A Killer in the Wind

  Was it all an illusion? I wondered. Was it all a dream—even this?

  Then Bethany was there again. A warm washcloth moved gently over my face.

  “Hold still.”

  “Bethany . . .”

  “You need a doctor.”

  “No.”

  “You need stitches for that cut, sweetheart.”

  “No.”

  The warm washcloth went over my face and blocked my view of her eyes. I wanted to look at her gentle eyes. I tried to see them around the washcloth.

  “Who did this to you?” she said.

  “A killer. A hired gun.”

  “Hold still.

  “I shot his brother. He’s after me.”

  “Okay. We’ll call the police.”

  I caught her wrist. Held the washcloth away so I could see her eyes. They were beautiful. “No,” I told her. “No police.”

  “Dan . . .”

  “They’ll just arrest him. That won’t stop him.”

  “What are you talking about? What are you going to do?”

  “No police, Beth.”

  “That’s crazy! What . . . ? You can’t just kill him.”

  “I can. I will. It’s the only way.”

  She didn’t answer. Gently, she pulled her hand free of my grasp.

  “Hold still,” she said.

  She went back to washing the blood off my face. Frowning, her eyes dark.

  “Look,” I told her. “We can’t call the cops here. Grassi’s got it in for me. He’s just looking to tie me up. You know he is.”

  “Well, forget Grassi then,” she said primly. She disapproved of my plan. “We’ll go to the sheriff.”

  “The sheriff is nothing against this guy. He’ll wind up doing the same thing—tying me up, holding me back—even if he doesn’t mean to. Even if they believe me . . .”

  “They’ll believe you, Champ. Look at you.”

  “Even if they do, even if they arrest him, it won’t stop. He’ll still kill me. He’ll kill you too, Beth.”

  “Me?” She pulled back, her eyes widening.

  “I’m telling you. I shot this guy’s brother. He wants to hurt me. Torture me. He said he’d kill everyone I love.”

  She was silent again. She knelt down beside me. She held my hand. She began to wash my hand with the warm cloth. She washed each of the fingers, one by one.

  “We’ll go to New York,” I told her. “I have a friend there. He’ll put some cops on it but he’ll leave me free to do what I have to do. Okay?”

  I heard her make a noise. I looked down at her. She turned her head away. I thought she had started crying but then I realized, no, she was laughing. Shaking her head, laughing.

  “What?” I said.

  She couldn’t stop giggling, like a kid. “That would be the way I’d find out you love me,” she said. “‘Why are you murdering me, Mr. Bad Guy?’ ‘Because Dan Champion loves you.’ ‘Oh, that’s sweet! I never knew he cared!’ Next time, Champ, could you send me, like, flowers or something? A greeting card . . .”

  I laughed. Looking down at the top of her head as she went back to cleaning my bloody fingers. Looking at the delicate white part in her blonde hair. Why hadn’t I held on to her? Married her? Built a life with her like Monahan had a life?

  What was the point of asking? I knew the answer.

  Samantha . . .

  Later, I woke in the car beside her. Stiff, aching, but clean now. Showered. Bandaged. In fresh jeans and a sweatshirt and windbreaker—clothes I’d left at her house one time. I turned my head on the seat to watch her driving. I watched her profile framed against the swiftly running dark.

  Then it occurred to me: my gun. I reached for my shoulder holster.

  “It’s in the backseat,” Bethany said, watching the mirror, watching the road. “Don’t worry. You can still shoot people.” She smiled at me.

  I sat up slowly. My mouth was sour with sleep. “I had papers, an envelope.”

  “It’s all back there. I brought everything.”

  I blinked. “Where are we going?”

  “New York City. That’s what you said.”

  I nodded. “Right, right. I remember. Stop at a gas station with a market when you see one, would you? I need a burner. A phone they can’t trace.”

  I waited in the car—her car: a jazzy old Mustang—while she went into the store. I watched her move under the gas station’s bright lights. She was wearing an orange trench coat against the cool of the spring night. Her legs were bare. She had good legs.

