September 17th, 2016. 10:20AM
Indianapolis, Indiana
Donnell had been knocking on doors up and down Second Street since seven in the morning, a task that was not at all an ideal way to spend his Saturday. He carried with him a picture, printed by LeTonya, that showed a string of low income apartments across from what was apparently Freaky Zack Magahey's place of residence.
Of course, it was a sprawling and nasty tri-level motel called Comfort Arms across the street from the projects shown in the photo, so there was an abundance of doors on which to knock. None of them had anything good going on behind them, Donnell knew that much before he started, and that made this entire process all the more miserable... and likely dangerous to boot.
Twice he'd been greeted by strung out women who looked like they'd just walked away from Auschwitz in their emaciation, and each time there was a similarly afflicted looking man asleep on the bed with pistols on the night stands beside them. In each instance, the tables were also littered with hypodermic needles, pipes or other drug paraphernalia that would probably affect the men's judgement should they wake up and see a big fat black man they didn't know standing at the door.
Another time, he was met by a man at least a full foot taller and probably a hundred pounds heavier than he was. This man's weight was in chiseled muscle, and he had what could best be described as crazy eyes. Having apparently been awakened by Donnell's knock, he looked as though he was ready to start beating the lawyer's ass with the aluminum baseball bat he was clutching at any moment. In order to escape this fate, Donnell was very apologetic once he realized this was definitely not Freaky Magahey's room. Still staring at him with those eyes, the man thankfully let him just slither away, apologizing all the while for disturbing him.
Several rooms proved to be either empty or housing criminals who weren't willing to wake up at such an ungodly normal hour to answer the door and face him. Looking through their peepholes, they probably thought this well-dressed visitor was an officer of the law coming as the prelude to a raid or something equally as threatening. As a result, Donnell would never know if these rooms belonged to Freaky Magahey or not.
Then there was room 204, in which he found a half-dressed David Marx... one of the attorneys on staff at the DA's office. Marx was sitting up on the bed when a woman with fewer than ten teeth answered, and the man seemed entirely shocked to see Donnell, who was often his opponent in court, when he locked eyes with him. Shying away from the sight, he apologized to them just as he had the hulking man he'd met earlier and left them to do whatever it was they were doing in peace and solitude.
Realizing that this was a pay by the hour or day facility left Donnell wondering if Zack Magahey was even here to be found. Based on his blog, some of which LeTonya printed to show his bizarre state of mind, the guy was largely a transient who rarely spent a lot of time in one place. His ramblings were clearly fueled either by drugs or severe mental illness, so there didn't seem to be a great likelihood that he would've stayed in this establishment ever since he posted the picture the projects across the street a month or so ago. Still, there was a chance. That couldn't be ignored.
Determined to see the lead through, Donnell continued knocking on doors in sequence, starting on the third level and making his way around and down the seedy building. As fate would have it, he'd touched nearly every door in the complex before he ended up at room 110, where he beat his sore knuckles against the fiberboard of just another shot in the dark and waited for another revelation of disappointment and depravity. Prepared to see another landscape of vice and criminality inside, he was shocked when a middle-aged man wearing a baseball cap lined with aluminum foil that spilled like a waterfall all the way down his neck opened the door to him.
"What?" The man said, his eyes wide and full of paranoia. "I paid for another week, why are you here?"
Taking one look at him and recalling the eccentric blog entries about mind control and big brother, Donnell knew immediately that he'd found his man.
"You must be Zack Magahey," he said flatly, exhaustedly.
"Huh?" Magahey recoiled, stepping back and closing the door defensively so that only his face showed in the crack. "Who are you, man?" He said, obviously frightened to the point of terror. "Why are you people after me? What do you want?"
"Relax," Donnell offered, fanning instinctively in the style he used with LeTonya. "My name is Donnell Hughes, I just want to ask you a few questions about what happened between you and Rusty Parker back at Central."
"Are you black ops?" Zack asked in horror, as if Donnell would say yes if he were.
"Who?" Donnell wondered.
"Psi-ops, man! Are you psi-ops? If you are, you have to show me your badge! It's the law!"
"What? No!" The visitor replied. "Look, I don't have a badge! I'm just a normal guy, like you," he lied a bit, "and all I want is to ask you about Rusty. Do you remember Rusty?"
There was a pause and Magahey seemed to calm a bit. Eventually he opened the door a bit again and spoke. "Rusty from the school?" He asked. "Yeah, I remember him. How could I forget, he tried to kill me!"
"Good," Donnell said, "can we talk about it?"
