Sleepwalking 
Ray Nayler

Ray Nayler was born in Quebec, Canada. He has
lived most of his short life in California. His work has
been published in such magazines as The Berkeley
Fiction Review, Deathrealm and The Edge. He has fiction
upcoming in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine,
Crimewave and Hardboiled, among others.
Mr. Nayler is currently residing in Toronto, where
he is doing research for a suspense novel. He can be
reached at like_the_rabbit@hotmail.com
©Copyright 2001
Ray Nayler

I had just gone in the back and switched off the outside lights.
Tim was in the bathroom, of course, hiding out so that he wouldn’t
have to help with any of the night’s cleaning. I was pushing mop
and bucket across the greasy floor, out to the lobby, when I heard
the dull jangle of bells that signaled a customer coming in. I cursed
under my breath. There is nothing worse than that last customer
who sneaks in before you can lock the door.
He was standing in the middle of the lobby. Thin, pale, faced,
around my age, wearing black pants and sweater and a brown
paper bag over his right hand. When I gave him the routine
greeting he stuck the bottom of the bag out at me.
“Empty it.”
I drew a blank on what he meant. The bag floated to the floor
and I was staring at a blunt little revolver.
My fingers were numb and fidgeting, missing buttons on the cash
register. It squawked and beeped at me. The revolver did a nervous
little dance in front of my face. Finally the cash register door
opened with a crash of small change.
He leaned forward and started grabbing the cash himself, not
even looking at me, shoving it into his pockets while I stared at his
perfectly average face and tried to memorize it. I was daydreaming,
even with the gun on me, of collecting a reward after picking him
out of a mug book.
Then he was on the floor, unconscious, and the gun was making
slow circles on the dirty tile, and Tim was shouting.
“Did you see that? I took him out! Did you see it?”
He snatched the gun up like a rugby player and slammed through
the glass doors. The man on the floor stirred. A bright curl of blood
crossed his face. From the parking lot came the sounds of smashing
glass and the bark of a tire. The reflected bars of fluorescent light
on the windows obscured what was happening. I saw a swirl of
taillight, shadows dancing on shadows.
I came around the counter, holding the handle of the mop like a
club, its shaggy head dripping on my shoes. The robber opened his
eyes and I let him have it, so hard the bones in my hands rattled.
He lay still.
The front door smacked open and a girl came sprawling in,
skidding on hands and knees. Tim was behind her, gun in hand.
The girl scrambled crabwise against a table and pushed her palms
out.
“Don’t! Please!”
Tim shouted “Bang!” at her. When she screamed he started
laughing. All 200 pounds of him, the biceps in his arms twitching
like it was the funniest thing he had ever seen. When he finally
finished he turned to me, still standing with the mop in my hand.
“Did you hit the silent alarm?”
I shook my head no. I hadn’t even thought of it. The whole thing
was like a movie-like someone else’s life.
“Good,” he said. He grabbed the girl by her upper arm and
dragged her over to her boyfriend.
“We’ll take them to the cops ourselves. Go get the tape out of the
back.”
Tim let me drive his car, which he never does. He put the girl in
the front passenger seat, her wrists balled together with duct tape.
He sat behind her, leaned forward, nestling the gun underneath her
ribs. We hog-tied the boyfriend and put him in the trunk. He was
still unconscious when we put him in. It freaked me out, loading
him into the trunk in the dark chicken-store parking lot, with the
cars prowling on Mowry Avenue a dozen yards away. All the drivers
had to do was turn their heads, and see two guys in polyester
uniforms, pushing a girl into a car at gun point, loading an
unconscious and hog-tied man into the trunk. But this is Fremont,
California. Nobody ever turns their head. Nobody ever sees anyone.
You could stand ten feet from them, firing a gun into the air and
screaming, and they would never see you.
I kept glancing over at the girl. She was pretty, even with her
eyelids blistered by tears and the long worm-tracks of them down
her pale face. Every time I looked over, she seemed about to say
something to me-but Tim’s face was right there too, at her shoulder.
At every stoplight his big arm tensed and the gun bit deep into her.
He was excited. I had seen him like this before-after winning a fight
or a girl at a party, when we would drive around for hours and I 
would space out, half-listening to him tell me things that I already
knew.
The police station was close now.
“Go past, man.”
“What?” I had been only half there, lost in my head and thinking
about Laura, about what she was doing right now. Asleep or with
someone else.
“Niles Canyon, man.” He jabbed her hard with the stubby pistol.
