The Truth Will Outwit
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Get down!”
Daniel shoved me into a bush alongside the sidewalk. From my awkward position in the shrub I watched as he scrambled forward and then bobbed his head, peeking twice over the bushes at rooftops before rising slowly to his feet. He came back and offered his hand. I grinned and accepted his help.
“Did he just shove you in that bush?” Another student had come up behind us.
I turned my grin to her. “Yes, he did. I’m used to it.”
She gave me a look that spoke volumes and walked on. If you spent any time with Daniel you got used to such looks.
I turned back to Daniel. “Snipers again?”
“Yes.”
I dusted myself off. “And you shoved me because…”
“They dinna like witnesses.”
“I didn’t hear any shots.”
“Any assassin worth his pay would use a silencer on campus.”
“And the bullets?”
He thought about that for a moment, looking around, and then pointed to the flowerbed opposite the bushes. “If they took a shot, the bullets are buried a foot deep in that loose soil. Dig them out if you want a souvenir, but they might not have fired…”
“Really?”
“I saw them soon enough…” He finished the sentence mumbling to himself and frowning at the flowerbed.
I also looked at the flowerbed, which had been freshly tilled, and then back at Daniel. For a moment he looked serious, and then his face broke into a smile.
“You don’t believe a word I’ve said, do you Sebastian?” It was more of a statement than a question.
I shook my head. “I admit that once again you’ve got it all the angles covered. You should write this stuff down.”
“I do,” he said. We turned and continued across campus. “Every Facebook note I post is an incident report. Not that my superiors read them. They left me for dead a long time ago.”
“You write nonsense. I think the title of your last note was ‘For Service Information Please Hold Your Breath.’ It was humorous, at times insightful, but it was no incident report.”
He cut me a look that was halfway between a smirk and pity. I rolled my eyes.
“It’s all in code right?”
“See, you do understand. Remember, the journey of a thousand miles can end very badly.”
“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” I lamented. ”Must you screw up every idiom known to man?”
He grinned and slapped me on the shoulder as we parted ways; I headed for Smurthwaite and he turned towards the Haymaker dorms. “I’ll see you back at Smith House. We’ve got Chinese to finish.”
That was sometime in May 2007, second semester of our freshman year, and a classic example of my roommate Daniel Kohman. He was living a spy novel for the amusement of his friends and, more importantly I think, for his own gratification. His world was his own, and he enjoyed it in spite of the fact that he complained about it all the time.
“If you knew what I went through in a typical day, you’d run screaming into the night,” he was fond of saying. I thought that was all there was to the statement, and I had known him more than a year before I heard the second half.
One night late in October of 2007, our sophomore year at K-State, he staggered into our room reeking of alcohol.
“What’s the matter with you?” I turned in my desk chair.
“Man, I hate alcohol.” He flopped on the couch. “Obviously I’m drunk.”
“How much did you have?”
He closed his eyes. “Way more than my nonexistent alcohol tolerance can handle.”
“Why?” I asked flatly. I could not imagine what his answer would be; he hated alcohol with a passion. Which was right in character; he never got drunk on the logic that the moment he was would be the moment he needed full possession of his wits.
“Got poisoned. The antidote is alcohol,” he unsuccessfully tried to sit up and flopped back again. “Man, I hate alcohol.”
Alcohol as an antidote. How ridiculous. But Daniel was still telling stories and using words like nonexistent and antidote, so I assumed he was in no danger. I offered him a bottle of water but he batted it away.
“You need to drink.”
“Later.”
“Who gave you alcohol?” Though it was not much of a hindrance in a college town, Daniel was only nineteen.
“I ssstole it from some party near Aggieville.”
“What were you doing in Aggieville?”
“Looking for alcohol.” He was being difficult.
“Why?”
“Because I got poisoned. They sstuck… stuck me right in the arm.”
I pulled up the sleeve of his shirt. On the inside of his arm, just below the elbow was an angry red mark. My eyes widened.
“You were shooting up?”
His eyes drifted open and attempted to fix on me. “Do I act drunk or do I act high?”
“Drunk,” I admitted. With him it would be hard to tell, I thought. And I had virtually no experience dealing with someone on drugs, let alone drunks.
He dug his cell phone out of his pocket and glared at the screen trying to figure something out before tossing it to me.
“How long since 8 o’clock?”
“Six hours.”
Daniel held out his hand. “Give me the water.”
I handed it to him. “Why did you wait?”
“I had to give the alcohol time to work. Got stuck at 8 o’clock, evaded pursuers, and obtained alcohol at 8:30.”
I chuckled; he sounded like a police report. He had put a lot of effort into coming up with this alibi. As drunk as he was I was surprised he could remember it so well.
He drained the water bottle. “If I was going to die, I would have keeled over by now.”
With a tremendous sigh he lay back and closed his eyes. Idly I opened his text messages and found a new one from Madeline, Daniel’s current crush. I opened it: wat did U think of nathan?
“Who’s Nathan?” I asked him.
His reaction startled me. For the first time that night he seemed fully alert and his eyes bored into mine.
“Nathan Hartman?”
