A Killer in the Wind

  You’re missing three or four years of memory. That’s why you can’t see it. Not seeing it is the whole point of everything.

  I tried to think about that but somehow I couldn’t keep my mind on it. My mind kept drifting. After a while, I was standing outside. I was in the backyard. I was wearing a baseball glove on my left hand, holding a ball in my right. I threw the ball and the Fat Woman caught it. She stared at me—huge, shapeless, featureless, her face a swirl of cancer stains. Her mouth opened. It was a deep black hole.

  Have you got him, Stark? she said.

  My eyes jerked wide. I heard the traffic on the Gowanus.

  That can’t be right, I thought. That was just a dream.

  I turned to look over my shoulder, to make sure I was awake now. I saw an open place surrounded by trees. The sunlight poured down through the branches in hazy beams. Men with shovels were digging holes in the dirt. Dead children slowly stood up in the holes. They stared at me. Alexander was one of them. He stood up in his hole and stared at me too. I watched the dead children, holding the baseball in my hand. I wanted to throw the ball to Alexander but I wasn’t sure whether the dead played catch.

  My eyes jerked open. Traffic.

  That can’t be right, I thought. That had to have been a dream.

  It was a long night. Dream after dream, all bad. Finally I woke to see a glow of daylight under the hem of the heavy curtains. I checked the clock on the bedside table. I was surprised to see it was after 8 A.M.

  I swung my legs over the side of the bed. I sat up, groaning. My body was sore all over. I staggered into the bathroom. I looked in the mirror. The face that stared back at me was hollow-eyed, bandaged, bruised. I tugged the gauze off my cheek. A thick black scab covered the cut beneath. The scarred man in the reflection looked at me accusingly.

  You don’t know who you are.

  I turned my back on him. Walked out. Walked across the hotel room. I found the curtain string and pulled it.

  The curtains parted and the gray city light poured in over me. I blinked out into it. I saw the motel parking lot. I saw the cars passing on the freeway just beyond, an unbroken, racing parade. There was a faint gray haze in the air, maybe from the highway fumes.

  I looked out and thought about the dead children in my dream. I thought about the Fat Woman. Still out there somewhere. Stark too. Still out there. Coming after me. Coming after everyone I loved.

  And the only link to them I had was Samantha. A hallucination come to life . . .

  Hallucinations don’t come to life. Unless they’re not hallucinations. Unless they’re memories.

  But how could I have known her and forgotten her? It made no sense.

  You’re the detective but you can’t see the answer, Bethany had said. Because the answer is you.

  I have to remember, I thought.

  After a while, I turned from the daylight back into the room. I went to the chair in the corner. The manila envelope was there—the envelope I had taken from Samantha Pryor’s apartment, from the hiding hole behind the wainscoting. This is what Stark had been looking for. What was it? What did Samantha know?

  I removed the sheaf of paper inside and dealt the pages out on top of the bedspread so I could see them all together. I put the snapshot—the faded photograph of Alexander—on the bedside table. I felt him staring at me the whole time.

  I hung over the bed, studying the papers.

  Most of the pages were printouts of newspaper stories. A lot of the stories were about my old case: Martin Emory and the “House of Evil.” The other pages were from legal pads. They were covered in scribbles: doodles, words, numbers lost amidst sketches of faceless people, houses, jagged lines like flames. I made out the words St. Mary. I made out the words New York. I made out names: Arnold, William, Jenny. My eye flashed to the name Samantha, the name Alexander—but they were there unconnected, like thoughts that had come and gone.

  I kept stalking around the edge of the bed, my eyes going over the pages with a hungry, predatory gaze. What did Samantha know? What was she looking for? I picked out other words: Elm, Sawnee, Pothurst . . . Street names? Towns? I wasn’t sure.

  Then I came to one page and saw my own name circled. Dan Champion. Scribbled next to it, almost illegible, was my address in Tyler, circled. There were two other addresses I didn’t recognize, both crossed out.

  She had been looking for me. And she had found me.

