Chris Diken
The Killer at the Beach
Without exception, the girls wear simple, tasteful bikinis, and
the guys high-cut trunks that display well-defined quadriceps. The
guys swim, cutting through the ocean, each confident that they can
outpaddle the most vicious undertow, thighs capable of thrashing any
rip tide into submission. Some perform shallow dives to casually
approximate how long they can stay under, quietly competing with one
another, quietly and unconsciously vying for the affection of the
girls on shore, each secretly convinced that lung capacity somehow
foretells the capacity for something much greater, the girls who
during these contests shade their eyes and peer out across open
water, wondering now what happened to Robert and Kevin and
Stephen, only to see them resurface again and glisten, taking
regular normal-length breaths. Hermit crabs are plucked from the sea
floor and held gently with concern for the animals’ safety and
comfort while the guys swim one-handed, slicing through the feeble
current, to the shore where they produce the crabs as gifts to the
girls who cavort at the edge of the rolling surf as they discuss
television programs which have portrayed their favorite celebrities
at their lowest and basest and most totally uncensored. Blankets are
spread on the beach, reclined upon by those with positive
self-images, all of whom are careful to apply plenty of suntan
lotion—not that the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays are something
anyone at the beach needs to worry about, because none of the
beachgoers have any family history whatsoever with melanoma or
cancer in general or any other diseases. No sand is kicked up by
wind, for there is no wind.
On each lifeguard stand sit two blond people charged with the
security of the beach, naturally blond, not just blond because they
are out in the sun for eight or ten hours at a stretch (although
certainly this increases the intensity of the blondness), a guy with
rippling abdominal muscles and an easygoing demeanor, the kind of
guy you might set your sister up with if your sister wasn’t a
boozeaholic, and next to him a girl, hairless legs crossed so that
she can alternately scan the ocean and glance at the painted
toenails of one foot; after a certain interval of time passes she
switches legs so as to examine the other set of toenails, both sets
merit equal attention, her eyes hidden behind mirrored-lens
sunglasses so no one knows where she’s looking, but the lifeguards
are really just there because it’s the law, basically just for show,
such excellent swimmers are all of the guys, each such a Spitzian
replica that it physically pains you to watch them because it makes
you seem so sad and uncoordinated and pathetic in comparison, and
the girls who frolic next to the white tumbling surf never actually
fully enter the water because salt dries out their naturally moist
skin.
The killer appears. He sweats profusely, for it is almost exactly
noon, the sun the strongest it will be all day, and he is wearing
his trenchcoat and felt-lined fedora. He stands at the edge of the
boardwalk and surveys the beach, his hands in his pockets,
ostensibly manipulating some unidentifiable objects, possibly a pair
of Derringer pistols, or some spoons that he sharpened during his
last term in the can and subsequently employed with great success
during the implementation of his insane yet brilliant escape plan,
spoons used to slit the throats of prison guards and other inmates
and the warden’s wife who was unfortunately visiting her husband at
work on the day of the killer’s insane yet brilliant decampment,
spoons that he probably should have disposed of a long time ago due
to the irrefutable DNA evidence splattered all over them, it
wouldn’t take a minute for a jury to send him to fry in the chair,
spoons that the killer continues to use, or at least keep with him
at all times, out of nostalgia, a sentimental quality that for him
engenders the kind of peace of mind he needs to go on killing in a
cold blooded, highly calculated, mercilessly efficient manner, a
manner that frustrates detectives to no perceivable end but also
fascinates them in a morbid way so that yes of course they want to
take him out and/or bring him down but they are also intrigued by
the case and don’t mind that it sort of stretches out and takes its
time in reaching a resolution. It would be presumptuous for anyone
to say exactly what he was fiddling with, the coat’s pockets being
triple-lined and not given to hosting silhouettes, the only certain
thing is that the killer’s hands are jammed in there good and he’s
engineering something, maybe trying to further hone his
spoons on whetstones which he has sewn into the pockets’ innards,
perhaps loading poison darts into separate blowguns, or maybe in the
best case scenario jingling loose change or idly fingering his
wallet, it might be a nervous habit, killers have tics too like
every regular person is prone to having when they get irritable or
worried or ennui’d, but it’s probably not a specifically nervous
habit, this killer is cool, even now at the beach, on the outside
sure his dark colors absorb sunlight, and he sweats, but underneath
it all, at the killer’s core, he is absolutely calm and composed,
the hand-in-pocket routine probably just something he mindlessly
performs to pass the time in between random savage acts of
unprovoked violence, but who knows really, it could also be
misdirection, something to throw the Feds off, let’s not speculate
though, it’s hard to tell from here.
