Excerpt from Three Strikes and You're In Prologue

by: John R. Phythyon, Jr.

Jack wasn’t dead before his car hit the tree, but it didn’t matter. In a way, it was better. After all, I’d only wanted to scare him to death. The fact that he died in a spectacular car crash made it all the more amusing – to say nothing of the fact that it would present a little mystery for the coroner.

His heart was already in the throes of its death struggle when he left the office after having read my letter. He wasn’t supposed to go home for another two hours, but he desperately wanted to get away from me – as if that was possible; you can’t run from a ghost. He must have thought that I was just haunting him at the college. He should have known I’d been watching him for much longer than that.

He felt that familiar pain in his chest – the one brought on by years of abuse – that had signaled his heart attack two years ago. You don’t get a pass this time, Jack.

I decided to give him a little help. He had the radio on, and Jim Morrison was belting out “Break on Through.” I made a few alterations.

“Break on through to the other side,” Morrison sang. “Today’s the day Jack Gordon’s gonna die.”

Predictably, the pain in his chest got worse. He reached for the dash to switch off the tormenting sound and felt his left arm going numb. The car swerved, and he was forced to put his right arm back on the wheel to right it. The music played on.

It was getting hard for him to concentrate. It was tough following the road. He didn’t pull over, though. He didn’t call for help on his cell phone. Like all cowards, he just kept running. Time, I thought, to let him know there was no escape.

I materialized in the passenger seat. He god-damned near crashed the car right then.

“Hiya, Jack,” I said. “Looks like Vietnam finally caught up with you.”

He tried to speak, but his heart was giving him too much pain now. It was all he could do to keep breathing.

“Took me a long time, but I found you, you chicken-shit son of a bitch,” I went on. “Time for you to break on through to the other side. Time for forty years of running to come to an end.”

Jack’s face was flushed. He was sweating. His eyes bulged as he tried not to believe what he was seeing.

“How,” he gasped.

“You got your boy to thank for that one,” I said with a smile. “Good old Al brought us together, although he doesn’t know it yet. He will, though. That’s the next big bang, Jack. I’m finished with you. Now I’m going after Al. You’re dead Jack. In a few weeks, your eldest son will be too.”

That was all his poor, overtaxed heart could take. When he heard I was going to kill Al next, it burst on him. The world went black, and he slumped over the steering wheel. The Mercedes veered off the road and hit that tree. I sat with him the whole way there. After all, a ghost can’t be killed in a car crash, and I didn’t want to miss one glorious moment of it.

I vanished after that, but I hung around for awhile after he died. I watched the whole messy clean up, and no one knew I was there. I just quietly savored a job well done. Jack Gordon was dead. After all these years some justice had finally been executed. Now I could turn my eyes on his son.