  What else was she looking for?

  Beneath my name was another name and address, also circled: Franklin Hawthorne, Washington Falls, NY. I lifted the page in my hand, stared at it, then lifted my eyes and stared at the wall above the bed’s headboard. I tried to probe my memory but got nowhere. The name meant nothing to me. I did not know a Franklin Hawthorne from Washington Falls, New York.

  It might be a lead, though. Something I could go on. Or maybe not. Whatever it was, it wasn’t enough.

  I laid the list back on the bedspread. I put my hand over my eyes, massaged my temples. I felt the snapshot of Alexander watching me. What did it all mean? What did any of it mean?

  And who was Samantha? What did she have to do with me?

  I walked to the window again. I gazed out again at the hazy day.

  Samantha had the answers. Everything kept circling back to her. It wasn’t enough just to follow her leads. Words she’d scribbled on paper. Words that meant nothing without context. I had to know who she was, what she was after, whose side she was on.

  I had to remember her . . .

  But I can’t, I thought. I can’t.

  I lifted my hand. I pressed it against the glass, against the dirty light and the pale sky over the expressway.

  There’s only one way, I thought. Only one way.

  I knew what I had to do.

  There was a diner next to the hotel. I ate a late breakfast there. It was nearly noon by the time I got in my car.

  I drove out to Queens. I got some cash from an ATM. I bought some clothes and an overnight bag. I called some of my old cop friends and scored some fresh ammo for my Glock.

  I went to the library. Used one of its computers. Looked up Washington Falls, New York, the name of the town Samantha had scribbled on one of her pages. There was a website; pictures: a small, prosperous-looking upstate town. I couldn’t find an address or phone number for Franklin Hawthorne. But I figured in a town that size, if he was there, I’d find him. I would try, anyway.

  But not yet.

  First, I drove to the shore. I found an empty stretch of road by the quiet waters of Long Island Sound. No one could follow me here without being spotted. I turned off the engine. I peered through the windshield at the tall yellow-green marsh grass stirring and waving in the soft spring breeze.

  I thought about what I was going to do. They weren’t happy thoughts. It was a desperate idea, a desperate measure. But the Fat Woman was still out there and Stark was still out there. I couldn’t just follow some treasure hunt of clues Samantha had left me, not knowing what they meant, not knowing what I was walking into, not even knowing who Samantha was. If Bethany was right, the answer to all my questions was locked inside me, locked inside my mind. It must have been there all this time. All my life, in fact. But I couldn’t reach it. I had never reached it.

  Or that is, I had reached it only once. By one path. One awful path.

  And now I was going to have to take that path again.

  Nothing had changed at the Harlem Lounge. A line of drinkers still sat shoulder to shoulder at the bar—for all I knew, it was the same line of drinkers as had sat there three years before. Some were hunched over their glasses, some lifted their faces into the glow of the basketball highlights on late night TV. Each raised his drink to his lips at intervals. They drank with unwavering purpose.

  A narrow stretch of open floor ran between their backs and the empty tables. At the end of that narrow corridor, at the end of the bar, where the bar curled around parallel to the bathroom doors—there, as before, sat the dealer, Janks. An
open stool, as before, stood beside him. As before, no one looked at me, not even Janks himself, as I planted myself on the seat.

  I raised my chin to the bartender. Still the one-eyed man. Still wouldn’t show a white junkie anything but his dead socket.

  “Think you could get me a beer?” I asked Janks.

  Janks raised his index finger a fraction of an inch off the surface of the bar. The one-eyed man saw that somehow. In response, he materialized in front of me. Slapped a glass down on the bar and filled it from a hose.

  I watched the yellow liquid swirl into foam. “I was afraid you’d’ve caught a bullet by now,” I said to Janks.

  Janks didn’t answer until the bartender was gone. “Never happen, my man,” he said then. “Even the people who want to kill me need my shit.”

  I nodded. Probably true. I turned to him. He was the same hungry-looking brown undertaker. Solemn, self-important. The pharmacist of the inferno.

