A Killer in the Wind

“She was tied to the chair and I . . .”

  “It’s all right.”

  She shuddered against me. Placed her palm against my chest and pushed away until she could look up at me. Now that she was awake to herself, she had no defense. Her eyes were wide. She saw everything.

  “Danny . . .” she breathed.

  I lifted my hand to her cheek, touched her soft skin. “It’s all right,” I said again. “It’ll be all right.”

  She looked around, only now beginning to think about it, really think about it, only now beginning to understand. “Will I have to go to prison?” She seemed to ask it more of herself than me, but when she heard the words, they went through her, and she turned to me in fear and repeated, “Will I have to go to prison? I couldn’t do that, Danny. I couldn’t go to prison, I . . . There isn’t enough left of me. I don’t have the strength for that . . . I’d die. I’d die.”

  She was drifting away again, but I brought her back. Touching her cheek, gently moving her head till she was looking up at me, into my eyes.

  “You’re not going to prison,” I said.

  “I’d die.”

  “You’re not going to die and you’re not going to prison.”

  “But . . . but what’s going to happen? What’s going to happen now?”

  I drew her face to me and pressed my lips against her forehead. “Don’t be afraid,” I told her.

  I sat Samantha down on a pile of files against the wall. She went where I took her, docile, quiet. She sat where I left her with her hands folded on her lap, like a little girl waiting for the bus to take her home from school.

  I went to work on the scene. I found a letter opener in the desk drawer. I went around behind the Fat Woman’s corpse. I cut the cord off her. Her big arms swung free. That was the only time Samantha flinched—when the Fat Woman moved like that. But then she saw how it was. She settled down again and sat quietly.

  I got Stark’s pistol off the floor. Wiped Samantha’s prints off it with my jacket and tossed it down again. I found the little knife Samantha had used and pocketed that.

  Finally, I took a look at the laptop. It took only a few seconds to discover what was there. The sight of it made my heart speed up. I shut it, tucked it under my arm.

  Then I took Samantha by the hand and led her to the doorway.

  She paused there, in spite of my tugging at her. She paused and looked back over her shoulder at where the Fat Woman sat in her chair, her big arms dangling down beside her, her head thrown back, her mouth open, her dead eyes staring at the ceiling. Samantha went on looking at her until I shifted my grip and took her by the arm.

  “Come on,” I told her. “There’s nothing there now. She’s gone.”

  Samantha went on looking back over her shoulder as I led her away.

  I torched the place. It was wood mostly, easy to burn.

  I found a plastic gas can in the carport, a length of tubing wrapped around it. I siphoned a couple of gallons out of the big sedan. I stood and let them flow into the can while the dead watchman lay at my feet, showing me what used to be his face, watching me with what used to be his eyes.

  When I was done, I carried the gas can back inside. I sloshed the gas around the ground floor. Splashed it over the curtains and the walls. Went back out for two more gallons and spread those around as well.

  Everywhere I went, Samantha followed me. Quiet, docile, like an obedient child. She watched everything I did but only in the most distant and uninterested fashion. Her eyes were wide and her gaze was steady, but for the most part, her face was expressionless.

  When the smell of the gas first reached her, she wrinkled her nose. “What are we going to do, Danny?” she said. Just like that. As if she were still a child.

  “No one needs to know what happened here,” I told her, working the gas can. “Not exactly anyway. I’m going to burn the place.”

  She nodded thoughtfully. “Like we did before.”

  “That’s right, baby. Like we did before.”

  She glanced upward at the ceiling then. “She’ll burn again too.”

  “That’s right,” I told her. “Only now—now she’ll go on burning.”

  She didn’t say anything else after that. She just went on following me around, silent, staring. When I emptied the last of the gas can onto Stark’s body, she turned her head away with a little pout of distaste. That was the only sign she gave that she was paying attention, that she understood.

  Stark had taken Samantha’s matches, but I fished them out of his pants pocket. I lit the gas and watched the blue flames splash around the floor and race up the curtains and up the walls. I watched a line of fire find Stark’s body and crawl over his fallen skeletal form.

  Quickly then, I led Samantha to the door. I sent her out into the front lawn. But I hesitated a moment alone in the doorway to make sure the fire took.

  It took, all right.

  The last time I saw Stark, his death’s head was staring at me through the steadily rising flames.

  Samantha and I stood on the lawn together, shoulder to shoulder. We watched the house’s dark windows flicker. We watched the flickering light grow brighter as the dead building became big and alive with flame. We flinched and drew back as the ground-floor windows exploded. Through our raised hands, we saw the glass spinning down through the night, flashing with firelight. Black smoke poured out of the empty frames and billowed up into the sky, obscuring the moon, covering the stars. Inside, the fire rose swiftly to the second floor and when the second-floor windows shattered, the flames, released, breathed and roared and flared into the darkness, making the darkness shimmer and glow.