This was the first time I heard the name Hartman.
“Is that the Nathan that Madeline would be asking your opinion on?”
He took a moment to work that out and then relief showed on his face for an instant, followed by misery, and then feigned indifference. “Oh, no, that’s Commodore.”
“Oh, that Nathan. Gosh, I’ve never hear him called anything but Commodore.”
“Madeline is the only who calls him Nathan. He’ll be Madeline’s boyfriend as soon as he get’s up the nerve to ask.”
“Lucky guy.”
“Yea…” The misery flickered across Daniel’s face. “Lucky guy.”
Now his drinking made sense. Daniel, however, refused to give up his fiction and rambled on as he fought a losing battle with sleep.
“They almost got me this time. He missed my side and stuck my arm…” He groaned. “Oh, bugger he didn’t miss, did he?” He made quotation marks with his fingers. “‘Died of an overdose.’ I canna imagine there would be much investigation into that…”
He sighed. “If you knew what I went through in a typical day, you’d run screaming into the night… and if you knew what my nights are like, you’d come running right back.”
His eyes drifted shut and his breathing became regular. I covered him with a blanket and left the room, taking his phone with me. I called Madeline, who was glad to hear that Daniel was safe at home.
“Nathan and I saw him in Aggieville a little after 8.”
“Was he drunk?”
“Daniel? Drunk?” She laughed, “No, but he must have been in a hurry. He wouldn’t even come in to Radina’s to say hi to everyone.”
Now that was unusual. Daniel frequented Radina’s coffee shop, not for the coffee or even as a place to study, but because he liked the type of girl that studied in trendy coffee shops.
“Why didn’t he text me back?” Madeline’s question was genuine.
“He probably just missed it; he’s always complaining that he doesn’t feel his phone when it vibrates.”
If at that time she suspected his heartbreak it was unlikely that she would have taken it seriously. Like every classic spy Daniel liked women, attracting the attention of many and loving on them all, though I never knew him to sleep with anyone. His favorite was the one he had his arm around when you asked. He was protective of his girl friends, of girls in general. The K-State Collegian bore witness to that the very first month of freshman year, August of 2006.
When I showed him the article he nearly tore his stitches and ripped off his oxygen tube before he fell back on the hospital bed, wheezing and cursing his collapsed lung. A Collegian reporter had been at Silverado’s, a smoky bar frequented by soldiers from Fort Riley and Hispanic blue collars, for that Thursday night’s Latino dancing. The article was entitled “Chivalry Wounded Not Dead.” According to the article, a woman at Silverado’s had been shoved, and when Daniel got grabbed for trying to intervene he smashed the offender’s nose five or six times more than was strictly necessary before he got stabbed by the man’s friend. The reporter wrote that what happened next was a blur, but the man with the knife joined his friend on the floor, his jaw smashed. The knife was still in Daniel’s back when he left the dance floor.
While they waited for the cops and the ambulance the reporter had snagged a quote from Daniel as he talked to his date.
“‘It would have been more impressive if we’d finished the dance,’ he said between gasping breaths.”
“That’s not quite what happened,” he told me after reading the article, “After the idiot shoved the lady I stepped up to him and told him to leave her alone. He said no problem, he was done with her, and then asked how my girl was in bed. That’s when I hit him.”
Daniel was charged with one count of assault and battery, which was dropped when all the eyewitness accounts matched the collegian article. Daniel made no effort to correct them. From then on he had to check in with the manager at Silverado’s before he went dancing and the editorial became the prologue for his spy novel. Every time we went to Aggieville he would lament getting stabbed and chide himself for not anticipating the second man.
“That’s how they found me you know. From the article, and the hospital record, and the police report they pieced it all together.”
“They” had been chasing him ever since and though we heard him complain about it frequently it never got boring. The way he spun everything into a plot against his person was simply genius. We mocked him for it constantly and it only fueled his fervor.
“The truth will outwit you.” Eventually, everyone but me gave up correcting his misspoken turns of phrase. His truth had many versions, but during the two years I knew him a few facts remained constant and a semblance of a plot emerged.
For starters, he claimed to be a bit more than human; something had occurred that gave him foresight to an unreliable extent. It had conveniently failed when he got stabbed at Silverado’s.
He told of drug dealing, betting, gun running, and being a gun for higher, but the result was always the same: “They” had taken notice. What he did in their service was wide ranging and involved a high body count. “Been there, done that, a lot of people died,” was the one catchphrase that Daniel overused.
Soon either rivals or the DEA took notice and he began playing both sides for copious amounts of cash. How he wound up at K-State he never tried explaining, but he was operating alone now.
“The last time I heard from anyone I was told that Hartman had been sent after me. I pay through the nose for information now.”
From the very first time he called his antagonist Hartman he never changed the name. Hartman was behind every imagined attempt on Daniel’s life. It was nearing Christmas break 2007 when Daniel sprained his wrist after throwing himself over the low stone wall that borders campus on the east side. His reason: the approaching UPS delivery truck was driven by Hartman. Later that day, feeling immensely foolish, I actually Googled “Hartman and Daniel Kohman.” To my surprise the search returned a number of news articles much like this one:
-----
“Tractor Trailer Runs Jeep Off The Road and Into The Missourri River.”
