Crimson Joy (17 page)

"Gordon, don't you dare," his mother said.

"See?" Felton said. He was smiling slightly. "It's good you came here, Doctor. Now maybe you'll believe me about her."

I looked at Susan and made a very slight headshake. Susan was silent.

"Gordon, that's enough. If you're in some kind of trouble, I want to hear about it. And I don't want any more fresh talk."

Felton turned and looked at her slowly, his body motionless, only his head moving. He held the look.

"Aw, Ma," he said, "fuck you."

She rocked backwards as if the phrase were physical, all the blood drained from her face. She spoke in a whisper. "What?"

Felton stood up suddenly.

"Just fuck off, will you. You been saying how you stood on your fucking head for me all my fucking life and I don't want to hear it anymore. Dr.

Silverman knows. You stood me on my head. You didn't love me. You never loved anybody. You loved me when I did stuff you liked and didn't love me when I did stuff you didn't like, and none of it had any logic.

You frigid bitch, you ruined my life, that's what you did."

I felt like cheering, except it was too late. The short, happy life of Gordon Felton. His mother seemed not to have heard him.

"Gordon, you may not use that language in my house.

You'll have to leave. And you'll have to take your friends with you."

She sat very straight.

"Language?" Felton's smile had widened. "Language? You mean like 'fuck you'?" He stared at her. "You know what I've done?" he said.

"Gordon, I'm your mother. You do what I say."

"You know what I've done?" Felton said again. "You know the Red Rose killer?" His face was bursting with mirth and pleasure. His cheeks were flushed. "Huh? You know that guy, Ma? Guy ties up colored girls and shoots them in the snatch?"

Mrs. Felton turned and looked firmly at the inexpensive tole lamp at the end of the couch.

Felton threw his arms wide, his face alight with laughter. "Ma, that's me. I did that, Ma. How do you like them apples, huh, Ma? Your boy Gordon is famous."

His mother whirled around at him.

"Shush," she hissed. "You just shush, this minute. I don't want to hear another word. I have friends to think of. You don't care what you do to me, do you?"

"What I do to you, Blackie? I'm the fucking serial killer, Blackie, and you did it to me."

"Don't call your mother by her first name," she said.

"I refuse to listen." She resumed her examination of the lamp.

Felton stood with his arms apart, his chest heaving, the smile beginning to narrow. His mother gazed steadfastly at the lamp. He looked at her staring away from him and shook his head once. He looked at Susan.

"You?" he said.

Susan shook her head slowly.

Felton stared at her and his eyes slowly filled with tears. He shook his head again and shifted his wet gaze at me.

"So, Big Daddy," he said. "It's you and me."

"What's in the bag, Gordon?" I said.

His eyes dropped. He'd forgotten it. He looked back up at me.

"My stuff," he said.

His face remained teary, but it began to be shrewd.

"You got a warrant?" he said. His eyes began to move around the room.

I took my gun out from under my arm.

"Right here," I said.

Mrs. Felton saw the gun. Apparently she wasn't as fixated on the lamp as she looked.

"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph," she said.

I walked across the living room and picked up the gym bag from the floor between Felton's feet. I handed it to Susan. She unzipped it. "There's some duct tape, clothesline, and a revolver," she said, "and some of those sanitary gloves made out of saran wrap or whatever." I was looking at Felton. He stared back at me, the tears still muddling his eyes.

"Gotcha," I said.

Felton smiled faintly. He shrugged his shoulders. From the couch his mother hissed at him.

"Run."

He looked at her as if she'd appeared from the skies.

"Run, Gordon. We'll say they're lying. No one will know."

"Ma…"

"Run," she hissed. Her voice seemed hoarse, almost guttural.

"Run, run, run, run…"

"The gun will convict him, Mrs. Felton," I said.

"It won't. They don't have to know. They don't."

She stood up from the couch and walked to her son.

"Would you put me through this," she hissed. "For God's sake, run." She shoved herself suddenly between us. I put one hand on her shoulder. She slapped Felton in the face hard.

"Run, you rotten brat."

Felton gave her a look of such horror that it made my throat close. He whirled and dashed for the kitchen. His mother grabbed hold of my gun hand.

"Run," she screamed. "Run, run, run, run, run."

