A Killer in the Wind (9 page)

I looked out through the slats of the blinds. We were on the second story. There was a courtyard below. Grass and paths and benches and a couple of small plane trees, leafless in the winter cold. No one was out there. Nothing was moving but a gray-brown squirrel. I pulled the string of the blinds and lifted them. I knew somehow the dead boy would be waiting—and there he was, small and frail and shivering beneath the naked branches of a tree. Gazing up at me, expressionless, with his large dark eyes.

“Were they girls and boys both?” I asked Monahan. “The bodies they found. Were they both girls and boys?”

“Yeah, both.”

“Any IDs.”

“We’re working on it.”

Alexander,
I thought. One of the dead children would be named Alexander.

“If you get any hits let me know,” I said over my shoulder—and when I looked out the window again, the courtyard below was empty. The emptiness had a feeling of finality to it.

I did not think I would see the ghost again.

After a while, Monahan left. I needed a doctor to give me release papers so I badgered the nurses until they sent one. He was a small, serious-looking Asian man named Lee. He held a clipboard in his hand. He had a round face and big glasses. He had no expression on his face, none whatsoever.

“You have any idea what it was you were taking?” he asked me.

I shook my head. “The dealer called it Z.”

“Zattera,” said Dr. Lee. “It was developed as an antianxiety medication but the FDA banned its ass because it makes you nutty as a brainless ape.” He said this deadpan. It was kind of comical. “Hallucinations, hyperaggression. Stuff’s not good for you, Detective.”

“No kidding.”

“Tell you what’s even worse: going off it cold. It’ll make you nuttier than the drug, plus you’ll puke your guts out. Taper off, say over the course of two weeks or so.”

“Right,” I said. But I was lying. I was never taking that crap again. Whatever cold turkey was like, I would get through it and be done.

“Have any good hallucinations?” asked Dr. Lee.

“I saw a ghost. A dead kid. He followed me around.”

“That’s pretty cool.”

“I don’t recommend it.”

“Wait till you try to quit. You’ll see things that look so real that reality will pale by comparison.”

“Can’t wait.”

“Like I said: Taper off it. Slow.”

“Right.”

“Right.” He studied his clipboard, expressionless. “I’d appreciate it if you could keep your mouth shut about this.”

“The drug?”

“I’ll lose my license if it comes out I’m covering for you.”

“Are you covering for me?”

“You killed a man in cold blood while doped out of your mind, Detective.”

“Yeah. So why are you covering for me?”

“Because you couldn’t have killed that son of a bitch dead enough to suit me.”

“Right. Thanks.”

“Also your friend Monahan asked me to and I’m afraid he’ll beat me up.”

“He is big, isn’t he?”

Dr. Lee nodded. He signed a page on his clipboard, tore it off, and handed it to me. “Give that to the front desk and they’ll set you free to do more damage to yourself and others.”

Something happened then. Just a small thing. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but it would come back to me. It was what I guess you’d call a sort of blackout. When I went to leave the hospital, I remembered walking past the reception desk, walking toward the doors. Then the next thing I knew, I was on the train headed back to the city. I didn’t know how I got to the train station. Walked, I guess. It wasn’t far. I didn’t know how much time had passed. Maybe half an hour. It was gone completely.

I shrugged it off. Just the drug, I figured.

Like I said, I didn’t think much about it at the time.

I made my way back to my apartment, the old place in Queens. I was on administrative leave until a grand jury could decide about the shooting. I wasn’t worried about that, though. The “House of Evil” was a big news story. There were pictures all over TV and the Internet. Child-sized corpses being carried in body bags from their forest graves. Fuzzy surveillance shots of the “Mystery Woman”—the Fat Woman—Aunt Jane. Long investigative portraits of Martin Emory, a Wall Street player and a serial killer who made a profit selling his victims to johns before he tortured them to death.

There was not a grand jury anywhere on the planet that was going to charge me with wrongdoing for having blown him away.

My only concern was to get that drug out of my system. I could still feel it working in me. It came in waves of mist and distortion. Weird little fits of distance. I kept catching glimpses of movements at the corners of my eyes. I tried not to turn toward them. I didn’t want to see whatever hallucination was standing there.

My place was on a residential street off the main boulevard. A gray two-story clapboard house with white trim around the windows. I lived on the second floor. The landlord lived below. Ed Morris, his name was. He was a cranky but basically decent old gramps who owned a couple of the houses on the street and spent his time complaining about the tenants.

I had a private entrance. A flight of white steps on the house’s side. I remember climbing the stairs heavily with a bag of groceries under one arm. I remember my apartment door swinging in. I remember stepping out of the gray day into a bleak and irascible darkness. The blinds in the apartment hadn’t been opened for days. Sandwich wrappers and beer cans were still on the low coffee table. I’d never gotten around to fully furnishing the place and it looked particularly empty and uninviting now, like a cheap motel room at the end of a long day’s ride. Nothing there but a TV and a sofa and the coffee table.

What else do I remember before the withdrawal hit full force? I flushed what was left of my supply of Z down the toilet, shaking the Baggie at the water even after it was empty—just in case I got tempted, I guess. I cleaned off the coffee table. I sat on the sofa. I cracked a fresh beer. I turned on the TV with the remote. Skipped past the video of bodies being brought out of the woods. The “House of Evil” surrounded by cops. “A noted psychiatrist says Emory may have been the victim of abuse himself . . .” A school snapshot of a smiling little girl, one of the victims who had been identified. I stopped on the sports channel. Stared at the screen and sipped my beer. I wondered if I’d pumped all five bullets into Emory at once or stood over him after he went down and planted the last two in his head more deliberately.

Well, there was no point getting sentimental about it. Monahan was right. The bastard deserved much worse.