  When she was inside, I scanned the area through the Mustang’s windows. It was after two in the morning. No other cars in the lot. No one had followed us. No one was on our trail. I didn’t think they would be. Not yet. I’d scotched their plan for now, forced them to burn their safe house. They’d want to regroup before they came for me again.

  Still, there was always a chance. They might act fast, hope to take me off-guard.

  I stepped out of the car as Bethany came back toward me carrying the phone. I stretched. My body was aching, sore.

  “I’ll drive,” I told her.

  She tossed me her keys.

  I drove—and as I drove, I talked to her. The broken white line of the highway zipped under the fender. The dark miles passed. In the rushing quiet of the car, I told her about being an uncle, an undercover, in the NYPD. I told her about my obsession with the Fat Woman. The sting on Martin Emory. About how I took the drug, Zattera—Z—to help me sleep. And the hallucinations that followed: the ghost of the little boy, Alexander, haunting me. Then I told her about the house—Emory’s house in the woods—and the little girl tied to the bedstead. I told her how I pumped five bullets into Emory and killed him dead.

  I glanced over at her when I told her that. To see how she took it. She gazed at me from the passenger seat, her eyes flashing in the passing lights.

  “What,” I said.

  “Nothing,” she answered.

  “He was a child-murdering son of a bitch.”

  “I know that. And I know what that kind of thing does to you. When someone hurts a child—or a woman, for that matter . . . or anyone who can’t defend themselves—I know how you take it, how angry it makes you. I happen to love that about you, Champ.”

  I looked away, back at the road. Made me feel funny, her saying that. Embarrassed. Exposed. “But you don’t like that I killed the guy,” I said. “You don’t like that I’m going to kill Stark.”

  “I don’t care about them. I’m just afraid of what it’ll turn you into. All the killing.”

  “I’ve killed before. I was in a war, remember? I’ve killed a lot.”

  “I know.”

  “From far away and up close. I’m good at it.”

  “I know.”

  I drove silently.

  Bethany said, “You know what I do like?”

  “What.”

  “To hear you talking. You never talk.”

  “Well . . . now I am.”

  “I like it. I’m glad.”

  “Okay.”

  I kept driving. I started talking again. The highway wound past darkened woods, under streetlights suddenly there, suddenly gone. I told her about kicking the drug, sick and crazy, curled on the floor of my room upstairs. I told her about Samantha, about seeing Samantha, and how she was the same girl who had washed up out of the river that night I was at her house . . .

  “Well, she must have been real all along then,” Bethany said. “You must have really seen her.”

  “She wasn’t real. She couldn’t have been. Unless the ghost boy was real too. Alexander.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I found a picture of him hidden in Samantha’s apartment.”

  “You found a picture of the ghost boy? A photograph?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How . . . ?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He was an hallucination. He had to be,” she said.

  “That’s what I’m t
elling you. He was and so was she. I imagined them both. Now they’re real.”

  Bethany was silent. After a while, she turned to look out the window. When I glanced over, I could see her face reflected on the glass.

  “What,” I said.

  She shook her head. “It’s just . . . all this stuff… It’s all been in your head.” She turned to me. “All this time . . .”

  I stared out the windshield. Stared out through my own reflection there on the glass. I understood what she was saying. All this time she and I had been together, there were all these things I hadn’t told her, all these things about me she didn’t know . . . I wondered if she guessed the rest of it. About Samantha, how I felt about Samantha. How I couldn’t love her—Bethany—because I loved another girl, a girl who wasn’t there. And now she was there . . .

  I stole another glance at her reflection on the glass. I thought she probably had guessed it. It was the sort of thing she would guess, being Bethany.

  “Well, now I’m telling you,” I said.

  “I know,” she said.

  She said it so sadly I thought she must have guessed for sure.

