A Killer in the Wind

  “I think she said, ‘They’re coming after us,’” I told him.

  “What’re we, making this up as we go along? You just add stuff as it comes to you?”

  “I’m just telling you. When Samantha regains consciousness, we’ll go in there . . .”

  “There’s no ‘we’ in this,” said Grassi, his eyes sparking with anger even as his teeth flashed in another smile. “This is my case, my friend.” Then, under his breath, so low I almost didn’t hear him, he muttered, “Anyway, she’s plenty awake already.”

  “What?”

  “I said, ‘She’s plenty awake . . .’”

  “Samantha?”

  “If that’s her name.”

  “They said she was gonna be out all night.”

  “Yeah, well, they forgot to explain that to her. Apparently, five minutes after they told us that, she woke up.”

  “Did you talk to her?”

  The way he looked at me just then—I couldn’t decide which I regretted more: that I had made an enemy out of him by threatening to run him in in front of his wife, or that I hadn’t actually run him in and booked him as he deserved.

  “No,” he said. “I did not talk to her. Nobody talked to her. Nobody even saw her.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The monitor flatlined at the nurses’ station and when they went in to check on her, she was gone.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You keep saying that.”

  “What do you mean ‘gone’? Damn it, Grassi.”

  He made a vague gesture with his hand, waggling his fingers to show she’d vanished as in a magic trick.

  For a second, I just stared at him. I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t want to believe it.

  “But Holbein . . .” I said.

  “He was outside her door.”

  “She had tubes . . .”

  “She pulled them,” Grassi said. “Or someone did.”

  “Someone?”

  “Hey, maybe another skeleton. Maybe the skeletons are triplets, who knows.”

  I went on staring at him, speechless.

  “Come on, Champion,” Hannah said, grunting under my weight as she started to draw me down the stairs.

  “Didn’t she leave a note? A trail? Anything?” I said back at Grassi.

  “Just some blood on the floor—from the catheter, the doctor said. And fingerprints all over the place. We’ll find her.”

  “You got a BOLO on her, right?”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Grassi said. He was no longer looking at me. Already turning his attention back to the dead man. Slapping the cell phone against his palm. “Girl who looks like that—in a hospital gown—someone’ll spot her.”

  Hannah kept drawing me down the stairs, down to the front path, down into the flashing red and blue lights.

  “How could she just disappear?” I called back over my shoulder. “For Christ’s sake, Grassi!”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Grassi said bitterly.

  7

  Meet the Starks

  I SLEPT IN THE hospital that night. I had bad dreams. Go figure.

  I woke in the bright early morning. I went into the bathroom. Looked in the mirror. What a disaster. My face was bruised and scratched, purple and red. My body was bruised. My ribs ached. Under the bandage on my side, the slice in my flesh felt like it was tearing open every time I moved. I kept having flashbacks to the night before. The grinning skeleton, his knife coming at me . . . The grinning skeleton—the other grinning skeleton—rushing at me out of the swirling darkness, shrieking, the train whistle shrieking . . .

  Then there were other flashes too—flashes of the nightmares I’d had last night. Samantha standing at the end of a hallway. Flame at the edges of my vision. Smoke curling around her, suffocating smoke. I was trying to run toward her, to save her, but I couldn’t move, the way you sometimes can’t in dreams. It was like running underwater. I couldn’t reach her. I was screaming in frustration. I could not, could not, get down the hall . . .

  I turned away from the mirror. I went back out into the hospital room. Rays of sunlight came through the venetian blinds, throwing bars of brightness and shadow on me. I had asked Deputy Stinson to bring me a change of clothes the night before. They were there, on a plastic chair, the shirt and jacket draped neatly over the back, the pants folded on the seat. I put them on and headed for the department, where the sheriff was going to take my badge and gun away.