It took about two hours for the real withdrawal horror show to get started. Once it was under way—Dr. Lee was right: It was pretty impressive.

The sportscaster on TV had just finished speculating about some off-season trade the Yankees were planning.

“If the Yanks don’t fill the holes in their roster, they could be looking at another long season,” he said. Then, he turned in his seat just slightly and looked directly at me. He said, “Aunt Jane is waiting for you, Champion. She’s waiting for you in hell. You’re going to burn down there with her forever.”

Well, that was kind of creepy—and it got worse. The sportscaster started spewing obscenities at me, a long, guttural rant of unbroken filth. He grinned and his eyes burned through the TV screen. The tirade went on and on and on a long time without commercial interruptions.

After a while, I found myself lying on the carpet at the base of the sofa. I was curled into a ball, clutching my midsection in pain. The sportscaster did a sizzling, staticky fade into the bowels of the machine. He was replaced by images of horror—images of the children Emory had tortured. I saw them tortured. I saw them killed.

“A noted psychiatrist says Satan may have been a victim of abuse himself,” the announcer said.

But at this point, I had other things to divert my attention. There were, for instance, the snakes and spiders covering every inch of the walls, oozing down and spreading over the carpet toward me like a twining, chittering stain. I writhed and screamed in agony and terror as they came toward me.

And oh yeah, Dr. Lee was right about the vomiting too. That also went on and on and on.

I wasn’t sure how much time had passed. I wasn’t sure whether it was night or day. It didn’t matter. I didn’t want to know. There was only one thing I wanted now. I wanted the strength to crawl to the door . . . to tumble down the outside stairs . . . to reach my motorcycle . . . to get to Harlem . . . to get to Janks . . . to get some more Z and make this agony stop.

I was in the process of clawing my way across the carpet to that end when I heard the knocking—or no: when I realized that I had been hearing a steady knocking for some time. I rolled halfway over and peered through a blood-colored haze at the door. I fought to focus. Yes. Someone was tapping, lightly tapping with a small fist—a woman’s fist, I thought.

“Hello?” A woman’s voice. Dim. Muffled through the door. “Hello? Can you hear me? Can you get to the door? Should I call an ambulance?”

No idea—no clue—how I found the strength to climb to my feet. As I did, the room seemed to plunge from the sky in a nauseating spiral. I fell through the air till I smacked against the door.

I managed to pull it open, staggering back from the effort. Staggering back against the couch and dropping down onto it, hard.

I sprawled there, clinging to the sofa back to hold myself at least partly upright. I stared at the doorway. It was day, as it turns out—bright day. The doorway was a tall bright rectangle of blue and white. The woman stood in silhouette in front of it.

“Oh, my God,” I heard her whisper.

She shut the door and came to me. Bent over me, put her hands on my shoulder, then quickly moved one hand to my forehead. That was my first good look at her. I don’t know if she was really as beautiful as she seemed to me at that moment. It was probably just that she was the first thing I had seen in I don’t know how long that wasn’t all cruelty and ugliness. I gazed at her. I was too racked with cramps and nausea to feel desire. I just gazed up in wonder at the sweetness of her face. She had a tumbling pile of auburn hair falling all around her high cheeks. She had red-gold cheeks dusted with light freckles. She had thin, prim, certain lips that suggested a fine, high virtue. She had large blue eyes so warm with compassion they were mesmerizing. Even through my own stench and the stench of the room, the smell of her reached me, fresh and clean. Her hand on my forehead was firm and cool and gentle.

“It’s all right,” she said. “Here, take it easy. Lie down.”

She helped me shift back farther onto the sofa so I could stretch out. I gave a cry as I saw the multilegged creatures crawling on the ceiling above us. I pointed at them to warn her they might drop down on top of us, fangs and all.

“No, no, no,” she murmured. “It’s all right. There’s nothing there. Close your eyes. Lie still.”

I lay still but I didn’t close my eyes. I didn’t want to stop looking at her. Her face was a consolation. I didn’t want to lose sight of it.

“I’m sick,” I murmured to her.

“I know. It’s going to be all right,” she said.

I think I must’ve fallen asleep as she sat hushing me, because at some point I jolted awake with a start, afraid she had gone, thinking she must have. But no, there she faithfully sat on the edge of the sofa. She had been wearing an overcoat before, I remembered, but it was off now, tossed over the sofa arm. She wore a skirt and a gray cotton blouse. Her hands were folded in her lap and she sat very still, looking down on me with concern.

“Who are you?” I said weakly.

“Samantha. From downstairs.”

“With Ed?”

“I’m staying with Ed. I heard you through the ceiling.”

“Sorry.”

She smiled and laid her hand on my forehead again, a gesture of almost intolerable kindness. “You were making quite a fuss.”

I ran my tongue around my thickened, rancid gums. I wanted to ask her how she knew Ed, what she was doing hanging around with old Ed. But all I could say was, “God, I’m sick. I’m so sick.”

“Well, no one could blame you. Anyone would be.”
What did she mean by that,
I wondered vaguely. She must’ve seen the confusion on my face. “Ed says you’re the detective they keep talking about on TV. The one who shot that monster. Going through something like that would make anyone sick.”

I closed my eyes. “I don’t remember. I mean, yes, I am the detective. But I don’t remember shooting him.” I forced my eyes open. I regretted closing them, all those seconds I had wasted not looking at her. “I was stoned on some kind of tranquilizers. Don’t tell anyone. It’s a secret.”

She smiled gently and pressed a finger to her lips.

“It was the only way I could stand to do it,” I told her.

“To shoot him?”

“No.” I laughed weakly. “I could’ve shot him straight. It was the only way I could stand to get in on him. To pretend . . .”

“Oh, to be one of his . . .”

“. . . customers.”

“Yes, that must have been awful.”