Driver Survives Vehicle’s Plunge into the Missourri, Passenger’s Body Lost.
Nathan Hartman, 18, and Daniel Kohman, 18, were on their way home from Liberty,
MO on Friday, April 14, 2006 when a tractor trailer broad-sided their Jeep Cherokee and sent the vehicle plunging off a bridge into the Missouri River.
Daniel Kohman, who was driving, managed to escape the vehicle, and suffered only moderate head trauma. The search continues for Nathan Hartman, assumed dead…
full story
-----
Daniel just stared quietly at the screen when I asked him about it and showed him the article. Finally he shrugged and left the house without saying a word. He did not answer till the day after when I asked him again. He hardly looked up from his homework as he spun his tale.
“Hartman wasn’t in the vehicle. He transferred into my high school to work with me. When things started to go sour he needed an out. We set it up, took a trip, parted ways and I drove off the bridge. I liked him, he was a decent fellow.”
This was a new depth to Daniel’s madness, and it got worse as it went on.
“He’s actually why it all went sour. He ratted me out to them–”
“The DEA?”
“No, the Cartel.” Calling ‘them’ a Cartel was a new development because of Hartman’s involvement in the story I guessed. “The DEA never cared what I did as long as I gave a name or two every month.”
Daniel sat back in his chair and dug out his wallet. “Hartman switched sides, DEA to Cartel. I didna realize that till too late.”
He opened his wallet, pulled a picture out from behind his driver’s license, and handed it to me. It was a senior portrait, the face in the picture was not much younger than we were, with spiky blond hair, and bright eyes above a pointed nose and hint of a smile. On the back of the picture was written, “To my partner in crime. If they knew what we went through…,” and signed Nathan Hartman, Senior ‘06.
I looked from the picture to Daniel and back again. Despite the stark contrast between Hartman’s fine features and Daniel’s sterner look and dark hair, the smiles were the same, the glint in their eyes told me these two would have been the closest of friends.
“Tough to lose a friend like that,” I said, laying the picture down on the table.
“With an enemy like that, who needs friends?” Daniel said and went back to work. At least that one was only backwards. I knew I had touched a nerve and decided to let it slide.
Daniel was less dramatic after that. Only twice during the 2008 spring semester did he make up a story. Once when he left in the middle of a thunderstorm and returned soaking wet he complained that his contact never showed up, and three weeks before school ended he disappeared for an entire day on “recon,” which he described as successful, but useless.
The day after that I found out the nature of his reconnaissance. He called me at about three in the afternoon.
“Hey, you busy?”
“Not really. Where have you been all day?” I asked.
“Poking around. Can you pick me up at Haymaker?”
“Just walk. It’s a nice day–” A fit of coughing cut me off. I held the phone away from my ear for a moment.
“Geez, are you okay?”
“No, I’ve been shot,” he snapped, “Please come get me before the cops do.”
I grumbled for a second to dead air. I had homework and he was playing games again.
I called him from the parking lot and he insisted I come inside and meet him on the stairs. I found him sitting on the landing between the third and fourth floor, slumped in the corner.
“What the deal, Daniel?”
He started to answer but began to cough. Not until he moved his hand to cover his mouth did I see the bright red stain on his side. When he got his coughing under control he smiled at me.
“Close your mouth, you look more surprised than you ought to. Go check on Madeline. Room 415, that’s the corridor on the right as you exit the stairs.”
I could only stare at him in shock.
“Go! I already called the ambulance.”
Slowly I came out of my shock, then I gave him a look. “Did you?”
“Would you find out if Madeline is okay before I bleed out?” he roared, and then he was wracked by another spasm of coughing.
I went, only to be confronted with a second terrible scene. A man in a UPS delivery uniform lay facedown in his own blood just inside the stairwell door. Daniel must have heard me stop on the steps.
“He’s dead, just go!” he called up at me.
To get to Madeline I had to push past several other students crowding around her door. She and her roommate sat on the room’s futon, faces tear streaked and frightened. Her roommate looked up, with her cell phone to her ear, and told me to get out. When I said Daniel had sent me Madeline looked frightened.
“Why? Where is he now?... What’s going on?!”
“He’s sitting downstairs,” I lied. “I don’t know what going on, what happened?”
“He tried to kill Madeline!” Her roommate’s eyes flashed. “He’s freaking insane!”
She went back to speaking into her phone.
“The man who attacked us. We think he’s still in the building…”
At least someone had called the authorities, I thought. I focused my attention back on Madeline who was a bit calmer.
“He called and as soon as I answered he said, ‘Please tell me Commodore isn’t there.’ He talked like he was running, all out of breath. I said Nathan was on his way and asked how he knew. ‘Call Commodore and tell him to turn around,’ he said, ‘I’m one floor down from you. Don’t open the door till I call you back.” He hung up just as there was a knock on our door. I got up to answer it. I heard shouts, I think it was Daniel yelling at Nathan, and two shots came through the door. I don’t know what happened out there. We weren’t hurt but…”
She slumped back onto the futon.
