The Handbook for Urban Terror and Retribution
Sidney Williams

It started when a pretty blond girl bumped into me outside my office one hot afternoon in late April. She angled out of the thin crowd and thumped into my shoulder. I almost dropped my briefcase as I realized she was off balance. Raising my right hand instead, I caught her shoulder and helped steady her. She smiled, flushing a little with embarrassment, though her blue eyes widened.
"I must not have been watching where I was going," she said.
"Maybe the sun was in your eyes," I suggested, grinning at the soft Southern drawl that seemed to stretch her vowels.
She wasn't wearing a hoop skirt, just a pale blue business suit with a short hemline that momentarily caught my notice. She carried a briefcase of her own, but I'd never seen her in our building. "Try to keep cool," she said, touching my arm.
In another lifetime, I might have followed her. Instead I only shrugged then nodded a farewell.
Nikki was off early, had already changed into shorts and a tee shirt—her shiny black hair pulled back in a ponytail. She was reclining on our apartment, but she tossed the new Utne Reader and got up to greet me. Her nose crinkled, interrupting plans to plant a kiss on my cheek.
"What's wrong?" I asked, expecting her to protest that I was sweaty. The car had been about 110.
"Perfume," she said. "That's not Susan's perfume."
Susan is one of the other CPAs.
"I didn't know your nostrils were that acute."
"I know when you've picked up traces of her Red Door. This is Calvin Kline Eternity."
"A little Southern belle bumped into me in front of my building," I said.
One of her eyebrows cocked upward. "What'd you do? Dance with her?"
"Just accepted an apology. I think she had a case of the vapors."
"You sure, Casanova?"
"I'm no longer a lady's man," I promised.
She accepted that and gave me a hug, and we talked no more of it as we did a dinner of stir-fry and rice. It was my turn to man the wok even though she’d grown up in her father’s Chinese restaurant.
After dinner we sipped white wine and watched a video of an old Tracy-Hepburn movie, missing the ending.
*
The next morning I was dead.
At least according to the newspaper obit. The announcement gave just my name: James Keegan, and my age: 36, along with a brief statement that I'd passed away. Susan displayed it gleefully just after I settled behind my desk.
"I'm sure there are a lot of James Keegans," I said.
"Yeah, but the age is right, too. And they note you work for Hoffman and Crowley. Coincidence or has Jim Keegan just stepped into dee-dee-dee The Twilight Zone?"
I called the paper but they didn't have any details. They'd taken the notice by phone, and they didn't give out information on their articles anyway.
I went through a day of quips and cajoling, and in the afternoon half the staff had taken to wearing black armbands. I still didn't realize anything out of the ordinary was happening, not then.
When I got home, I started to wonder. Nikki was crying when I shoved open the front door. Her hair was a frenzy of tangles.
"What's wrong?" I asked.
Her reddened eyes narrowed, and she held up a large brown envelope that she had ripped open across the top. Pressed against the envelope was the photo it had contained. Before I could look at it, she threw it against my chest.
I watched the eight-by-ten flutter to my feet, then, figuring I'd better get an idea of what was wrong, I stooped and picked it up. I was looking into the face of the girl who'd bumped into me. She was wearing a sundress and looking like a Cosmo cover. Inscribed across one corner of the print in hot pink lipstick were the words: "Jim, Nice bumping into you the other day." -- C.
"Is she the one who wears Eternity?"
"She's the one I bumped into," I said. "I mean she bumped into me."
I picked up the envelope and checked the address. There was no return. It had been sent to Nikki.
"This is some kind of joke," I said. "Probably from the same person who ran my obit. Maybe I didn't get somebody a big enough break on his taxes."
"Looks like she's pleased with the way you enter figures."
"Come on, Nikki," I protested. "Why would she send a picture addressed to you?"
"Maybe because she wants you for herself. What does C stand for? Candi or something else that's so sweet it would make you puke? Candi with an `i' and a little heart over the i?"
"I saw her for ten seconds on the damned sidewalk. I can’t tell you how she knew my name let alone yours."
"Are you tired of me? I mean she's pretty much my opposite isn't she? Blue eyes, right? Honey blond hair?"
