The first chapter of my new novel--SnapShot.

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ONE

“Bugs Bunny has Type 2 Diabetes.”

He sat in confusion, eyes blinking for clarity at the little girl that stood before him, no older than six years old.

“I’m sorry?” he asked.

“Bugs Bunny. He has Type 2 Diabetes. He’s gonna have to get his foot cut off, like gran’ma.”

With no idea how else to respond, he told the girl “okay”, and her mother called her back to her side, apologizing. He smiled and told her it was quite alright.

The noise in the waiting room was unbearable. Whenever the doctors and nurses weren’t racing gurneys back and forth, then the radios of nearby cops and EMTs would squawk nonstop. And whenever the ringing phones weren’t echoing from one end to the other in cacophonous tandem, then the cries of patients and eventually loved ones would slam into his ears.

He’d been in hospitals before. Far too many. He’d also had his suspicions, and now they were confirmed: all hospitals were built by the same person—the same, empty, voided, coldhearted, and icy-handed person. They had to have been. Every single hospital that he’d ever visited housed the same linoleum tiles, the same dreary walls, and the same harsh lighting—not to mention the constant smell of pain, anxiety, and sometimes even death.

He hated hospitals. After the many years spent visiting them, eventually the time came when he was no longer required to visit. He’d made a vow to never return and had done a good job of sticking to his word. Now, he was back, and though not the same hospital he’d visited countless times before, thanks to the uniformed tiles, walls, and lighting, it gave him the same feeling as the one from years ago. The feeling of a finger, big like his, hard like his, pressing deep into his flesh, through his stomach, and into his ulcer.

The news reports of the recent attack had long since became repetitive, and he had no desire to continue watching them. As best he could, he kept his attention on the reading material he’d plucked from the table. Thumbing through the pages were large, calloused hands, and connected to them was an even larger body. He was built like a French-door refrigerator—tall and sturdy—with the button of his navy blue suit having a hard time holding on as it pinched his black tie to his stomach. He sat quietly and awkwardly in a chair with a seat only half the size of his own as his eyes glanced over the articles in his hands.

To have called Hush-Hush Weekly a magazine would’ve been a bit of a stretch and an insult to magazines everywhere—Teen Vogue included. It was a tabloid. A rag. Cheaply funded with even cheaper morals. Bold and brazen statements such as:

BAT-FLECK BACK WITH BOOZE

COSBY STAR SECURES WALMART BAG

MICHELLE OBAMA’S SECRET SEX CHANGE

headlined the yellowed, toilet-paper thin sheets that blackened when in contact with the oil of a fingertip.

He hated the tabloids. More than the outrageous stories they printed, and much more than the self-proclaimed “journalists” who concocted them, he hated the way they always, without fail, pulled him in.

He’d never cared about Ben Affleck’s successes. The details of his failures were none of his concern.

He had enough problems with his own urinary function, getting up all hours of the night. It mattered nothing to him whether Mrs. Obama did her business on her feet or on the seat.

But he read the stories just the same. Like trout to a lure. A junkie to a spoon. A diabetic to—

“What makes you say that?” he asked the little girl.

“Huh?”

“That thing about Bugs Bunny. And diabetes. Where’d that come from?”

“My mommy. She told me that bunnies don’t really eat carrots in the wild. They eat hay and grass. Bugs only eats carrots ‘cuz he was copying a movie.”

“What movie was that?”

“I dunno,” she exaggeratedly shrugged. “Carrots have a lot of sugar for bunnies. Sugar gives you Type 2 Diabetes like my gran’ma, and he’ll get his foot cut off, like my gran’ma.”

“You seem to know a lot about bunnies.”

“Uh-huh. And rabbits. And hares. Bunnies and rabbits are kinda the same, like kid and grown-up. But bunnies and rabbits are different from hares.”

“How so?” he asked, leaning forward, elbows on his knees.

It’d been a while since he’d spoken to a child, yet he picked it up as if it were a bicycle.

“Rabbits live in holes and make tunnels, but hares make nests. Kinda like birds, but on the floor.”

“Ground,” her mother corrected.

“Yeah, on the ground. They’re fast, too. Real fast.”

“Oh yeah?” he asked, matching her excitement. “How fast can they go?”

She held up four fingers in her right and and three in her left.