“He must have found out about Nathan. If I’d just chosen one or the other –”
My eyes widened. “One or the other? Daniel said Commodore was your boyfriend! You’ve been... gah! Daniel’s bleeding to death two floors down, is there an ambulance on the way?”
Madeline’s roommate nodded.
As I went back down the stairs I could not drag my eyes from the dead UPS man, and once past him I had to watch my step to avoid slipping on blood stains.
“Is she okay?” Daniel asked.
I could only nod in reply. I sat down on the stair facing him, cradling my head in my hands as I tried to take it all in and sort it all out. Madeline has been playing Daniel, Daniel found out. Surely he would never…
My thoughts were interrupted by hurried footsteps coming up the stairs. I looked up as Daniel produced a gun from behind his back.
When Nathan Commodore rounded the corner and saw Daniel he stopped short and put his hands in the air.
“Whoa, it’s me man!”
Daniel relaxed and lowered the gun.
Commodore’s face twisted in anger, “What have you done, Daniel? If you’ve hurt her so help me–.”
“She’s fine, no thanks to you,” Daniel coughed. “When I got the news that ‘Nathan had an eye out for Madeline’ I thought it was you.”
“I didn’t know either man–”
Daniel interrupted by pointing the gun at Commodore. “Don’t lie to a dying man. Go get Madeline out of the building.”
Commodore blanched visibly and hurried past me up the stairs. The gun dropped from Daniel’s hand and clattered on the concrete. I let my head drop back into my hands. I could feel Daniel’s eyes on me.
“What happened, Daniel?” I asked without looking up.
His laugh was weak and pained. “Do you want the truth or a story?”
I could not believe his impudence. “I don’t think I want the truth.”
“A story then….,” he thought for a moment, “We’ll go with the classic they set up: I’m madly in love with Madeline. She played me for months, and when I found out about Commodore I snapped. I opened fire on the UPS man who just happened to be packing, something no one will understand but they’ll all be very grateful for his bravery–”
“Stop. Just stop.” I could not listen to another word. Even as he outlined the scenario he denied it.
He was only silent for a moment, and then he spoke in a rush. “I’m sorry, Sebastian. I canna tell you how sorry I am. They drew me out, made me choose. It was die trying to save her or go to jail for killing her. I got hit coming out of the stairwell, it threw off my aim, and I put two in the door and one in that traitor. I retreated…” He grimaced. “Sorry, there I lie. I fell down these stairs. I finished him off…” His eyelids fluttered. “…before he realized I had gone down instead of up for the height advantage–”
“Why are you lying about this?” I was infuriated.
Again he laughed, but it was terribly weak. “Because hope has sprung a leak.”
I didn’t even chuckle, “Hope springs eternal, you idiot.”
“No,” his voice was a whisper, “I said what I meant. Later… later you can say I lied because I was past caring.”
“Why would you shoot the UPS man?”
When he failed to answer I looked up at him. His eyes were closed and his head slumped forward. I went to him and felt for a pulse. Nothing. On the ground beside Daniel I found his wallet and the picture of Nathan Hartman. It was crumpled and smeared with blood. I wondered if Daniel had pulled it out to say goodbye to his friend one last time. Without thinking I took the picture with me.
I walked down the steps and out the building in a daze. Police cars arrived as I exited, and the first policeman out of his vehicle caught me by the arm.
“What’s going on in there? Do you know what’s going on in there?” he asked as he frisked me.
I found words. “He’s dead.”
“Who’s dead, son? The shooter?”
I nodded. “In the stairwell.”
He waved the rest of the policemen on into the building and took me to the ambulance where I was quickly checked for injuries. I was wrapped in a blanket and instructed to stay put by the ambulance. The police cleared the building slowly. I was questioned at one point and I told them I knew the shooter. They kept a policeman by me after that.
Finally, after hours of waiting, the paramedics were allowed to retrieve the bodies. As they rolled out the first one I was called over.
“We need you to identify your friend.”
I looked away as they unzipped the bag. Steeling myself I looked at him. Relief and horror mixed inside me as I realized I was looking at the UPS man.
“That’s not…” I stopped, staring at the man’s face and the name on his shirt. My mouth moved, but I could not get sound past my lips.
“Son, is that your friend?”
I shook my head. “That’s not Daniel.”
They rolled the gurney away and it was soon followed by the second. This time I did not look away when they unzipped it. Daniel was almost smiling, as if he knew what I had seen and was laughing at me.
“That’s him, Daniel Kohman.”
I was given a week off of school and I spent most of it at home, reading and watching news coverage of the shooting. The media ran profiles of both victims. The picture they showed most often of Daniel was not very flattering, but every time they showed a picture of the UPS man I leaned closer to the TV, looking back and forth between the screen and the bloodstained senior portrait in my hand. The UPS man had brown hair and his features were not so sharp as Nathan Hartman’s were in his senior picture. Maybe Daniel rubbed off on me, but the more I looked the more I was convinced that the smiles were the same, and the glint in his eyes told me that Daniel could have been the closest of friends with the heroic UPS man. A man named Nate Harkman.
