Chapter 4
Frank shot up, out of a sound sleep. The ringing from his phone drowning out the ringing in his head.
“Karen?!”
“Karen? As in Karen Page? You expecting a call from her… Wow I’m proud, you finally grew some balls and talked to her. Hold on I got to tell Sarah… SARAH-” Frank pushed the phone away from his ear, David’s screeching was not helping the brewing headache he was sure to have.
“Jesus, Lieberman…. What time is it?” Frank rifled around Karen’s bedside table, looking for any kind of pills that could give him some relief.
“Well it’s around six thirty, hut Sarah and I just wanted to confirm with you that you were coming over for brunch today. We’ve been talking about this for weeks. And you promised the kids- it’s unbreakable.” He laid back down before rubbing his face ready to put out an obvious rebuttal.
“Look man, I know what I said- But some stuff went down last night and I-”
David cut him off before he could continue, “What happened?”
“You know that tip you gave me about the drug dealer selling to middle schoolers. That jackass?”
Frank could hear a door close before David answered, “Yeah, I remember. I couldn’t forget- all I could think of was one of them could have been Zach if he went to the wrong school. I remember.”
“Well I went to his address last night and I found him beating on his little girl. Maybe three or four. All I could see was Lisa…”
There was a pause before David asked the inevitable next question- but already he knew he didn’t really need to ask, David knew what Frank would do in that situation. Yet he still had to ask, “And? What’d you do?”
“What do you think? You think I’d let that piece of shit keep breathing after what he had done- no doubt he’s done much worse!”
Frank was getting worked up and had to calm down before Karen’s neighbors came knocking wondering why a scruffy man was screaming his head off.
“I know Frank. And I think you did the right thing, for the kid. And all the other kids he was selling drugs too. But I’m talking about after. What happened after?”
He knew this question was coming and somewhere deep down Frank had wanted David to ask it, “I couldn’t leave her there, the girls mom was overdosed in the bathtub. She didn’t belong there… I couldn’t leave her.”
“So… what did you end up doing?”
“I brought her to Karen’s,”
Coffee that’s what he needed.
“I thought it would be better if Karen called the cops and said she found the little girl alone in the apartment. That everyone else was dead. That she was doing an investigation. I figured it would be better than me dropping Sophie off at the police station.”
“Sophie?”
“The little girl. Then I had to leave her and Karen in that shitbags apartment to call the police. God, I had to leave them….” Keeping the phone between his shoulder and his ear made getting the coffee pot ready a bit harder than normal, but Frank was glad for the distraction.
“I think you did the right thing Frank. Don’t beat yourself up about it, come on over for lunch and we’ll talk about it.” David sat in his office knowing how his family would be disappointed if Frank missed another would be meal with them, but in this instance he could understand. But no matter how much he understood, David knew he at least had to put up a fight over him coming or his family would skin David alive for giving up so easily.
“You know I can’t, I told her I’d be here…”
“Where are you, Frank?”
There was a pause before Frank answered, something that almost sounded like embarrassment, like a teenager getting caught in his girlfriends bedroom kind of embarrassment laced his voice, “I’m at Karen’s, I told her I’d be here when she gets back.”
“Oooo…. okay I think the Liebermans can get behind that, I can already hear the taunts- frank and Karen sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-”
“Oh shut up would you, I wanna know what happened down there, she’s already been there a few hours,” he looked at the clock on her microwave before continuing, “about four hours now. I need to know, David.”
“Okay. I get it, I’ll let the troops know. Hopefully they won’t shoot the messenger, but I expect a full report mister, and you let me know if there’s anything I can do, for it?”
“Yeah, yeah. Let em know I’m sorry, okay?”
“Will do. See you around Frank.”
The line went dead and Frank sat with the coffee in his hand and the silence of her apartment surrounding him- suffocating him.