The Unusual Suspect
People always say that heat makes everybody more irritable. Tempers go hand in hand with the temperature, and the hotter the heat, the easier it is for people to blow up. Growing up in Arizona, I lived in a little county called La Paz. I only ever left the state twice in all my 18 years before graduating high school, so I was used to the heat. My parents, however, had moved to Arizona before I was born. For me, I was born in the fire, so it was all that I had known. For Mom and Dad, they lived way up North, in places like Minnesota and Wisconsin, so the heat hit them like a bullet. In hindsight, I never knew why they stayed, or why they tolerated the scorching weather, or why they moved there in the first place. I never blinked twice about the heat. So, as anyone would expect, the summers were near torture for some. If people weren’t out swimming in the lakes, staying inside air conditioned buildings, or flying out to vacation spots, they would usually lounge around and tan. The family that lived next door did just that, only they liked to drink tea.           The Phillips family were a snobby group of people, and I hated the whole damn bunch of them growing up, and they hated my family just as much. Ironically, we never gave them any reason to show any disdain towards us.  Their favorite thing to do besides drink tea was to yell at children anywhere nearby their house. The wife, Allison, had a particular knack for phrases along the lines of, “rotten,” “dirty,” and simple one word insults. The husband on the other hand, Bill, was more of a longer insult kind of guy, his all-time favorite being “good-for-nothing.”   I didn’t know why, as I never did anything to harm them, but their favorite child to pick on was me. It was bad. They had threatened me on numerous occasions, and they only stopped when my dad, who was the town Sheriff, threatened them with legal charges. From that point on, they usually left me alone.         
             Then the day came when my parents were on their way home from a party, celebrating Dad’s promotion at work. They had too much to drink that night, and no one tried to stop them from driving home. I got a call that night at around 10:00, asking me to come into the hospital. Coming from an officer family, I knew all about the dangers of drinking and driving, and in the pit of my stomach I knew what had happened. But, since I didn’t have my own car, I went to ask the Phillips family for help. I was desperate. When I had gotten to their house and told them what was going on, Allison laughed, and Bill spat on me and slammed the door in my face.   That was the day I decided what would become of the Phillips family. I ended up walking to the hospital, some 20 miles away, and got there just before midnight. Turns out both Mom and Dad died sometime around 11:30. The doctor told me there was nothing I could’ve done, but I know he was just saying that. If it weren’t for the monsters next door, I just knew that somehow, I could have saved my parents.   
            This all happened in the middle of May. School was just getting out, so I had a whole summer ahead of me to figure this all out. It wasn’t the easiest thing to do, I had to make a lot of calls to a lot of people I trust, and it was even harder finding people who would be willing to be an accomplice to a crime. I spent months planning everything out, and I finally was able to convince a friend to help out. He had access to boats, and he knew people that could get you any kind of drug in existence. After thinking up every possible scenario with the police, and any other kind of legal issues as far as witnesses go, we finally set the date.

        On August 21, 2013, I should have been arrested for murder. That morning, somewhere between 2:00 and 3:30, I snuck into the Phillips house and drugged their cups of tea with a couple doses of Rohypnol. At that point, all I needed to do was to get out, and wait.
          Of course, I didn’t sleep, and a few hours later, the sun was high and the sky, and the Phillips family made their way outside to drink their tea. I watched from inside my window, and as they took a couple swigs, they slowly began to droop. They were falling asleep. Two drinks later, they were completely passed out. I then made sure to pack up all of the equipment in my car, and drove it in front of their house.
           I wasn’t exactly worried about anybody seeing me, as in the past few months I talked to all of the neighbors, and they were all out of town, out of state, or out at work. I was in the clear.
          Once the car was parked, I got out and picked up the couple, and one at a time, I placed them in the back seat. Afterward, I went and folded up their chairs, stored them in the trunk, and drove. 
           I drove all the way down to the border, by the Colorado River, and got to work. The sun was starting to set, and by the time I got there, only a few people were still in the area. I knew I couldn’t let the monsters wake up, so every hour and a half I gave them a dose of a sedative. Just to make sure. Finally, night had fallen, and the whole place was deserted. My partner had been able to get me a boat, and I was relieved to see that it was docked and ready to go. I put on a pair of gloves, loaded the Phillips, the chairs, and the ropes onto the boat, and went to the middle of the River.
          Once I stopped the boat, I sat them down in their chairs, tied them down to it, and woke them up.  Their eyes opened up, and the last thing they saw was me dumping them into the depths.                 
            The most satisfying part? Nothing compares to the look on the face of a sheep entering the world of wolves.        
              In the nights after I had sent the Phillips back to hell, I was only asked a few times about the disappearance. I simply said, “I have no idea,” and it worked.      Two years later, I had graduated high school and joined the county police force, just like my father. I thought it would be a nice way to honor his memory. One day, in the spring, the station got an odd call. There was an anonymous tip about someone finding skeletons at the bottom of the Colorado River, strapped down to lawn chairs. When I got the news, my stomach lurched. I offered to the chief to go out and investigate it, and he let me. I spent the entire car ride over trying to think about a way to cover this up. By the time I made it back to the river, I had nothing. Once I pulled into a parking spot, I rented a boat, and set out to the same spot I had been two years prior. Once I made it to the middle of the river, I set out some gear, and I dove, searching for the remains of the devils. It didn’t take long to find them however, and once I did, I felt happy again. There they were, sitting on their lawn chairs, the skeletons of the two people in the world I had hated the most: the skeletons of the monsters that murdered my parents. I cleared them out, knowing that no one would ever find them again, and rose to the surface. I made my way back to the shore, dried off, and called the chief.  
           The phone rang twice.
“Hello?”
“Hey Chief it’s me.”
“Ah, Grayson, good. So? The skeletons in the river? What’s the story on them?”
       I laughed, “I’ve got some good news. They’re fake.”
They say that in everyone’s life, there’s always one moment where time stands still. This was that moment.
         “Fake? Well, that’s a relief.”