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Installment #2
Trinidad, Colorado
5:40am
The darkness of sleep became the darkness behind Vincent Delgado’s eyelids when the phone started to ring.
The irritating beetling repeated a second time, and a third. Vincent grudgingly became aware that it wouldn’t stop until he answered. His left hand groped across the night stand for the phone, his peripheral vision catching a glimpse of the time in the process. He thumbed the “Talk” button and rolled onto his back so he could speak.
He could taste something sour in his mouth as he said, “Hello?”
There was a short pause before a machine at the other end registered a response. An audible click in the headset told him he was likely being transferred to a real person. Solicitors had realized they could save heaps of their time by having a computer dial the numbers and wait for a response, rather than their employees. Vincent stared up at his bedroom ceiling as he waited, feeling just comfortable enough again to fall back asleep.
“Mister Delgado?” a woman’s voice came over the line, “This is CheckPoint Security calling. We’ve just received an alarm from your business’s front door. We need to verify that you or any of your employees are at the location.”
Vincent sat up and dragged his free hand through the thick of his black hair, “Which alarm is going off?”
“The front entrance, sir,” the woman repeated.
He forced himself to squint at his bedside clock again, straining to cut through the fog of exhaustion. Quarter to six. He racked his thoughts, remembered it was Friday today. The pharmacy opened at seven on weekdays. Trinidad was too small of a town to require early hours like that on its own, but being the only pharmacy within an hour’s drive for many smaller surrounding communities made for very unforgiving customers. Especially when Denver and Colorado Springs had hospitals that were very capable of mailing out prescriptions to anyone unwilling to drive his way. This wasn’t the first time someone on the morning shift had forgotten to disarm the system before unlocking the door.
“Sir,” the woman said, “Do you want me to contact your local police?”
For a moment he entertained the thought of having an officer sent over to scare the life out of his crew, but thought better of it. Going back to sleep was an option that had drifted out of reach once he had gotten his gears spinning.
“No, that’s alright. I’ll take a look,” he said, thanked the woman, and hung up.
He rubbed the grit out of his eyes and slid to his feet, taking stock of his room as he stifled a yawn.
His house was just a simple one-room, one-bath deal. His room sat at the end of a short hallway that branched out into a small kitchen area and a den that doubled as his dining room. He had spent some money painting the walls in each room a rich shade of honey, his bedroom and bathroom several hues lighter than the rest of the house. The carpet was original to the house when he bought it: a deep red shag rug that ran corner to corner. His mother had insisted he have it removed, but backed off when offered to pay the bill. In the end, the shag stayed.
After finishing a quick shower and some essential bodily functions, Vincent pulled on a pair of jeans from his dirty laundry and threw on his favorite “Queen” t-shirt. He unwrapped a Pop-Tart from its foil, jammed one in his mouth and slipped out the service door.
Trinidad was a small town even by rural standards. Main Street was a highway that briefly slowed traffic to less-than-lethal speeds, though it wasn’t uncommon for drivers to pass through town at sixty-plus. It took Vincent less than five minutes to get from his driveway to the empty parking lot he shared with a corner book store he’d never been in.
His flip-flops slapped his heels as he crossed to the front of the pharmacy, its plate-glass windows bearing several ads for over the counter drugs including Tylenol and Zyrtec. He could see from the sidewalk that the lights behind the cashier’s desk weren’t on, which struck him as unusual. He gave the handle on the front door a light shake. The door only resisted slightly, the door’s hydraulic closer hissing as the door moved away from the threshold.
As he pulled the door open, he became vividly aware of something warm and slick between his fingers. He jerked his hand away, his expression registering immediate disgust.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” he said, and looked reluctantly at his hand.
Blood.
His stomach scrambled into his ribs, forcing him to swallow hard. He wiped the lukewarm gore onto the leg of his jeans and looked through the glass doors. He squinted through his own reflection in search of any movement, his heart pounding so hard in his chest he was afraid someone inside would hear it. He saw nothing out of the ordinary except for a now very obvious trail of blood droplets that led into the store, and the fragments of the bolt-lock scattered across the display floor.
Fear turned into worry. The drug problems in Denver and Colorado Springs hadn’t reached Trinidad yet, and even if they had chances were nobody would break into a local pharmacy if they knew how much DNA they were leaking. Someone was hurt.
Vincent pulled the door the rest of the way open with the tip of his flip-flops and let the door hiss shut behind him.
Droplets drew scattered paths between each aisle, growing thicker between their intersections. He looked down each one as he inched past, noticing that very few bottles and boxes had been disturbed. Whatever his burglar had been looking for, he seemed to have had something specific in mind. He hadn’t wasted time, either. The store was dead silent.
He found the mess in the First Aid aisle, closest to the cash registers. The speckles of blood had collected in small puddles near the center of the aisle, among several opened First-Aid kits. Larger pools of hydrogen peroxide and iodine gave off a strong chemical odor that forced several racking coughs from his lungs. He took a few steps back from the fumes.
A medical sewing kit lie open on the floor, the needle and a tendril of black nylon string drifting at the bottom of a bottle of peroxide.
Then something caught his eye. He lowered himself to one knee and squinted down at an expanding pond of peroxide. It was tinted pink with blood, and tiny bubbles were still frothing on the surface.
Sudden pain erupted between his shoulder blades. An instant later he was lying face-down on the floor with his attacker’s hand pressing down on his neck. The open bottle of peroxide had tipped over, its contents sloshing out in a growing pool that spread beneath his face and began to soak the front of his favorite shirt. The biting odor of the antiseptic mixed with the metallic stink of blood, teasing out another series of ragged coughs that sprayed the pink cocktail across the bottom shelf like a paint gun. The intruder pulled Vincent’s right hand to the small of his back, pinning it in place with his knee. His left arm was crushed beneath his own chest.
He was trapped.
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