A Killer in the Wind (37 page)

“Why didn’t you come to me before?” I said, speaking carefully to keep the words from slurring. “Once you knew who I was, why didn’t you just come?”

“You know why,” she said. “I didn’t want to see . . . that look in your eyes. That look there now—the disappointment.”

“I’m not disappointed,” I lied.

She didn’t answer. She only smiled bitterly—and I realized: It was all that way with her. Bitterness and tears. It was that way with her all the time.

“After they found me in the river . . . when I woke up in the hospital, I just . . . I panicked. I started running again. And I kept running. Too afraid to try to contact you again. Too afraid to do anything except run and hide. Until I came here, the only place I could think of where they might not find me, and you might. And I just waited. I waited, thinking,
Danny will come. Danny will find me. Danny is so strong, Danny is so fast
. . .” She choked on the words and was silent.

I nodded. She’d made it happen too. Finally. After all these years. She’d left a trail for me and I’d found her.

“That’s it,” she said. “That’s everything.” And after a moment’s hesitation—a moment’s thought—she tapped the balcony railing twice with her two palms and said, “I’ve got to go, Danny. I’m gone.”

She moved abruptly into the billowing curtains.

I reached for her, took her arm. “No . . .”

But the fever rose in me again, much stronger, and she and the curtains and the night spun off sickeningly into a haze. She pulled from my grip easily. She went in through the doors.

“Samantha . . .”

I stumbled in after her. I was going dark fast, my legs weak under me. I clawed my way through the swirl of curtains. Pushed out of the night into the common room.

She was already moving toward the hall and its shadows. I tried to go after her. But the fever quickly got worse the moment I was in out of the fresh air. I felt the room growing smaller, the walls pressing in. I gripped the back of the sofa and held on, the room dipping and swaying around me.

“Samantha . . .”

She turned, a dim figure in the dying light. “I’m sorry, Danny. I really am.”

“Trust me. Let me keep you safe.”

“I can’t. I’m sorry. I’ll be safer on my own.”

“No . . .”

I saw her tilt her head. I saw her eyes glistening. “You’re so sweet, Danny. Brave—you’re still so brave. Like one of those knights in the stories I used to tell you. Really. Like one of those knights who married the princess, remember?” On the last word, her voice broke. “I wanted so much to be that girl. I was supposed to be, you know. They ruined me. They had no right, Danny. They had no right.”

“Don’t . . . don’t,” I said thickly. I tried to go to her, but I knew if I let go of the sofa, I would tumble down—down and down into unconsciousness. “Don’t cry, okay? I hate it when you cry.”

She laughed and sobbed at once. “Too bad. I cry a lot. As we see.” She started to fade from me as the shadows folded over her. I couldn’t tell if she was moving away or if I was sinking down into the deeper depths of my fever. “You go get them for me, Danny, all right?” she said. “You get them and make them pay. Get her, Danny. Stop her. Don’t let there be any more Alexanders. Remember him. Remember me.”

“Samantha . . .”

“Oh, Danny,” she said, her voice growing fainter and fainter, almost a whisper now. “Brave Danny. You’re still you. I wish so much I were still me.”

Then she was gone.

I took a step after her but that was all I had in me. The strength went out of my legs and they folded. I only just made it onto the sofa. I lay down there, the darkness deepening. Deepening . . .

Did she come back for me? At one point, I thought she did. At one point, I thought I saw her sitting above me. Looking down at me with those tender eyes. Drawing her cool hand over my forehead. Just like before. Just like I dreamed her when I was in withdrawal before. Just like Samantha . . .

I flashed awake in darkness. I sat up fast. I was weak and my head felt heavy, but my thoughts were clear. I knew where I was. I knew we had to move, had to get out . . .

I peered around me until the shapes of the common room showed themselves. It was the moon that did it, the light of the moon shining through the thin white curtains still dancing around the balcony doors.

“Samantha?” I said.

No answer.

I stood. I moved—too fast. I hit the table, stumbled, nearly fell. Then I put my hand out, felt my way through the deep shadows to the hallway. Moved down the hallway a few steps, away from the moonlight coming in from the balcony, into even deeper darkness.

The huge hospital stretched empty and silent all around me.

“Samantha!” I shouted. My voice died without an echo.

I knew she was gone.

I felt . . . too much to describe. Grief. Twisting, terrible grief. Frustration. Rage.

Fear. Fear that I had lost her this time forever.

I stared down the hall into pitch blackness. Only then did I remember . . . the name . . . She had given me the name . . . the address . . . The address about four hundred miles from here . . .

Well, that’s what I had come for, wasn’t it? That’s why she had led me here and that’s why I had come. For that name. For that address.

Go get them for me, Danny. Make them pay
.

My face set, hard, my lips pressed tight together. My hands balled into fists at my side. At least there was that, I thought—at least she had given me that before she left. At least, wherever she was, I could do what she wanted now. Get the Fat Woman. Make her pay. Make sure she wouldn’t hurt anyone else. Make sure Samantha didn’t have to be afraid of her and her hired killers anymore.

I could put an end to this—finish it for good this time.

I lifted my eyes into the emptiness and darkness.

“Bobbi-Ray Jagger,” I whispered.

15

The Fat Woman

A
NIGHT OF FEVERED
half-sleep in a nearby motel—then I drove all the next day. The fog of withdrawal was still thick in my mind and the ghosts were everywhere. There were dead children watching from the fields outside the car window. There was Stark suddenly sitting in the passenger seat beside me, and just as suddenly gone. There was Samantha like a mirage drifting in and out of sight on the road ahead or in the rearview mirror—following after me or drawing me on, as I knew now she always had.

