Off Kilter

Chapter 1

Crazy Eddie tossed down his cigarette, pulled a tattered piece of cardboard from his back pocket, and made a beeline for the silver Accord at the light. The woman inside sat with her elbow half out the window, absorbed in her phone. Eddie could have slit her throat before she knew he was there. Instead he thrust his makeshift sign through the open window, straight in front of her face.

"Spare some change, lady?" The way she shrank back, you'd think his hand carried the plague.

"Get away!" Her free hand darted out toward the controls for the window.

Eddie yanked back his arm to keep from getting pinned. "Bitch!" The light changed, and the car surged forward. Eddie ran after it, waving his cardboard sign. "Can't you see I'm a fuckin' vet?"

He was anything but. When Eddie scrawled out his sign earlier, he'd been lucky to spell the word vet. The closest he had ever come to the military was two years earlier, when he had pegged a National Guardsman with a rock. But that proved he was the better soldier, didn't it? Smarter, too. He hadn't been the one trying to stand between an angry mob and the stores they wanted to loot.

A cacophony of horns blared. Eddie thrust out a finger without looking back and hopped up on the curb. He pulled out a fistful of bills, took a quick mental inventory and smiled. He was smarter than those idiots who wasted their time working for a living, too. He dug out his phone, called his bookie and placed fifty bucks on Ray of Sunshine in the fifth.

"Yeah, you have a great day, too. Just place the damned bet, okay?"

He checked the time on his phone. 8:13. Rush hour was letting up, and the take had already started to fall off. Hardly worth the effort at this point. Time to call it a day.

Eddie lived for his "me" time.

He lived several blocks away in a rundown building on Interchange Lane, so named because of its proximity to the spaghetti network of highway interchanges in downtown Miami. His building, once a cheap motel from the '50s, had two sloped floors, open-air hallways and a crumbling concrete stairwell on each end. The first thing he saw as he drew near was Mrs. Greenbaum heading up the stairs with a grocery bag clutched in her two shaky hands. The crazy bat had to be at least eighty, but she still walked the six blocks to Brenson's Market every morning just to buy the crappy discount produce that should have been tossed out the night before. As usual, she was having trouble climbing the stairs.

"Hang on, Mrs. G, let me help."

Her chin snapped up at the sound of his voice, and she stepped up her efforts. She managed to shuffle all the way to her door before Eddie reached the landing. She was a spry one. He had to give her that. But she was struggling with her key in the lock.

"Harvey, open the door!"

Eddie laughed. Harvey wasn't coming. Mr. Greenbaum kept to his TV and wouldn't have heard the door if it broke from its hinges and crashed to the floor at the foot of the bed. Mrs. Greenbaum's key stuttered across the face of the lock. Against all odds, it slipped into the keyhole. She turned the knob. She even managed to push the door open six inches before Eddie's hand clamped over hers and pulled it shut again. "What's your hurry, Mrs. G.? Bring me anything good today?"

She yanked her groceries out of his reach. "Harvey! Get out here."

Eddie lunged for the bag and caught one corner, tearing the paper. Over-ripe tomatoes and bruised peaches spilled out and splattered on the concrete.

"Shit," Eddie said, "now look what you done." Among the debris was a bunch of half rotten grapes. He stooped and grabbed them up, picked out the greenest of the lot and tossed the rest over the rail. "This fruit is crap. Can't you ever get nothing worth . . . hey, where'd you go?" Must have slipped into her apartment. Spry and stealthy. A regular ninja granny. He popped a grape into his mouth. "Bitch."

He thought about kicking in her door, but what would be the point? All she was good for was her crappy groceries, and those were already out here for the taking. Instead he strolled down the open walkway to his own apartment. Unlike Mrs. Greenbaum, his hand was rock steady as he slipped his key into the lock. With a simple twist, he opened the door and flipped the switch for the lights.

Nothing. Goddamn Crowley. His landlord must have shut off his power again.

Or maybe Eddie had just left the lamp off at the table. No biggie, except the room was dark, the floor was covered with crap, and his stupid door had a heavy spring that would slam it shut the second he let go. He used a pile of dirty clothes to prop the door open a crack. Then he groped his way through the gloom to the small table that held the lamp and felt along the base until he found the switch.

Click.

Dammit. He was going to kill Crowley.

He clicked the switch on and off a few more times, as if it might suddenly come to its senses and work. Surprisingly, on the fourth try, a bright light assaulted his eyes. Not from the lamp. From the corner of the room near the curtains.