“We’re gonna teach Bonnie and Clyde here a lesson.”
“Tim . . .”
He turned to me, the gun following his face.
“Don’t worry, Adam. We’re just gonna scare them a little. Then
we’ll drop them at the cops.”
I wished that I’d pushed the silent alarm.
Laura. Tim hadn’t approved of her at all. He’d said she was
nothing more than a whore. A little white-trash slut. That by going
out with her I was getting sloppy seconds from half the guys in our
high school, and a few of the girls. I told him to lay off. We weren’t
even in high school anymore. We’d graduated three years ago.
Besides, who could blame Laura? She was one of the most
beautiful girls I had ever seen. Men watched her wherever she
went. When we went out to dinner, every guy in the restaurant
would stare at her. Even guys with their girlfriends, their wives and
daughters. By the end of the meal, I would be just about ready to
bury my steak knife in someone’s thigh. I was all nerves until we
were alone, with her hair closing the world like a curtain, the
impossible softness of her skin and voice. After our first time, she
told me about the others. Twelve of them, a series of darkened
rooms, of parents’ beds and alcohol and vague movement in the
dark. Mine was the first she had ever seen. So I thought of myself
as her first.
Something happened. I don’t know what. She seemed to get so
impossibly beautiful that I could hardly look at her anymore, or talk
to her. I needed her all the time. Then she was gone.
Tim used the rest of the duct tape to tie the boyfriend to an Oak
tree. We were down by the dark, rain-swollen river on a sand spit
with a rotting picnic table and a rusted trash can. Tim handed me
his knife-a Benchmade sharp as the look he gave me.
“Hold onto her. If she tries to run, cut her throat.”
I could not remember how we had gotten down to the river.
There is something wrong with me. I think too much. I don’t mean
that I am smart. If I were smart, I would not have slung chicken for
five years. If I were smart, I would not still be in the town where I
was shat out screaming twenty years ago-the town that I hate. I am 
not smart. Sometimes, though, I think so much and so hard that I
lose time. I just go away, into my own head. Coming back is like
waking up in black water.
Tim opened the revolver and picked out five of the shells,
dropping them into the sand. He snapped the cylinder back into
place and spun it clicking.
The girl made a small, awful noise in her throat, and I held her
waist to keep her from falling.
“We’re going to play a game,” Tim said. “If you live through it,
you just go to jail. If not . . .” he turned to me. “Adam and I get to
do whatever we want to Bonnie here.”
“Tim . . .” I said, quiet as I could. “Let’s just go, man. This is
crazy.”
There is something wrong with Tim, too. He’s good looking,
strong, and about twice as smart as me, yet he never got out of
Fremont. I know why I could never leave: I was afraid. Fear is
Suburbia’s gravity. It’s what keeps you down here with the PTA
moms and the stripmalls I knew that I could never make it in the
city. In the city you can be anyone. Nobody knows you. I would
never survive there. Tim, on the other hand . . .
Tim pulled the trigger and the gun made a wincing click. The
boyfriend’s face was as white as the already dead, and crawling
with fear. I could feel my feet moving forward . . . could see myself
. . .
He always seemed ready to go. In high school he gave off an air
of someone who has already packed and bought tickets for a better
place. Yet here we were-Tim, Laura, me. Who could blame him for
what he did?
“Two more times. That’s fifty-fifty odds. Are you ready?”
The girl wasn’t crying anymore. I felt her against me, shaking,
impossibly soft, I felt HER. She whispered in my ear.
“Please. Do something.”
“You’ll do something with your life. You’ll get over me. It’s better
that I’m with Tim. You’re going to be all right. You’ll see.”
Tim stumbled, trying to get at the knife pegged in the center of
his back. He made a noise that I have never heard before. Then his
knees gave out and he pitched forward into the black water.
And that was it, sir. I freed the boyfriend, and his girl kissed me
on the cheek, and they went away. I sat there in the sand, thinking.
After a while it was light. A few people came down, and asked me
what I was doing there. I told them that I had killed my best friend.
They went and got you.
I don’t know. Maybe it didn’t happen that way at all. Maybe I
took Tim down there and killed him because he took Laura away 
from me. Like you said, they still haven’t found that couple. Or their
car. Or anything. And why wouldn’t I have pressed the silent alarm?
It just doesn’t make any sense at all. It’s like I said before, sir. There
is something wrong with me. I feel like I’ve been sleepwalking all
my life.