I started yanking at my tie because I felt like I was choking. "Have I ever done anything that would make you believe that?"
"You came home reeking with another woman's perfume yesterday. What am I supposed to think?"
"She must've dumped it on me. I don't know."
"They don't give that stuff away."
We squabbled for a half-hour before I persuaded her to trust me again, tentatively. When it was settled, we sent out for dinner and spent an uneasy evening. I tried to put myself in Nikki's place. It had to be an unsettling feeling, but she seemed to be overreacting.
Later, while she read a dog-eared paperback, I watched a movie without following the plot. I was trying to think of whom I might've pissed off recently. Like everyone else I yell at drive-through clerks who fail to get orders right. Telemarketers at dinnertime make me contemplate homicide. I’m not wild about feel free to consult me about my religious affiliation in grocery store parking lots, either, but basically I try to be a nice guy. Most of my accounts are businesses. I have only a couple of individuals, people who have been with me a while.
I tried to figure out who the girl might be, but she was not familiar. She was definitely not a girlfriend from my single days. I'd had a few because I was thirty when I met Nikki. She was managing her father's restaurant, and I was doing their audits when we fell in love.
After her father died the children decided to sell and split the profits. She used her money to open her consulting operation. She helps restaurants with efficiency problems, an important part of the industry these days. She's kept a lot of places from failing.
Neither of us has the kind of work that makes enemies. Nikki's suggestions may have led to a few people being laid off, but those events were second hand. If someone wanted to get even with a restaurant, they'd just call in a bomb scare on a Saturday night.
Besides, this crap seemed to be directed at me. I wondered about the obit's meaning. Was it a veiled death threat? So far we'd had bad taste pranks, but what was around the corner?
That night, I made a careful check of the doors and windows before going to bed.
*
No intruders came that evening or the next. I began to think the jokes had passed and grew complacent. That's when the phone rang at 3 a.m. The nightstand is on Nikki's side so she mans the telephone and the alarm clock. My heart leaped into my throat because I was afraid it was news about my father.
"Why do you want to talk to my husband?" Nikki demanded.
At least my father was all right. She was obviously talking to the girl.
"What is it?"
"I just wanted to tell you I miss you," she said in her sultry drawl once the receiver was in my hand. Nikki could hear her.
"Who the hell are you?" I asked.
"Oh, you're gonna play that game because your wife's close by? Don't string her along, Darlin'. It's just going to hurt her worse in the long run. It's time to tell her the truth. Tell her you're in love with me."
"The hell with this," I said.
I'd have had to lean across Nikki to slam the phone down, so I elected to yank the receiver loose instead. I sent it sailing across the room.
"What the devil is going on here?" Nikki demanded, wide-awake and fumbling for the bedside light.
"Some sick game," I said.
"Is that the best excuse you can manage? That somebody's playing pranks? What's the deal? Is she your lunch-hour liaison? Where'd you meet her? Does she work in the same building?"
"I don't know who the hell she is or what this is about. You can't believe I'm having an affair. Come on."
I spent the night on the couch.
*
The next day, between projects, I began searching my files, hoping a name may jog my memory. Someone sneaky enough to come up with an elaborate plot should stand out, but no one seemed that grim. I was going to have to move beyond work, pick out someone from my past that might want to break up Nikki and me. That would be quite a cruel move because she was my soul mate, a girl who'd come to me after I'd had my heart broken a couple of times. She rescued me when I was lonely and feeling I was on the way to becoming a little old bachelor number cruncher.
While she was sharp in business, she was also quiet and sensitive off the job, a lover of music and, like me, bad movies.
Sitting at my desk, I did a rough pencil sketch of the girl. It was nothing like a police composite, just freehand. I didn't see her as the villain here but was guessing she was an accomplice. I had never met her, and I didn't think she was the sister of any old girlfriend who harbored a grudge. What was left?
Who was out there with such a sick sense of humor? I let myself think for a moment it was over, that the prankster's purpose had been served, but I couldn’t pinpoint anyone who would benefit.
I should have known it was about to get a lot sicker.
*
Nikki and I began to patch things up over the next few days. Her confidence in me was shaken, so I started making it home on the dot. I left her pager messages from work when I couldn't reach her on the phone, and tried to account for all of my time so she'd have no suspicions.