  Deputy Holbein was young, tall, muscular. Blond and cruel-faced and actually cruel. He was the sort of cop you hope the cop who pulls you over isn’t. The deadpan guy who calls you “sir” but is really waiting for an excuse to slap you around. Aside from that, he was competent, responsible, and ambitious. For instance, he was still at work, off-shift, when I got there. Writing his report, ready and willing to answer for any mistakes he might have made in letting Samantha escape from the hospital.

  I sat on the edge of his desk. I was angry about Samantha’s disappearance, but I tried not to show it. “What the hell happened, pal?” I asked him—sympathetically like that, one professional to another.

  Holbein glanced toward the hallway door—that’s where Sheriff Brady’s office was. “I gotta go in there and explain it all to him in a minute,” he said unhappily.

  “But you didn’t leave her alone or anything?”

  “No, hell no. I never did. I never even took a leak.” He glanced at the hallway again. Dropped his voice. “But, you know, she was right there on the first floor.”

  “So she went out the window, you mean.”

  “Yeah! Into the . . . there was a courtyard right outside.” He shook his head. Gave his computer keyboard an angry push. “They said she’d be unconscious all night.”

  “I heard that.”

  “You heard that, right? They said that.”

  “I’ll vouch for you with the old man if anyone questions it.”

  “Thanks, Champ. I appreciate it.”

  I pushed on. “You think someone could’ve come in? Through the window? You think someone could’ve come in and taken her?”

  “Champion.”

  I turned. Sheriff Brady was standing in the doorway. Tall, dark, sour-faced. Lean, except for his potbelly. Good sheriff, but never a happy man. Something about his digestion. It was always acting up on him. He looked even less happy than usual this morning, the dyspeptic misery twisting his lips.

  I lifted my chin to him in greeting.

  “In my office, please,” he said. And he left the doorway and went back down the hall.

  I turned back to Holbein. “Didn’t anyone see her leave?”

  “Now, Champion!” Sheriff Brady shouted from out of sight.

  Holbein hesitated but I didn’t move. I waited him out.

  “No one saw her leave,” Holbein said finally. “But I don’t think anyone came through the window and took her or anything like that. There were just her footprints—in the grass out in the courtyard. And there was a trail of blood too.”

  “A lot of blood?”

  “No. Just a drop or two. Doctor said it was probably because of the Foley tube, the catheter. I guess it has—I don’t know—a sort of bulb on the end, makes it hard to pull out. Doctor says it probably hurt her . . . you know . . .”

  “Urethra.”

  “Right,” said Deputy Holbein. He looked even more unhappy than before. His eyes shifted back to the door where the boss had stood. He had large blue eyes and usually there was a lot of brutality in them. But they weren’t brutal now, just worried. “Shouldn’t you get in there?”

  I nodded. Sighed. Stood off the desk. I was still angry—seething—but not at Holbein. It was just everything. The pain in my side. A couple of skeleton bastards trying to kill me. Brady about to pull my badge. Samantha . . . Mostly Samantha, suddenly gone again. Out of reach, like in the dream about the burning hallway. I think it was mostly that, mostly Samantha.

  “The blood tell you anything?” I
asked Holbein.

  “What?”

  “The trail of her blood. You get anything from that.”

  “It was just a few drops. It was consistent with her walking out on her own.”

  “Where’d it lead to.”

  “We think she just crossed the courtyard. Went through a door on the other side. Then right out again, through an emergency door into the parking lot.” His lips pulled back, baring his teeth. He dropped his voice nearly to a whisper. “I wasn’t guarding against her escaping. You know? They said she’d be unconscious all night.”

  “Well, maybe the experience of your own shortcomings will teach you compassion for others.”

  “What?”

  “Just kidding.” I patted him on the shoulder. “You’ll be fine.”

  I walked away.

  Sheriff Brady pushed an old-fashioned wooden out-box across his desk at me. He didn’t even say anything. Just tilted back in his chair and waited, the fingers of his two hands interlaced on his paunch. I pulled my 19 out of its holster, laid it in the box. Drew out my shield. Spun it in, like tossing a card in a hat.

