Shadowkiller (40 page)

Back then—when he was living in the Hell's Kitchen apartment that was a palace compared to his prison cell—he liked the show
Cops
. He always sang along with the catchy opening song,
Bad boys, bad boys . . . whatcha gonna do when they come for you?

It was so exciting to watch the cops turn on the sirens and chase down the bad guys and arrest them. Then one night, they came—in real life, the cops did—and they arrested Jerry because Mama was dead in the bedroom and they thought
he
was a bad boy. They thought he had killed her, and two other ladies, too.

“Admit it, Jerry!” they kept saying. “Admit it! Tell us what happened!” They said it over and over again, for hours and hours, until he started crying. Finally, when he just couldn't take it anymore, he did exactly what they were telling him to do: he admitted it. He said that he had killed his mother and Kristina Haines and Marianne Apostolos, and then he signed the papers they gave him.

He did that because you have to do what the police tell you to do, and also because maybe he really had killed the women. Maybe he just didn't remember.

He doesn't remember a lot of things, because his brain hasn't been right for years, not since the accident.

Well, it wasn't really an
accident
.

Someone doesn't
accidentally
bash a person's head in with a cast-iron skillet. But that's what Mama always called it, an accident, and that's what Jerry always thought it was, because the truth about his injury was, of course, just one more thing he didn't remember.

Ten years ago, right before he was arrested, he finally found out what had really happened to him on that long-ago day when his head was bashed in.

His twin sister, Jamie, had attacked him.

Once he knew the terrible truth, he tried to forget it, because it was too horrible. For years, he couldn't even remember anything about that night. Now, bits and pieces come back to him, though most of the time, when his mind tries to think about it, he can push it away.

Sometimes, though, usually late at night, when he's lying awake in his cell, the terrible truth sneaks back into his head, and he can't get rid of it.

It's the same with Doobie Jones, the big, mean inmate who lives in the cell next to Jerry's. He talks to Jerry in the night sometimes, and Jerry can never seem to shut out his voice. Even when he pulls the thin prison pillow over his head and presses it against his ears, Doobie's voice still seems to be there, on the inside, saying all kinds of things Jerry doesn't want to hear.

Sometimes, Jerry wonders if Doobie is even real.

Jamie wasn't.

That's what the cops told him, and so did his lawyer, and the nice doctor who came to talk to Jerry a lot back when he was first arrested.

Everyone said that Jamie had died years ago, and now only lived in Jerry's head.

It was hard to believe, because Jamie seemed so real, walking and talking, and bringing Jerry cake . . .

“That was you, Jerry. You said and did those things,” the cops said on the awful day when Jerry found Mama dead in the bedroom, and Jamie ran away just before the police came to the apartment . . .

That was what he thought had happened, anyway. But when he told the policemen that the bloody dress and the bloody knife belonged to Jamie, they didn't believe him.

“Jamie only exists up here.” Detective Manzillo tapped his head. “Do you understand, Jerry?”

He didn't at the time.

Even now, when he thinks about it, he's not quite sure he understands how someone who only lives in your imagination can go around killing people.

Maybe that, too, is because Jerry's brain is damaged.

Anyway, it's not his fault that he is the way he is.

You can't help it.

That's what Jerry's lawyer told him, and that's what she told the judge, too, and the jury, and everyone else in the courtroom during the trial. She said Jerry shouldn't worry, even though he had admitted to killing people and signed the papers, too.

“You were not responsible for your actions, Jerry,” his lawyer would say, and she would pat Jerry's hand with fingers that were cold and bony, the fingernails bitten all the way down so that they bled on the notebook paper she was always scribbling on.

“You're going to be found not guilty by reason of insanity,” she said. “You're not going to go to prison. Don't worry.”

“I won't,” Jerry said, and he didn't.

But then came the day when the judge asked the lady in charge of the jury—the tall, skinny lady with the mean-looking face—“Have you reached your verdict?”

