Nice Guy Type

by Sean Doolittle

I spent a few days on my buddy Treynor’s couch, as far from the Jeanie situation as I could get before I ran out of buddies with couches. Trey waited a day and said, “Not that it’s any of my business, but when we say ‘the Jeanie situation,’ what are we talking about, nutshell?”

“Her husband went through her phone,” I told him.

“Shit. Then what happened?”

“He used her phone to call my phone.”

“Logical.”

“And yet psychotic.”

“What did he say?”

I’d been trying not to think about that. Jeanie’s husband was a meat cutter by trade, built like a cage fighter and, according to Jeanie, devoted as a grown man to inflated doses of the same Ritalin he’d been prescribed as a teenager. “He said he was going to hack me up and feed the pieces to his snakes.”

“Well, shit,” Trey said. “He’s probably not gonna do that.”

“Not if he can’t find me, he won’t.”

In the mornings, Trey went to his job at the batch plant for the small town where he’d been living. I spent the days laying around reading the paper and watching television. Nights he came home covered in fly ash, whipped and dragging his tail. We’d order pizza or Chinese or go to the Mexican place two blocks over. It was the least I could do to pick up the tabs.

After five days of this, Trey handed me a beer and said, “Guess you probably need to get back to the job pretty soon, huh?”

I confessed that there was no job at present; the company had reduced half my department two months ago, and I’d been more or less playing around on my severance. Ten years had bought me eight weeks.

“Jesus.” He sighed, leaned over, clinked his bottle against mine. “Why the hell didn’t you say so? What’s the market like?”

“Haven’t really looked yet, to be honest,” I said. “And I still have my share from the house, if it comes to that.” I saw the way Trey was fiddling with the label on his bottle and added, “But you’re right. Thanks for letting me crash, I owe you one.”

“It’s not like that,” Trey said. “You’d do the same.”

I almost pointed out that I already had done the same: once after his own marriage had split up, another time when his construction business went under and he couldn’t find work for awhile. But we’d known each other a long time. And I didn’t see Trey very often since he’d moved out of the city.

“What I’m saying is, why not hang here awhile?” He glanced at me across the scratched-up, second-hand kitchen table where we sat. I thought back to a time when Trey had four employees and a nice house in Oak Heights. Things had changed all around. “As long as there’s no pressing business, I mean.”

I met his eye briefly. “You looking for a roommate?”

“I don’t mind the company.” He shrugged and tipped his beer. “And no offense, buddy, but I think you could use a change of scenery yourself.”

I made a plan to head back to my apartment that Saturday and pick up the things I’d need for awhile. Trey claimed he wasn’t busy and offered to tag along. It took a few more beers than I’d expected to work up my nerve, and Trey ended up driving.

It was forty miles through the country from his place to mine. His truck guzzled gas, so we took my car. On the way, Trey told me he’d been saving his pennies, and in six months he’d be able to get serious about setting up his own shop again.

“There’s basically three other guys in town,” he said. “One’s solid, one only does decks, the other’s been busted twice on regs this year. I’ve been doing odd jobs around. Nothing big, but people are getting the idea I do good work and charge fair.”

“Sure they are,” I said.

“I’ll need get up and go money,” he said. “But there’s a guy at the bank who said he’d work with me.”

I watched the bare cornfields pass by my window, stubble bristling and blurring beyond the glass. “For a minute I thought you were telling me you were looking for investors.”

“What I was thinking was maybe you might be looking for a job at some point.”

I laughed. “Please. I can’t tell a hammer from a chainsaw.”

“That’s the truth. But you can set up computers. Run a website. Figure out, like, marketing and shit.” He shrugged. “Something to think about, that’s all.”

I tried to imagine a scenario like that as I watched a flock of wild turkeys peck for grain along a far tree line. After a few miles, I said, “You’d be my boss, huh?”

“Well, hey. You got any cash burning a hole, I’d consider a partner.” He glanced over, grinned a little, looked back at the road. “Junior partner, maybe.”

He took the new spur, got off the Interstate at the expressway, and joined in with street traffic in the gathering dusk. I told him where I’d been living; he headed north on 60th toward midtown.