Until the next set of pictures, it really looked as if it was all going to blow over without much more of a headache.
The pictures.
They certainly changed things. They were delivered by messenger to one of Nikki's clients, packaged in a brown envelope, one of those official types with the string ties. Fortunately she didn't open it in the client's office.
She was in her car when she slipped out the eight by ten glossies of me embracing Miss Tennessee. They should have been plain, candid shots of me touching her arm as she staggered off balance and me smiling at her and giving my little nod.
Instead they depicted us face to face in a bedroom. In the pictures where she was dressed, she wore a black lacy thing with garters. In most of them she had on much less. There wasn't a powder blue power suit anywhere in evidence.
"You have to realize those are fakes," I said. I was sitting in our living room with my legs crossed as Nikki paced back and forth in front of me. "Very good fakes," I admitted, "but fakes. They snapped shots when I bumped into her and went from there. They're grainy because they're trying to cover the lines."
"They're pretty clear to me."
She'd been crying for an hour. Now she plopped into a chair and buried her face in her hands. "I don't know which is more insulting. That you had an affair or that you're trying to use lame lies to get you out of it."
"Haven't you heard about those websites with fake celebrity nudes? It’s the same thing. You can do anything in Photoshop these days."
"If someone’s out to get you why wouldn't they do something to your work? If they're as clever as you say, they could damn sure screw up your columns and decimals."
In the blink of an eye she was gone. That night, she took her suitcase and went to a friend's. A couple of days later her friend came for her things, and all I could do was sit back and watch her stuff them into cardboard boxes.
Whoever was doing a Franz Kafka number on my life was doing it well. I was going to have to find a way to fight back. I thought about a detective and a couple of other possibilities, but they all seemed obscure and impersonal.
I wound up calling a photographer. I wanted to get an idea of who might have done the photo work.
His name was Wallace Pettigrew, and he worked in advertising and marketing for one of my clients. He was like a TV sitcom version of a photographer, wore his hair long, his beard trimmed into a goatee, and he dressed in loose, flowing shirts with loud prints. He was an artist, even if he was forty.
He met me for lunch and whistled when I showed him the black and whites. They were the one thing Nikki had left behind, and they were so hot he pushed his sunshades over his forehead for a better look.
"How'd you start getting this kind of action?" he asked.
"I saw here once on the sidewalk."
He shook his head. "Someone was clever, but then a lot of people are clever," he said. "I doubt this job was done at Wal-Mart, but you'd still be looking for a needle in a haystack. Anybody with a Mac and a little time."
"Thanks for the encouragement. I'm trying to get my wife back here."
"What might be a little easier," he suggested, "is giving me one of these and letting me see if I can run down the girl."
"Isn't she a needle too?"
"We'll see. He didn't just ask his sister to do this. She's somebody who's making the rounds, and I'd bet she's got a portfolio and an agent."
"I haven't seen her on the side of any buses."
"No, but I bet she'd like to be, especially if she's here from down home."
I picked one of the more modest shots and offered it. "Get back to me when you can."
While I waited for word, I tried initiating contact with Nikki, but she wasn't interested.
I probably wouldn't have believed her if the situation had been reversed, but that didn't help the depression. Over the next couple of weeks it grew more and more difficult to perform my duties. Columns of numbers seemed to shimmer and topple before my eyes, and I had to pour over ledgers and spreadsheets to make sure something wasn't slipping past me.
Periodically I had to deal with annoyances related to my demise: mail problems, telephone problems and other shut downs.
At home, the apartment seemed like a cavern, vast and empty, yet filled with Nikki's artifacts which only enhanced the pain. I could not fix breakfast without recalling the first days of our marriage, stumbling around each other as we tried to prepare meals. I could not watch television without remembering our Monday night movies.
I could not clean corners without recalling how we'd talked of buying a house. Memories of that procrastinated, now abandoned, plan were perhaps the most devastating.
I'd felt as if my life had begun when Nikki had arrived. The thought that we would never do the things we'd hoped for or that we'd never dream together again made me feel it was over.