With a bit more convincing that he wasn't some kind of government agent, Donnell got Freaky Magahey to let him inside of room 110. The space was tiny and musty, certainly not the kind of place that any reasonable human being would choose to live for any real length of time. There was an area with a queen bed that doubled as the living space with a television that was at least as old as Magahey himself mounted and bolted to a dresser. Just off of that was a kitchenette, which consisted of a tiny fridge that Freaky said didn't even work, a microwave and a plug-in hot plate on the counter. Just off of the kitchenette was a small and ancient looking bathroom, complete with a pull-chain hanging from a wall-mounted tank that you had to pull to flush it. There was orange carpet throughout, the pile of which was crushed and collapsed by foot traffic over the years to the point that it looked like something you would see in a sunroom instead of a living area.
The room was cluttered, but relatively clean, which was somewhat surprising. Magahey had a fairly large collection of books scattered about and organized alphabetically, but none were the sort that Donnell -- or any other reasonable person -- would ever wish to read. Most of them dealt with conspiracies or alien intervention in the affairs of mankind, and all of them looked as though they'd been thumbed through a hundred times or more in their history.
Magahey took a seat on his bed, the ancient springs inside squeaking loudly at his weight, and invited Donnell to sit on a filthy looking upholstered chair that was sitting in a corner nearby. Fearing something like bedbugs or worse, Donnell declined and found a metal folding chair near an area where the counter of the kitchenette dropped down to form a dining space. Setting it up opposite Zack, Donnell began his questioning.
"Okay, Zack," he began, "like I said, I'm here to talk about what happened with you and Rusty Parker back at Indy Central. I know it was a long time ago, but I need to tell me exactly what happened in as much detail as possible."
"Yeah, that's fine," Magahey said, "but why do you want to know? I mean, that's been almost twenty years ago, why come around asking about it now?"
Carefully crafting his response to Freaky's level of understanding and ability to interpret information without jumping to wild conclusions, Donnell replied. "I have a friend who is in some trouble, and I have reason to believe that Rusty is the one who ought to be in that trouble. I think my friend is innocent, and I think that Rusty is guilty. What happened between you and Rusty back then might be a clue, and I might be able to use that clue to get my friend out of the trouble he's in. Okay?"
"Yeah, that's cool," Zack answered. "I'll be glad to see Rusty finally get what's coming to him. I tried to tell Sheriff Blake about what he did, but he didn't believe me. He should've believed me. Rusty should've been in jail a long time ago."
"Great," D
onnell said. "Now just start from the beginning, and tell me everything you remember."
"Well," Freaky said, "it was my sophomore year, I guess I was sixteen or so. Rusty started working as a maintenance man or something, and suddenly we were always seeing him around."
"Did he talk to the students a lot?" Donnell asked.
"No, no not really," Zack said. "But every time I would see him, he would smile at me... like he liked me or something. Like he wanted to get down with me."
"Okay, about that," Donnell interrupted. "Do I understand correctly that you are --" he paused, searching for the right word, "homosexual?"
"Yeah, that's right," Magahey offered freely and without restraint. "Always have been, always will be."
"And did people know that back then?"
"Well, yeah," Zack continued, "that's part of why they called me Freaky. It wasn't so fashionable back then, people didn't see it the way they do now, so I was Freaky to them. It's funny that most of the people who called me that were the ones spending time with me, but... what can I say? I guess Rusty must've found out about it or something, because he always looked at me like he was hungry or something. It didn't bother me, I kind of liked it, actually. I liked older guys, still do. Anyway, it went on all year like that, and all year I kept on waiting for him to do something about it, but he never tried anything."
"Never tried a thing?" Donnell asked. "Never talked to you, made a pass at you?"
"No, nothing. He never talked to anybody, myself included. He was always really reserved. In fact, I think the day of the incident was the first time I ever heard him talk at all."
"Tell me about the incident."
"It was in May, May 17th. I'll never forget the date." Magahey explained. "I had American Civil War as my fourth period class. I hated American Civil War, so I decided I was going to skip it again. I skipped it most of the time, it was boring as fuck and I didn't have any friends in the class with me. First lunch was going on when the class started, and a lot of my pals had first lunch. I had third lunch, but I usually would hang out in the cafeteria with my buddies when I decided I wasn't going to class. I was at a table eating some apple pieces that a friend of mine had brought, and here comes Rusty marching through the cafeteria straight at me! I saw him coming, that look in his eye the whole time, staring at me the whole time. For a minute I thought he was gonna bust me for skipping class, but hen I remembered that he was just a janitor, so why would he do that? When he got to me, he put his hand on my shoulder and leaned down to talk into my ear. He whispered come with me, and I thought I was in deep shit! I thought he knew that I was skipping class and that he was taking me to the principal, even thought it was none of his business. I followed him, because I thought I had to, and he took me to the door that led to the boiler room. When we got there, there was nobody in the hallways, so we were alone. He stopped and turned to face me, then he reached out and grabbed my -- " he hesitated "my junk, I guess. It felt really good because I was a teenager... I mean, what teenager doesn't get off on somebody grabbing his junk?"
