Pure Hate (5 page)

Reed sat and thought. His family was dead, murdered by a man he hadn’t seen or thought of in
over a decade, but who had obviously been thinking of him. The police would catch
him. They had all the information they needed. Something about that troubled
him. He knew that Malcolm wasn’t a stupid man.
Why had Malcolm left him
alive knowing that Reed would identify him and lead the police right to him?
He knew Malcolm was crazy, but Malcom had always been crazy—smart, cunning,
deadly, crazy. It didn’t even surprise him to hear that Malcolm was the Family
Man. The only thing unusual was that Reed was still breathing. Malcolm had to
be planning something else. He remembered how Malcolm used to always quote from
the movie
Shaka Zulu
.

“Never leave an enemy behind or he will rise
again to fly at your throat!”

Well, Malcolm had left him behind but Reed was in no
condition to fly at anyone’s throat. He hated Malcolm, wanted him dead, but he
feared him too much to go after him himself. His own feelings of guilt kept
getting in the way of his anger. He knew that Malcolm was no doubt crazy before
Reed took his girlfriends from him, but was he this crazy? Would he have killed
all those people if it weren’t for what Reed had done to him? Would he have
murdered Linda, Jennie, and little Mark? Had Reed pushed over the first domino
that knocked over dozens of lives and came back around to crush the lives of
his family?

Reed began to daydream about his wife. He dreamed
about Jennie’s birth. He had been scared to death when all of a sudden, in the
middle of the delivery, his wife had stopped dilating and had to be rushed into
surgery for an emergency Caesarian section. He held her hand and they sang
children’s songs while waiting for the anesthesia to take effect. He would
never forget the sound of his first child’s cries. The smile on her face, on
his wife’s face, on his own face. He had a family now . . . then. Now he had no
family. He was alone again. Reed began to weep quietly into the pillow.

A soft,
respectful knock proceeded James’s entrance into Reed’s hospital room. Reed was
almost thankful for the distraction. The silence was full of ghosts and demons.

“I’m Detective Bryant from the Philadelphia
Police Department, Homicide Division. May I speak to you a moment? I know it’s
been a long evening, but the sooner we get some facts from you the sooner we
can catch this guy.”

“Come on in. I can’t sleep anyway.” Reed pulled
himself upright, wincing in pain.

“Thank you.” James sat down in a chair by Reed’s
bed, looked thoughtfully at Reed’s battered face
,
and got right to the point.

“Who is Malcolm Davis and how do you know him?”

“Detective Bryant . . .”

“James. Just call me James.”

Reed considered the old detective. In his
crumpled old Botany 500 suit, he looked like a
stockier black version of Colombo. The chewed up,
unlit cigar that hung from his mouth completed the effect. He looked kind,
harmless, like someone’s father or grandfather. But, if you looked closely, you
could see the thick sinuous arms and chest bulging through the suit—you could
see the hard, determined look in his eyes.

Detective Bryant—James—was more than he appeared.

“Okay, James. Where should I begin? You want to
know who Malcolm is? He’s my very own Frankenstein monster. I made him and now
the chickens have come home to roost, so to speak.”

“I wouldn’t think a novelist would be so quick to
mix metaphors.”

Reed laughed, then winced in pain, curling into a ball and holding his sides.

“Please. Don’t make me laugh or I literally will
split my sides.”

“Okay, so what do you mean you created him? What
is it between the two of you?”

Reed continued to hold his sides. He rocked back
and forth and stared at the television set which had never been turned on. The
pain in his ribs had subsided. The pain in his mind raged.

“Malcolm was my best friend in high school and I
betrayed him. I slept with his first girlfriend. The first woman he’d ever
loved, maybe the first human being he’d ever loved besides, maybe, his
mother.”

“And what did Malcolm do? Did he
know?”

“Malcolm suspected it but he wasn’t
sure. He wanted to believe me. He trusted me. I think, maybe, he loved me.”

“Loved you?”

“Not in a sexual way.” The memory of
Malcolm attacking him in the men’s room of a train station long ago crept its
way past his defenses. “I don’t think. I . . . I think he just thought of me as
an intellectual equal. His only peer in a world of morons. Without me he would
have been alone.”