"Get down!”
Daniel shoved me into a bush alongside the sidewalk. From my awkward position in the shrub I watched as he scrambled forward and then bobbed his head, peeking twice over the bushes at rooftops before rising slowly to his feet. He came back and offered his hand. I grinned and accepted his help.
“Did he just shove you in that bush?” Another student had come up behind us.
I turned my grin to her. “Yes, he did. I’m used to it.”
She gave me a look that spoke volumes and walked on. If you spent any time with Daniel you got used to such looks.
I turned back to Daniel. “Snipers again?”
“Yes.”
I dusted myself off. “And you shoved me because…”
“They dinna like witnesses.”
“I didn’t hear any shots.”
“Any assassin worth his pay would use a silencer on campus.”
“And the bullets?”
He thought about that for a moment, looking around, and then pointed to the flowerbed opposite the bushes. “If they took a shot, the bullets are buried a foot deep in that loose soil. Dig them out if you want a souvenir, but they might not have fired…”
“Really?”
“I saw them soon enough…” He finished the sentence mumbling to himself and frowning at the flowerbed.
I also looked at the flowerbed, which had been freshly tilled, and then back at Daniel. For a moment he looked serious, and then his face broke into a smile.
“You don’t believe a word I’ve said, do you Sebastian?” It was more of a statement than a question.
I shook my head. “I admit that once again you’ve got it all the angles covered. You should write this stuff down.”
“I do,” he said. We turned and continued across campus. “Every Facebook note I post is an incident report. Not that my superiors read them. They left me for dead a long time ago.”
“You write nonsense. I think the title of your last note was ‘For Service Information Please Hold Your Breath.’ It was humorous, at times insightful, but it was no incident report.”
He cut me a look that was halfway between a smirk and pity. I rolled my eyes.
“It’s all in code right?”
“See, you do understand. Remember, the journey of a thousand miles can end very badly.”
“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” I lamented. ”Must you screw up every idiom known to man?”
He grinned and slapped me on the shoulder as we parted ways; I headed for Smurthwaite and he turned towards the Haymaker dorms. “I’ll see you back at Smith House. We’ve got Chinese to finish.”
That was sometime in May 2007, second semester of our freshman year, and a classic example of my roommate Daniel Kohman. He was living a spy novel for the amusement of his friends and, more importantly I think, for his own gratification. His world was his own, and he enjoyed it in spite of the fact that he complained about it all the time.
“If you knew what I went through in a typical day, you’d run screaming into the night,” he was fond of saying. I thought that was all there was to the statement, and I had known him more than a year before I heard the second half.
One night late in October of 2007, our sophomore year at K-State, he staggered into our room reeking of alcohol.
“What’s the matter with you?” I turned in my desk chair.
“Man, I hate alcohol.” He flopped on the couch. “Obviously I’m drunk.”
“How much did you have?”
He closed his eyes. “Way more than my nonexistent alcohol tolerance can handle.”
“Why?” I asked flatly. I could not imagine what his answer would be; he hated alcohol with a passion. Which was right in character; he never got drunk on the logic that the moment he was would be the moment he needed full possession of his wits.
“Got poisoned. The antidote is alcohol,” he unsuccessfully tried to sit up and flopped back again. “Man, I hate alcohol.”
Alcohol as an antidote. How ridiculous. But Daniel was still telling stories and using words like nonexistent and antidote, so I assumed he was in no danger. I offered him a bottle of water but he batted it away.
“You need to drink.”
“Later.”
“Who gave you alcohol?” Though it was not much of a hindrance in a college town, Daniel was only nineteen.
“I ssstole it from some party near Aggieville.”
“What were you doing in Aggieville?”
“Looking for alcohol.” He was being difficult.
“Why?”
“Because I got poisoned. They sstuck… stuck me right in the arm.”
I pulled up the sleeve of his shirt. On the inside of his arm, just below the elbow was an angry red mark. My eyes widened.
“You were shooting up?”
His eyes drifted open and attempted to fix on me. “Do I act drunk or do I act high?”
“Drunk,” I admitted. With him it would be hard to tell, I thought. And I had virtually no experience dealing with someone on drugs, let alone drunks.
He dug his cell phone out of his pocket and glared at the screen trying to figure something out before tossing it to me.
“How long since 8 o’clock?”
“Six hours.”
Daniel held out his hand. “Give me the water.”
I handed it to him. “Why did you wait?”
“I had to give the alcohol time to work. Got stuck at 8 o’clock, evaded pursuers, and obtained alcohol at 8:30.”
I chuckled; he sounded like a police report. He had put a lot of effort into coming up with this alibi. As drunk as he was I was surprised he could remember it so well.
He drained the water bottle. “If I was going to die, I would have keeled over by now.”
With a tremendous sigh he lay back and closed his eyes. Idly I opened his text messages and found a new one from Madeline, Daniel’s current crush. I opened it: wat did U think of nathan?
“Who’s Nathan?” I asked him.
His reaction startled me. For the first time that night he seemed fully alert and his eyes bored into mine.
“Nathan Hartman?”
This was the first time I heard the name Hartman.
