Michael was doing what he was always doing on a Thursday night. He was seated comfortably in his armchair in the living room watching his favourite TV show, is home-made spaghetti Bolognese on his lap, and a cold beer on the table next to him. Mike was one of those guys, a creature of habit. Living alone for 3 years does that to you, I guess. Every weekday evening he would come home from work at somewhere between 5:30 and 6 pm, say hello to his cat Pontius, who didn’t seem to care whether he came home or not. But then all cats are like that aren’t they? While life as a single guy sometimes had its drawbacks he had to admit that not only was he getting used to it but he kind of liked it a lot. Mike and his wife had separated all those years ago, they had no children, and she had disappeared to another state with her gentleman friend and left him a house and all the possessions with nary a word.
Tonight was no different to any other night of the week apart from a different TV show and a different meal. The weather outside had deteriorated since he had arrived home and it had started raining, and the wind had risen. Pontius, the cat, was asleep next to him on the sofa and Mike was feeling pretty relaxed while being totally immersed in the TV show. Suddenly there was a knock on the door, not loud, just a couple of short soft taps. As Mike rarely got visitors particularly at this time of night, he didn’t really believe that he had actually heard the noise as being a knock on the door. He thought to himself that if he was hearing things, there would be nobody there, and if there really was somebody there, they would knock again.
Sure enough, after only about 20 seconds, the little soft taps started again. Mike placed his half-eaten spaghetti on the table next to him, groaned and grunted and cursed under his breath wondering just who would be knocking on his door at this time of night. The cat raised its head and raised a whisker over one eye and watched as his master slowly plodded towards the front door. When Mike got to the door, he turned the safety latch and shouted, “Who’s there?” as he opened the door just a few inches to see who had been knocking. He was rather surprised to see absolutely nobody standing there! With another mutter and a curse, he slammed the door shut, closed the latch, and wandered back to his armchair scratching his head and thinking to himself that he must be hearing things. Maybe it was the wind which by now had become a lot stronger.
He had no sooner sat down and reach for his bowl of spaghetti when there was a knock again at the front door! Thinking it might be the neighbourhood kids (although what they would be doing out on a night like this didn’t bear thinking about), he jumped up and almost ran to the door, unlatching and swinging it wide open, about to shout a curse but there was nobody there! With the door wide ajar, Mike stepped outside to look around. With the rain coming down heavily and the wind now blowing a gale he couldn’t see anybody or hardly anything.
Just at that moment he heard the window at the back of his house being smashed and the sound of glass hitting the laundry floor. Now, a little frightened, Mike raced around to the back, through the living room, the kitchen, down the hallway a bit and opened the laundry door. The window was broken, the class was on the floor, but there was nobody there trying to get in. The common sense thing to do at this point in time was to call the police. A little scared now, Mike closed the laundry door and went back into the living room to get his mobile phone. He could hear the rain and the wind coming through the open front door, and again Mike cursed himself for forgetting to shut it in his hurry to get to the back of the house and the laundry.
Walking to the front door, he noticed wet footprints on the floor and immediately he knew he had made a mistake. By this stage, Mike was feeling rather terrified, but he still walked to the front door, closed it, latched it and walked back to the living room knowing in the back of his mind that something not really nice was about to happen. As he entered the room, he saw a man relatively well wet through from being outside in the weather, sitting on the other armchair with Mike’s beer in his hand. His annoyance at seeing the stranger drinking his beer was overcome by the fact that this stranger held a gun in his other hand. The gun was pointed unerringly at Mike.
“And who the hell are you?” asked Mike nervously.
“Just because you think it’s an ingenious plan don’t think you’re going to get away with it,” said the stranger.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about and just who are you?”
“I’m the guy that your wife has been living with for the past three years. You know, the one you two set up in your little plan that would strip me of all my possessions. Now that she owns everything of mine she says she’s coming back to you just as you had planned. She told me you two had been plotting this for quite some time before she met me. I was your mark. I was your easy road to riches.”
“Mister, I have no idea what you are talking about, and I haven’t seen or spoken to my wife since the day she walked out of here. She always was a very devious woman, and she’s sold you a story that really has no truth to it.”
Mike could see that the guy was completely out of his mind, and all he could think of was how was he going to get out of the situation. They say that when people find themselves in a perilous predicament, they have two choices, fight or flight. While it was stupid, Mike could only think of the fact that it was pouring rain and blowing a gale outside and all he had on was a pair of socks and a T-shirt. So flight may have been an option that could have saved him, but he decided the other way. As he lunged towards the man seated in the armchair his only hope was that the gun would misfire.
It didn’t.
As Mike lay on the floor slowly bleeding to death, and as the darkness enveloped him, his mind was still able to register the sound of a police siren in the distance. He also thought that it was rather strange that the police were coming when he knew he hadn’t rung them.
Anita was screaming at the police, “Hurry! Hurry! They are both in there. I heard a shot! Please hurry!”
She had pulled it off. Her husband was dead. The house was hers. Her boyfriend would go to jail for life. All he owned would be hers. The only thing left for her to do was to find a good home for that stupid cat!