I shoved her out of the way and looked at Susan. She had her gun out too. Goddamn.

"I'll be fine," she said. "Get him."

I went out the back door after Felton.

Felton was across the drive when I rounded the corner. He went down the stairs to the beach. I jammed the gun back in the shoulder holster and snapped the safety strap as I went across the drive after him. When I reached the stairs he was a hundred yards up the beach toward Nahant. I settled into a fast jog on the damp sand. My goal was to keep him in sight.

The wind off the water was fresh and we were running into it. No world record today. The sand, as I ran, moved and reorganized under my feet and I could feel it in my shins. Felton gained a little on me. I was not perturbed. I knew I could run ten miles, maybe more, and I figured I'd outlast him. Ten miles from here and we'd be five miles out to sea.

I could feel the sweat begin to form inside my shirt. As I ran I slipped out of my Red Sox jacket and let it fall on the sand. A guy walking a German Shepherd stared at the gun in its shoulder holster.

The sand was tough. I was heavier than Felton and the more weight it bore, the more the sand shifted and turned as I ran. Ahead of me Felton seemed to float above it, his feet barely reaching down to touch the ground. I lumbered on, fighting the sand, feeling the heavy Colt slapping and bouncing against my rib cage under my left arm. Ahead the beach was interrupted by a mass of tumbled boulders. Felton went up onto the boulders, and started around the promontory. He was out of sight around it by the time I reached the first rock. It was massed with seaweed and barnacles. The whole tumble of rocks was a kind of rusty color and the edges had been rounded by the continuous washing of salt water. I was careful as I climbed among the rocks. It was low tide. At high tide most of the rocks were underwater. The seaweed was wet. Perfect for clambakes; as footing, less so. A wave bigger than the others broke against the rocks, and spray tingled down on me. I steadied myself as I rounded the point of the promontory. Barnacles scraped my hand. Another big wave broke. More salt spray. It was grand work, out in the fresh air, smelling the surf, exercising vigorously.

Ahead of me the beach returned. Felton had reached it and was hot-footing along it. He glanced back at me as I dropped off a boulder and hit the sand. Felton put it into another gear, sprinting, as the gap between us widened. If he could keep that up, he'd be gone soon. I was beginning to feel pretty good. My legs were loosening and the muscles in my chest and back began to soften a little as I ran, steadily, getting a little more used to the sand. I would have shin splints tomorrow, but right now the muscles were rocking easy in vernal heat.

Felton stumbled ahead of me. The sand was no help to him either. He looked back and saw me still there and put his head down and moved out even faster. Why he took the route was a puzzle. If he'd stayed on the sidewalk and sprinted up into the neighborhoods that rise from the shoreline, he would probably have lost me by now. He was at least 150 yards out ahead. On the other hand, sweet reason had not been the guiding force for Felton up to now, and there was no reason to expect that it would suddenly appear. He'd run, probably, like an animal, toward the open light. I felt the air going in and out in large, easy breaths, sharp with the smell of the ocean. I felt like a beer commercial. Chasing a murderous psychopath along the verge of the restless sea. It doesn't get any better than this, Gordie. Maybe when I caught him we could exchange high fives and look at beer without drinking it. Ahead of us another promontory, more boulders, a jutt;

Felton was still on my side of it. A good sign. Here the boulders reached higher up the seawall and those near the top were dry and clear of seaweed. I went up onto the boulders more easily this time. My rhythm was in synch. Higher, above the wet line, I jumped from boulder to boulder, moving only a little slower than I had running on the beach.