  “What can I do you for?” he said.

  “You sold me something years ago. To help me sleep. Z, you called it. Zattera.”

  Janks made a horselike noise, riffling, dismissive. “You don’t want that shit. That shit’ll kill ya. Government banned that shit.”

  “What’re you, the surgeon general?”

  “Just saying. I’m, like, a warning label. What do you want with that shit anyway?”

  “It made me see things,” I said, staring into my beer. “I need to see those things again.”

  “Man, I don’t know how to break this to you. But that shit you saw? That shit ain’t real.”

  “It was real enough. Just cut the crap and hit me, Janks.”

  While Janks was in the men’s room, I sipped my beer and watched the TV. My stomach churned. I didn’t want to do this. But I had to. I had to remember.

  Janks plopped his scrawny ass down on the stool next to me. Slid his hand across the bar to mine. I took the Baggie of white pills and he took the money.

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” he told me. “That shit’ll make you crazy.”

  “I’m already crazy,” I said.

  I slipped the bag into my pocket.

  I stared at that first pill a long time before I worked up the nerve to take it.

  I was in another motel by then. North of the city—on the way to Washington Falls—plunked between a burger joint and a gas station off a strip of commercial two-lane. It was close to midnight. The television was on. Some old comedy playing. The laugh track in my ears.

  I stared at the white pill on the bedside table.

  You’re missing three or four years of memory. That’s why you can’t see it. Not seeing it is the whole point of everything you do and say. You don’t know who you are. You don’t want to know. That’s the whole point of everything.

  Ha ha ha, went the laugh track.

  I took the pill.

  I had forgotten how the Z worked. How easy and natural it was. It didn’t feel like taking a drug at all. It just felt like a change in your point of view. There I was, at first all worried, all balled up and twisted inside. Getting off the bed every few minutes to peek out through the curtains into the night. Watching for Stark or another one of his men. Knowing they were out there somewhere, looking for me.

  Then, maybe ten minutes later, I just didn’t care.

  I was lying on the bed again and I wasn’t afraid of Stark and I wasn’t obsessed with the Fat Woman and I was very philosophical about all the dead children in my dream—very philosophical about everything.

  That’s just the way it goes sometimes, I was more or less thinking.

  Then I was asleep. Suspended in a deep and peaceful nothingness. I only woke up once, startled out of a dream of fire.

  Ha ha ha. People were still laughing on the television set, although I guess they were different people than before, laughing at something else.

  I found the remote and turned the TV off and went back to sleep in the comforting silence.

  In the morning, I drove north. I kept off the highways. The Z made me calmer, but I still felt Stark at my back. I didn’t know how close he was or how sophisticated his tracking methods were. The first time he found me was at Samantha’s apartment. He might just have guessed I would go there but maybe he could track my credit cards or ATM transactions. I didn’t know what he could do.

  So I stayed on the two-lane for a while. Then I stopped for gas and bought a sandwich at the minimart. I washed another Z pill down with a Coke. I figured the more I took, the faster it would do what I needed it to do.

  I drove another few miles, then got off the two-lane and drove down a winding country road past rolling hills. The hills gave way to a forest, red with new spring branches, and pale green with new spring leaves. I drove through the woods for about twenty minutes. I felt good. I felt calm. But I kept watching the rearview.

  Then, suddenly, I caught a glimpse of someone. I turned my head and—yes, there!—a figure was standing in the woods, staring at me as I drove past . . .

  I hit the brakes. The tires squealed. The car wove unsteadily onto the road’s shoulder, sending up a cloud of dust.

  I jumped out into the mild weather. I was wearing jeans, a T-shirt, a windbreaker. I felt the cool of spring on my skin. I walked cautiously back down the road, my hand inside my jacket, my fingers brushing the butt of my gun. There was no sound at all except the breeze through the forest and the distant thrum of an airplane.

  I stood and peered into the woods where the figure had been. Nothing there but tangled vines and lacework branches. The sun in hazy beams. No one watching. No one I could see.

