Gingerbread Man (42 page)

“I’m fine.” As soon as she said it her knees
bent a little, and he had to snap an arm around her waist to keep
her upright.

“Whoa. Okay, that’s it, you’re going to the
E.R.”

“I really don’t have time, I—”

“Ambulance is already here,” Mason said.

“Like I said, I don’t have time.”

He gave the paramedics a wave. “Over here,
boys.” Then he turned to her again. “Just go get checked out. I
won’t be able to work all day if I don’t know you made sure you’re
okay.”

“Oh, well, I wouldn’t want to mess up
your
day. And mine’s pretty much fucked anyway.” She clapped
a hand over her mouth, and he saw those blue eyes widen behind the
crooked glasses.

The lady had a temper.

Just as quickly, he saw her face change. It
was like she put on a Halloween mask. Only backwards. In this case,
the wicked witch was the one
behind
the disguise.

“So you’re a detective?” she asked, as if
she’d only just heard that part of his partner’s spiel. Her voice
was a half octave higher, softer, her attitude polite instead of
pissed, as if she wasn’t
really
just aching to kick him in
the balls for hitting her.

“Yeah.”
And I see right through you,
he thought.
You wouldn’t give a damn what you said to me if you
didn’t know I was a cop. And that makes me wonder why it
matters.
“Here come the paramedics. Hey, Reno.”

“Hey, Mason.” Reno, an EMT Mason had known
for three years, took her other arm and led her to the back of the
ambulance. She handed Reno her bag and her stick, gripped the rail,
found the step without a single miss, and pulled herself up and in
as Mason watched her, thinking she was really good at being blind.
And then thinking what a dumb-ass thought that was.

No wonder she was on the bitchy side. He
would probably be a bear if he were in her shoes.

“Look, I’ll see how you’re doing later,
okay?” He wasn’t quite able to walk away just yet. “I need to take
care of things here, get that car out of the road, free up the
traffic, climb the paperwork mountain. But I’ll check in on
you.”

“No need. I’m not going to sue you.”

That’s what they all say,
he thought.
Right before they call a lawyer.
That was one headache he
didn’t need. “I’ll see you later, okay?”

She settled onto the gurney, still sitting
up. “All right. Actually, there’s something I’d like to talk to you
about, anyway.” Sweet smile, flung at him without warning. He
hadn’t been expecting it, so its impact was stronger than it should
have been. “Maybe…maybe this little accident was
supposed
to
happen.”

Huh? What the hell did
that
mean?

He stood there puzzling on that after the
ambulance doors closed, until Rosie came over and clapped a hand on
his shoulder. “She’s way better-looking in person than on her book
jackets, isn’t she?”

“I wouldn’t know, having never seen one. Who
the hell is she, anyway?” They started back toward Mason’s car.
There were uniforms out in the street taking photos, another one
stopping traffic to let the ambulance pull out.

“Self-help author. Big celeb. On TV a lot.
Preaches nonviolence, happy happy joy joy shit. You know, like
Marlayna’s so into. Positive energy. Love your enemy and raise your
vibe. What you get in life is always your own doing and all that.
How can you not have heard of her?”

“Like
you
would have if not for your
better half, pal? We’re not exactly
vibing
on her level, are
we now?”

Rosie grinned. “Guess not, bein’ as we been
up to our necks in bloodless crime scenes and MPDs lately.”

Missing, presumed dead. Twelve so far. Not a
single body yet, though. But back to the blind chick. “Did you hear
what she said to me, just before they closed the doors, Rosie?”
Rosie shook his head. “She said maybe this accident was
supposed
to happen. What do you think she meant by
that?”

“Shoot, I don’t know. I said I know who she
is, not that I’m a true believer. I’ll ask Marlayna, though. She
might have an idea.”

“Yeah, you do that.”

Mason’s phone chirped just then, and he
pulled it out and looked at the screen.

His big brother Eric’s face—he looked fifty
but was only thirty-eight—popped up beside the text message icon.
He clicked through, and the message read: Take care of Marie &
the boys.

What the hell?

“I gotta go.” Mason turned toward the car,
moving on autopilot, then stopping. “Shit, I need a car.” He
couldn’t move his until he got the okay.

