “LAKSHMI” was scrawled onto each in black marker.

  “Bullshit,” Buddy muttered to himself as he continued to the stairway. Mrs. McGrady had been the perfect neighbor. She’d been somewhere in her eighties and never made a peep. She never had guests either, not even family. He only saw her every few weeks or so when she was coming or going from one of her doctor’s appointments. Then last month she’d had a medical emergency in the middle of the night. Luckily she wore one of those bracelets that could summon an ambulance with a push of a button, or she might have gone unnoticed, dead in her bed, until she started smelling up the floor. The firefighters made a racket banging on her door before they busted it open. Buddy stuck his head into the hallway and asked what was going on, but nobody wanted to tell him. He waited and watched as Mrs. McGrady was wheeled away on a stretcher, then he closed the door and went back to sleep. He learned the details the following day from the landlord, Mr. Wang, an industrious frog of a man who always seemed to be fixing something around the building. He’d been replacing Mrs. McGrady’s door when Buddy came home from work, and he gave Buddy all the details. Heart attack. Massive. No way she could go back to living on her own. If she survived the ICU, she’d get shipped to a hospice, so said the doctor Mr. Wang had spoken to when he rang the hospital to inquire whether Mrs. McGrady would be able to pay her rent on Tuesday.

  Anyway, Buddy had been hoping her unit would remain vacant for a while. The last month without a neighbor had been great. Not that he blasted his music or threw a big bender or anything like that. It was just nice to know he had the entire third floor to himself.

  So who was moving in now? he wondered. Some burnout who’d have his buddies over all the time? Some immigrant couple with half a dozen noisy kids?

  The name on the boxes had been Lakshmi. That was Pakistani or Indian, wasn’t it?

  “Bullshit,” Buddy repeated, descending the staircase. One flight down he ran into the movers. He stepped into the second-floor hallway to let them pass. They were carrying a partially dismantled metal bed frame. They didn’t say anything to him, didn’t thank him for moving out of the way, and he was fine with that. He thought it was ridiculous you had to say something to someone else just because you came to within speaking distance. When people did this he always thought of grunting apes. He grew up in Calabasas, California, which had been full of grunting apes. You couldn’t walk down the street without one grunting at you. They always said the same thing too. “Hi, Buddy” or “How’s your mother?” or “Hot today, isn’t it?” That last one pissed him off the most. He had a few pet peeves, but talking about the weather was number one. He knew when it was hot or cold, sunny or rainy. He didn’t need someone pointing this out to him, thank you very much. Yeah, they were just breaking the ice, but that underscored the whole problem with small talk. The ice didn’t need breaking. Silence was fine. Don’t grunt at me, I won’t grunt at you.

  This was one of the reasons New York was great. People didn’t grunt. They didn’t even look at you. If someone did, they were either panhandling or selling something, and it was all but expected of you to ignore them.

  Buddy reached the first floor. The double mahogany doors to the front of the building were propped open with more of those wood blocks. He squinted as he stepped outside into the morning sunlight. Then he sneezed four times. It was always four times, never five, never three, and always when he stepped from somewhere dark to somewhere bright. He used to think he had some freak allergy to the sun. But when he looked up the condition on the internet he discovered it was due to his brain getting its wires crossed, a nerve in the nose getting mixed up with one in the eye. Some weird shit like that. Completely harmless, but pointless.

  “Bless you,” a woman said.

  Buddy had been so busy sneezing he hadn’t seen her until he was on the sidewalk a few feet away.

  “Thanks,” he said, continuing on.

  “Hey,” she said. “Do you live here?”

  Buddy stopped and turned. The woman was brown-skinned, his age, or maybe a couple years older. She had a beauty mark on her left cheek, which made him think of Marilyn Monroe. The rest of her features could have been cut from a magazine: large brown eyes, sharp lips, strong yet feminine jawline.

  Not a panhandler, he thought. Selling something then?

  She wasn’t holding a clipboard.

  “Yeah,” he said hesitantly. “Why?”

  “Cool! I’m Dil.”

  “Dil?”

  “Dilshad. But call me Dil.” She stuck out her hand.

  Buddy stared at it for a moment, the long, bony fingers, then shook. “Buddy.”

  “Nice to meet you, Buddy,” she said. “I was worried there wasn’t going to be anyone my age in this place.”