“Is that the Nathan that Madeline would be asking your opinion on?”
He took a moment to work that out and then relief showed on his face for an instant, followed by misery, and then feigned indifference. “Oh, no, that’s Commodore.”
“Oh, that Nathan. Gosh, I’ve never hear him called anything but Commodore.”
“Madeline is the only who calls him Nathan. He’ll be Madeline’s boyfriend as soon as he get’s up the nerve to ask.”
“Lucky guy.”
“Yea…” The misery flickered across Daniel’s face. “Lucky guy.”
Now his drinking made sense. Daniel, however, refused to give up his fiction and rambled on as he fought a losing battle with sleep.
“They almost got me this time. He missed my side and stuck my arm…” He groaned. “Oh, bugger he didn’t miss, did he?” He made quotation marks with his fingers. “‘Died of an overdose.’ I canna imagine there would be much investigation into that…”
He sighed. “If you knew what I went through in a typical day, you’d run screaming into the night… and if you knew what my nights are like, you’d come running right back.”
His eyes drifted shut and his breathing became regular. I covered him with a blanket and left the room, taking his phone with me. I called Madeline, who was glad to hear that Daniel was safe at home.
“Nathan and I saw him in Aggieville a little after 8.”
“Was he drunk?”
“Daniel? Drunk?” She laughed, “No, but he must have been in a hurry. He wouldn’t even come in to Radina’s to say hi to everyone.”
Now that was unusual. Daniel frequented Radina’s coffee shop, not for the coffee or even as a place to study, but because he liked the type of girl that studied in trendy coffee shops.
“Why didn’t he text me back?” Madeline’s question was genuine.
“He probably just missed it; he’s always complaining that he doesn’t feel his phone when it vibrates.”
If at that time she suspected his heartbreak it was unlikely that she would have taken it seriously. Like every classic spy Daniel liked women, attracting the attention of many and loving on them all, though I never knew him to sleep with anyone. His favorite was the one he had his arm around when you asked. He was protective of his girl friends, of girls in general. The K-State Collegian bore witness to that the very first month of freshman year, August of 2006.
When I showed him the article he nearly tore his stitches and ripped off his oxygen tube before he fell back on the hospital bed, wheezing and cursing his collapsed lung. A Collegian reporter had been at Silverado’s, a smoky bar frequented by soldiers from Fort Riley and Hispanic blue collars, for that Thursday night’s Latino dancing. The article was entitled “Chivalry Wounded Not Dead.” According to the article, a woman at Silverado’s had been shoved, and when Daniel got grabbed for trying to intervene he smashed the offender’s nose five or six times more than was strictly necessary before he got stabbed by the man’s friend. The reporter wrote that what happened next was a blur, but the man with the knife joined his friend on the floor, his jaw smashed. The knife was still in Daniel’s back when he left the dance floor.
While they waited for the cops and the ambulance the reporter had snagged a quote from Daniel as he talked to his date.
“‘It would have been more impressive if we’d finished the dance,’ he said between gasping breaths.”
“That’s not quite what happened,” he told me after reading the article, “After the idiot shoved the lady I stepped up to him and told him to leave her alone. He said no problem, he was done with her, and then asked how my girl was in bed. That’s when I hit him.”
Daniel was charged with one count of assault and battery, which was dropped when all the eyewitness accounts matched the collegian article. Daniel made no effort to correct them. From then on he had to check in with the manager at Silverado’s before he went dancing and the editorial became the prologue for his spy novel. Every time we went to Aggieville he would lament getting stabbed and chide himself for not anticipating the second man.
“That’s how they found me you know. From the article, and the hospital record, and the police report they pieced it all together.”
“They” had been chasing him ever since and though we heard him complain about it frequently it never got boring. The way he spun everything into a plot against his person was simply genius. We mocked him for it constantly and it only fueled his fervor.
“The truth will outwit you.” Eventually, everyone but me gave up correcting his misspoken turns of phrase. His truth had many versions, but during the two years I knew him a few facts remained constant and a semblance of a plot emerged.
For starters, he claimed to be a bit more than human; something had occurred that gave him foresight to an unreliable extent. It had conveniently failed when he got stabbed at Silverado’s.
He told of drug dealing, betting, gun running, and being a gun for higher, but the result was always the same: “They” had taken notice. What he did in their service was wide ranging and involved a high body count. “Been there, done that, a lot of people died,” was the one catchphrase that Daniel overused.
Soon either rivals or the DEA took notice and he began playing both sides for copious amounts of cash. How he wound up at K-State he never tried explaining, but he was operating alone now.
“The last time I heard from anyone I was told that Hartman had been sent after me. I pay through the nose for information now.”
From the very first time he called his antagonist Hartman he never changed the name. Hartman was behind every imagined attempt on Daniel’s life. It was nearing Christmas break 2007 when Daniel sprained his wrist after throwing himself over the low stone wall that borders campus on the east side. His reason: the approaching UPS delivery truck was driven by Hartman. Later that day, feeling immensely foolish, I actually Googled “Hartman and Daniel Kohman.” To my surprise the search returned a number of news articles much like this one:
-----
“Tractor Trailer Runs Jeep Off The Road and Into The Missourri River.”
