A Killer in the Wind

“It’s nice when brothers love each other.”

  “Right. He meant it too. It wasn’t just the usual I’m-gonna-torture-you-to-death chitchat. My friends in the Sheriff’s Department are investigating whether I dotted my i’s before I blasted Skeleton One, meanwhile I’m gonna wake up one night tied to my bed, Skeleton Two standing over me with a syringe and a skinning knife.”

  Monahan chuckled. I’m not sure why. “Anything else?”

  “I got the number off his burner.”

  “Excellent.”

  I gave it to him. There was quiet while he wrote it down. I watched the clustering trees at the side of the highway. They parted like a curtain at an exit, giving me a view of gas station signs and stores and streetlamps. The city was less than an hour away.

  “All right,” said Monahan finally. “I’ll make some calls. And don’t worry. If this guy is really a professional, he’s not gonna expose himself by torture-killing a cop.”

  I nodded. I guided the G8 over the twisting pavement.

  “Consider me reassured,” I said.

  I stopped off in Queens to visit my old apartment. The house in Jackson Heights was just the same as when I lived there: a gray and white two-story clapboard, a flight of stairs going up the side to the second floor. There was a fresh paint job but otherwise nothing had changed. Made me feel for a moment like I could walk right back into the world I’d left behind.

  But that feeling went away fast when I knocked on the door downstairs and Ed Morris opened it. The old man had withered, as if he’d aged fifty years in three. He’d always looked like he was deflating downward into the ground, but now he was collapsing inward too. Gaunt, sunken, his clothes baggy around him, most of his iron hair gone.

  “Well, well, well,” he said—his voice was hoarse and more gentle than I remembered it. It was almost as if he were pleased to see me. “Detective Champion. You look like someone been beating on you, boy.”

  “Must’ve been something I said.”

  “I’ll bet it was.”

  “How about you, old man? How you doing?”

  “How I look?” he said, and laughed and coughed.

  “What, you sick?”

  “Oh, yeah. I’m dying, Champion. Just a few months left, they say.”

  “Ah, shit, man. I’m sorry.”

  “Me too.”

  He led me into the living room. The curtains were drawn. It was dimly lit. The air smelled two weeks old. He settled himself carefully in an aging armchair. It had a brace on the arm supporting a metal tray. There was medicine on the tray and water and a bowl of half-eaten soup. The television was playing some god-awful thing—women screeching their stupid opinions at one another, I don’t know what. Ed only just managed to gesture with a trembling hand toward a worn green sofa. I sat down on the edge of it.

  “So? What you want?” he said. “You didn’t come to see my—” he coughed roughly—“smiling face.”

  “You remember that time I was sick upstairs?”

  His sallow eyes shifted, searching for the memory. “Yeah. Just at the end of you staying here. Yeah, I remember.”

  “You remember I came down here afterward and asked you about a girl.”

  He searched the corners again, vague, thwarted. “My memory . . .”

  “A pretty redheaded girl named Samantha. You said you didn’t know her.”

  “Nah . . . Oh, wait. Back in the kitchen there. Yeah. Yeah. I didn’t know her.”

  “That’s what you said. I gotta ask you something.”

  “All right. Go ahead.”

  “Did anyone make you say that? Threaten you? Offer you money?”

  “Money? What do you mean?”

  “Did someone tell you to say you didn’t know the girl, that you’d never seen her? I’m sorry, Ed, I need the answer. Were you telling me the truth? You really never saw her?”

  It took him a moment to grasp what I was asking him, but then he did. “Nah. Nah. No one threatened me. Or paid me. That’s crazy.”

  “There was just no girl.”

  “There was never any girl. I swear it. You must’ve been seeing things.”

  “You never saw two guys, twins. White men. Scary-looking. Like twin skeletons. They never came here. You never saw them.”

  He shook his head. “Nothing like that.”

  “No one’s ever threatened you . . .”

  “Who could threaten me now? Or buy me either? What I got to lose or pay for? Wives don’t talk to me, kids don’t talk to me. I’m dying alone here, Champion. I got no reason to lie to anyone anymore.”