“What’s up?” Rosie unsnapped his key ring
from his belt and held it out.

“Don’t know. Eric’s at my place, showed up in
the wee hours and wouldn’t talk to me. He had a fight with Marie or
something.” He looked at the text again as he took the keys, a cold
chill going up his spine. “Thanks, pal.”

“Holler if you need me, Mace.”

Mason gave a nod and headed around the corner
to the parking lot behind the Binghamton P.D. Rosie’s yellow Hummer
stood out just like its owner, the only black detective in a mostly
white police department, so he didn’t have to look for it.

There was a sick feeling in his stomach as he
drove the oversized toolbox out into traffic. He was worried about
his brother.

Nothing new there. Worrying about Eric had
become the Brown family pastime. Habit, he guessed. He told himself
that there was probably nothing wrong. Maybe Eric was quoting a
line from one of those damn grim poems he was always reading,
scaring the hell out of Mason for nothing.

But he didn’t think so.

* * *

ERIC CONROY BROWN had gone straight to work
after dumping the body, worked the entire day and then headed home
late last night just like he always did after the rat had been fed
and had crawled back into its hole, leaving him to clean up the
mess. It made him feel normal to lie in bed beside his wife and
pretend he wasn’t a monster. He knew he was, though. The rat was
him. No matter how hard he tried to convince himself it was some
other being, some demon possessing him, some evil other personality
trying to force its way to the fore, it was him. He was the rat,
which was probably why he couldn’t get it to shut up and stay
inside, much less kill it.

This time, however, home had provided no
solace.

Marie had been angry, waiting at the door
with one hand at the small of her back and the other on top of her
basketball-sized belly. “Why didn’t you come home last night?
Honestly, Eric, I told you yesterday morning that the boys would be
home from camp and I was making a welcome-home dinner.”

He blinked. The boys. Baseball camp. They’d
been gone all summer. Hell. “I’m sorry. I got busy at work
and—”

“You left your cell phone home. Again. I
called the garage three times last night.”

“You know the garage phone switches over to
the service at five whether we stay late or not. This guy needed
his car finished, and the boss asked if I could stay late and get
it done. It got so late I just slept on the cot in the store room.
I just forgot about the boys is all.”

“You
forgot
?” She’d stared at him for
a second there as if she knew. Or suspected. As if she was trying
to get a visual of the rat inside him.

Don’t let her see, don’t let her see, don’t
let her see. Spackle. Plaster. Shhh. No scratching!

“Are they already asleep?” he asked. He’d
stayed late. It was hard to face the family too soon after…

“It’s 2:00 a.m., Eric. What do
you
think?”

He sighed heavily. Then, unable to bear the
way she was looking at him any longer, he went to the boys’ shared
bedroom and closed the door behind him. He heard Marie huff and
stomp off into the kitchen. He imagined her waddling and stomping
at the same time and smiled. She was beautiful when she was
pregnant. All the time, really. A blue-eyed blonde just like
Mother. But pregnant, she was at her best.

He didn’t deserve her.

Joshua was sound asleep. His curly carrot mop
had grown longer, and his freckles had undergone a summertime
explosion. How did kids change so much over a single season? He
hoped sixth grade would be a good one for Josh. He hated sending
his kids to school. School had been nothing but hell for him. He’d
suggested homeschooling, but Marie had insisted she had no time,
and the boys had hated the idea. And really, the more they were out
of the house, away from him, the better.

Besides, the boys weren’t like him. They fit
in. They weren’t freaks.

He’d wondered, back then, if everyone would
always be able to see the rat inside him as clearly as the kids in
middle school seemed to. Because they saw it. He had no doubt that
they saw it. Even when he could keep it mostly silent and sleeping
for months at a time, and only had to feed it a neighbor’s cat here
and there, they saw it. Kids homed in on shit like that and tried
to kill it. You know, like a litter of healthy animals, mom and
all, will push the one sick one right out of the nest and leave it
to die? He’d seen it on the Discovery Channel. Lions did it. Wolves
did it. Birds did it. Kids were
just
like that. A weak one,
a different one, a broken one, or even an especially gifted
one—anything different—was to be shunned, banished, destroyed. It
was probably a matter of self-preservation left over from the
caveman days. You didn’t want anyone evolving faster than the norm
or they’d be unfair competition. And you didn’t want anyone
evolving slower than the norm, or they’d drag you down with them.
And you sure as shit didn’t want predators—the kind who would prey
on their own—because they’d eat you.