“Is that how you thought? That you
were alone in a world of morons?”

“I never had Malcolm’s ego. I never
shared his contempt for everybody and everything. He found that charming. He
thought I was naive and weak. He treated me like a pet.”

“And so you fucked his girlfriend to
prove to him that you were as much a man as he was?”

“To prove it to myself. I was jealous
of Malcolm. He was the meanest bastard you ever met and the girls loved him.
They loved him! They always go for the assholes. I was too nice. I was the kind
of guy girls dated because they knew I’d never have the nerve to ask them for
sex. I was their best friend. They called me their little brother and talked to
me on the phone about how much they wanted to fuck guys like Malcolm, but of
course Malcolm was obsessed with Renee’.”

“Malcolm’s first girlfriend?”

“He thought she was perfect, flawless—goodness
and innocence personified. He had her on a pedestal so high she was dizzy. It
was like he thought that if an angel like her could love him then maybe he wasn’t
completely evil. But she was no angel. I proved that. His suspicions eventually
led to their break up. Then, after he and Renee’ broke up, he started dating
this girl named Natasha.”

“Did Malcolm love her?”

“He thought he did. All he ever did
was torture her by telling her how she would never measure up to Renee’. See,
he still thought Renee’ was some type of angel.”

“And what happened to Natasha?”

“I slept with her, too. That’s when
Malcolm found out. He caught me over at Natasha’s house, in her bedroom. I
thought he was going to kill me right then. I was trying to talk my way out of
it and he was trying to believe me. He still wanted to believe that I hadn’t
done it. I was amazed when he let me walk out of there alive. When I left he
went into Natasha’s kitchen, blew out the pilot lights on her stove, and turned up the gas. He brought her down there
in the kitchen with him and sat while the kitchen filled up with gas. He had a
pack of matches on the table. She lasted maybe five minutes before she told him
everything. She even told him about Renee’ and I. Malcolm lit the match. There
was a small explosion, but only the stove was destroyed. She had cracked too
quickly and there wasn’t enough gas to level the house and kill them both like
Malcolm wanted. They only suffered a few minor burns and bruises. The kitchen
got burnt up pretty bad but the firemen put out the blaze before it took the
rest of the house. Malcolm walked back home during all the commotion of the
fire trucks, police cars, and nosy neighbors. When the police came to arrest
him for arson, he took a knife and slit his
own throat, cut right through his esophagus and tried to saw through his
cervical vertebrae. He was trying to decapitate himself.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“They rushed him to the emergency
room and the doctors stitched him up. The doctor who operated on him said she’d
seen hundreds of suicides but she had never seen anyone try to cut their own
throat let alone remove their own head. They had him on suicide watch. A few
weeks later, he left the hospital and I never saw him again until tonight,”
Reed said.

But that wasn’t exactly true. He’d
seen Malcolm following him one day after school, soon after he’d left the
hospital. He’d caught Malcolm’s familiar shadow trailing him onto the bus, glimpsed
it briefly between the dozens of passengers packed in like human cattle. The
image was so brief he could almost convince himself that he hadn’t seen it. But
he had. Reed left the bus and tried to lose himself in the press of downtown
shoppers, shoplifters, and pickpockets on Chestnut Street. Repeatedly, he
glanced behind to see if Malcolm was following him, but the hundreds of bargain
hunters formed an impenetrable curtain. A flash of dark clothing, black skin, a
massive shape slipping between the human traffic pumped panicked adrenaline
into Reed’s step. He crossed Market Street at a near sprint, headed toward the
train station inside the huge Gallery Mall.

As Reed walked nervously into the
Gallery and down to the station, he thought
he’d caught a momentary glimmer of two furious eyes burning from a face the
color of liquid night. A chill raked his spine. Reed never saw more than a
second or two of his pursuer, but he’d known
he was there.

Electric tendrils of fear had snaked
beneath his skin, making him shiver and bounce nervously from foot to foot. He
looked around in a near panic, wondering what direction the attack would come
from. Then he’d seen Natasha. She was smiling and heading towards him, and
Malcolm was still somewhere close by. Even if he couldn’t see him, Reed knew
Malcolm was coming for him and he knew that if Natasha so much as hugged him
within sight of Malcolm, he would’ve die right
there on that platform. Malcolm would’ve torn him apart where he stood. He had
to get away from her.