“Seven? That’s it?”

“She means forty-three,” the mother chimed in, holding back a laugh.

“Wow!” he exclaimed. “That’s really fast!”

“Uh-huh!” the little girl beamed, her feet dangling off the chair, nowhere near close to touching the floor. “Unless they get hurt. Then they’re slow. I saw a doc… a doc… a doc-you-men-tuh-ree where she was in a desert, trynna get home, but she was hurt, so the vultures got her.”

“Oh. That’s so sad.”

“Yeah. She got hurt from something else, but the vultures were waiting for her. They’re always waiting. Waiting for you to get tired and give up. And she did.”

“Why’d she give up if she was almost home?”

“Well, if she didn’t, what would the vultures eat? She has to give up. That’s just how it is.”

“That doesn’t seem fair,” he said.

“Maybe. But it’s easy.”

With a double-blink to decipher what he’d heard, he opened his mouth to respond, but genuinely had nothing to say. Just then, a man in scrubs stepped off the elevator and greeted both the little girl and her mother with hugs and kisses. Excitedly, they walked off, sharing the stories of their day. The large man in the navy blue suit waved them goodbye as his mind drifted somewhere else entirely.

It’s easy, the little girl had said.

Tired, hurt, and so close to home, the hare had given in to the vultures for the sake of the vultures because it was easy. For what felt like ten minutes, but was only ten seconds, he sat silent and still, locked in a frozen daze.

“You Marshall?” a voice asked from his left.

Marshall turned to the voice’s direction. Coming out of the elevator, walking towards him, was a man he’d never seen before but immediately didn’t like.

The man was short and thin, which really shouldn’t have been held against him, but it had been Marshall’s personal experience that small men had big mouths with even bigger appetites. He wore a windowpane suit far too flashy for Marshall’s taste, and instead of accompanying it with a tie around his neck (like a decent gentleman in Marshall’s person opinion), he did so with pods in his ears and a tablet in his hand. Beside him was another man, a real man, much to Marshall’s liking, who, like him, was built big, and whose face and demeanor was as silent as a night in the countryside. In this man’s hand was a brown paper bag.

“Yes, sir,” Marshall said, rising to his feet and extending his hand.

The windowpane’d man with the EarPods did not accept. Instead, he repeatedly jabbed his finger against his tablet, and made not the slightest bit of eye contact.

“Ezra, Ezra Goldberg. This is my guy, Reggie. Thanks for comin’, I know it’s short notice. First things first: I’m gonna need you to empty your pockets. I’m talkin’ keys, smartphone, watch, the whole nine. You’ll get them back once we start to move.”

Marshall undid the watch from around his thick wrist. His cinderblock hands rummaged through the pockets of his wrinkled Columbo raincoat, and out from them came his keys and wallet. Both were then deposited into Reggie’s paper bag.

“You want my piece, too?”

“You can keep that,” Ezra said. “That ain’t the kinda shootin’ we’re worried abou—”

He braked hard in the middle of his sentence the second Marshall pulled out his phone. In every sense of the word, it was just that: a phone. It made calls and received calls. Made messages and received them, too. Internet, GPS, no signal when you needed it, and a full signal when you didn’t. Marshall had a phone like any other, with one major exception.

It was a flip-phone.

Yes, with flip-phones, frustrating calls could be ended with a klak!, but along with the blessing of glorious catharsis also came the curse of miserable constipation: typing on a number pad. That mattered none to Marshall. He wasn’t much of a texter anyway.

“Okay,” Ezra sighed, dismissing the fossil he’d just laid eyes on. “Now, we just need you to sign this non-disclosure…”

A pair of half-glasses were in Marshall’s hands, about to be deposited into the paper bag. Instead, he unfolded them and sat them on the bridge of his wide nose. Leaning forward, he looked at the screen of the tablet Ezra held before him.

“Sign on this?” he asked, brows furrowed.

“If you would be so kind.”

“Won’t the ink mess it up?”

“The what?”

“Ink.”

“Oh, there’s… no pen needed,” Ezra sighed, growing tired with the conversation’s every syllable. “Just your finger.”

“Just my finger? That’s all?”

“2019, Mr. Marshall. Brave new world.”