Driver Survives Vehicle’s Plunge into the Missourri, Passenger’s Body Lost.
Nathan Hartman, 18, and Daniel Kohman, 18, were on their way home from Liberty,
MO on Friday, April 14, 2006 when a tractor trailer broad-sided their Jeep Cherokee and sent the vehicle plunging off a bridge into the Missouri River.
Daniel Kohman, who was driving, managed to escape the vehicle, and suffered only moderate head trauma. The search continues for Nathan Hartman, assumed dead…
full story
-----
Daniel just stared quietly at the screen when I asked him about it and showed him the article. Finally he shrugged and left the house without saying a word. He did not answer till the day after when I asked him again. He hardly looked up from his homework as he spun his tale.
“Hartman wasn’t in the vehicle. He transferred into my high school to work with me. When things started to go sour he needed an out. We set it up, took a trip, parted ways and I drove off the bridge. I liked him, he was a decent fellow.”
This was a new depth to Daniel’s madness, and it got worse as it went on.
“He’s actually why it all went sour. He ratted me out to them–”
“The DEA?”
“No, the Cartel.” Calling ‘them’ a Cartel was a new development because of Hartman’s involvement in the story I guessed. “The DEA never cared what I did as long as I gave a name or two every month.”
Daniel sat back in his chair and dug out his wallet. “Hartman switched sides, DEA to Cartel. I didna realize that till too late.”
He opened his wallet, pulled a picture out from behind his driver’s license, and handed it to me. It was a senior portrait, the face in the picture was not much younger than we were, with spiky blond hair, and bright eyes above a pointed nose and hint of a smile. On the back of the picture was written, “To my partner in crime. If they knew what we went through…,” and signed Nathan Hartman, Senior ‘06.
I looked from the picture to Daniel and back again. Despite the stark contrast between Hartman’s fine features and Daniel’s sterner look and dark hair, the smiles were the same, the glint in their eyes told me these two would have been the closest of friends.
“Tough to lose a friend like that,” I said, laying the picture down on the table.
“With an enemy like that, who needs friends?” Daniel said and went back to work. At least that one was only backwards. I knew I had touched a nerve and decided to let it slide.
Daniel was less dramatic after that. Only twice during the 2008 spring semester did he make up a story. Once when he left in the middle of a thunderstorm and returned soaking wet he complained that his contact never showed up, and three weeks before school ended he disappeared for an entire day on “recon,” which he described as successful, but useless.
The day after that I found out the nature of his reconnaissance. He called me at about three in the afternoon.
“Hey, you busy?”
“Not really. Where have you been all day?” I asked.
“Poking around. Can you pick me up at Haymaker?”
“Just walk. It’s a nice day–” A fit of coughing cut me off. I held the phone away from my ear for a moment.
“Geez, are you okay?”
“No, I’ve been shot,” he snapped, “Please come get me before the cops do.”
I grumbled for a second to dead air. I had homework and he was playing games again.
I called him from the parking lot and he insisted I come inside and meet him on the stairs. I found him sitting on the landing between the third and fourth floor, slumped in the corner.
“What the deal, Daniel?”
He started to answer but began to cough. Not until he moved his hand to cover his mouth did I see the bright red stain on his side. When he got his coughing under control he smiled at me.
“Close your mouth, you look more surprised than you ought to. Go check on Madeline. Room 415, that’s the corridor on the right as you exit the stairs.”
I could only stare at him in shock.
“Go! I already called the ambulance.”
Slowly I came out of my shock, then I gave him a look. “Did you?”
“Would you find out if Madeline is okay before I bleed out?” he roared, and then he was wracked by another spasm of coughing.
I went, only to be confronted with a second terrible scene. A man in a UPS delivery uniform lay facedown in his own blood just inside the stairwell door. Daniel must have heard me stop on the steps.
“He’s dead, just go!” he called up at me.
To get to Madeline I had to push past several other students crowding around her door. She and her roommate sat on the room’s futon, faces tear streaked and frightened. Her roommate looked up, with her cell phone to her ear, and told me to get out. When I said Daniel had sent me Madeline looked frightened.
“Why? Where is he now?... What’s going on?!”
“He’s sitting downstairs,” I lied. “I don’t know what going on, what happened?”
“He tried to kill Madeline!” Her roommate’s eyes flashed. “He’s freaking insane!”
She went back to speaking into her phone.
“The man who attacked us. We think he’s still in the building…”
At least someone had called the authorities, I thought. I focused my attention back on Madeline who was a bit calmer.
“He called and as soon as I answered he said, ‘Please tell me Commodore isn’t there.’ He talked like he was running, all out of breath. I said Nathan was on his way and asked how he knew. ‘Call Commodore and tell him to turn around,’ he said, ‘I’m one floor down from you. Don’t open the door till I call you back.” He hung up just as there was a knock on our door. I got up to answer it. I heard shouts, I think it was Daniel yelling at Nathan, and two shots came through the door. I don’t know what happened out there. We weren’t hurt but…”
She slumped back onto the futon.
