The Killer Is Dying (16 page)
BY MORNING, sight had partially returned. The day was out there, just beyond reach, shot with shadows and restless, ever-moving bright spots like silver buttons, everything blurred at center and edges, as though the world were gradually excusing itself from existence.
Which, he supposed, was exactly what it was doing.
He had managed to feel and fumble his way to the back door of the house to ask Mrs. Guinner if it would be possible for Chris to come out for a minute or two, he could use a little help.
“Are you okay?”
“Slightly under the weather, I think,” he said. “Nothing contagious.”
“Christopher is upstairs getting ready for school. I’ll send him right out.”
He thanked her and did his level best to walk back across the patio as though nothing were amiss. He could feel her eyes on him, sense the questions behind them.
He’d scarcely got back inside and into his chair when Chris showed up. Heard the boy’s feet dragging across the cement, through the grass. Then the boy was at the door and, suddenly, right in front of him.
“I brought you something,” and an elongated shape moved toward him. He reached out.
A book. Slim, paperback. Cover heavily creased, page corners so ruffled and burred that they must look like tiny carnations.
“It’s one of my favorites. Kinda goofy in parts, but pretty cool.”
He felt the boy’s eyes on him, like the mother’s, but he didn’t sense unspoken questions behind them, only a waiting, an eagerness to take in as much of the world as would offer itself.
“Thank you.”
“Mom told me you wanted something?”
So together they had rearranged the room, dragging table and chair over to the window where the extra light helped a little, moving the lamp in close. He had the boy boot up the computer for him, figured he might be able to take it from there. When they were done and Chris said he had to get to school, nevertheless he hung back. Not wanting to presume or intrude, Christian thought, but seeming to understand more than made sense given Christian’s beggarly explanation. Where did someone his age get that kind of intuition, that kind of sensitivity?
“I could come back after school, if you want. If that’s all right.”
“That would be great. Thank you. For the help, and for the book.”
Shortly thereafter he was sitting with his face three inches from the computer screen, shutting his eyes and opening them again and again, trying to resolve ramshackle lines and shapes into words, into meaning.
Special doll for sale.
The one you’ve been looking for.
He’d answered that posting last night. And now there was a response. Leaning still closer, he was able to make out the letters—reconstruct them really, piece by piece. Like a child learning to read. And fumbling his fingers around the keys with the font kicked ridiculously high, he was able to cobble together his own response.
The timing sucked, for sure. But this was it, the hole, the rabbit, and it wasn’t likely to turn up again. No way he could make it to the meet he’d just set up, of course. Only one thing to do.
So this is what it’s come to, he thought, more than half amused. This of all things. Going to the police for help.
EVERYTHING WAS DARK. He lifted his hand, knew it was in front of his face but couldn’t see it, however close it came. A blur, nothing more—and even that, he could be imagining. Imagination clicked in hard as you lay unseeing. Sounds came, and you worked to affix substance to them: the refrigerator cycling on, the front door settling in its frame with the change in temperature, a tree limb scratching at the roof. And as you listened, more and more sounds made their way to you, an unsuspected world of them, another, alternate world.
Somewhere (the fire station?) a chain rang against its flagpole.
A helicopter hovered, swung away and was back, out over I-17.
Getting to his feet, he took three steps and stumbled against, what? A chair, a table edge? The thought came that he’d have to move the furniture, put it back against the walls. As though this was the way it was going to be forever now.
But it was not his thought. And not him (he thought, waking) moving through that place where everything was dark.
SURPRISED? Not at all. How could I be? As I said, the way things went down, I knew it was just a matter of time. Funny how things never go the way you think they will, how they always get so tangled up. Our lives aren’t a hell of a lot more than that, are they? A bunch of tangles.
I didn’t shoot anyone, though. Hell, turns out I didn’t really do much of anything. Ran around a lot, tripped over my own feet and everybody else’s. When here I thought I had it all worked out. My old man used to say I was dumb as a rock, far back as I can remember. Maybe he was right after all, that ass-wipe.
Guy you’re chasing, he’s a ghost, a shadow. No one knows who he is, no one’s ever seen him. That lived to tell about it, anyways. You go looking, and look hard enough in the right direction, a bunch of names pop up. Doc Watkins, Stu Carter, John Brown, Bill Gaunt. And that’s about the whole of it. Names, smoke. Fumes.
But you know what this guy does for a living, so you go at it backward.
