Page 36 of Serial Killer Games

He shakes his head at me. “I recognize you from the video.”

He’s not making any sense. Dementia? But then he raises one gnarled hand and points, and I follow his gaze to a camera on the corner of the neighbor’s house.

That’snew.

“They showed me.” He speaks slowly, like he has all the time in the world, although at his age, he really doesn’t. “Snooping through my mailbox, prowling around my yard, peering in my windows. Three times in the past two weeks since they set them up. Gave me your plate number, too.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Burglars and murderers case out their targets before striking. Which are you? Might as well make it easy for you. Here’s my house, doors unlocked. And here I am, a lonely, doddering old senior with no family. If you kill me, it would be good timing. It will be at least a week before anyone notices that I didn’t take my recycling out for pickup.”

“You’re confused. I don’t have time for this.” I consider the height of the fence. Six feet at least, but with a foot on top of the weedy flower planter, I could get over.

“Neighbors have a German shepherd,” he says, as if reading my mind. “Not a smart idea.”

No fence-jumping, then. He and I consider each other, then he stumps up the steps to his side door and points his cane inside. “May as well make a proper visit of this.”

A good serial killer has the good manners to keep it personal, and it’s an invitation I can’t turn down. I follow him inside the house—the house I’ve been so curious about. A TV is playing somewhere I can’t see, and canned laughter erupts as the door closes behind me. It looks different from inside,the clutter and dust more apparent. It hasn’t been properly cleaned in a very long time.

Down a little doglegged hall with creaky floors, past an open door—there it is, the TV, in a room that looks like a nest. There’s a pillow and a blanket on the armchair, a stack of old books on a table to one side, dirty mugs and plates, a little space heater in lieu of a properly functioning furnace. No wellness checks here.

At the back of the house is the kitchen, and there he heaves himself down into a chair by the table, where there’s a new coffee maker fresh out of its Amazon box. He pokes it contemptuously with the handle of his cane.

“Neighbors ordered this for me. I’d offer you coffee before you murder me, but I can’t figure it out.” The old, battered coffee maker on the counter is from the nineties and has one toggle switch. This one has as many buttons as a graphing calculator.

Next to it a finished crossword rests on the table. A small plate freckled with toast crumbs sits nearby. I bet he uses that same plate every day. I pan around a little, trying to steal just a bit more from this moment while I can. Bottles of medicine in a jumble by the sink. A pair of broken reading glasses on the counter, held together by tape. Is anyone helping him from day to day?

“Help yourself, kid. It’s just stuff. It’s all going to a landfill when I croak. They’ll scrape my remains off the linoleum, and then they’ll toss everything into a bin and take it away. I have no family, so the house will revert to the city. In a few years the neighbors won’t remember the name of the stooped old wanker who lived by himself and forgot to tie the front of his bathrobe when the postman rang.”

He swivels a little in his chair and points through the doorway.

“My TV is twenty years old, and I haven’t seen the remote in two years. It’s been on this whole time. Mary’s jewelry and silverware went to her nieces in the States, so there’s none of that here. I have about a hundred dollars cash in that drawer right there. I don’t remember if there’s anything good upstairs—haven’t set foot up there since my knee surgery. So when you’re ready, one swift crack to the back of the head, right here—and make it count, please—and then have fun rifling through my stuff.”

It’s nothisstuff I want to rifle through. There are probably boxes shoved into an old childhood room, upstairs. My eyes fall onto a yellowed newspaper clipping stuck to the fridge. A picture of a smiling, handsome man with dark hair and glasses, and two paragraphs of text below it: an obituary. He catches me staring.

“That’s my son. He was only a little older than you when he died. A bludgeoning on the back of the head would beat how he went. Degenerative neurological condition. It was awful, once it started. Numbness.” He raises one gnarled hand and waggles his fingers at me to show where the numbness started. “And then he lost function bit by bit, until he was trapped in his own body. A terrible way to die. You young men think you’re indestructible, but you’re not—unless you get to my age, and you realize you’re one of the unlucky few who are. Hereditary. It’s a good thing he never had kids.”

On cue, the sitcom audience laughs uproariously in the next room.

He twists his head like an old vulture and peers at the photo. “I wish I had more photos. I never thought I’d live so long I’d forget the color of my son’s eyes, but there you go.”

“What time do you drink your coffee?”

I press buttons until the coffee maker is programmed torun at the time he tells me. When I look up, he’s staring at me with a bemused expression.

“Change out the grounds when you’re done and it’ll be ready the next morning for you,” I tell him.

“You’re a very helpful murderer.” He squints his eyes shut and scratches his hairy ear. “Hazel. They were hazel.”

Applause erupts from the TV in the next room.

“What are you really here for?” he asks.

I’ve stayed too long. Dodi will be wondering where I am.

“I have to go, Bill,” I say, and he raises his bushy eyebrows when I use his name. He never told it to me.

I walk out of the kitchen, down the dim hallway. There are faded family photos on the walls—many of them of that young man with the glasses, from babyhood to adulthood—and I let myself out the front door. I lock it from the inside before I close it.

---