Point Blank

“Point blank—” the phrase sends a chill through you. A sensation of panic tigthens through your chest. When you realize someone has died, someone you had known years ago—sadness overwhelming you like tangles of seaweed around your feet. 

You arrive at Connie Coyer’s residence. She’d texted you 6549 N. Keller Road. Both of you had been in a barrage of friendly correspondance through Facebook Messenger on your phone, and you ask, after all these years, if you two could meet up. Be nice to see you again. If you’re up to it, Connie? 

Of course, Connie replied. How about Friday? Come by the house.  

In 1998, Connie lived with her mother on the other side of town. You don’t remember this house when you had dated her then. The house is a bungalow painted light green with maroon window shutters and a rickety-looking storm door. You get out of you S.U.V. leaving the motor running, thinking this shouldn’t take but a minute to greet Connie at the door. Along the street you see other older houses, mounds of dirty snow plowed along the curbs and into yards after the winter storm that hit a week ago. You see a squirrel scramble from a tree branch. Your radio is blaring inside your S.U.V.

Connie, I’m here, you type on your phone. The phone screen glows a faint blue in your hand. You are nervous—stomach cramps in worry, hoping that reuniting with your high school girlfriend goes well. Of course, you’ve seen Connie’s social media posts and photos, and she’s still pretty with her vanilla blonde shades of highlights, her hair parted down the middle. We all change, that onslaught of aging, especially after forty. 

“What’s the worst that can happen?” you whisper, as if this helps calm you.

But Connie Coyer hasn’t come out of the house. You brush snow off the pleat of your khakis. Whirls of breath evaporate from your mouth in the chilly thirty-degree morning. When the front door ajars, the rickety storm door squeaking like fingernails against an old-school chalkboard, you see a man’s head. He’s wearing a black T-shirt, Led Zeppelin on his chest. He has on scuffed blue jeans, his bare feet in faintly stained light-brown moccasin house slippers. He squints at you, hoping for some recollection of who you are (a new neighbor bringing mail over that was accidentally delivered in the wrong mailbox? Too early for one of those door-to-door salesmen promoting new window installations).   

“May I help you?” he asks. The squint on his face has now transferred into a fatty layer of skin on his neck, with a shadowery scruff of gray whiskers. His watery, tired eyes burning in the morning sunlight glaring off the snow. 

“Uh, is Connie here?”

“Connie? No, she doesn’t live here. I’m her father. Why, what has she done now?”

“Nothing, sir. We were to meet. She texted me this address. I was going to pick her up.”

The man shakes his head. 

“Well, you look business,” says the man. “That would be a step up from the men she’d dated. Although, that was years ago, and I haven’t heard from my daughter. An occasional email, but that’s the extent of it. Or, if she needed money.”

“We dated in high school. 1998. I’m Harmon Sutter. It’s been a long time.”

“Ninety-eight? Damn! Well, Connie lived with her mother back then.”

 “Yes. Not far from Wooster High School. Anyway, she texted me this address. We’re going out for coffee. Nothing serious. We hadn’t seen each other and started chatting on social media.”

“I wish I can help you, but I don’t know where my daughter is. The last I’d heard she was out west. Living in Utah. Attending that festival, Burning Man. Heard she went to those Rainbow events in different states. You know, those damn cult-like gatherings with hippies and drugs?” 

“Yeah, sorry to bother you, Mr. Coyer. Didn’t mean to wake you, if I did so.”

“You didn’t bother me.” He stepped further onto the porch, the storm door slowly closing. 

“I’d better get going.”

“Hell, a good night’s sleep is rare for me,” says Connie’s father, snickering under his breath. “I’m almost seventy-four. Hard to fathom. Seems like I should still be forty, when time starts mess with your brain. You look about forty. Relatively still young. Enjoy it. Life kind of goes downhill after that. But it’s okay, it’s the good times that you don’t see or feel when you’re younger but remember them later.”

The old man stretches his arms, catching the scent of crisp air like a curious bird dog. You notice the man’s thick forearms and a metallic faded tattoo of a boat anchor tattoo on his bicep. He still looks in shape, as though he’d been in the military years ago, but pudgy around the midframe. You see the shadowy shape of a dog’s head in the window. Quiet. Watching. 

“This might sound weird, but I like the cold,” he says. “Most people hate it, but I enjoy the clean feel of it. Having lived in Florida. I still rent a condo near Sarasota, but came back here for a little while. Get away from that blast furnace, you know? The hurricane last summer did a number on the Gulf Coast. What a shame. It used to be so beautiful. And affordable.”

“That was awful,” you say, and step back, looking at your running S.U.V, music playing behind the tinted windows. “It’s nice to get out of the heat, I’m sure.”

“Wait a minute,” he says. “Hang on, Harmon. I got a number. Connie’s friend, Shelia Sawyer. She might know where Connie is. I’ve tried contacting this Shelia girl, but she won’t call me back. Like I said, last I heard, Connie was out west. Hard telling what she’s gotten herself into. Don’t quite understand these young people today. I raised that girl right. She knows from right and wrong. We haven’t been on speaking terms after her mother passed from breast cancer years ago.”

“I’m so sorry.”

The man hands over a business card with a number on the back. You nod thank you and walk back to the driveway. The old man whistles for his dog to come out. You hear the dog’s collar rattle, the front yard with small snowy tree limbs, and there’s an inner calm and tranquility about Connie’s father who reminds you of your own father who’d passed away ten years ago.   

