Punctured

part vii:
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Jane thought she heard something . . . someone. But it wasn’t possible. The door was equipped with a lock and chain, as well as a no-entry deadbolt. She suspected she wasn’t the first criminal to occupy this room. Criminal . . . it’s what she was now, wasn’t it? No matter what happened next, nothing she could do or say would ever change that fact.

She ran into the bedroom and frantically searched for the remote. It was bolted down to a small end-table on the further side of the bed. Jane’s hands were trembling and she felt her heart beating in her head; it took her three tries just to get the power on. She flipped through the channels until one scene caught her eye.

The trembling stopped and she hardly breathed, seeing that place now.

When she saw the quiet desert road, the whole episode -she couldn't get herself to name it for what it was yet- became more surreal to her. Only television crews seemed to inhabit the piece of desert now. Jane sat at the end of the bed and turned up the volume manually.

. . . and one day after this horrific crime takes place, Mike, I stand just a few feet from the very spot where Richard Onge was discovered with seven bullet wounds in his body. Mr. Onge had been a Canadian citizen for nearly two decades and lived a quiet life, I am told, in Buffalo, Alberta.

The dead man’s brother, who we now believe was meant to be a stop on Mr. Onge’s itinerary, resides in the foothills of Western Montana. It took several hours to locate him due to the non-existent phone lines in the vicinity of the man's home, somewhere outside of Ronan. What made it even harder yet, Mike, is that Matthew goes by the name Onger, though both brothers were born Onge.

Matthew has been kind enough to speak with us this morning. Thank you, Matthew. This has to be an absolutely excruciating time for you, and we won’t keep you long, but I was . . .

As the brother came into view, Jane was unable to process what she was seeing on the fifteen inch screen . . .
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