I was twelve years old. Came home from school one day, least I was supposed to have been in school, and there’s a police car in the driveway. Not the first time, mind you, but this time it was different. Chief Winfrey was waiting to tell me my old man was dead. He’d had his throat cut a few hours back, when he was in the bath with a bottle and the radio tuned to the country station.
You know, I’ve always wondered what miserable cheatin’-and-drinkin’ song he was listening to when he died.
I’d never seen Chief Winfrey look uncomfortable before, but he did. Kept turning his hat in his hand, round and round, and glancing at the window. “I had the boys take your mother over to the hospital,” he told me. “She’s okay, just real upset.”
He always said, right there at the first and any time it came up later, that something wasn’t right about the whole thing. Killings back there and then, they happened in the street, or in backyards when kinfolk got into it, or up in the woods. No one walked into a man’s house in broad daylight and slit his throat while he was in his bathtub and then just walked out and vanished.
Like I say, I was twelve, what the fuck did I know, I could barely get my pants on straight. I knew my life had changed, I wasn’t that dumb, but it took a long time before I realized how
much
it had changed.
Then one day—I’m out of college by then, earning my keep, as my mom would say—I’m in a bar after work and the guy next to me’s a retired cop. He gets to talking about this one case he could never get over, never forget. Wife came home and found her husband sitting in his favorite armchair—thing was all butt-sprung and worn through, the cop said, but every time she’d try to throw it out,
he
’d throw a fit. Anyway, he was sitting there with his head back like he was catching a nap, but when she walked up close she saw his eyes. That was what she saw first, the cop said. His eyes. Then, a little farther along, she saw how his neck was all swollen and bruised where he’d been choked to death, with a braided wire of some kind.
Thing was, he, this cop, could never find any reason for it. Man had no one set against him, far as could be found. His trucking business was in trouble, but with the economy back then, so were better than half the businesses in town. And no way was it a crime of passion. It was cold, calculated, done by someone with a lot of strength who knew exactly what he was doing.
Someone brought in for the job, the cop said, that’s what I always thought. Never found hide or hair of him.
How would you even go about looking for someone like that, I asked him. And over the next few beers he lays it out for me, how you look for cognates. That’s what he called them, cognates. Carryovers, derivatives. How people so often use names like those they’ve used before, same initials, same number of syllables. How the way they eat, the way they dress, doesn’t change that much. How people tend to stay with the same kind of work, whatever name and background they’ve shifted into place.
Find the work, he said, you can find the money. And once you have that …
I paid the tab for both of us, which by that time was big enough that I knew I’d be hurting till the next payday, and I carried what he’d said out of there and back to my apartment, one of those godawful places with mirrors and shiny metal everywhere you look.
Not long after that, and early in the game, I got into computers. Tech stuff at first, then designing them, software finally. The future came to me one day in a chat room as I watched some guys grousing about the census, that they’d only answered how many people were living at the residence and mailed it back in, because that’s all the government needed to know—or saying they’d just thrown the damn thing away. And I’m sitting there thinking, You fuckers slide your MasterCard at Kmart or run your Exxon card, you’re giving away a hell of a lot more than that. Nowadays, I’m thinking, damn near anything you get involved in is floating around somewhere out there. You buy something, there’s a record. You borrow a book from the library, there’s a record. Your kid’s baseball team loses, that’s out there too. Cyberspace. It’s like this huge field that goes on forever, and there’s footprints everywhere, going every which way.
Getting involved—that was the key. No one just sits alone in a room. However much off the grid you stay, sooner or later you have to get involved with
something
.
The site I was browsing that day belonged to a bunch of libertarian types, people who spent their time discussing inexhaustibly their privacy and rights and God-given freedom.
Like their right to bear arms. Pry it from my cold dead hands, etc. So okay, I figured, guns is one place this’ll take me. Lots of options, a man could spend his life bouncing like a pinball from one site to another. And once you’re there, it’s a hop, skip and a jump to homeschooling, spyware in our telephones, killer vaccinations, survivalists, secret societies, war enacters, and mercenaries. So for the next few months I had a guided tour, with myself as guide, of every organization, every ragtag club, every cockeyed assembly and midnight gathering that stood three steps to one side or another of the mainstream culture.
Took a long time, but I found my way. I went on the notion that Chief Winfrey was right, and whatever the reason for it—I never did know that, and never will—someone had been brought in. And that ex-cop back at the bar, the one who got me started on this—same thing. I still didn’t know who I was looking for, or where to look, really.