Exiting onto the interstate ramp, you glance at your phone in the cup holder, wondering if Connie’s message might appear. You’d taken the morning off work to meet her, so rude of her to stand you up. Your eye catches the IHOP sign off I-65. Coffee, bacon and hashbrowns with scrambled eggs, appeases your appetite. 

The server lady sits you at a booth by the window. You place your order and then stare at the snow that has started to thaw. It’s the ugliness of it fading into harden mounds of oily gray in the parking lot that irritates you and wish for spring weather. First of March, that up and down month, is two weeks from today. 

A few minutes later, holding your coffee, you tear open a sugar pack. 

“Damn, I’ve been duped,” you whisper to yourself.  “Catfished.”

Maybe Connie will walk through the entrance of IHOP, you think. You’ll see her smile—1998 Connie from Wooster High School. Vibrant Connie Coyer, sexy as fucking ever. 

But you feel that uncomfortable dig in your chest that seeing her is unlikely. In this uncomfortable moment, you decide to call Shelia Sawyer. After a few rings, a groggy, sad female voice:

“This is Shelia,” she says a second time, now agitated. 

“Hello, I was given your number. I’m trying to reach Connie Coyer. She’s a friend of mine. Class of ’98. I’m Harmon, Harmon Sutter.”

For a few seconds, there’s silence. 

“Gosh. Harmon is this really you? You probably don’t remember me. I went to Wooster. Class of ’01. A few years behind you and Connie. A long time ago, for sure. But yeah, I know where Connie is.”

“That’s great. She wasn’t at her father’s house. Very odd. He didn’t know where she was, and I didn’t know they’d been estranged.”

“You’ll have to talk to my husband.”

You pause, watching a trash truck make its way around the corner in the IHOP parking lot, that loud and annoying sound of it breaking your concentration. For second, you thought you misheard Shelia. You take another drink from your coffee mug. 

“Your husband? Why is that?” you ask.

You hear her breathing, as if in a panic, startled. Then the quick bursts of air as if Shelia is taking drags off a vape or cigarette. 

“My husband,” she says again. “I hate what he did. He’s in trouble. But look, I ain’t part of it. You sound cool, Harmon. You sound trustworthy.”

“I am. What is going on, Shelia?”

“I don’t care anymore.”

“All I need is a good number to contact Connie. I feel that I’ve been catfished. I’m not sure why Connie would do that. This is pissing me off.”

“You’re not catfished. You won’t be able to talk to Connie, sir.”

“Why not?”

“Because Connie’s dead.”

An elderly couple seated across from you glances in good spirits and the lady reminds you of Grandma Sutter from the early 1990s, with her white poofy hair in a bonnet, and you think Shelia must be kidding, buzzed on marijuana and just messing with you. 

“You still there?” Shelia continues. “You heard that right. Connie’s dead, Harmon. My husband killed her, shot her point blank no more than a foot away from her. They had a falling out. I don’t know all the details.”

You hear Shelia cough. Another exhalation from what sounded like drags on a vape. 

“I’m over it,” Shelia continues. “I’m probably next. I don’t want to die, get involved. It was their damn business. I don’t know why Kevin did it, other than over a deal. You know how that goes. Always comes down to business or what somebody owes somebody. People should be smarter than that, you would think. Knowing the consequences.”

“Well, that’s not what I wanted to hear,” you say.

The elderly people across from you sip their coffee, but it seems like, in this moment after hearing Shelia Sawyer, they are frozen in time. The waitress brings your eggs, cooked how you liked them: scrambled, mixed in with the hashbrowns and tabasco sauce dabbed over the top. After a few minutes, you anticipate a laugh from Shelia, waiting for her to say: I’m just messing with you, Harmon. Can’t you take a joke? Connie’s fine. Let me get her for you. Ha! ha!

But instead she says, “I don’t have anything else to tell you, Harmon.”

Shelia ends the call. You think how so many people are malcontents, aloof; they get strung out on drugs and have lost control of their lives. Even old friends you thought you had known have fallen through the proverbial cracks. Drugs. Money. People packing nine-millimeter semiautomatics with hollow points to make sure the enemy was gone for good. No witnesses, no snitches… 

This isn’t happening but it is, and you feel your heart skip through your chest like an arithemia after running a mile in 1998—going around the last turn on the track at Wooster High. You feel that natural inoculation of euphoria from the speed of exercise.  

“You have to go back now,” you whisper. “Drive back to Connie’s Dad’s house and let him know about the strange call you had with Shelia. Maybe it’s nothing, and the Wooster Police will find this a sick hoax?”

A father needs to know what has happened to his daughter. If true. Hope to God not true! But why would Shelia make that up? you wondered. The fragility of her voice, her quick vape hits… You finish breakfast. You leave a twenty dollar bill on the table and hurry out the door. As you drive back through town, a few minutes from Connie’s Dad’s house, you hear that voice: Point blank. It ripples through your body like a swift clean swipe of a sword into your jugular. Light snow falls through the tree branches, the sun half-showing through the white fluff of the morning sky. There’s the old man, Mr. Coyer, smoking a cigarette along the sidewalk, tugging on the leash of the older black lab enjoying the crisp silence of the wintery air. Your eyes meet. You pull into the driveway, and you walk up to tell him that you had just spoken to Shelia Sawyer and it’s not good news about Connie. “We should call the police.” The old man’s sad mouth, his tired red eyes, drift away from you, as if he knew this day would come. He waves you inside the house, where you two wait for the Wooster Police to arrive.