That's why I jumped when Wally Pettigrew called. I was staring at Excel and trying to keep the numbers on the screen in focus when his ring jolted me.
"I have that party you were asking about in my office," he said in a stage whisper.
I almost dropped the phone into my chilled morning coffee. "What?"
"Miss Tennessee. Her real name is Beverly Sharpe. She thinks she's here to interview for a spot in a bank advertisement."
"I'll be right over."
*
She was sitting in a little waiting room sipping a cup of Wally's herb tea, pretentious stuff he orders from a catalog for exorbitant prices. She seemed to like it.
She almost spilled it on her red dress when I walked through the door.
"Hello, Beverly," I said with a smile. "Since you've been missing me, I'm glad we've bumped into each other."
She was out of her chair. "What's goin' on here?" she demanded.
"That's what we asked you here to find out."
She looked at Wally. "I thought you had a job for me."
"I lied," Wally said, throwing up his hands. "Kind of like you did."
Her eyes were starting to bounce around in the sockets. "I didn't lie."
"Have a seat," I suggested.
"I'm getting out of here." She slammed the teacup as hard as she could manage onto an end table and started for the door. Wally blocked her way.
"You put my life into a tailspin," I said. "Don't think you're going to waltz out of here. I want to know what the hell's going on."
"It was a job. I was told it was a joke."
"Leno tells jokes. This was a full scale sabotage."
"I'm sorry."
"Who put you up to all this?"
"I don't know. He paid in cash. He said you'd get a kick out of it once he told your wife it was just a joke."
"My wife left me. Have you got anything that will help me find him?"
Her shoulders rose and fell. "It was all by phone. I never even saw him in person. He just told me what to do."
"You didn't get dressed up in garters and lace?"
"He must've put her head on another body just like yours," Wally said.
"Well, the least you're going to do is tell my wife the truth," I said. "I'll figure out who this nut is later."
She settled back into the chair and nodded. She seemed to have folded in on herself, as if something insider her had crumpled. "I guess I could do that," she agreed.
I called Nikki's friend, who told me Nikki was with a client. I had to plead to get permission to come by that evening with proof that I was an innocent man, but she finally agreed to run interference.
"You sure you're not just talking your girlfriend into lying for you?" she asked.
"I know in a normal world it would appear that way, but we've stepped into an alternate universe where the usual rules don't apply. Something weird's going on, and if I can't get to the bottom of it, I'm going to undo some of the damage. I hope. I'll have Miss Tennessee with me at seven."
"I'm from North Carolina," the girl said.
"I stand corrected."
*
Nikki didn't show up at seven. Or seven thirty. Or eight.
"Who was this client?" I asked.
"Some guy who used to work for her father," answered Elly, her new roommate, she of frizzy red hair and wire-rimmed glasses—arch type of suspicious best friends. She kept her arms folded and tapped one toe most of the time she was alternating her glare between me and Beverly Sharpe a.k.a. Miss North Carolina nee Tennessee.
"He used to work in the old restaurant?" I asked.
"Yeah, he came into some money, and he's thinking of opening a place of his own. Nikki's supposed to set him up a plan of action."
That sounded mostly reasonable.
"What's his name?"
Whenever she met with new clients, Nikki made sure someone had a notion of where she'd be. It was a contemporary American precaution. Elly had to check around on a desk in one corner of the living room. Finally she produced a day-old calendar page with a name.
"Seamus Shertzer."
"That's alliterative," I said. "But it doesn't quite have the ring of a super hero's alter ego."
"What?"
I walked to the desk and picked up the phonebook. "Super heroes always have alliterative alter ego names. Bruce Banner. Clark Kent. Peter Parker."
"Tony Stark, Steve Rogers," Elly countered.
"Billy Batson," I said. "Lana Lang."
"She wasn’t really a super hero."
"She probably turned into one in some issue of something or other."
Seamus was listed. That made me feel a little better. Both super heroes and bad guys have unlisted numbers don't they?
I dialed him, and he was in. "Mr. Shertzer? I'm looking for my wife," I said.
"We're having a discussion," he said. He cupped the phone for a few moments, and I heard rumblings of conversation. "She doesn't want to speak to you right now."