The big waves threw a little spray but most of it hit below me as the waves broke against the rocks. When we rounded the promontory and started down toward the beach again, Felton looked like he was starting to labor. He was scrambling on the rocks with hands and feet, and when he got close to the beach he half jumped and fell onto the sand. By the time I hit the beach, Felton was only seventy-five yards ahead and his pace had slowed. He turned again to look at me. I was picking up speed. And ahead a long, unbroken stretch of beach curved gradually along the seawall for a couple of miles at least. Better be in shape, Gordie. As I ran now there was a kind of music to it. Big wheel keep on turning. To my left the ocean stretched away into space with its illusion of empty freedom. Maybe Felton's last illusion as he fled along it. Infinitely open, and yet if we turned into it, we died. Proud Mary keep on burning. Ahead of me Felton stumbled and fell, sprawling forward on the sand. He was scrambling as he hit and was back up and running, but in the process he lost another ten yards and I kept pumping. Rolling on the seashore. Felton was running in a kind of rolling motion, heaving like a horse. His pace was uneven, and his arms were beginning to swing erratically. I closed to sixty yards. To fifty-five. To fifty. A half mile down the empty beach was the last promontory, surrounded by its jumble of sea washed boulders. Felton looked back at me again and looked to his right where the blank seawall cut him off from the street above. He hit a particularly soft spot in the sand and pitched forward, stumbling without falling. He looked back at me. His mouth was open and his chest was heaving. I could see him blowing his breath out like sprinters do when they get anaerobic. He almost stopped. Then he lunged ahead toward the rocks. By the time he reached them he'd widened the gap again by maybe five yards. He started up them. His arms and legs moved out of concert, as if they were separately controlled. He sprawled more than he climbed, scraping along the crusty rocks, heading not only up, but out, toward the sea. I was behind him, feeling almost airborne as I went up the rocks, flexible and elastic. The Amazing Spider Man. This was the highest cluster and the one that spilled farthest out into the water. Felton was laborious now, grappling over the rocks as he went seaward. He didn't look back. He seemed eminently intent on short-range goals. Get over this rock. Don't slip into that crevice. I came behind him. Slower now. Easy. He was no longer running away. I didn't know what he was doing, but he was going to a place where there was no other place to go. Another minute of gasping struggle and he made it. Whatever it was for him. He was surrounded on three sides by the sea, the tide on the way in, the water driven by the tide boiling among the boulders fifty feet below. He slumped against a big, flat boulder that had tilted, in another age, onto its side, so that its flat plane made an angle maybe 30 degrees off the vertical. His back was to the boulder, his legs braced wide in front of him, his arms by his sides, palms against the rock face. His breathing was harsh and desperate and complicated by the fact that he was crying.

I walked along the sloping top of the boulders with the wind blowing strong in my face. Herring gulls roosting in the rocks flared up and circled and settled back down a bit further away. Finally I was six feet from Felton and I stopped. His face was streaked with tears and sweat. He had scratched himself on the rocks and there was blood on his hands and forearms and a little on his face. No sound came from him other than the agonized harmony of his sobbing attempts to get his breath.

Riding above the other sounds, behind me, I could hear the high sound of sirens. Susan would have called the cops. It was a long way back, however. Out of the spray, off the rocks, on shore, where footing seemed more secure.

"Hello, hare," I said.

He looked at me and through me and beyond the rocks and shoreline. He was looking at things I'd never see, things maybe no one should have to see, and he gazed at them as his breath rasped in and out and the tears flowed down his face and his chest heaved.

"We gotta go," I said.

The sirens were still riding on the wind, but they were fewer, and already some of the police cars were on the park above the rocks, the blue lights turning, the radios making the flat noises police radios make. Mechanical voices speaking of life's darkest side. I didn't look. I knew what it looked like. I'd seen it too much, and seen lives driven into a corner too much, and done some of the driving too much.

"Shoot me," Felton gasped.

I shook my head.

"You know… what'll… happen me… in jail."

I nodded.

Felton looked down at the roiling water among the rocks.

"If… I jump… you… stop me?"

I shook my head. I looked down at the water.

"Should take you a while to die, though," I said.

Felton's breath was starting to come back. The crying hadn't stopped, but, because he could breathe a little easier, it didn't seem as frantic. He was looking at me now, his eyes a little more focused.

"I'm crazy, you know?" he said.

"Yes," I said.

"They'll put me in Bridgewater or someplace," he said. "They'll help me."

"Probably," I said. "I think they got seven hundred inmates and one shrink at Bridgewater. Might be a little different from the help you're used to."

The spray was kicking higher as the tide rose. I was damp with it. My hair was flat to my skull, my face was wet. My breathing was nearly normal and my heart rate was back under a hundred and I felt the easy passage of blood in my veins. Couple of cold beers would be grand right now, maybe a friendly chat with someone who hadn't murdered four women.