"Edward Randolf Schmidt?" a man's voice asked from behind the light.

"What the fuck? Who the hell are you?"

A searing pain erupted from his leg, and he crashed to the floor. It took him a second to realize he'd been shot. "Jesus!"

The man spoke again, his voice eerily calm. "When I ask a question, I expect an immediate answer. Now, is your name Edward Schmidt or not?"

Eddie could barely find his breath. Sweat poured from his brow. The pain was unbearable. His kneecap. The fucker had shot him in his damned kneecap. He raised his hand to shield the light and squinted, trying to make out the man in the darkness behind.

Another blast rang out, a hammer blow to his hand that sprayed blood over his face and left him a few fingers short.

"Fuck!"

"You don't catch on very quick, do you?"

"Yes! Yes, I'm Eddie Schmidt. What the fuck do you want?"

A pause. Literally a lifetime from Eddie's point of view, before the voice spoke again.

"Confirmation."

Eddie never heard the third shot.



Chapter 2

Emma Kilter hated shopping. Well, grocery shopping, anyway. Drop her in a shoe store and she turned into your proverbial kid in a candy shop, but today she had spent half an hour struggling with a sticky metal cart that resembled a dog chasing its own tail, wasted twenty more minutes in a two-person line watching every other shopper in town head to the parking lot ahead of her, and now, after fighting traffic a final fifteen minutes to drive the three point two miles to her apartment, she found herself in a stuffy hallway in the world's most uncomfortable shoes carrying about four thousand pounds of groceries to her door. She shuffled faster. What had she been thinking, wearing heels to shop? It's not like she needed to attract a man. She already had one. She could have worn poodle slippers for all anyone cared. Maybe next time she would.

Halfway to her door, her bags started to slip. She clamped on with an elbow and stepped up her pace. Somehow this hallway grew longer whenever she had groceries. It must hate grocery shopping too.

One bag was determined to break free. By the time Emma reached her apartment, she barely held it by the top, the thin paper squeezed between hip and elbow. Through a series of contortions, she managed to knee it back into place.

Yes! She shifted both bags to her left arm and stabbed at the lock with her key.

Apparently, groceries didn't just have the magical ability to stretch hallways. They also shrank keyholes. After two dozen attempts, the key slid in, the door swung open, and Emma used her nose to flip on the lights.

Nothing. Great. She must have accidentally left the switch off on the base of the lamp.

She was about to navigate the room in the dark when she heard something stir near the couch. No, not heard, exactly. More like sensed. She couldn't put a finger on it--she was almost certain there was no sound--but there was something. Something not right.

For a second she just stood there, wondering what to do. You're being crazy, she told herself. Letting her nerves get the better of her. A little girl again, afraid of the dark. But what if someone really was there? A tiny quiver crept through her and worked its way into a full-on quake. Okay, she would admit, she wasn't exactly Wonder Woman. Tomorrow maybe she'd buy a stun gun or take a krav maga class or something, but for now . . . well, no way in hell was she going in there.

She backed out of the room as casually as she could, trying not to look like someone who had suddenly changed her mind about stepping into her own apartment for no good reason, pulled the door closed, and took two calming breaths. Her building had four units, two of which were empty. That left the Rubensteins. She wasn't sure what help they could be. They were retired, somewhere in the seventy to one thousand age range, and seldom left their apartment. She checked her watch. 7:59. Would they even be up now? Of course they would. No one their age missed The Wheel. This, along with the thought of entering her own apartment alone with an ax murderer lying in wait, helped her arrive at a decision. She hiked up her groceries and shuffled toward the Rubensteins' apartment.

No doubt about it now, her bags were gaining weight, possibly living off her fears. She shifted them again to free up a knuckle and tapped lightly on the Rubensteins' door. It jerked open a crack between taps, startling Emma so much, she nearly dropped her groceries. A bald head peered out at her, about shoulder level high. Mr. Rubenstein. He had dozens of dark splotches splattered across his scalp, and his nose covered nearly half of his face.

"Awful late," he said. "Who in their right mind goes around banging on doors in the middle of the night?"

"It's eight o'clock."

"Like I said."

"Sorry, Mr. Rubenstein, I was hoping you might have a flashlight I could borrow."

A few seconds passed. "Do I know you?"

"It's me. Emma Kilter."

He stared blankly.

"I share the building with you. I've lived here for three years."