I gripped the phone a little more tightly so I wouldn’t lose my grip, on the phone or on my nerves. "Tell her it's important."
He cupped the phone again, then returned, too quickly, I thought with: "She doesn't have time for this. Please leave her alone
I let my voice drop to a low growl. "Put her on the phone," Mr. Shertzer."
"She can't talk to you. I'm going to hang up now."
I wrote down his address from the book.
"She's not going to want to see you if she's busy," Elly protested.
"I don’t think she’s busy. Something's wrong."
"Wow, are you going to change into your tights?"
"Just stay here and take a deposition from Miss North Carolina. Best friends have that authority."
"How do I know she's not a convincing liar?"
"Nobody can lie for long with that drawl."
*
The apartment complex, Oakwood Terrace, was an upscale place across town. Andrew Jackson had been dead too long for the doorman. I had to slip him a picture of Grant before he found an interest in some paperwork and failed to notice me slip past.
I went up to Shertzer's floor with a growing sense that he had no plans of becoming a restaurateur even though he'd obviously inherited money.
I knocked briskly on the door when I found his number.
"Mr. Shertzer, there's been some problem with your cable connection," I shouted through the door. "I'm going to have to come in and check to make sure your hook-up meets specifications."
He opened the door just a crack. He was a slender, blond guy with features that brought needles to mind. "I just have basic," he protested, then recognized me. That was a sure sign something was wrong. He shouldn’t have known who I was. I didn’t have a patch with my name over my breast pocket.
I put my shoulder against the panel before he could slam it, ripping the chain from its mooring. The door slammed against him, sending him sprawling back into his foyer.
I was across the threshold in about two seconds, but he was already scrambling toward the living room. I went after him, hoping to grab him until the sight in front of me brought me to a halt.
Nikki was on her feet holding some architectural drawings. She appeared startled yet oddly relieved to see me bustling through the doorway. She'd obviously been thinking something must not quite be together.
Her relief was premature. Seamus had a gun up his sleeve, a little silver job, probably no less deadly for its size. I thought he was going to blast me, and every internal organ within five inches of my epidermis constricted.
Instead he went for Nikki. She tried to get out of his way, but he had an arm around her throat in an instant. In the next instant, he had the barrel at her temple. Her flesh seemed to fold around the weapon, as if it were sinking into her skull.
"She doesn't care about seeing you," he said. "She doesn't need to see you at all."
"Because you want her to fall in love with you now?"
Elvis would have appreciated his snarl. "She will. You're all wrong for her."
"You had a crush on her while you worked for her father, right?"
"Not a crush. I was in love with her." His eyes moistened slightly. "Then you came along."
"So when your rich uncle died you decided you'd do things to get me out of the picture. You had enough money to hire a model and play tricks to make it look like I was having an affair."
He shook his head. "It was an aunt."
"Perry Mason always made this stuff look so easy."
"Seamus, let me go," Nikki suggested. "We'll talk. I never knew you had feelings for me."
He kept the gun in place but with his other hand he gently ran his fingers through her hair. "I couldn't tell you, but you were so perfect. You were nice to me."
His gaze turned back to me, and his eyes were on simmer. "He should have never gotten in the way."
My feet wanted to move, to send me hurtling toward him regardless of the danger. I had to will the override on my anger that kept me in check. "How'd you come up with this damned scheme?" I asked. "It practically worked."
"It's from the handbook," he said.
"The what?"
"The Handbook for Urban Terror and Retribution. It has a chapter on psychological warfare."
"Is that one of those modern, paranoid, `government's going to get you' publications?" I asked.
"It works like you said." He gave a dry chuckle, forced but frightening. "Your problems were going to get steadily worse."
"Until I was such a wreck Nikki wouldn't have wanted me back even if I convinced her Miss North Carolina was a hoax?"
"Yeah. I'm going to have to do a different strategy, though."
He pressed the pistol against Nikki's head. My throat closed as I watched his trigger finger. It wasn’t steady.
"She's going to have to see you kill yourself."
"What?"
"Now. It's what you've been thinking about isn't it?"
"It's crossed my mind a few midnights."
"Because you're worthless. Not capable of dealing with the traumas of life. That’s what she would have seen given time."