Reed looked around for an exit and
finally retreated to a men’s room deeper within the mall. He’d been in there
for less than a minute when Malcolm walked in. Reed’s whole body shook
convulsively when he saw him. Malcolm, his very own boogie-man come to drag him
to hell . . . in pieces. It wasn’t just the thought of dying. It was the way he
would die. Reed’s eyes traveled from the feral scowl on Malcolm’s face, the
flaming hatred roiling in his eyes, to the wicked looking switchblade in his
right hand. Reed had seen the slasher movies. Most of them he’d watched with
Malcolm. Reed knew what a determined man could do with a knife. He knew what
Malcolm could do with one.

Reed remembered Malcolm moving toward
him. He remembered feeling the big man’s rage traveling before him like
onrushing storm clouds. The temperature seemed to rise in proportion to
Malcolm’s anger. The bathroom grew thick and
humid as if Malcolm’s fury were heating the very air, boiling off his skin like
steam. Sweat rolled from Reed’s forehead into his eyes making them sting.

A tidal wave of emotions crashed down
on his mind, guilt and fear gripped him like a physical entity, impregnating
his whole body with an oppressive dread. He could feel its weight pressing down
on him, rooting his Nikes to the piss-stained tile floor. The realization of
his own eminent death froze his tongue to the roof of his mouth and drained the
phosphagens from his muscles. His eyes locked on Malcolm’s and his emotions
grew deeper and more confused. A profound sadness, sympathy for his friend’s
pain
,
confused his self-preservation
instincts. Fear morphed with his guilt and remorse and he found himself moving
toward Malcolm, opening his arms to embrace him, waiting to feel the cold sting
of the blade penetrating his skin, muscle, and organs, ripping him open. But he
never felt the knife.

What happened next remained locked in
the place where past pain hides from the conscious mind, a profound chasm half-filled
with chimerical nightmares, nebulous impressions, and abstract sensations. A
vague recollection of not being able to breathe, feeling Malcolm’s powerful
arms crushing down over his throat. Mixed feelings of pleasure and pain, of
vulnerability, of surrender, of sheer horror and something that he could not
accept, could not believe. Even now his mind retreated from it. What he’d felt
had been sexual excitement simultaneous with the certainty of death.

But those memories were all obscure,
wisps and shadows, shreds of memory coming to him as if from a dream. He’d
awakened crumpled on the floor in a bathroom stall, not quite certain why he
was alive. Malcolm had not killed him.

That had been the last time he’d seen
Malcolm until last night and now, as he had then, he had no idea why Malcolm
let him live.

James got up from his chair and turned to leave.
He felt woozy, needed air. This case just seemed to get more and more horrible.

“Renee’ and that other girl, Natasha, do they
still live in Philly?”

“Probably. Nobody ever leaves Philly. It’s like a
black hole, but I don’t have their addresses or anything.”

“Where did they live back then?”

“Renee’ lived in Frankford. Natasha lived in
Germantown a few blocks from Malcolm. Her mom was one of those liberal hippie
types.” Reed offered that last bit of information as a way of explaining why a
white woman would live with her young daughter in a black ghetto. James tried
his best not to be offended and failed.

“I’ll have Dispatch locate them for me. What were
their last names?”

“Renee’s last name was Volare’.”

“Volare’? Like the song?”

“Yeah, like the song. Natasha’s name was
something Indian sounding. I can’t remember it.”

“Take my card and call me if you
remember it. If Malcolm went after you, he
might go after them. I’m placing you under protective custody. There’ll be an officer
posted outside your door.”

“You think he’ll come after me again?”

James thought about everything he’d heard tonight
and considered lying but instead he gave it to him straight.

“I think that a man who slit his own throat and
tried to blow himself up isn’t gonna stop until he feels he’s avenged whatever
wrong you’ve done to him or until we stop him.”

Never leave an enemy behind or he will rise
again to fly at your throat!