Along the way I cracked my window, letting in the sounds of traffic and a stream of crisp autumn air. My buzz had mellowed, and the ride had been nice. I’d only been gone a week, but I felt like I’d been through something. The time away had been centering, it was good to see Trey again, and the whole thing with Jeanie was beginning to feel like a harmless comedy.

I was feeling pretty good until we reached my street. Then my heart started pounding. I grabbed the wheel as Trey began turning, wrenched it back the other way and said, “Keep going straight.”

“Whoa,” he said. “One driver at a time.”

“Just keep going.” I scrunched down in my seat like a low-rent crook. “Take the next block.”

We took the next block all the way down to the cross street, then came back two blocks the way we’d come. Finally, we pulled to a curb within view of my building but not within view — I hoped — of the big, spotless red Dodge Ram pickup waiting out front.

“Lights,” I said. “Kill the lights.”

Trey set the brake and twisted off the ignition. We sat there in silence, listening to the engine tick.

“Okay, I’ll ask,” he said. “What are we doing?”

“Staying out of sight.”

“I got that. Why?”

“That’s him, that’s why.”

“Where?”

I nodded. “Truck.”

Trey followed my gaze across the empty boulevard to the muscular rig brazenly illuminated in the streetlight outside my building. The truck sat high on wide knobby tires, with riveted fenders, a gleaming chrome roll bar, and hooded KC lights. A pair of novelty rubber testicles hung low from the trailer hitch.

“Inconspicuous,” Trey said.

My throat felt dry all of a sudden. “I told you he was nuts.”

“How long you think he’s been sitting there?”

“No idea” I said, and shivered like the feeble coward I’d accepted myself to be. “But he’s sitting there now.”

Trey shook his head. “Let’s just go in,” he said. “Hell, there’s two of us.”

“I count one including you.”

“Come on. Grow a pair.”

“No time for that now.”

Trey sighed. After a minute, he drummed his thumbs on the wheel and leaned back. “So, now what?”

Honestly, there wasn’t anything I truly needed in the apartment. Now that we were here, I was having trouble remembering why I’d bothered with this in the first place. If we turned around, we’d be back to Trey’s in forty-five minutes. We could drink beer and watch SportsCenter and talk about this business he had in mind.

“Let’s see what he does,” I said.

He didn’t do anything but smoke cigarettes out his window for almost two hours. We sat there and watched a tattooed, muscle-bound arm flick butts into the street. He seemed to smoke a hell of a lot for a bodybuilder, though maybe not so much for a butcher. Not that I knew either way. After the first hour, Trey wanted to know what was so extra special about this Jeanie person.

I admitted that there wasn’t anything extra special about her. She was nice and funny, a thirty five-year-old Zumba instructor with a great body and problems at home; I met her at the gym one day a few weeks ago. Being around her helped my self-confidence, which had been in the toilet for months, possibly years; she laughed at my jokes, I bought her a few drinks, and we’d been screwing each other silly ever since. That was all.

“The latest in a series of bad decisions,” I said.

Trey said, “I guess that’s my point.”

“Were you making a point?”

“Sport-bagging married ladies? I don’t know, man.” He shook his head. “It doesn’t sound like you.”

“I was married ten years,” I said. “I’m single for the first time since college.”

“So go after college girls.”

“Where would I meet college girls?”

“Exactly.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“A player would know where to meet college girls. You?” He looked at me. “Many things, my friend. But you’ve never been a player.”

He had me there. While I was married, I’d been relentlessly faithful, even after learning that Laurel hadn’t lived up to that particular vow herself. All I’d wanted was to be married, even after she admitted that she’d been bored stupid for half a decade. In high school, I’d had exactly one girlfriend, and I moped for two years after she moved away to become one of those college girls I didn’t date until Laurel. Trey had known me a long time.

“Maybe I’m a late bloomer,” I said.

“Bullshit.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I know you,” he said. “And you’re not a dick. You’re the nice guy type.”

“I hear nice guys finish last.”

“That’s because they get caught banging the wife of a guy who wears a rubber apron for a living.”

Again, hard to argue. “I admit I didn’t plan very well.”

“Uh huh.” Trey watched Jeanie’s husband toss another cigarette out his window. “Maybe.”

“I don’t know what that means, either.”

“Look. Laurel cheated on you, right?”

“Serially, yes.”

“And you’re you.”

“That’s what she reminded me. Thank you.”