The lady said, “We have, Your Honor.”

The verdict was guilty.

The courtroom exploded with noise. Some people were cheering, others crying. Jerry's lawyer put her forehead down on the table for a long time.

Jerry was confused. “What happened? What does that mean? Is it over? Can I go home now?”

No one would answer his questions. Not even his lawyer. When she finally looked up, her eyes were sad—and mad, too—and she said only, “I'm so sorry, Jerry,” before the judge banged his gavel and called for order.

Jerry soon found out why she was sorry. It was because she had lied. Jerry
did
go to prison.

And he's never going to get out. That's one of the things Doobie says to him, late at night.

He scares Jerry. He scares everyone. His tattooed neck is almost as thick as his head, and he's missing a couple of teeth so that the ones he has remind Jerry of fangs.

He's in charge of the cell block. Well, the guards are really supposed to be in charge, but Doobie is the one who runs things around here. He decides what everyone else gets to say, and do, and watch on TV.

Tonight, though, the same thing is on every channel as Doobie flips from one to the next: a special news report about the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks.

After shouting a string of curses at the television, Doobie throws the remote control at the wall. When it hits the floor, the batteries fall out. One rolls all the way over to Jerry's feet. He looks down.

“Touch that, and you're a dead man,” Doobie warns.

Jerry doesn't touch it.

He's sure—pretty sure, anyway—that he doesn't want to be a dead man, no matter what Doobie says.

Doobie is always telling him that he'd be better off dead than in here. He tells Jerry all the things he'd be able to do in heaven that he can't do here, or even back at home in New York. He says there's cake in heaven—as much cake as you want, every day and every night.

He knows Jerry's favorite thing in the whole world is cake. He knows a lot of things about Jerry, because there's not much else to do here besides talk, and there aren't many people to talk to.

“Just think, Jerry,” Doobie says, late at night, when the lights are out. “If you were in heaven right now, you would be eating cake and sleeping on a big, soft bed with piles of quilts, and if you wanted to, you could get up and walk right outside and look at the stars.”

Stars—Jerry hasn't seen them in years. He misses them, but not as much as he misses seeing the lights that
look
like stars. A million of them, twinkling all around him in the sky . . .

Home. New York City at night.

The thought of it makes him want to cry.

But the New York City they're showing on television right now doesn't bring back good memories at all.

He remembers that day, the terrible day when the bad guys drove the planes into the towers and knocked them down. He remembers the fire and the people falling and jumping from the top floors, and the big, dusty, burning pile after the buildings fell, one right after the other.

“
Sheee-it
,” Rollins, one of the inmates, says as he stares at the footage of people running for their lives up Broadway, chased by the fire-breathing cloud of dust.

“I was there.”

All of them, even Doobie, even Jerry, who had the exact same thought in his head, turn to look at B.S., who uttered it aloud.

B.S. is small and dark and antsy, with a twitch in his eye that makes him look like he's winking—like he's kidding around. But he's not. He told Jerry that he always means what he says, even when everyone else claims he's lying.

“I don't care what they say, because I know I'm telling the truth,” he told Jerry one night after lights-out. “You do, too, don't you?”

“I do what?”

“You know I'm telling the truth, right, Slow Boy?”

That's what they call him. Slow Boy. It's just a nickname, like B.S. and Doobie.

Doobie says nicknames are fun. Jerry doesn't think they are, but of course, he doesn't ever want to tell Doobie that.

As nicknames go, that's not the worst Jerry has had. Back in New York, a lot of people called him Retard. And in the courtroom, during his trial, everyone called him The Defendant.

“That's a big ol' pile of bull,” Doobie tells B.S. now. “Just like your name.”

“No!” B.S. protests. “I was. I was there. I was a fireman.”

“You wasn't no fireman in New York City,” Rollins tells him. “
Sheee-it
. You from Delaware. Everyone know dat.”