  We didn’t talk again for miles. We sat in the car together in silence. It felt to me as if Samantha was there too, sitting between us. The trees gathered darkly on the sides of the freeway. The lights of the suburbs winked and flashed behind them. Streetlights, the glaring lights of gas stations, the dim yellow lights of houses, lights left on through the night—I caught glimpses of them through the branches and the new leaves.

  After a while, I felt Bethany watching me again. I felt she’d been watching me a long time and I hadn’t noticed, lost in my own thoughts as I was.

  “What,” I said.

  “Well, I kind of think I get this.”

  “Get what?”

  “All of this. What’s happening. I mean, do you really not see it?”

  Something in the tone of her voice made me clutch inside. Something tender and knowledgeable in the way she spoke. I knew deep down I didn’t want to hear what she was going to say next, but I had to. I had to know.

  “What do you mean?” I asked her.

  “This is actually kind of funny,” she said. “It’s like a joke from God or something. I mean, what am I? I’m no big brain. I know that. I wait tables at Sal’s. But I get it. And you’re the cop, you’re the detective and you can’t figure it out. And that’s it, isn’t it? You literally can’t. That’s the whole point.”

  I shook my head. “What’s the point? The point of what? What are you talking about?” But I felt like I knew what she meant and like I didn’t want to know.

  “You dreamed Samantha,” Bethany said. “You’ve been dreaming about her all this time, haven’t you? And now she’s real.”

  My breathing went shallow. I drove the car over the dark, winding road. I licked my dry lips. “Yeah?”

  “The boy too. You saw the ghost of the boy while you were on the drug. And Samantha has his photograph. Which means he was real too.”

  I worked the wheel, worked the Mustang around a long curve, worked to swallow down the knot in my throat.

  “Do you remember when we were talking?” Bethany said. “How we were in bed talking just before you got the call to come to the river? You remember?”

  I tried to say yeah but the word turned to ashes.

  “I asked you what your earliest memory was,” said Bethany. “You said it was playing catch with one of your foster fathers.”

  I tried to say so what? but those words turned to ashes too.

  “You said he coached Little League and wanted you on his team. You said he was shocked you’d never played catch before.”

  I turned to her. She was a shadow in the darkness. Only her eyes gleamed. Then she laughed.

  “It really is a joke from God. You’re the detective, but you can’t see it. My nephew’s in Little League. Little League is for seven-year-olds. Six at the youngest, but if your foster father was shocked you hadn’t played catch, well, then I bet you were probably at least seven, maybe even eight.”

  I faced the windshield again, my reflection half–blacked out, half-visible. I licked my lips again. I tried to tell myself I didn’t understand what she was saying.

  “Come on!” said Bethany. “Your first memory is when you were seven or eight? I can remember stuff from when I was, like, three years old. I can remember a wedding I went to when I was four—what the bride was wearing, what the preacher looked like, everything . . .”

  I was driving in the left lane, moving fast, close to eighty. I saw a green exit sign by the right side of the road. I swerved across the empty lanes, my hands unsteady on the wheel, my palms damp. I shot the car off the highway, down the ramp, braking hard, slowing. I reached the stop sign at the intersection. Took a right onto the two-lane and pulled over quickly under an oak tree by the side of the road. The tree bowed down out of the pale starry sky and hung over the roof of the car. I sat with Bethany in the deep shadows there, the glow from the dashboard light playing over us. Man, I was exhausted. I hurt. My eyes felt sunken and weak. My lips felt shivery and slack. The scratch on my face burned and ached under the gauze Bethany had taped over it.

  Bethany spoke softly out of the darkness. “You’re missing three or four years of memory,” she said. “That’s why you can’t see it. Not seeing it is the whole point of everything—everything you do and say. You don’t know who you are, Champ. You don’t want to know. That’s the whole point of everything.” She reached over and touched my arm and I started—I almost jumped back away from her—but her fingers curled gently around my wrist and held on. “Hallucinations don’t come to life, Dan. Unless they’re not hallucinations. Unless they’re memories.”

  I leaned forward in my seat. I pressed my forehead against the steering wheel, holding the wheel in both hands. I closed my eyes.