"Is that what the handbook said I'd turn into?"
"Yeah. It's true. I know about how you've screwed up some accounts. I have friends who told me about it."
"I'm not that devastated."
"Nikki has to see what a wreck you are."
He wasn't rational. How could he expect her to fall in love with him if he rushed his game plan?
"She's seen who's the better man, who can take care of her. Get yourself out of the way." In his mind it probably passed for logic.
His forehead was covered with slimy beads of perspiration, and his eyes were as hard as stones, the pupils no more than pinpricks. I suspected the money had afforded him more than creature comforts.
"How do you want me to do it?" I asked.
"Taped under that table, there's a knife."
"And you'll hurt her if I don't? That's going to turn her on."
"Do it!"
I reached under and found the duct tape, which held the blade as he'd promised. In case society fell and the denizens of the street rose up against the good people of Oakwood Terrace, he was prepared.
It probably would have made hundreds of fries instantly. It was razor sharp, a nasty piece of metal he'd probably obtained through the same mail order house that had sold him the book.
"Hurt yourself," he demanded.
I looked at the terror in Nikki's eyes. I had to do something.
I made a small incision on the underside of one arm, careful to miss the tendon and the blue tributaries as well. Closing my fingers into a fist, I produced a pretty good trickle of blood.
"That's not deep enough," he said.
Blood ran down across my palm in a jagged red trickle.
"You have to cut lengthwise," I said. "That's the most effective. Didn't you pick that up in your reading?"
I made a similar cut on the other wrist and dropped into a chair, trying to look weakened. The slices were stinging like crazy, and seeing my own blood made me queasy. I feigned grogginess. It wasn't hard.
"Don't expect it to be easy," I said. "I’ve talked to Ms. Sharpe. You left a trail. I wasn't joking about your cable, and a few other things will crop up too. Then there's my friend, Wally Pettigrew. He knows what to do if I'm gone."
"No way," he said.
"You think your's is the only handbook? I've been reading dirty tricks magazines since Nikki left. For a while I didn't know who I was after, but I knew I was damned sure going to get even."
"You're bluffing."
"You hope," I said.
I blinked, trying to look weak. "All that money you inherited is going to seep away, pal. Just like my blood is. A computer glitch here, a problem there."
He jabbed the gun toward me. "You're a liar."
As soon as the weapon left her temple, Nikki leaned into him, and in a heartbeat he was in the air. Call it stereotypical, but her dad taught all the kids martial arts.
The movement surprised him, and his arms flailed. He looked like he was trying to fly, but it didn't work. He crashed down onto the coffee table then, and I pounced. My goal was to pin his gun arm, but he swung it before I could reach him.
The sight at the end of the barrel raked along my jaw, opening a new cut. The stinging hit a second later, but I forced myself to ignore it. I had only a couple of seconds, while his gun arm was still flailing.
I went toward his body, putting a shoulder into his chest. He wheezed at the impact and started backwards. I let my weight continue forward, so that he went toppling downward.
Hitting the floor with me on top of him wasn’t easy. The jolt rattled through his body, and his head bounced forward then back again. Somehow he managed to keep his hand on the gun, and the trigger finger twitched.
The bullet tore harmlessly into a wall. With one knee I pinned his gun arm to the floor at the same time I started pressing my dagger to his throat.
He stayed put until, swearing at me but not struggling any longer until the cops arrived. He called them names and accused them of ideologies they’d probably never considered until they dragged him away.
"The world's getting weirder and weirder isn't it?" Nikki asked as paramedics bandaged us.
"The weirdoes have handbooks. That’s kind of scary."
"Tonight we’ll double lock the door," she said. "When we get home."
"Yes," I said. "When we get home."

Sidney Williams is a web editor for a Texas hospital system. In addition to writing fiction, he has worked as a newspaper reporter and reference librarian. 

His books include Night Brothers, Blood Hunter, Gnelfs, Azarius and others. He has also written numerous short stories in the horror, science fiction and mystery genres. His latest is "Miss Daisy and the Rosary Pea" to be featured in the upcoming 100 Crafty Little Cat Mysteries. his next comic book script is "Blood Line," a one-shot from the independent publisher Silverline.