Malpractice - 6. Chapter 6

Remmington Montague graduated from high school in the top three percent of his class. Both Jason and Nicholas, his brothers, graduated as Valedictorians of their classes. After going to Louisiana State University on a football scholarship and obtaining a bachelor’s degree in criminal psychology, Remi turned down an offer to play professional football with the New Orleans Saints in favor of going to Tulane University to obtain a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice. Getting accepted to the New Orleans Police Department’s training academy was much easier for Remi than getting his mother to accept the idea of him going into law enforcement.

Remi came home one day with his acceptance letter in hand and excitedly told his brothers, who were both visiting. Jason and Nicholas congratulated him, but he could tell that something was wrong.

“Jay, Nick? What aren’t you telling me?”

“Well,” said Nicholas, “you know that Mom isn’t going to take this well.”

“Yeah,” piped in Jason, “it was hard enough to get her to accept Nick being a Medical Examiner and me going into forensics. She’s already scared that we’ll end up like Dad. What do you think she’s going to do when you tell her you want to be a cop?”

Remi blinked. The realization dawned on him that he did have to tell his mother. He knew that Sadie Montague wouldn’t take the news lightly. As he looked around the living room, taking in the warm, honey tone of the walls, the darker chocolate tone of the suede sectional couch, the deep mahogany of the coffee table and the center piece of fresh bougainvillea. He glanced at the television broadcasting a weather update for the balmy summer of New Orleans, and the pine flooring that ran throughout the house with the exception of the kitchen and bathrooms, and he absorbed how much work his mother put into keeping the house clean, and how much more work it must have been when he and his brothers were still children, bringing home various creatures they’d found outside, along with the mud and whatever else they had gotten on themselves that day. As he considered all of this information, it brought a slight tear to his eye. Now, he realized, he would have to tell his mother that her middle son would be going into the same career field that had killed her husband so many years ago.

He could hear her singing to herself as she worked away in the brightly lit and decorated kitchen. Coming around the corner, his senses were assaulted with the lemon colored walls, the black and white diamond patterned linoleum, and the smells of Sadie’s Creole cooking. She was making gumbo, and she made the best gumbo in all of New Orleans if you asked her sons.

Remi steeled himself and cleared his throat. “Mom?”

Sadie turned around and flashed a brilliant smile. Her sun-baked face showed signs, not of aging, but of living. Her crystalline blue eyes showed love for her family. It broke Remi’s heart as he looked at her and knew that he was about to deliver a crushing piece of information to her. Sadie hugged her son, and he embraced her.

“Remi, baby, it’s so good to have you home.”

“It’s good to see you, too, Ma. I need you to sit down.”

“Uh oh. Dis canna be good.”

Remmington smiled. Sadie had always retained her Creole accent, and he had missed that while he was away at college.

“Well, Momma,” he started.

“Oh, no. Ya callin’ me “Momma”. Ain’t no good can come o’ dat.”

“Ma, please. I need to tell you this, but I need you to not be mad at me for it.”

“Whachyoo done, Remmington?”

“I joined NOPD, Ma. I just got my police academy acceptance letter today.”

Remi produced the letter and pushed it across the table to his mother. Sadie wiped her hands on her apron and picked it up, dipping her head so that she could get the right angle on her bifocal glasses to read the document. Remi felt his own eyes burning with the threat of tears as he saw Sadie’s eyes begin to shimmer.

“Your Pa’d be proud o’ you, Remi. It don’ mean I like it.”

“I know, Ma. But it’s what I want to do with my life. I want to get into the F.B.I. at some point, and hunt down men like the bastards that killed Dad.”

Sadie nodded, then stood from the oak dinner table and pushed in the chair she had taken with the floral seat cushions. A silvery tear made its way down her right cheek, but Remi didn’t see it. She bent over the pot of gumbo, and smelled it, added a few seasonings, tasted it, then turned back around to face Remi just as he was gathering the letter from the table and standing.

“You go on an’ tell ya brothers dinner’s almos’ ready.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

Remi sighed as he pushed in the chair and turned to leave the dining area of the kitchen. Upon coming back into the living room, he heaved a sigh of relief. Jason and Nicholas looked up from the television show they were watching.

“Well?” asked Jay.

“She took it better than I thought,” said Remi, “she doesn’t like it, but she’s accepted it.”

“Crisis averted, then,” said Nick.

Remi sat down on the couch between his brothers, and took the beer Jay offered. Somehow, he knew he was on a precipice of life. Everything he’d come to accept as comfortable and good was about to have a dark shadow cast on it.

~***~

John never made it to Minneapolis. He got off the Greyhound bus in Denver. He’d already done all the pick-pocketing he could do on that bus when they stopped in random towns along the way and he’d “accidentally” bumped into almost every other passenger on the bus. He had six hundred dollars now and he was going to hitch hike his way from here to wherever he ended up.