  Brady had a sharp widow’s peak of black hair. It accented his dour features. With his black suit, complete with vest, he looked more like an undertaker than a lawman. He sat with his long figure framed between the American flag on the pole to his right and the state flag on the pole to his left. He flinched and shifted and massaged his gut discreetly with one thumb. “Don’t hang around here, either,” he said—the first words he’d spoken since I walked in. “Don’t ask anyone questions, don’t put your nose here and there. Don’t come back at all, in fact, until the grand jury convenes.”

  “Did you have to put Grassi on this?”

  He shrugged his narrow shoulders. His lips worked uncomfortably. “It has to be someone. It’s none of your business who. It’s not your case.”

  “Yeah, but Grassi hates my guts. He wants to make some kind of conspiracy out of it.”

  “Maybe it is some kind of conspiracy—how do I know? It’s a pretty weird goddamned story, the way he tells it.”

  “It’s a weird goddamned story, all right, but that’s my point. I don’t understand it either.”

  Brady sat forward. He grabbed the box with my gun and badge in it. Dropped it into one of his desk drawers and closed the drawer decisively. “Wish the girl hadn’t bunked on us,” he said.

  “Me too.”

  “But you don’t know anything about her. Right? You know her but you don’t know her. That’s your story.”

  “I recognized her. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen her before.” How could I explain it? I couldn’t. I couldn’t think of a way.

  The sheriff shifted his body around, like he was trying to work out a cramp. “I also wish you’d stop killing people, while we’re on the subject of things I wish for,” he said. He looked up at me. I was still standing in front of his desk. He hadn’t invited me to sit down. “This is the second time you’ve ventilated a citizen in the line of duty, isn’t it?”

  “He drew down on me, Sheriff. Would you prefer I’d let him shoot me?”

  “Would’ve been a hell of a lot easier to explain to the papers.” He slumped in his chair now, shaking his head, forlorn. “I just want to make sure it’s not your idea of fun, that’s all. That’s why I put Grassi on it. Way he feels about you, if you fucked up even a jot or a tittle somewhere, he’s gonna find it.”

  “Great.”

  “I’ll ride herd on him. Don’t worry. I just want to know the worst.”

  I didn’t answer. What was there to say?

  “The important thing is that you stay out of it,” he told me. “Don’t muddy the waters. Don’t make things worse. I hear about you questioning witnesses or doctors or deputies or pulling records on the sly, I’ll put you at a school crossing with a lollipop.” He made a noise of pain, stiffened as his hand went back to his belly. “That’s assuming you get your badge back at all.”

  “I appreciate your confidence.”

  “Ah, you’ll get your badge back. You’re a great lawman, Champion. I’ll make sure the grand jury convenes in the next couple of days. I’m sure they’ll find everything was right and proper.”

  “I’ll live in hope. You didn’t get an ID off the girl’s prints yet, did you?”

  “Don’t ask me that. Don’t ask me anything. What’ve I just been saying to you? It’s none of your goddamned business.”

  “All right, all right.”

  “And don’t leave the county. Have I said that already? Do not leave the county without letting Grassi know.”

  I held up a hand in surrender.

  He leaned back in his chair again, a dismal figure between the two flags. “You look like absolute shit by the way.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Enjoy your time off.”

  I stood alone in my ransacked house again, and the craziness of the whole business hit me full force. As I kicked through the pile of coats on the floor of the entryway, stepped over the debris in the living room and the spongy stuffing from the gutted sofa and chairs, felt the glass of a broken pitcher crunching under my shoes, my whole life seemed as much of a mess as this—the last three years of it anyway.

  Three years since I’d left the city, come here to Tyler. Three years I’d spent not thinking about Martin Emory, not remembering how I’d shot him dead. Three years I’d tried to forget about the Fat Woman too and how she’d escaped me, and to forget about Alexander, the little dead boy who’d haunted me through the streets of New York.

