Tales of Ricky #6

Ricky pulled into his driveway and parked his truck under the carport. It rained so infrequently here in California that the carport was mainly used to keep the sun off and the temperature down during the day. It was dark now after a late dinner at Carson's Roadhouse, and it would still be dark when he left for work the next morning.

He shut the truck's driver side door and walked slowly along the stone-paved walkway toward his front door. Usually, he went in the side door, but he hadn't grabbed his mail in three or four days and so went to the front. The mailbox was nearly empty still. It only held a few adds for lawn care services, or dentists, or roofers all looking to get a bit of business from someone new in town. It had been almost a year, but in a community like this, five years might still be "new." Ricky held the junk mail in his left hand and pulled open the screen door with his right. It creaked as he opened it. "That'll need replacing before too long, too," he thought with an audible sigh. And then he stopped dead, his right hand now on the doorknob of his red front door.

There was a note attached to his front door. It sat between the two panes of frosted glass just above eye level held on by a single piece of transparent tape. It read "HI RICKY!" He stared at it, transfixed. His mind whirred but no distinct thoughts reached consciousness. Fighting his intuition, he grabbed the note from the door and entered his house. He never locked the doors. He'd never needed to.

He set the mail and the note down on the little entryway table he'd found at a yard sale a few months ago. When he turned on the living room light, he saw that the furniture had barely been moved from where it was, but it had been moved. The couch was an inch or two too far away from the wall, the coffee table was slightly askew. Someone had been in here.

His first thought was that it was some nut with a shotgun that knocked on his door. "And if I were at home, they'd find me there," he said aloud. House unlocked, they could just walk right in, bang bang bang. But that made no sense. Those kinds of random crimes didn't happen here on the Santa Barbara coast. Ever. And it wasn't a robbery as far as Ricky could tell. Nothing of value appeared to be missing.

Then he remembered the note, and the truth hit him in the gut like a prizefighters right hook. The note had called him "RICKY," but all the mail he received was addressed to Carl P. Shillins. No one here knew him as Ricky. His neighbors, his boss, his few new acquaintances, they all called him Carl. The only people who knew him as Ricky were far, far away, he hoped. Or gone, too many of them gone.

"Oh my god," he said. "They found me. I don't know how, but they found me."