Recognition seemed to strike. "Oh, right. The new girl." His eyes narrowed. "What kind of name is Kilter? You some kind of kraut?"

Oh, boy. "I'm not German, if that's what you're asking. I was born right here in America, just like you."

"Not like me. I was born in Germany."

"Oh."

"You sure you're not from there? You look familiar."

"Maybe because you've seen me around the building for the past three years."

"No, that's not it." His eyes locked on her groceries. "What did you bring me?"

"Oh, um . . ." She shifted both bags to one arm again, rooted around in one with her free hand, and pulled out a small tub of yogurt.

"Bleh," he said. "Can't eat that stuff. Binds me up something awful."

Emma sighed and dropped the yogurt back in the bag. Reluctantly, she held up the peach she had planned for tomorrow's breakfast.

Mr. Rubenstein stuck out his tongue. "What's with all the healthy stuff? Don't you have any cookies?"

"Sorry." She waited a few more seconds, but he made no move to invite her in, or even to open the door more than a hands-width. Her groceries slipped another inch. "About that flashlight . . ."

A woman's voice called out from deep within the apartment. Mrs. Rubenstein. "Morey, who are you talking to? You didn't answer the door in your boxers again, did you?"

"Of course not," Mr. Rubenstein shouted behind him. He turned back to Emma. "What do you need a flashlight for? You forget to pay your power bill?"

"No, no, I just left the lamp off. But it's, um, hard to see inside at night."

He offered a grin full of crooked teeth. "You're afraid of the dark, aren't you?"

"No, I . . ."

"Nothing to be ashamed of. Young girl like yourself, alone in a dark apartment. Naturally you came looking for a big strapping man to protect you. I understand completely." He stepped out of his apartment and closed the door.

"All right, let's do this."

Emma fought back a grimace. The man was wearing a stained undershirt and yellowed boxers held up with black suspenders. That and black socks, stretched up to his knees.

"I have a second, if you want to get dressed first."

"Meh." He waved away the thought and shuffled purposefully toward her apartment.

"What about the flashlight?" Emma asked.

"Don't own one. Not much point. Every time you go to use the dang things the batteries are shot."

She was about to tell him she didn't need his protection, just a flashlight, but stopped herself. He might not be the ideal protector, but he was the closest to a man the building had to offer. And if an ax murderer did chop her into teeny pieces, at least Mr. Rubenstein could work with one of those sketch artists to provide a lead for the police. She easily beat him to the door and paused with her hand on the knob.

"Wait right here. No sense both of us getting killed." He wouldn't be able to report back to the police unless he reached his apartment in one piece. If he waited in the hall, he'd have a shorter distance to shuffle. Emma took a deep breath and opened the door. There it was again, more definite this time. A nearly imperceptible rustling from the direction of the couch. She was sure of it. "Who's there?" She tried to sound less terrified than she felt. The fact she managed to utter any words at all was a tribute to her success.

More rustling, louder this time, over near the lamp. Something clicked, and bright light flooded the room. Her groceries hit the floor. She imagined an ax swinging down at her face, the heavy blade cleaving open her forehead, Mr. Shanker hiking up her rent to cover the cleaning--before recognition struck. Her boyfriend sat buck-naked on the couch, a stupid smile plastered across his face.

"Zach? Oh, my god."

Mr. Rubenstein shuffled carefully around a broken cantaloupe and took in her boyfriend. Emma felt he should have looked more startled. He peered up at her, then back at Zach, and sighed. With a shrug he started to take down his suspenders.

"What are you doing?"

"Usually I don't get involved in this sort of thing, but you know, me and the missus, we're getting on in years. At this point I can't afford to pass up any opportunities."

"Out! Get out."

"I'm getting mixed signals here."

She shoved him out the door and slammed it shut. Eeuuw. Since Emma last looked, Zach had managed to throw a pillow over his lap and turn red, but had accomplished little else.

"Zach, what the hell?"

"Sorry, Em. What was Mr. Rubenstein doing here?"

"You nearly gave me a heart attack. What are you doing here?"

"It's the one-week anniversary of your new job. I thought I'd come over and take you out for a celebratory dinner."

"And you thought we'd eat dinner naked?"

He shrugged. "Could be fun."

"God, Zach, have you heard of a phone?"

"I wanted it to be a surprise."

She gave him a look.

He tossed the pillow aside and waved his hands half-heartedly. "Surprise."