With his large index finger, Marshall pressed onto the screen much too hard, and dragged it across much too slowly as he signed his name. Satisfied (not much, but enough), Ezra saved the file with a beep!, sent it with a swoosh!, and pressed the elevator button with a ding!

“Right this way.”

Within seconds, they were on the topmost floor. Ezra’s wingtips clacked through the halls, competing with Marshall and Reggie’s squeaking gumshoes.

“Now normally, we’d’ve waited for a police escort, but then that’d’ve been too many mice in the wall. Or is it ‘cooks in the kitchen?’ Either way, it’s best the cops stay as far away from this as possible. Above all else, we need radio silence.”

As Marshall walked, he noticed the tell-tale signs of undercover hired guns. Big men: each wearing a jacket of sorts to cover their holstered firearms, each strategically placed by a stairwell exit. On their faces was not the fearful exhaustion of visiting a loved one—a face to which Marshall had become familiar, having worn it himself. Instead, they carried the visage of intensity and alertness, of soldiers on a mission. Another look to which Marshall had also been personally acquainted.

“We’ve got a car,” Ezra continued, “a driver—my guy Reggie, over here—and the route all worked out. All we need is someone with mobile experience. You know, boots-on-the-ground, on-the-move kinda thing. Someone with the skills to make the transition go smoothly. You came highly recommended.”

At the end of the hall stood the door to an examination room. The closer they neared it, Marshall noted, the more hired guns were congregated, each pretending not to know each other despite being dressed so similarly they might as well have been in uniform.

Marshall and Ezra reached the door, and Ezra quickly spun around, his hand to Marshall’s chest. He had to prepare him for what he was about to see. The importance of the situation had to be stressed.

“You gotta understand how serious this is. Bad enough she’s gotta deal with stalkers—one more persistent than the others—but the kinda spotlight that’s on her? I mean, come on… You know a paintin’ of her face—just her face alone—was auctioned off for five-mil? Durin’ the recession?”

He then stuttered, trying to fathom the immense fame himself, only to simply sigh in his failure to properly do so. Knowing that he couldn’t hold it off any longer, Ezra took a step back from Marshall, and nodded towards the door.

“In any event, you get a sense as to how far we’d go to try and protect that investment.”

Marshall took a step forward and looked through the wired window in the door. There the “investment” stood inside, her complexion as dark as Marshall’s, but even-toned. Against her godly smooth skin that reflected the midday sun was a sheath dress colored in the shade of blood as preferred by Hollywood: bright, lush, and bold. Her back was to him as she zipped her dress up to her shoulder blades. Heels already on, she wrapped herself in her coat, its fringe swirling around her in a grand fashion befitting her status.

She was beautiful. From the grace in her movements and the poise in her spine, she had to have been beautiful. But before Marshall’s eyes was no evidence on which to rest his opinion. Along with her godly skin, dark and reflective as a river under moonlight, and her lush dress, as red and bold as lust and blood, were surgical bandages that covered her face from forehead to chin. Only her eyes and lips were exposed.

The terribleness that most assuredly hid underneath crashed hard against the luxuriousness that her presence exuded.

“We’ve uh… we’ve tried to mum the word about the fire,” Ezra told Marshall. “But then again, loose lips sink ships. And get paid a fortune for it, too. The surgeon starts tomorrow. All we need is to get her from here to her penthouse safe and sound. And that’s where you come in.”

Even if they wanted to, Marshall’s eyes dared not leave the woman as she adjusted the gray coat on her shoulders. The weight her bandaged face carried, the solemn look within her eyes…

Ezra pulled his attention back to the matter at hand.

“Hey, listen up, cuz this is the be all end all. I’m talkin’ straight Book-of-Exodus-Ten-Commandments type of rules. No stops. No hold ups. And most importantly, absolutely—I swear, I cannot stress this enough—under no circumstances is her picture to be taken. You got me?”

Marshall nodded in agreement.

Reggie returned the flip-phone, watch, keys, and wallet from the paper bag, and Marshall’s eyes once more peered through the wired window and into the examination room. He watched her, and when she glanced upwards and her eyes locked with his, she didn’t so much as flinch or step back.

She remained. People had always watched her, and she had long since grown accustomed. Watching him back through the slits of her bandages, she gently flipped up the hood of her coat.

Shrouding her bandaged face in shadow.

Available only on amazon.com

By Rich Etienne

From: United States

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