The boardwalk on which he stands is not a carnival-style
promenade replete with food vendors and games of chance and rusty
children’s rides poorly assembled by half-competent ex-cons (not to
say by any means that all ex-cons are half- or some other percentage
or iteration of competent; take, for example, the killer), rather it
is a bridge, a pathway that prevents foot traffic from disrupting
the natural dunes and the manifold species of protected shore
grasses that separate parking lot and beach. The boardwalk is not
made of planks of wood in accordance with the kind of typical older
boardwalk construction methods used in developing the typical
carnival-style promenade, seeing as how genuine wood can’t endure
all sorts of weather situations without cracking or warping or
splitting apart and splintering off into shards and slivers which
become embedded in the bare feet of boardwalkers. This beach’s
boardwalk is part of the Keep Our Boardwalks Safe Initiative, as
most beaches’ boardwalks are slowly becoming part of through local
referendums and such forth. In order to comply with KOBSI the
boardwalk on which the killer is standing and sweating and
manipulating some very possibly sinister items in his pockets is
composed of a synthetic polyfiber material, a kind of plastic that
looks like wood and even sort of feels like wood but isn’t prone to
fixing miniature wooden daggers into the skin of those who traverse
it. The killer’s feet are always fully and imperviously booted, and
he laughs maniacally at miniature wooden daggers, metaphorically
anyway, his boots even sporting a steel insert in the toe and with
it he could easily kick the living hell out of your regular old
wooden boardwalk. He doesn’t even know what KOBSI stands for. But if
he’d taken the time to read the weatherproof plaque posted at the
boardwalk’s entrance, he’d probably have thought it was the sorriest
most miserable thing he’d ever read, and consequently would have
unloaded a few rounds into the synthetic polyfibers as part of his
own personal safety initiative.
The killer as he stands overlooking the beach possibly wonders
how the special synthetic polyfibers might act should they come into
contact with the blood of his victims, would it bead up
instantaneously as demonstrated in the late night infomercial for
the world’s leader in water repelling technology? Where, the
insomniac killer always thought, and maybe this is the insomnia
talking, blood is symbolically replaced by water? Or it’s entirely
feasible that as he stands on the boardwalk ostensibly surveying the
area where he is possibly about to undertake a spree of brutality
free of motive or reason, he imagines the sweat pouring off him as a
cooling liquid that pools into a glass from which he can drink and
experience an interior deadening whereby he might feel even less
compassion for the living things around him, thereby engendering
more destruction or, perhaps more alarmingly, the exact same amount
of destruction, only conducted in a more brutal fashion. The killer does look unusually
well-rested—it’s not impossible for him to have picked up a
prescription.
The beachgoers are in general quite ignorant but on this day they
seem to be particularly blissed out in their ignorance; say for
instance if on this day no killer presented himself—say rather in
place of a killer, a singular dorsal fin suddenly emerged, a fin
that gradually moved closer to shore and to the oceangoing public in
a pattern of speed and menace that anyone could immediately
recognize from movies about willfully malevolent fish, for instance
if this happened, the beachgoers would most likely, if we’re going
to be truthful here, probably plain ignore it or chalk it up to the
strange way that light reflects off the ocean, or identify it as the
sign of a bottlenose dolphin coming to make friends. But each of
these is in any case an unlikely circumstance since they all depend
on the beachgoers’ recognizance of the fin in the first place, and
with all of the gracefully powerful swimming strokes being hammered
out, the subtly flirtatious shorebreak frolicking to distract them,
with all the apparently innocent sexual tension wafting languorously
around and numbing the beachgoers into a state of warm safe
semi-aroused contentment, there’s just no chance that anyone is
going to notice a potentially malefic fin coursing towards the beach
in a manner that the Survive a Shark Attack! guidebook
suggests is an easily-interpretable sign that a predator of the deep
is about to impose its own hungry will on whatever unfortunate thing
should get in its way. This just isn’t the kind of beach where death
occurs—not once has a breath-holding contest ever turned deadly, no
one has ever been swept out to sea, in fact no misfortune has ever
headlined the beach’s complimentary monthly newsletter—not like at
the other beach, the free one, located on the other
side of the quaint shore community, which last year saw the loss of
four lives not including that family of indeterminate Eastern
European descent who clearly underestimated the American current,
but one might say that they—in any case, it was a tragedy for the
whole village.
The killer scans the beach with the gentlest head movement
available, in order to attract the least possible amount of
attention to himself. There are no children in view, thankfully. But
it could be worse than just icing a kid, even, something that
most people don’t even like to mention, but hey we can’t just
pretend it doesn’t ever happen, although it would take a whole
different kind, someone above and beyond a killer, more like your
kidnapper or abductor or molester type personality, which is a
number of degrees apart from a straight killer’s personality
according to psychological profiling textbooks—even a killer who
seemingly follows no set rationale or lacks reason for what he does
doesn’t go around giving children what they (our children) are
taught to describe as "bad touches" unless he has one of those rare
killer plus sick abductor/molester dispositions. There are
some children at the beach, but they are way down at the end near
the jetty, exploring the tide pools, the boys practicing the
transportation of hermit crabs and the girls are running away from
them, shrieking and pretending that they are incompatible with all
of it. If the killer even notices the children, he probably only
sees them as small dark specks against the dark mottled background
of the jetty rocks, some kind of human forms, surely, but most
likely he doesn’t recognize them specifically as children—and again
it really wouldn’t matter unless by some wild chance he was in
possession of that horrible rare affinity, but typically a person
suffering from such a condition focuses his attention on
children and only considers adults as secondary targets, like for
instance an adult might be victimized if he or she blocks the path
between the killer/molester and a child, similar to a witless,
bumbling camper caught between a mother grizzly and her cub. If this
killer were doubly afflicted, as it were, by homicidal and
pedophilic tendencies, he—again, according to psychological
profiling textbooks—probably would have sought the children out
directly, and since he hasn’t (unless he is successfully
disguising his intentions), one may assume that he is strictly a
killer, and nothing more.