“What I’m saying is, you were too all-around reasonable to send her packing like she deserved, and if she hadn’t ended it? Buddy, you’d still be there getting your guts trampled.” Trey turned toward me a little, leaned an elbow on the wheel. “Did you ever stop and think that maybe now, on some level, you’re working through all that by pretending to be a wife-chasing douchebag yourself?”

This was about as much as I’d ever heard Trey spit out at one time, and I didn’t know what to say in reply. I could have pointed out that I wasn’t really pretending — that I was in fact a wife-chasing douchebag at this point, and a tactically poor one at that, which was how we’d come to be sitting here, watching my apartment building like a pair of idiots. But Trey wasn’t finished.

“And that maybe,” he continued, “just maybe, on some level, you walked yourself into this situation because deep down you’re too nice a guy not to feel just the teensiest, tiniest bit shitty about it?”

I stared at him. “You think I want this psycho to turn me into snake food?”

“Your words, not mine.” He seemed deeply pleased with his own insight.

“Wow,” I said. “For a psychiatrist you’re a hell of a carpenter.”

“Yeah, well. Your time’s up anyway.” Trey dug in his jacket pocket and pulled out his cell phone. “This is officially lame.”

“What are you doing?”

He held up a finger as he dialed a number, then put the phone to his ear. “Yes, hello,” he said. “I need to report a suspicious vehicle at 49 California. Red Dodge Ram, Big Horn edition, license plate GR4–296? The driver. . .” Pause. “No. But he’s been sitting there for hours. I think he’s watching my building.” Pause. “Yes, okay. I will. Thank you.”

Trey put the phone back in his pocket. “There,” he said. “Easy.”

I felt supremely weak and foolish. And relieved. I said, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

Trey grinned. “I thought of it two hours ago. Just wanted to see if you’d nut up.”

We waited fifteen minutes before a black-and-white police cruiser trolled slowly up the street. From our spot across the boulevard, we sat and watched the unit pull over to the curb facing the Ram. A cop got out the passenger side, sidled up to the truck, and tapped on the glass with the butt of her flashlight. She shined the light in through the open window, stood there talking a minute, one hand on the butt of her service weapon. Then she made a shooing motion in the air, stepping back as the big truck growled to life. Seconds later, the Ram scratched its tires and lurched away down the street like a pouting bully, rubber nuts swinging.

Having cleared the street, the cop holstered her flashlight and got back in the cruiser. The cruiser sat in its spot for a minute or two, then pulled away. That appeared to be that.

Trey started the car. “Let’s do this and go eat someplace. I’m starving.”

“Maybe on some level you feel empty inside,” I said. “And you’re working through it by chasing food.”

“Maybe you’re a dick after all.”

“Your words, not mine,” I said.

Trey stayed in the car and kept a lookout while I went up and packed a bag. I pulled together enough clothes for a week between loads, threw in the books from my night table, rounded up a few toiletries. The apartment felt odd to me, stifled and foreign, and as I packed, I realized that not only had I never truly settled into this place — my first solo apartment since my early twenties — but in my mind (“on some level,” as Trey might have said) I’d left it behind me already.

I thought about the things he’d said: about me lashing out at the world through out-of-character bad behavior, about subconsciously creating situations in which to sort out my (admittedly many) unresolved feelings about Laurel. All by myself, here in this midtown apartment I’d never come to view as home, I wondered if the guy wasn’t on to something.

I didn’t feel like myself, and I hadn’t for awhile. I kept expecting this to pass with time, but enough time had passed by now that I was having trouble remembering what myself used to feel like. If I was honest, the Jeanie situation hadn’t helped matters. It had been thrilling and reassuring and sort of awesome, but it hadn’t helped.

At the very least, Trey was dead right about one thing: I did know how to run computers. IP cameras as well.

While we were married, Laurel had been respectful enough to do most of her cheating away from our tidy home. But there were a few times — half a dozen or so — when she’d made exceptions and had somebody at the house while I was gone.

Though she’d never known it, these occasions had all been recorded and memorialized on DVD. I used to think that I’d be able to use them against her in some way. Possibly during the divorce. Even better, to keep the divorce from happening at all. Hell, I didn’t know — maybe I’d them to her parents. Or post them on the Internet. Something to humiliate her the way she’d humiliated me.