  Before I left, I went upstairs to see the old place. I’m not sure why exactly. I’m not sure what I was expecting to find. I think I just wanted to get a sense of the past, a sense that the past had really happened, that it wasn’t just a figment of my drug-addled memories.

  Ed told me there was a young couple living upstairs now. Only the girl-half was at home when I got there. A skinny creature in her twenties with dyed black hair and a bad complexion. Wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt. Sporting a spiderweb tattoo on her arm, a ring in her nose, and a stud on her tongue. Cocaine eyes. And, oh, yeah, a baby on her hip.

  She opened the door, took one look at me, and went blank and scared. She knew a cop when she saw one.

  “Albert’s not home,” she said instantly.

  “It’s all right, sweetheart,” I told her. I waggled a finger at the baby’s nose. The kid stared at it, cross-eyed, openmouthed. “I’m on personal business. I used to live here. I just want to look around.”

  “Well, I’m just . . . I’m not . . .”

  “It’s all right,” I told her again.

  She didn’t know what to do, so she let me in.

  I stood in the center of the room. The place was littered with baby stuff. A playpen, brightly colored plastic toys, stuffed animals. There was a round dining table in one corner. A box of crackers on it. Also, cracker crumbs and trace amounts of white powder.

  The girl stood next to me as I looked around. She kept eyeing the cocaine residue on the table. Her aura of fear and panic was distracting. I just wanted to stand there and get a feel for the old days.

  “We’re just . . . you know . . . bringing up our baby,” the girl said to me. Trying to sound wholesome. Ruining the effect with a nervous laugh.

  Annoyed, I just held up my hand in answer. I wished she’d be quiet. I also wished she’d stop doing blow while she was taking care of her baby. And dump her dealer boyfriend. And go home to her mother—or any clean relative she had. But mostly I just wished she’d shut up and let me think.

  I looked around the room. At the places I’d been. At the places where Samantha had appeared to me.

  What the hell? I thought. How was it possible? What the hell was happening to me?

  I moved to the wainscoting, crouched down, and checked the panel—just as I had back in the day. I didn’t need to do it really. I knew there’d be no secret hiding place. There never was.

  I straightened up. I thought of the woman who had washed impossibly out of the Hudson. The same face, the same hair, the same eyes. The same woman as had appeared to me in my hallucination. Samantha.

  They’re coming after us.

  What the hell? I thought. What the hell?

  I was waiting for Monahan when he got home. Nice suburban house in Little Neck. Cheryl had assigned me to their front room and plunked me on the sofa by the window there with a bottle of beer. The front room was the formal living room. Clean carpeting and stuffed furniture with embroidered upholstery. Family portraits taken by professional photographers. A painting of Jesus holding a lamp—the light of the world. Putting me in there, I think, was Cheryl’s version of treating me as an honored guest. Plus the formality of the room was supposed to keep the kids away from me. That didn’t work much. Tribes of the midget barbarians kept drifting in, drifting closer, gazing at me. Man, there were a lot of them.

  “Why is your face all hurt?” one of them asked me.

 
“I punched a bad guy with it.”

  “You can’t punch with your face!”

  “Oh, now you tell me. Where were you when I needed you?”

  Cheryl would keep shouting from somewhere, “Kids, leave Mr. Champion alone, you know you’re not supposed to be in there!” But that would only disperse them briefly. Then the little savages would come back, drifting closer and closer, bolder with each return.

  By the time Daddy got home, they were swarming over me like the bloodthirsty cannibals they were. Then Monahan stepped through the front door and I was unburied in a single sweeping rush. The kids launched a heedless charge at the thick-necked muscleman and a second later were dangling from his enormous arms and body like Christmas ornaments. Cheryl came out of somewhere too, carrying the new baby on her hip—a mess of a thing covered in some hideous green substance. Monahan nevertheless bent his big body low and kissed it and even paused down there to plant one on his wife as well. Cheryl handed him a bottle of beer.

  “Come on, kids,” she said then.

  Monahan shook them off him and said, “Outta my sight, you criminals. I’ll be in in a little while.”