The urge to kill, to get that high again was creeping up in John. Stealing just didn’t hold the same rush for him that it used to. When he’d killed Paul, he’d instantly become addicted to the rush of power it gave him. He’d never felt more alive than he did in those moments in front of his bedroom mirror. He had to kill again. But he also needed to keep moving. John headed to the highway and stuck his thumb out to hitch a ride.

The first car to stop and pick him up didn’t come along for five miles. By this time John was hungry and tired. Even in the summer, the mile high city and its surroundings didn’t get very warm. The dark blue sedan pulled off to the side of the road, and John approached. Inside was a young, hippy-looking man. The vehicle reeked of cannabis. John viewed this as an opportunity to score in more ways than one.

The hippy leaned across the front seat and rolled down the passenger side window, “Need a ride, Man?”

John flashed a devastatingly charming grin, “Yeah, Man. Anywhere but here.”

The hippy laughed as John got into the car, and they took off down the road. From Denver, they drove eastward. They shared the weed, and a few laughs. They stopped off a few times for food and gas. When they got to Saint Louis, Missouri, John watched as the hippy went into a bank, and came out with three hundred dollars. He knew it was time. As they got back onto the highway, John chatted with the hippy, making him more comfortable as they smoked some more. When they pulled over to eat again, John grabbed the hippy by the throat as he leaned over to get out of the car, and strangled him. He kept holding on as the man’s arms flailed wildly in the front of the car. A few times, he heard the engine rev as the man’s foot pushed down on the gas pedal in the midst of struggling. The whole time, John just smiled, his eyes gleaming with malice as he rode the high of taking another human’s life. When the man went still, John pulled his eyes open, and then checked his neck for a pulse. There was none.

Satisfied that his hippy companion was dead, John pulled him across the seat, and opened the passenger side door. Pulling the man out of the car, John dragged him down into the ditch at the side of the road. As John was pulling the man to the bottom of the ditch, his victim started to come to. John didn’t even panic. He simply finished pulling the hippy to the bottom of the ditch, where the run-off from field irrigation and rain had formed something of a minor eco system of its own, and the water was nearly knee deep on John. The hippy had begun to move, and groan. John hauled up the dead weight and threw the man the three feet from where he was into the stagnant water gathered in the ditch. John casually strolled over as the drowning hippy managed to finally push his own body up well enough to suck in one, final breath. John stepped first on the man’s back, between the shoulder blades, forcing him to collapse so that his face was in the water again. John continued standing like that until the man started struggling again, at which point John knelt with his knee between the hippy’s shoulder blades and held his head under water, until he felt the man go into death spasms, and then there was no more movement.

Not quite satisfied that he was finished, John stripped the man naked, and then proceeded to sodomize him, taking pure joy in decimating the fresh corpse while it was still warm. When John felt his seed spill from him, he covered the man’s body with brush, gathered up the hippy’s clothes, closed his own pants and headed back up the bank to the waiting Sedan. Pure pleasure screamed through his veins as he put the Sedan in gear, and continued Eastbound.

John left Missouri with a full tank of gas in the hippy’s car and an extra three hundred dollars in his pocket. He thrilled at the thought that he was going to get away with it all. He decided to head north east and see where it took him. He got as far as Chicago before the gas ran out. Chicago was a veritable melting pot for John, and he planned to use it to its fullest potential. He knew this wasn’t where he was going to stay. Oh no. John had bigger, better plans for his future. He was going to make something of himself. To prove not only his mother, but every piece of shit deadbeat fucker that she brought home, wrong. They all said he’d never amount to shit. They were all wrong, and he was going to prove it. John spent six months in Chicago’s underbelly, selling drugs, buying drugs, always looking for a high that was as good as the one he got from killing. He tried every drug he could get his fingers on and just couldn’t reach that same kind of high. Eventually, John gave up. He went out to Interstate 55, and began hitch hiking south to New Orleans.

A woman stopped this time. She was young, with pretty blue eyes and dark red hair that hung down to her waist. She had a wreath of flowers on her head. John turned his charm on full blast, flashing a white smile at her, and complimenting her beat up old Charger. Her name was Eileen Markowitz. Eileen and John kept traveling south, talking, laughing, and getting to know each other. Just outside of New Orleans, John felt the familiar stirrings returning to him. Eileen pulled into a rest stop to relieve herself and get some munchies for the last leg of the trip. John followed her into the bathroom, where he raped Eileen over and over again until she passed out.

Eileen’s loss of consciousness only further incensed John. In a fit of rage, he sliced away at her vaginal tract, and then proceeded to stab Eileen in the face, chest and stomach. Eileen never stood a chance. She bled out there in that dirty rest stop bathroom.

John stole her keys and the money from her purse, and took her Charger into New Orleans. After several weeks in the city, John found out that the drugs in New Orleans, even the old Creole drugs couldn’t match the high that he got from murder and rape. He left New Orleans in that Charger and headed north east. He already knew where he was going and what he wanted to do. He was headed to Harvard University.