  Three years I’d spent dreaming about a girl I’d seen once in a drug-induced hallucination, loving a girl I’d seen, or dreamed I’d seen, just that once . . .

  If someone had told me that those three years had been a lunatic’s delusion, that this, this now, was a lunatic’s delusion and I was really in some institution somewhere, straitjacketed and howling in a padded room—well, I would not have dismissed the idea out of hand.

  I trudged up the stairs. Trudged down the landing to the bedroom. The damage there seemed worse than in the rest of the house. It was as if this had been the main focus of the killer’s search. The mattress was upended, half on the floor, half on its frame. Slit in a dozen places, the foam torn out in handfuls, strewn around. My clothes had been dumped out of the dresser and the closet. The dresser drawers had been pulled out and hurled across the room—hurled so hard that one of them had broken and splintered when it smashed against the wall. There was a hole kicked into the wall too, down near the base.

  Skeleton Two had found my spare piece, of course—a Glock 19, same as my service gun. I kept it in a metal lockbox, on the floor of the closet, by my shoes. I don’t know how he’d managed to pry the box open—it had a strong lock—but he had. He’d tossed the gun and its holster and magazine aside, torn up the foam in the box, and left everything on the floor, where it got buried under a bunch of shirts and sports coats.

  I unearthed the weapon and slid it into the holster under my jacket. I wondered if the deputies had also found the gun when they went through the place last night. I doubted it. Grassi probably would have ordered them to take it if they had.

  I found my gym bag and threw some clothes into it. Threw in my toiletry kit and so on.

  Then I stood a moment and surveyed the shambles. What had they been looking for? It made no sense. Just craziness. All of it.

  I went downstairs, got in my car, and drove out of the county, heading for Manhattan. I needed some answers, Grassi and the sheriff and the grand jury be damned.

  “This is Monahan.”

  I smiled at the sound of his voice coming over the G8’s speakerphone. It reminded me of the old days. I hadn’t spoken to Monahan in over a year.

  “It’s Champion,” I said.

  “He-ey! There’s a voice from the past.”

  “How you been, buddy?”

  “Good. Great. Cheryl’s great. Got a new kid.”

  “Jesus! What’s that—seven?”

 
“Four. Five—something like that. How about you? How’s life in the boondocks?”

  Outside the windshield stretched the pale spring day, the sky pale blue, the sun pale yellow, the trees’ new leaves pale green. The highway wound south. It was lined with dense stands of willows, elms, and maples. I could catch only brief glimpses of the suburbs gathering behind them.

  “I need help,” I said.

  “I sorry. I no speak da English so good.”

  “Very funny.”

  “What do you need?”

  “I killed a man last night.”

  “Again?”

  “Once you get started, it’s hard to stop.”

  “Yeah, I’m like that with peanuts. So what’re you calling me for? Don’t they have anyone in Mayberry who knows how to plant a throwaway?”

  “Believe me, I didn’t need a throwaway with this guy. He put a slug in a porch post half an inch from my ear. I can still hear the wood splintering.”

  “Okay.”

  “I need an ID on him.”

  “He’s dead, right? Check those little finger thingies at the end of his hands. They usually have prints on them.”

  “They’re not gonna find anything off a print—and if they do, they’re not gonna tell me.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “I’m pretty sure you’ll only need to make a couple of calls to get everything there is on the down-low.”

  “All right. Give it to me. What’ve you got?”

  I flashed back on the moment I turned the porch light on. That grinning face. The knife coming at me . . .

  “There were two of them,” I said.

  “Two? Good shooting. You killed them both?”

  “No, one got away.”

  “That’s not like you, Champion.”

  “I think they were brothers. They had to be. Maybe even twins. They looked like skeletons.”

  Monahan didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.

  “They really did, buddy, I’m not kidding you,” I said. “Pale, bony, bald, sunken cheeks. Probably ex-military. Definitely professionals. Crazy as cats on fire, the two of them. Totally nuts. The one who got away? Swore he’d come for me. Swore he’d kill me slow by way of revenge.”