Just like you.
But I knew what the man did. And to do that, he had to be hooked in somewhere, somehow, to this social underbelly I’d been getting to know. Lot of these sites had sections with people trying to maybe sell a gun or trade it for a hunting bow, or areas where they’d offer to barter services for goods, or sell collectibles. Good places to start, I thought. So I started running ads and responding to them. Spent hours getting them worded right, vague but not too vague, you know? Not like you can come right out and put
I need someone killed
, right?
You have to say it without saying it.
Most of the responses I got—well, most of them were just crap, but the ones that had a germ to them, a certain smell, those I followed up on—they were like that too, trying to say something without seeming to say much of anything. You’d get a headache from squinting, trying to read between the lines. Then you log in three, four responses and it gets
really
hard. Like you’re both waiting for the other one to blink, you know? That’s the point that most of them just fall away. So you keep plugging, poking about in there to see what’s what.
Till finally, and let me tell you, it took me a while, I had my A list.
Obviously an audition, some kind of trial run—show me what you got—wasn’t in the picture.
It was after work, this neighborhood place half a block off Camelback where I’d go afternoons, watch people, drink overpriced coffee. Looked up from my laptop and saw this guy heading out the door with one of those cardboard trays for carry-out coffee, but only one cup in it. How he’s dressed, look on his face, the way he goes through the door sideways, that single cup, it’s … I don’t know, not sad or anything, just … blank? I follow him and like I thought, he’s going back to work. I see where he works, an accounting firm, and the name, and I think no wonder the guy’s not beaming with pleasure at life.
There are two vehicles left in the parking lot out back, a shiny black pickup with locked cover, a recent Hyundai. No way this guy drives a truck, so I get the license number of the Hyundai. Only sign of life I see’s on the second floor, down near the corner, someone standing close to the window with a carry cup, looking out.
Next day I called up Quality Accounting, explained how I’d met one of their staff at a function and he’d given me his card but I’d misplaced it, and gave them a description. “At a function?” Ms. How-May-I-Direct-You said, as though I’d told her we ran into one another on Mars. So now I had his name, where he worked, car and license number. Another late-afternoon visit to the Brell building and a short ride later, I also had a couple of photos and where he lived.
Ducks in a row.
Good to go.
All five on my A list got the information. Four, I sent money; the last, I never heard any more from. So there I am, don’t know any of the four of them any more than they know me, who they are, what they plan. So now I’m a sentinel. Hanging. Watching. From the car, from benches or low walls, from a restaurant half a block up the street. Place probably has a name, but
Home Cooking
and
Daily Specials
is what you notice, painted on the front window, big yellow letters. I’d sit in the front, watch my building through those letters. Trying to suss out who worked there, who belonged. Who didn’t.
Drank a lot of coffee sitting there, and the whole thing happened on one of my bathroom breaks. Came back out to all this commotion across the street.
You know what happened, the guy that actually got in, the one that went for it, he bungled the job. And the others, they’re not around anymore, after that—if they ever were. Knew what happened and to stay away, maybe. Took the money and ran.
I had a suspicion, though. Just because I wasn’t seeing them didn’t mean they weren’t there. Once it’s quiet again across the street, I slide over and talk to some folks sitting outside, get some skinny, and find out where the ambulance was headed.
I think I saw him at the hospital. At the time … Well, no way I could be sure, just had that feeling, you know? But then, when I spotted him at the house, I knew. Had to be him. Watching the house just like me, nondescript car, nothing to draw attention to himself. Next thing I know, he’s passed out there in the car, close to dead for all I can tell. I make the call, firemen come—then before I can blink twice, he’s gone again, not a trace, not a footstep.
Christian.
So that’s all I know, all I have to hold on to. Still, in the long run, I did better than you guys, didn’t I?
Revenge? Yeah, right … How many things can you guys get wrong? Not that you’d have any way of knowing. How badly off base you are, I mean.
My father was a monster. I was a kid, I thought my mother’s skin was naturally purple. I’d hear things at night no child should ever hear. Then go down in the morning and there she’d be, fixing breakfast with her eyes swollen so bad she could barely see, using the one arm that was still working, sort of. Revenge? Hell, I was looking for the man to
thank
him. For saving my mother’s life. And for making my own possible.