  The drug, I thought. It’s the drug. It’s starting to work.

  I got back in my car and drove on.

  Another motel room. I doubled the dose of Z. All my terrors left me and I fell fast asleep.

  I was fast asleep several hours later, two hours before dawn, when I heard Stark laughing right beside me.

  The sound was so like the slither of a viper that I felt the cold snake-skin coil around my throat and tighten. My eyes flashed open and I went for my gun, but too late—he was already there, standing over me, that skeleton head leaning toward me with its fixed rictus, the silver blade flashing in his white hand . . .

  Then, in the next moment, he was gone. The light from the motel sign outside bled in through the thin curtains and I could see that the room was empty. I sat up, my heart hammering hard.

  It’s the drug. Just the drug.

  I hung my head. Drew in a deep breath.

  I smelled smoke.

  Quickly I turned on the bedside light. I looked around me with wide eyes. There was no smoke, no fire. But I could smell it still.

  I got out of bed. I was in my underwear. I padded barefoot into the bathroom. Ran the water in the sink, grabbed some in my hands and splashed it over my face to clear my head.

  As the water dripped down, I looked in the mirror. I saw myself, my face unshaven. I saw the black slash on my cheek, still jagged and raw. I saw the frightened look in my eyes.

  And I saw the dead child standing behind me.

  It was Alexander. He was standing in the room, very still against the far wall. He was wearing a white shirt and dirt-stained corduroys. His skin was as pallid as the shirt, bloodless, lifeless. His stare was lifeless. He was holding a candle in his hand.

  He stood and stared at me and I stood staring back. I didn’t want to turn around because I knew if I did, he wouldn’t be there, he’d be gone. I wanted to keep him there, I wanted to ask him who he was—or who he used to be. I wanted to get the truth out of him.

  So I stood and stared at him as he stood there holding his candle. Then something caught my eye. I noticed a hole in the wall behind him, a hole down low against the floor. My glance flicked to it only for a moment, but when I looked up again, Alexander was gone.

  I swung around. The room was empty. My eyes went down to the base of the wall, the place where I’d seen the hole. There was no hole there now. But I had
seen it.

  He hid the candle in there, I thought suddenly. In the hiding hole behind the wainscoting. A candle and some matches. Because he was afraid of the dark.

  I let a long, slow breath come out of me. I stood with my mouth open, my eyes on the place in the wall.

  It was true. Somehow I knew it was true. He hid the candle behind the wainscoting because he was afraid of the dark.

  I remembered.

  I took more Z. Careless now. I wanted to see more, to know more. I had to.

  In the morning, I drove on. I drove for hours on back country roads. Every few minutes, I looked in the rearview to make sure no one was following me.

  Once I looked up and the Fat Woman was sitting in the backseat, grinning at me. Her face was melting like wax.

  I lost control of the car and it swerved back and forth, tires screaming, before I wrestled it back into the lane.

  Now I was on an empty stretch of country road, about ten or fifteen miles from Washington Falls. I was thinking about Franklin Hawthorne. Who was he? Why was Samantha looking for him?

  There was birch forest on either side of me, slender white trees with new leaves hanging from their high branches. The midday sun poured down through the open spaces, striped the white bark with gleam and shadow and made the greenery shine nearly gold. There was nothing ahead of me on the road and nothing behind.

  I was feeling the drug now. I was dosed up and hazy. The road, the woods, the blue sky up ahead were all covered over with a layer of mist. I couldn’t tell whether it was in my mind or outside or where the border was between the two. I remembered that feeling from the last time I’d taken Z.

  Sometimes I felt as if I were about to remember other things as well—things I had forgotten for a long time. Sometimes I heard those lost things speaking to me. Whispering.

  Don’t let them take me . . .

  They’re not real . . .

  I’m afraid of the dark . . .

  I strained to draw out the memories, but they wouldn’t come.

  I drove through the birch forest. Then, all at once, my heart lurched. I hit the brakes. The Mustang jolted, screeched, and stopped.