  “That’s the joke,” Bethany said. “You’re the detective but you can’t figure out the answer. Because the answer is you.”

  Now it was after three A.M. We were sitting in the Gemini Diner on Second Avenue in midtown Manhattan. We were in the last booth. My back was to the wall so I was facing the door but I was staring into my coffee. Bethany was sitting across from me. I could feel her watching me but I didn’t look up. I was thinking about everything she had said. It was like I knew it was true but I didn’t want to know. It was like I wanted to think about it but I couldn’t.

  I raised my eyes to her—I guess I was going to try to talk it out. But just then, Monahan pushed in through the glass door.

  “Don’t tell him,” I said.

  Then Monahan was standing immensely over us. He gave a short, sharp laugh when he saw the state of me.

  “Jesus, Champion.”

  “They started it.”

  “How many’d you kill this time?”

  “Just one.”

  “Jesus.”

  “One thug. Stark slipped me.”

  “Do I have to worry about a body turning up?”

  “Not likely.”

  Monahan laughed again, not a happy laugh. He jerked his head at Bethany. “Shove over, sweetheart.” He slid into the booth next to her. He loomed over her, made her look tiny, made her look like a tourist under the Rock of Gibraltar.

  “I’m Bethany,” she told him.

  Monahan nodded, but he kept his eyes on me. He didn’t care who she was. “So it’s still you and Stark,” he said to me.

  I nodded. “He says he’ll kill everyone I love.”

  Monahan’s big Irish schoolboy face broke into a big Irish schoolboy grin. “That’s a short list, anyway. I know I feel safe.”

  “He asked after you, in fact.”

  “Thoughtful guy.”

  “I gave him your address so he could drop you a line.”

  “Nice.”

  “A map to your place. Pictures of your kids.”

  “So I gotta move ’em somewhere?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you want me to
take this one too.” He barely tilted his thumb toward Bethany.

  “Why not? I figure if you’re all together, it’ll save Stark travel expenses. I’m all about economy.”

  Monahan placed his giant paw over his giant forehead. He drew the hand slowly down over his face, as if he were wiping away cobwebs. He leaned in across the table. “How hard would you laugh if I told you to come in with me?”

  “Only moderately but for a long time.”

  Monahan sighed. “Okay.” He slapped the tabletop. Slid out of the booth. He said to Beth: “Come on, sister, let’s go.” She slid out too and stood beside him. He wrapped his paw around her elbow. Made her arm look like a toothpick stuck in a steak. He looked down at me.

  “Really, Champ. Come in. Give us what you got. Let us handle it.”

  “Oh, yeah? So you’ll run him to ground in a year or two?”

  “We’ll get him. It’s what we do.”

  I looked up at him. I thought about it. I thought about what Bethany had said.

  I’m afraid of what all the killing will turn you into.

  “Right,” I said aloud. “You and the NYPD—you’ll run Stark down and arrest him.”

  “The FBI too. This isn’t just a New York operation.”

  “Another couple of years, assuming he doesn’t make bail—assuming he doesn’t skip bail—you might even manage to put him on trial.”

  “We’ll put him on trial. He’s a hired gun. The feds could give him the death penalty.”

  “Sure, if he’s convicted. Then, what, even if he is convicted. Fifteen, sixteen years down the line—if he doesn’t win an appeal and if the laws don’t change—he could have himself a date with the executioner.”

  “There you go.”

  “Good plan,” I said. I glanced at Bethany. She frowned down at me. I turned back to Monahan.

  “Only one problem,” I said. “I am the executioner.”

  11

  Desperate Measures

  I HOLED UP IN a motel in Brooklyn just off the Gowanus Expressway. I didn’t bother to get undressed. There wasn’t much left of the night. I just kicked my shoes off and lay on top of the bedspread in my clothes. Curtains drawn, room dark. I watched the ceiling. I listened to the traffic, the wash and rumble and roar of the traffic, never ceasing outside the window. I heard Bethany’s voice in my head.