  Cheryl herded them away—all except the oldest boy, who hid behind a chair and aimed his finger at me like a gun, making shooting noises.

  “I potted this one, like, ten times already,” I complained to Monahan. “He won’t stay dead.”

  “Yeah, they’re like zombies, you gotta go for the head shot.” Monahan pressed a finger to the kid’s temple and said, “Blam. Now get outta here.”

  That did the trick. We were finally alone.

  Monahan sat on the edge of one of the embroidered armchairs, his elbows on his knees, his beer bottle hanging out from beneath one huge paw. The chair was a big one, but it looked like doll house furniture under him. I sat on the edge of the sofa and we bent our heads together until they were almost touching. Monahan kept his voice low so his family wouldn’t hear him.

  “Their names are Roy and Robert Stark,” he murmured. “They’re professionals, like you said. Top of the line. Twins, like you said too. There’s not much background on them. Some rumors they worked security for the Arab slavers in North Africa.”

  “Nice.”

  “Then out of nowhere, maybe five years back, they blew into town, cut the throats of a couple of freelancers, and consolidated the business.”

  “What business?”

  “Murder for hire, security, debt collection—a sort of temp agency, I guess you could say: one-stop shopping for all your enforcement needs.”

  “Damn. This was five years ago? I never even heard of them.”

  “They probably didn’t advertise in the NYPD Shield.”

  “That must be it.”

  “The thing is though—according to what I hear—the Stark twins themselves have mostly graduated from the bloody stuff. They bring in people to do the wet work for them.”

  “Not this time. Not with me.”

  “Well, right. So if they came after you themselves, maybe you stepped on their territory somehow. Have there been any big busts up in Nowhereland lately that might’ve gotten Roy and Rob ticked off?”

  I shook my head. “A fugitive killer out of Tennessee. It was just a domestic rap, though. Killed his girlfriend. Could’ve been a pal of theirs, I guess.”

  “The other possibility, I’m thinking, is that you somehow made yourself an enemy powerful enough—rich enough—to hire these guys to do you with their own skeleton-white hands.”

  When he said that, I thought of the Fat Woman. Or, that is, I tried not to think of her, as I had tried not to think of her every day for the last three years.

  “What?” said Monahan. He was watching me carefully. He must’ve seen the idea go through my mind.

  I shrugged. No point telling him. Why would the Fat Woman come after me? Why now? It was just my old obsession acting up. “What else you got?” I asked him.

  He leaned even closer to me, spoke even lower. “The burner. The number you gave me.”

  “Right, right.”

  “There were only three calls on it, all of them three days ago, all of them to one other burner.”

  “So twin-to-twin probably.”

  “Probably. The calls came out of a town called Greensward, Pennsylvania. From a coffee shop there—The Grind, it’s called—on State Street. The caller was in the vicinity at least ninety minutes, roughly seven-thirty to nine A.M.”

  “Good, that’s good,” I said, feeling a touch of excitement. It was a place to start, anyway. Greensward, Pennsylvania. “What else?”

  He shifted uncomfortably, averting his eyes. “Some of this stuff I heard . . . You know how it is with guys like this. When they first hit town, they took out some top-level talent. A lot of bloody, dramatic stuff, laying claim to the territory, inspiring fear. They went after one guy’s face with a power sander . . .”

  “Yeah? So?”

  “So, I’m just saying, it’s like . . . they’re urban legends now. Everyone you talk to has a story about them.”

  “Spit it out, Monahan. What’re you trying to tell me?”

  “Well . . . remember what you told me? How Stark was gonna make you beg for death and all?”

  “Yeah?”

  “And I said he wouldn’t expose himself by coming after a cop.”

  I nodded.

  Monahan took a swig of beer before continuing, a swig of courage. “I don’t know which one of them you killed. I don’t think it matters very much. These guys . . . apparently they were . . .” He held up two fingers close together. “Heart to heart. You know? Like they were still in Mommy’s tummy. They thought the same thoughts. Even went at girls together, one on one end, one on the other. So the point is, when you killed one of them? It’s like you ripped a single guy in half.”