The killer steps off of the boardwalk and onto the beachfront
proper, where the footing is less sure. He stumbles at first as he
sinks into the sand but soon he is crossing the beach, his
trenchcoat’s belt flapping gently behind him, fedora tilted back so
that we can get a good look at the guy’s face, at the emotionless
visage which hardens itself even further just prior to an act of
violence. Upon closer inspection the killer’s face now seems a
little soft at the edges, somewhat porky actually in the neck and
jowl regions, but in the center right around his nose the face is
rigid and constricted, pulled tight and devoid of expression and
countenance, and as he approaches the lounge chair rental station he
wipes the sweat from his brow and reaches into the interior pocket
of his coat and produces a few dollar bills. Soon he is staking out
a location for his chair, certainly an inconspicuous area is
preferable but one which affords good visibility and a clear shot,
if it should come to that. He covers the length of the beach several
times in pursuit of the appropriate location, and feels more
self-conscious with every pass, like more and more people notice
him, an anomaly at their beach, the sweat is stinging his eyes and
suddenly the chair feels almost too heavy to carry, but just as he
prepares to give it up and pack it in out of embarrassment, he
notices a lone piece of driftwood near the dune preservation fence.
He unfolds the chair, and sits.
He sits, then, prodded by what may be the blades and
semiautomatic weapons concealed beneath his coat, he shifts in his
chair, stretches his legs out, pulls them back in—it’s probably hard
to get comfortable with that kind of arsenal strapped to your
person. Some beachgoers wonder whether he’s going to expose himself
on account of the trenchcoat. They wonder if he paid to get on the
beach or if he snuck on, maybe slipped through a gap in the dune
preservation fencing, or made himself a gap with wire cutters. It’s
not clear to them if the killer is wearing the mandatory beach badge
and his hands are engaged under his coat, observers thinking, God,
if he’s playing with himself, I’m going straight to the surf cabana
and calling the beach police.
He’s not playing with himself, although the prospect of laying
waste to an entire beach does arouse him slightly, but not exactly
in a sexual way. His psychological state is calm but prone to
stimulation by the smallest input, and as he watches a family pass,
an exhausted mom still trying to hold it together and her husband
who categorically denies the obvious fact that his children are
deeply morose because of something huge and scary that neither of
them can quite articulate except through mumbled one word responses
and shrugged shoulders and secret hopes each harbor about one day
having the courage to forge a murder-suicide pact, he feels a quick
pang in his chest for each of them, a strange sensation of pressure
to which he attaches no meaning whatsoever. It might just be the
buckle of his shoulder holster poking him in the pectoral, the
definition of the pectoral produced by countless bench-press reps in
the center of the prison yard, he wasn’t the strongest guy in the
pen as far as brute force was concerned, but far from the weakest,
and definitely the strongest at the beach as far as potential raw
force generated by the body, he could crush an esophagus while
whistling (You’re A) Grand Old Flag, so solid is his own wind. The
killer reaches down next to his rented beach chair and picks up a
shell and runs his finger along its ridges. Not a major thing to
slice a femoral artery with a shell. Just a swipe in the right place
and no tourniquet could cut off that supply. He releases the shell
and crushes it with the heel of his boot. Application of crab claw
to jugular, stray picket from dune preservation fence conducted
with stabbing motion, enticement of sharks via chum from severed
appendage, liver trauma by way of pointy driftwood causing
self-poisoning and long slow sad death on sandbar at low tide with
tiny waves lapping over chest and sun not far from horizon, sky lit
pink the last moments a mixture of shivering and overheating while
body shuts down.
Halfheartedly, the killer tries to read a magazine, but the heat
makes him drowsy. His neck muscles begin to have a difficult time
holding his head up. He lays the magazine down next to the chair and
resettles himself, resting his head back on the nylon webbing. He
regards the beachgoers individually, and when possible, as a group.
It wouldn’t take much. A plan of action would barely be required to
just stand up and reach into the depths of the coat. They certainly
wouldn’t be suspecting.
The beach is quiet. It’s still a fine day, but the sun is going
down. The beachgoers have all departed in order to patronize their
community’s excellent seafood restaurants. The wind has picked up
and it fans the trenchcoat of the killer, who is asleep in his
rented beach chair. His jaw slack, his fedora crooked, the killer
dreams of his childhood, which was, by all accounts, a very pleasant
time in his life.
Chris Diken is from New Jersey |