"Right," Donnell chuckled to mirror Freaky's laughing, but his chuckle was forced and uncomfortable. He was listening to what amounted to a story of child molestation, he found nothing humorous about it.
"So he's got a hold on my junk, and he says how'd you like me to suck it?" Zack continued. "I was like hell yeah," he laughed again, "that would be great! So he opens the door to the boiler room, and we go inside. I'm kind of awestruck when we get in there, because there are all these big giant machines and stuff that I had never seen before all around. I was so busy looking at all the stuff that I didn't really pay attention to the path we took, and it was kind of a maze of catwalks and pathways. Eventually, we're deep into this boiler room, and we're in this big open area with a workbench and a big metal table in the middle of it. He tells me to lean against the table, so I do."
"Then what happened?"
"He unzips my pants and starts to do his thing, ya' know? So I'm standing there, leaning against this work table with my back to a big open space. That's when I heard it, and I'm glad I did, because I'm pretty sure it saved my life."
"Wait," Donnell said after Zack fell silent for a period. "I'm afraid you lost me, what did you hear?"
"A voice," Magahey answered, "a voice in my head. It wasn't the first time I'd heard a voice, but this one sounded serious!"
"What'd it say?" Donnell asked, disconcerted.
"Turn around!" Zack said emphatically, as though he were hearing it all over again. "It said turn around, so I did!"
"And what did you see?" Donnell prodded, the man pausing his account again for an uncomfortably long period.
"I saw a man sneaking up on me!" Freaky offered, his chest rising and falling quickly in reliving his ordeal. "A big man, with a rag in his right hand, and the rag was wet! So wet that it was dripping, and he was holding it just as low as he possibly could, just as far from his face as his arm could go! He was really close to me, and when I turned he swung the rag up and pressed it against my face -- over my mouth and nose!"
"Did you know him?"
"And he pressed hard!" Zack resumed, ignoring the question and enraptured in the memory. "It smelled sweet, almost like an orange, but it was cold like menthol or something on my throat and lungs! I tried to pull his hand away, but he was strong! I tried holding my breath, but it was hard because Rusty had grabbed hold of me, his arms wrapped around my stomach and squeezing the air out of me!"
"What did the man look like?" Donnell tried to ask for clarification again.
"I started feeling faint," Magahey continued. "Like I was going to pass out! I got scared because I knew they were gonna do something to me when I passed out, something bad! I was starting to lose it, I was starting to fade out and I remember just throwing my hands around trying to do anything I could to get away. That's when I felt it, sitting right there on the table next to me!"
"Felt what?"
"It was a box cutter, a razor in a metal handle. I didn't know whether it was opened or not, I was too goofy at that point to know, or to open it if it wasn't already. Thank God, it was open, and I had just enough sense to take it and swing it at the guy who was holding that damned rag over my face!" Breathing a sigh of relief, as he must've in that moment, he finished his tale. "I swung it at him, and I cut him!"
"Where?"
"I cut him, the bastard! I cut that nigger," he said as though Donnell weren't sitting there in all of his blackness, "from the top of his forehead down to the bottom of his chin, I cut his fucking face open!"
"Oh my God," Donnell whispered to himself in shock and a flood of memories. Memories of his youth, memories of time spent in a hazmat suit at the Super Socket Fasteners building. Memories of a colleague, memories of a founding father in the business. Memories of the race track, memories of a tour and the farrier who conducted it.
"That's when they let me go," Zack concluded. "That's when they started trying to stop his bleeding and let me jump off that table and stumble away! I cut that motherfucker, and it's the only reason I got away from him! Then the voices, they told me how to get out of that place. It's a good thing they did, because I had no idea how to get out of there!"
"This man," Donnell began, as though any further confirmation was necessary. "Was he bald and very tall?"
"Well -- yes," Magahey said, stunned. "Do you know who he is or something?"
"Yes," Donnell answered, still beneath his breath in disbelief. "Yes, I know him, I've known him for a long time. He goes by Sarge... but his name is Grover Simmonds..."
SIXTY