  Buddy glanced at the moving truck, then at the silver Prius parked beside it. The car hadn’t been there when he’d looked out the window earlier. The hood and windshield were dusty, the bumper muddied. Kentucky plates.

  “You’re moving in?” he said.

  “Don’t sound so overjoyed,” she said with a smile.

  She had straight, white teeth. Buddy liked that. He had a thing for nice teeth, a nice smile. Too bad about that beauty mole though. Some people liked them; he hated them. She should probably get it removed. Then again, what did he care? No way he was going to fuck her. Getting involved with a neighbor? Worst idea ever. Would never happen.

  He said, “I was expecting… I don’t know.”

  “Are there any roaches?”

  “Huh?”

  “Cockroaches. I hate them.”

  “None that I’ve seen.” Buddy decided not to tell her about the mice. He’d caught one a while back, which he now kept in a cage and called Spot because of a black patch of fur on its back.

  “Good,” she said. “I don’t know anything about this place. I found it online. Saw the pictures. The price was right. Spoke to the landlord, Mr. Wong…?”

  “Wang.”

  “Right. I spoke to him. He was nice. Or sounded nice. So I took a leap of faith. I was supposed to move in last night, but the movers delayed last minute, so I had to stay at a crummy hotel. I wasn’t going to sleep on the floor.” Just then the two movers emerged from the building. “Hey, that’s them. Hold on, Buddy, I’ll be right back.”

  Buddy made a show of glancing at his wristwatch. “I actually have to get going to work. I’m going to be late.”

  “Oh, right. I didn’t even think about that—but the suit and everything. Okay, well, listen, I’m in 3A. Knock on my door when you get home. Pizza and beers on me. Just chitchat, you know. I’d love to hear about the neighborhood.”

  “I’m, um, probably going to be pretty late.”

  “Sure, no problem. Swing by whatever time you get back.”

  She gave him another smile and a wave, turned, and immediately whipped up a conversation with the movers.

  Buddy watched her for a long moment, then he continued on his way to work.

  ***

  Buddy worked at a TD Bank branch on Fordham Road a few blocks from his building. He’d studied finance at college even though he’d had no idea then what he wanted to do when he graduated. But he figured if money made the world go round, then he should know something about it. He definitely ne
ver saw himself as a loan officer. Yet that was the first job he’d applied for, was hired for, and the rest was history. Four years now he’d been at it. Not a great gig, but not a bad one either. He had his own desk, a computer. He had to bullshit with a few applicants every day, explain to them the different types of loans and credit options that were available, but mostly he completed paperwork and updated files, stuff he didn’t mind doing. The best part, he could bunker down in his office and not deal with his moronic coworkers, who could be just as bothersome as neighbors, always wanting to grunt about one thing or another.

  And speaking of neighbors, what was up with that Dil girl? She had a yapper on her, that was for sure. Didn’t shut up. She was going to be trouble. Probably come knocking on his door asking to borrow sugar and shit, or asking him to fix her blocked sink. Like he knew anything about fixing blocked sinks. Fuck. And inviting him over for pizza and beers? They’d known each other all of two minutes. Maybe Hickville, Kentucky, was like Calabasas, where everybody said “Hello neighbor!” to everyone else. But not New York. In New York you didn’t go inviting strangers into your apartment. Not unless you wanted to get raped and cut up and left for dead. There were psychos in New York, lots of them. Neighbors included. After all, psychos had to live somewhere too.

  Buddy had been walking with his head down, preoccupied with these thoughts, when he looked up to discover the bank twenty yards away, a bland, functional building in the middle of an empty parking lot. And there was Wilma Walters between him and the bank, ambling up to the front doors in that hippo shuffle of hers, giant ass flagging this way and that. She was in her sixties, a teller, been with TD since before there were computers. She was the only teller allowed to sit down behind the counter. She had a nice tall stool, with a nice cushion. It wasn’t fair to the other tellers. What, just because you let yourself go you got special privileges? But Gino was too chicken shit to do anything about it. If he made her stand, and she toppled over and burst open like a gelatin-filled piñata, he’d cop the blame. Which meant his only option would be to fire her. Yet, in his words one evening when Buddy had stayed late and they got to grunting, how did you fire someone from a job they’d been doing long before you were even born?