But, of course, Trey had been right about that, too: in the end I simply didn’t have it in me. I used to watch the videos late at night just to torture myself, but even I could see something unacceptably pathetic about that, and I’d mostly given it up.

Still, I kept them, unlabeled, on a shelf in my office closet. I went in there now and grabbed the oldest of the bunch, starring Laurel and Trey, back when Trey had been staying with us. Both times. No, these were not isolated incidents — if you fast-forwarded through them in sequence you could actually see Trey’s hair thinning — but if any of this had played a specific role in Trey’s divorce, I didn’t know about it.

It certainly hadn’t played a role in mine. In fact, these with my oldest friend were the only encounters Laurel had never confessed to me in the end. I suppose that proved, if nothing else, that her contempt for our life together hadn’t been total.

I tossed the disc in the bag with my laptop and thought about playing it for him later tonight. We could talk about wife-chasing douchebags and see what he thought of things then.

Or maybe we’d just talk about this construction business idea. I honestly didn’t know what I wanted.

I was on my way downstairs with my jacket and bags when I heard a muffled squeal of tires outside the building, followed by a thunderous, ground-shaking crash. I leapt the bottom steps and raced out the front door with my things, heart hammering, and what I saw stopped me in my tracks.

Jeanie’s husband had returned. With extreme prejudice.

And if I’d thought (on some level) that Jeanie’s husband being murderously crazy was at least partly an exaggeration on my part — an excuse to feel (on some level) justified in running away from my life for a while — I realized that I had been both wrong and right.

Jeanie’s husband — what was his name? Brad? Brett? No, but something with a B — had driven his big truck with the rubber testicles straight into the grill of my car with Trey stuck behind the wheel. The car was Dodge Rammed at least twenty feet back from the spot I remembered. Trey must have had it running, because steam billowed from the crumpled hood. The windshield had shattered. Nuggets of broken glass twinkled in the street.

The truck looked no worse for the wear. Even as I stood there, frozen on the stoop, Jeanie’s husband pulled Trey out of my mangled car, held him up by the throat, and began punching him dead-center in the face. Over and over. The guy was a beast; a six-foot mass of tendons and muscle, decorated all over with tattoos.. Trey, who’d done manual labor all his life and was not wimpy himself — whom I’d seen come out on top of any number of bar fights in our younger days — had gone limp in Jeanie’s husband’s grip.

Brandon: that was it. His name was Brandon.

And he kept right on punching Trey’s face, his fist painted in blood by now. Trey’s nose was a flat place, his mouth a toothless dark hole.

I thought again about what he’d said earlier, about subconsciously engineering this situation. It occurred to me that Trey might have construed all this as psychologically incriminating (on some level), further evidence in support of his theory. Wasn’t it convenient that he happened to be sitting behind the wheel of the car Jeanie’s husband knew to be mine?

But on that point, my old friend Trey was finally wrong. It had been a conscious act when I’d called Jeanie’s husband at home, earlier this afternoon, to let him know I’d be stopping by my apartment tonight if there was anything he wanted to say to me. In truth, the two hours Trey had spent waiting for me to “nut up” in the car, I’d been trying to decide whether I should back down.

In truth, I’d been glad when he’d finally called the cops.

He was my best friend. We’d known each other a long time.

As for the cops, I was still standing like a statue when the cruiser rolled back up the street. From half a block the unit hit its roof lights, sped abruptly, and screeched to a stop in front of the building.

When the spotlight hit him, Jeanie’s husband Brandon had already dragged Trey to the curb like a ragdoll, positioned him face-down on the concrete bumper, and raised his foot. The cops piled out with their guns drawn, shouting. I was convinced that if they’d arrived ten seconds later, I’d have witnessed my oldest friend being stomped to death in front of me.

I may have been a late bloomer, but that wasn’t what I’d wanted, not on any level. As far as I knew.

Sean Doolittle is the Barry and International Thriller Award-winning author of several crime and suspense novels. His short fiction has received the Derringer Award and been reprinted in Best American Mystery Stories, among other venues. Doolittle’s most recent novel, Kill Monster, is available on audio from Audible Originals and in print from Severn House. His next novel, Device-Free Weekend, is forthcoming in 2023.

Photo by Frans Ruiter on Unsplash