“He must have found out about Nathan. If I’d just chosen one or the other –”
My eyes widened. “One or the other? Daniel said Commodore was your boyfriend! You’ve been... gah! Daniel’s bleeding to death two floors down, is there an ambulance on the way?”
Madeline’s roommate nodded.
As I went back down the stairs I could not drag my eyes from the dead UPS man, and once past him I had to watch my step to avoid slipping on blood stains.
“Is she okay?” Daniel asked.
I could only nod in reply. I sat down on the stair facing him, cradling my head in my hands as I tried to take it all in and sort it all out. Madeline has been playing Daniel, Daniel found out. Surely he would never…
My thoughts were interrupted by hurried footsteps coming up the stairs. I looked up as Daniel produced a gun from behind his back.
When Nathan Commodore rounded the corner and saw Daniel he stopped short and put his hands in the air.
“Whoa, it’s me man!”
Daniel relaxed and lowered the gun.
Commodore’s face twisted in anger, “What have you done, Daniel? If you’ve hurt her so help me–.”
“She’s fine, no thanks to you,” Daniel coughed. “When I got the news that ‘Nathan had an eye out for Madeline’ I thought it was you.”
“I didn’t know either man–”
Daniel interrupted by pointing the gun at Commodore. “Don’t lie to a dying man. Go get Madeline out of the building.”
Commodore blanched visibly and hurried past me up the stairs. The gun dropped from Daniel’s hand and clattered on the concrete. I let my head drop back into my hands. I could feel Daniel’s eyes on me.
“What happened, Daniel?” I asked without looking up.
His laugh was weak and pained. “Do you want the truth or a story?”
I could not believe his impudence. “I don’t think I want the truth.”
“A story then….,” he thought for a moment, “We’ll go with the classic they set up: I’m madly in love with Madeline. She played me for months, and when I found out about Commodore I snapped. I opened fire on the UPS man who just happened to be packing, something no one will understand but they’ll all be very grateful for his bravery–”
“Stop. Just stop.” I could not listen to another word. Even as he outlined the scenario he denied it.
He was only silent for a moment, and then he spoke in a rush. “I’m sorry, Sebastian. I canna tell you how sorry I am. They drew me out, made me choose. It was die trying to save her or go to jail for killing her. I got hit coming out of the stairwell, it threw off my aim, and I put two in the door and one in that traitor. I retreated…” He grimaced. “Sorry, there I lie. I fell down these stairs. I finished him off…” His eyelids fluttered. “…before he realized I had gone down instead of up for the height advantage–”
“Why are you lying about this?” I was infuriated.
Again he laughed, but it was terribly weak. “Because hope has sprung a leak.”
I didn’t even chuckle, “Hope springs eternal, you idiot.”
“No,” his voice was a whisper, “I said what I meant. Later… later you can say I lied because I was past caring.”
“Why would you shoot the UPS man?”
When he failed to answer I looked up at him. His eyes were closed and his head slumped forward. I went to him and felt for a pulse. Nothing. On the ground beside Daniel I found his wallet and the picture of Nathan Hartman. It was crumpled and smeared with blood. I wondered if Daniel had pulled it out to say goodbye to his friend one last time. Without thinking I took the picture with me.
I walked down the steps and out the building in a daze. Police cars arrived as I exited, and the first policeman out of his vehicle caught me by the arm.
“What’s going on in there? Do you know what’s going on in there?” he asked as he frisked me.
I found words. “He’s dead.”
“Who’s dead, son? The shooter?”
I nodded. “In the stairwell.”
He waved the rest of the policemen on into the building and took me to the ambulance where I was quickly checked for injuries. I was wrapped in a blanket and instructed to stay put by the ambulance. The police cleared the building slowly. I was questioned at one point and I told them I knew the shooter. They kept a policeman by me after that.
Finally, after hours of waiting, the paramedics were allowed to retrieve the bodies. As they rolled out the first one I was called over.
“We need you to identify your friend.”
I looked away as they unzipped the bag. Steeling myself I looked at him. Relief and horror mixed inside me as I realized I was looking at the UPS man.
“That’s not…” I stopped, staring at the man’s face and the name on his shirt. My mouth moved, but I could not get sound past my lips.
“Son, is that your friend?”
I shook my head. “That’s not Daniel.”
They rolled the gurney away and it was soon followed by the second. This time I did not look away when they unzipped it. Daniel was almost smiling, as if he knew what I had seen and was laughing at me.
“That’s him, Daniel Kohman.”
I was given a week off of school and I spent most of it at home, reading and watching news coverage of the shooting. The media ran profiles of both victims. The picture they showed most often of Daniel was not very flattering, but every time they showed a picture of the UPS man I leaned closer to the TV, looking back and forth between the screen and the bloodstained senior portrait in my hand. The UPS man had brown hair and his features were not so sharp as Nathan Hartman’s were in his senior picture. Maybe Daniel rubbed off on me, but the more I looked the more I was convinced that the smiles were the same, and the glint in his eyes told me that Daniel could have been the closest of friends with the heroic UPS man. A man named Nate Harkman.