Sometimes—when my mind really misted over—there were only eyes and half-seen faces, gazing at me through the haze. Once or twice, it got so bad I had to pull the car to the side of the road and go to sleep. After an hour or so, I’d wake up smelling smoke—in a panic until I remembered:
Oh yeah, the fire. A long time ago
. Then I kept on driving—through the ghost-world of my withdrawal—toward the place where I would finally meet those ghosts face-to-face, finally find the creature I’d been hunting all these years.

But the hunt was different now than it had been. Everything was different—and I knew that everything would be different for me from this time on. Before, I’d been propelled into pursuit by a darkness in the back of my mind I didn’t even know was there. Now I knew. Now I had found my past, nightmare that it was. I had uncovered . . . well, I won’t say the events that had made me who I was, because now that I remembered my childhood, I could see that, in fact, I had always been pretty much who I was. But I had uncovered the events that had given me the language of my obsessions. Alexander. The burning house. Aunt Jane. Samantha. The past had given names and faces to my fears and desires. And now my fears and desires led me back into the past.

Because I had to go back. There was no getting out of it. I still had to face the Fat Woman before this would finally be done. I didn’t know what I was going to do when I found her. Driving through the haunted landscape, I was still so heavy with grief—so hot with anger—at having found Samantha and lost her again, having found her and lost my dream of her, having seen what they made of her, what they turned her into . . .

They had no right, Danny. They had no right.

All I wanted was to rain unholy death on anyone who’d been responsible. Stark. His men. Bobbi-Ray Jagger. Unholy death.

But all that was up ahead and I didn’t know what it would be like, what I would do, what would happen. I just kept driving.

By nightfall, all the ghosts were gone. The last effects of the drug had worn off. My mind was finally clear again.

I drove through the dark. Down another winding forest road. Past deep watchful pines. Through thick moonlit mist. I searched for the address Samantha had given me. And there it was: another dirt drive by the side of the two-lane. It was hidden among conifer branches. I almost missed it.

I drove on a little ways. I found a place to pull over. I steered the Mustang under some trees, as far off the road as I could get. I killed the lights. Killed the engine. Got out of the car. The night was moist and cool. The mist was glowing under the high and gibbous moon. The woods were loud with the sound of frogs and crickets. As I walked back along the two-lane, I heard creatures scrambling away through the underbrush. I looked up ahead and back behind me. No lights. No houses. No cars passing on the road. I hadn’t seen one for the last half hour at least. Must’ve been miles away from everything out here. I guessed that was the way she liked it these days. Bobbi-Ray. Aunt Jane.

I reached the drive. I walked into the forest.

There’s no darkness like the darkness of the woods, like its heavy, hunkering blackness. I moved slowly, feeling my way. I had a small flashlight on my key chain. I used it sparingly. Flicked the beam on and quickly off to pick out the path, then edged on under cover of the night. Now and then the moon shone through the crowns of the trees. Even then, I couldn’t see much besides the brooding shapes all around me and the tangled meshwork of vines and branches silhouetted against the sky.

The path went on a long time. A long time. And all the while I was thinking:
They had no right, Danny. They had no right
.

I sensed the road turning. When I looked up—when I peered through the trees—I caught my first glimpse of the house lights ahead of me.

They had no right
.

I walked on.

I came to the end of the path, the edge of the woods. There was a broad grassy clearing. The house stood at the center of it.

I could see it clearly by the light of the moon. It didn’t look anything like the old house, the one with the tower, the one I burned. I realized now that I had half-expected to find that place, that old place, waiting for me, as if I really had walked back in time. But this was a big, broad, shingled, all-American country home, two stories and an attic beneath one of those cross-gable roofs. There was a balcony at one window on the second floor. A wraparound overhang above the first floor with pillars holding it up over the porch along the house’s side. A nice, comfortable, secluded place in the woods.

I stood still, watching it. The house was all but dark. There was only one light burning in one small second-story window. As I looked up at it, a shadow passed through the yellow glow. I felt my breath catch. Someone was in there. I felt a moment of unbridled childish dread—as if this were the old house, after all; as if I were still just a boy who might fall helplessly into Aunt Jane’s clutches . . .

Just then, another light went on—a pale outdoor light under the porch roof off to the right. The light cast a glow up over the house walls and gave the place a living, looming, waiting aspect. Or maybe that was my imagination.

Now there was a movement. A flashlight beam. I saw the watchman.

He was just stepping off the porch. The light there caught his face and I saw he was one of the two men who’d nearly blown my head off at the cabin up on the cliff. He was wearing a black suit and I could tell by the hang of it that there was a big pistol hiding beneath it, a real cannon of some kind tucked in a holster under his arm.

He held the powerful flashlight in his left hand, keeping his right hand free to draw the weapon. He shone the beam before him as he walked across the front of the house, moving toward where I was at the edge of the clearing. He passed the beam over the woods to my right, then moved it in my direction. His appearance had caught me off-guard and I froze right where I was. The light almost reached me before I reacted. But then, just before he saw me, I darted to the side of the path and dropped down on one knee behind a tree. The flashlight beam passed over the tree and on into the woods beyond without touching me. The watchman kept walking past the front of the house, searching the area, making his rounds.

He went by the front door and kept moving, scanning the dark with the flashlight. He reached the driveway on the far side of the house. He moved around the large black sedan that was parked under the carport there. He explored the carport with his flashlight. Then he kept going, on to the far side of the house. He stood there with his back to me and shone the light toward the trees in the rear.

I drew my gun. I started moving toward him.