  “So you’re telling me he was serious about coming after me.”

  “The word is he’s brought in his top talent to help look for you—that’s two, three, maybe four expert killers on your trail, not counting Stark himself. And their orders are to take you alive . . .”

  “Right, right, right. So Stark can really go to work on me, make me beg for death.”

  Monahan blew out a worried breath, ran his sausage-sized fingers up through his bristly red hair. “Look, I know the sort of stuff you did in the ’Stan. I know you can mix it up with anyone. But in this case . . . maybe I should arrange to get you some police protection, maybe even witness protection . . .”

  I didn’t answer. I just smiled at him. We both knew the police couldn’t protect me from this. No one could.

  “’Cause the thing is,” he said, “they’re good at this stuff, Champ. The Stark boys, I mean—that was their rep. They were always good at the torture stuff. They learned the techniques in Africa. Those Arab slavers, man. Not nice people.”

  “Well . . . maybe you’ve just been hanging around the wrong Arab slavers.” I gave a pale laugh as I said it, but when our eyes met, the big cop’s schoolboy face was so full of concern for me it was kind of touching.

  “All right, boys,” said Cheryl. She had come into the room’s archway to fetch us. She stood framed there, children clinging to her legs. “Lasagna’s ready.”

  Monahan and I traded gazes another moment. “Screw it,” he finally said. “Dinner’ll probably kill you anyway.”

  I spent the night in a hotel near the airport. I skimmed over the surface of sleep. Every few minutes, my eyes opened, checked the door. I kept my gun on the bedside table.

  Cheryl had offered me the sofa at the Monahan house. “What do you mean a hotel? You’re not going to a hotel. You stay with us.” Monahan stood behind her nodding his big head and saying, “Yeah, you should stay.” But he was looking at me the whole time, telling me with his eyes: He didn’t want me there. Skeleton Stark—whichever one of them was left—was coming after me. Him and his top talent. Two or three or four expert killers. Monahan wasn’t going to have me bringing death and destruction down on his wife and ki
ds.

  So I lay on the hotel bed, alone, and watched the door.

  In the morning, I left New York for Pennsylvania. It was a windy spring day. The vertical stone city opened like curtains as I crossed the river into Jersey. The narrow corridors of sky grew bright and wide. Soon, green farmland stretched into blue distances. The shadows of large clouds drifted over rolling hills. Hours of highway rolled out ahead of me. I watched the traffic in the G8’s rearview. I didn’t spot a tail.

  I tried to listen to the talkers on the radio, but they kept fading out as I traveled. It interrupted the train of their conversation. It was annoying. I tried to listen to music instead but it didn’t occupy my mind. That was the trouble. My mind wouldn’t leave things alone. I couldn’t figure the situation out but I couldn’t stop thinking about it either. I couldn’t stop asking myself: Who sent the Stark twins to get me and why? Where had Samantha come from? How could she even exist?

  The gash in my side throbbed. So did the sore spots on my face and my body. There were still flashbacks too. The porch light coming on to reveal the skeleton face standing next to me. The knife just slipping past. The gunshots, the bullet just missing, the porch pillar splintering by my ear. The Glock jammed in my eye . . .

  I couldn’t stop thinking that if one of those skeleton bastards had nailed me—the knife in the gut, the bullet in the head—I would’ve died without a clue to the reason for it. Not that it would’ve mattered much, I guess. But a fellow likes to know these things.

  I forced the questions out of my mind, but they kept slipping back in, my thoughts kept returning to them.

  And to the Fat Woman. I couldn’t stop thinking about the Fat Woman. The old obsession back again.

  I reached the town of Greensward around 11A.M. It was a nice old town set in the hills above low farmland. Fine old white buildings on the outskirts and fine old brick buildings at the center. Views of the valley at the end of every avenue.

  I parked the car in a public lot and toured the area on foot. The neighborhood was quaint and artsy. Brick brownstones with bay windows. Cafés with sidewalk tables. It was Saturday now and there was plenty of traffic. Plenty of pedestrians and people in the shops. Young, most of them, college age. There must’ve been a college somewhere nearby.