Kids always knew. Adults, not so much. Adults
were mostly blind. Not his mother, though. His real one. She must
have taken one look at him and seen that he was broken.

Eric smoothed Josh’s hair and turned toward
Jeremy’s bed, then stopped where he was, shocked by how much more
of the bed Jeremy took up. He couldn’t possibly have grown that
much taller since May. Could he?

He moved closer, surprised when Jeremy rolled
over and opened his eyes. They were brown and accusing. “You
forgot, didn’t you?”

But it wasn’t his words that made Eric’s
blood chill in his veins. It was his
look.
He didn’t look
like a kid anymore. He looked like a young man. Tall, lean, lanky,
with brown hair he’d let grow all summer long, and deep brown eyes
with heavy brows and thick eyelashes.

He looks just like they all look.

And that hot scratching began deep inside
Eric’s brain.

“No,” he whispered. “No.”

Scratch, scratch, scratch.

“No? Well then, where were you?”

Eric backed away from his son.

Jeremy rolled his eyes and gave an
exaggerated sigh. “Come on, Dad, can’t you even talk to me?”

But he couldn’t. The rat was coming out. He
felt it scratching, clawing, gnawing. The plaster hadn’t even had
time to dry, and already the rat was breaking through. Its
twitching nose was sniffing through the first tiny hole.

Eric backed out and closed the bedroom door.
The digging intensified. That scratching rat inside his brain had
caught the scent, and it was demanding to be fed. And the meal it
wanted this time was Eric’s own son.

He couldn’t stay at the house. Not once that
feeling had begun. It never went away once it started. Nothing
would stop it, nothing but killing.

He heard Marie banging pans in the kitchen,
warming up leftovers for him. She was always worrying about what he
ate, his cholesterol, his weight, shit like that, shit that didn’t
even matter. His body wasn’t diseased, his brain was.

He walked quietly back through the house. It
wasn’t a bad house. Small, only three bedrooms. The boys each had
their own, but Josh had given his up to be a nursery, so they were
sharing now. The living room was a mess. The boys’ sneakers
scattered randomly all across the rug, jackets flung over chairs,
backpacks spilling out onto the floor. He looked at the clutter, at
the out-of-place sofa pillows and the TV, turned on, volume muted,
running an infomercial about an electronic gadget you plugged into
the wall to drive away pests. Mice and ants and spiders…

Not rats, though. Once you’ve got a rat,
you’ve got a rat, that’s all there is to that that that.

He went out the front door, barely making a
sound. He knew how to move in silence. He was a predator, after
all. A hunter.

He got into his ‘03 F-150, and drove back the
way he’d come, over the bridge onto 81, and twenty minutes south to
Binghamton. To his brother’s apartment. Mason let him in, groggy,
only a little curious, but too tired to stay up long enough to
grill him. Just pointed at the couch and scuffed back to his
bedroom. A minute later he brought out a pillow and a blanket. “You
need to talk, bro?”

“No. Maybe tomorrow.”

“All right. Get some sleep, okay?” Mason
handed him the bedding, and went back to his room.

Eric hadn’t slept, though. He’d thought. All
night long, he’d paced and he’d thought.

He guessed he’d probably been hoping to
stumble onto another solution. A different answer. But he knew down
deep that there wasn’t one.

And now it was morning. He’d pretended to be
asleep while Mason was getting ready to go to work, knowing his
brother wouldn’t wake him. Better that way. If he spoke to Mason
first, his detective instincts would tell him something was wrong.
So he faked sleep and waited until Mason left.

And now he was alone, and he was ready.
Everything was done. He’d showered, and he’d gone down to his
pickup to get his stuff out of the locked toolbox where he kept it.
A man’s toolbox was sacred. Like a woman’s purse, according to
Marie. People didn’t snoop in a man’s toolbox. Not without a damn
good reason, anyway, and he’d always been careful never to provide
one.