B.S. is shaking his head so rapidly Jerry thinks his brains must be rattling around in his head. “I climbed up miles of stairs dragging my fire hose, and—”

“Your fire hose was
miles
long?”

“Yeah, yeah, it was long, like miles long, and I got to the top floor right before the building collapsed—”

“If you were up there,” one of the other inmates cuts in, “then how the hell are you sitting here right now? How'd you get out alive, you lying mother—?”

“I jumped. That's how. I jumped, yeah, and the other firemen, they caught me in one of those big nets.”

Jerry regards him with interest as the others shake their heads and roll their eyes because they're thinking B.S. makes things up all the time.

Jerry usually doesn't know if B.S. is telling the truth or not, and he doesn't really care. He talks all the time, especially at night, and Jerry usually has no choice but to listen. Like Doobie, B.S. lives in the cell next to Jerry's, but on the opposite side.

But this time, for a change, he's interested in what B.S. is saying.

“I was there, too,” Jerry says, and they all turn to him. “When the terrorist attack happened.”

“Yeah? Did you jump out the window too, Slow Boy?” someone asks.

“I wasn't in the building. But I was near it. I saw it burning. I saw . . .” Jerry's voice breaks and he swallows hard.

He squeezes his eyes closed and there are the red-orange flames shooting out of white buildings, gray smoke reaching into a deep blue sky, black specks with flailing limbs, falling, falling, falling . . .

There are some terrible things that, despite his brain injury, he has no problem remembering.

September 11 is one of them.

That was the day before he killed Kristina Haines, the other lawyer, the one who didn't like Jerry, said at the trial.

“On the morning of September eleventh, The Defendant was teetering on the edge . . .”

At first, Jerry thought the lawyer was confused. He tried to speak up and tell everyone that he wasn't in the towers on that morning. A lot of people were teetering on the edge up there, but he wasn't one of them.

But he found out that you aren't allowed to just talk in the middle of a trial, even if you're The Defendant and what they're saying about you is wrong.

Anyway, Jerry soon discovered that the lawyer wasn't talking about teetering on the edge of a building.

Sanity: that's the word he kept saying. Teetering on the edge of sanity.

“When those towers fell,” he told the courtroom, “a lot of people lost their already tenuous grip on sanity. Jerry Thompson was one of them.”

He told everyone that Jerry stabbed Kristina Haines to death in her own bed because he was angry with her for turning him down when he asked her out.

The lawyer was right about that.

Jerry
did
ask Kristina to go eat cake with him.

He
was
angry with her when she said no, especially because she gave him the finger as she walked away, and—

“Tell us more, Slow Boy.”

Doobie's voice shoves the memory of Kristina from Jerry's mind. “What?”

“Tell us what happened in New York that day.”

He doesn't want to look at Doobie, or at anyone else, either. He can feel their eyes on him, burning into him, and he turns away, toward the television. He stares at the pictures of the mess the bad guys made when they flew the planes into the buildings. He takes a deep breath and his nose is full of the smell of burning rubber and smoke and death.

Jerry shakes his head. “I don't know why they did that.”

“Why who did what?”

“Why the bad guys made that mess. Why they killed all those people. They even killed themselves. Why would they do that?”

“Because they knew the secret, Slow Boy,” Doobie says, leaning closer so that the only way Jerry won't be able to look at him is to close his eyes. He doesn't do that, though, because he thinks it might make Doobie mad.

“What secret?”

“The one I told you. Remember?”

“No.” Jerry doesn't remember Doobie telling him any secrets.

Doobie's face is close to Jerry's, and his black eyes are blacker than black. “The bad guys knew that heaven is the best place to be. They wanted to go there. They chose to go there. It's better than anywhere on earth. A hell of a lot better than here. Hell . . . Heaven . . . get it?”

He grins, and Jerry can see that his teeth are black in the back.

“So . . .” Doobie shrugs and pulls back. “You should go. That's all I'm saying.”