  We stood and watched another little while. Samantha was right. It did feel as if we had been here before, done this before together, as if somehow we had had to come back, were fated to come back to finish the job.

  Some things are like that, I guess. Some things don’t die the first time.

  When I was sure the house was beyond saving, I used my cell phone to call the fire department. I didn’t think the flames would spread to the woods, but I didn’t want to take the chance. When the call was done, I hurled the phone through a window and watched it disappear into the churning depths of smoke and fire.

  I picked up the Fat Woman’s laptop from where I had left it lying in the grass. Then I took Samantha by the arm. Tried to draw her away.

  “Come on,” I said. “We have to go before the firemen get here.”

  She resisted a moment. A section of the roof collapsed, flinging sparks up, making the black smoke glimmer. Samantha went on standing there, watching the house as if hypnotized by the roaring spectacle.

  I put my arm around her.

  “Come on, baby,” I said. “This time we’re gone for good.”

  She finally moved away with me. We crossed the lawn to the edge of the forest. I slipped my arm off her shoulder and took her hand.

  Hand in hand, we walked off into the dark woods, the house in flames behind us.

  EPILOGUE

  Something Like Good-bye

  WE DROVE THROUGH the night in silence. A long time. Samantha sat beside me, staring out through the windshield. Sometimes I would glance over at her, thinking she had fallen asleep, but no, she was awake all the while, just sitting there, just staring ahead.

  I worked the car along country roads, heading for the highway. I tried to think about what had happened, everything that had happened, but I couldn’t really, not yet. It was still too fresh; I was still too shaken by it. It came to me in scenes and flashes and obsessive little loops of memory that kept repeating and fading and starting up again.

  I remembered Martin Emory. His round, bland, flaccid face, coy and corrupt. I remembered the ghost of Alexander haunting New York City’s streets. And the night I raced through Emory’s house and found him in the cellar and shot him dead—I remembered that too, at least some of it.

  I tried to ask myself what I would do now, where I would go from here, but I couldn’t come u
p with an answer—I couldn’t concentrate long enough. Those scenes and flashes kept rising into my mind. Samantha washing up out of the river. Fighting the Stark brothers at my house. The feeling of lying in the trunk of the car, my hands bound behind me. The ghost town. Moments of rattling gunfire . . .

  I drove on through the dark country, watching the road through my reflection on the windshield, watching the flashes of memory playing out like movies on the shadowed glass.

  Shortly after we crossed the border into P.A., I heard Samantha say something, very low.

  I turned to her. “What’s that?”

  But it hadn’t been meant for me. She was murmuring to herself, the words tumbling out of her very quietly, very fast.

  “I didn’t mean to. You have to understand. She did such terrible things. My whole life. Who I am . . . My only life . . .”

  I understood. She was talking to the police in her mind, explaining things in her mind. On and on like that, until it started to spook me. “Samantha,” I said. And still she went on, so I said more loudly, “Samantha. Stop.”

  She turned to me, blinking, as if startled to find that I was there with her, beside her, behind the wheel.

  “But what will I say to them?” she asked. “What will I say to the police when they question me?”

  “The police aren’t going to question you,” I told her. “Why would they? All they’re going to find is some ashes and a body, the remains of some professional killers and a sex slaver, probably killed by one of their own. Public service murders, we call them on the job. You think the cops’ll come looking for a librarian from Pennsylvania? They’re probably not going to come looking for anyone, but if they do, it won’t be you. No one will even know you were there.”

  She faced forward again. We were on the interstate now—81, heading for Wilkes-Barre. Traveling fast, the road nearly empty except for the big rigs rumbling south.

  For a while, Samantha fell silent again, as if she were thinking about what I’d said, about how it was going to be.

  Then, without turning, still gazing out at the interstate and the darkness beyond it, she whispered, “I just . . . came to . . . in that room. I was dazed. That horrible man. Stark. He hit me and I was dazed and then . . . I came to and . . . and I stood up and . . . I saw her.”

  I wanted to stop her right there. I wanted to tell her it didn’t matter anymore, none of it mattered anymore. I wanted to tell her to forget the whole thing. But I figured she couldn’t stop thinking about it, same as me. She had her scenes and her memories too, just like I did. I figured she had to tell it now, to get it out of her system. So I just drove and listened and let her go on.

  “I didn’t really . . . see her there before that, you know. Not really. With that awful man—Stark—with him holding the gun against me . . . and knowing the whole time I had to use the knife . . . I had to cut my hands free with the knife, Danny, that’s all I could think about and somehow . . . I didn’t really take in the fact that she was there or who she was or . . . anything. And then I came to, and I did see her. And I knew who she was.”

  I nodded. “Of course you did.”

  “I was over by the wall. I was . . . I was sitting—kind of half-lying—right against the wall. And I stood up and I saw her and suddenly . . .” She let out a trembling sigh, talking more to herself than to me, explaining it more to herself than to me. “Suddenly it was like . . . it was like being inside some kind of big glass bubble or something. There was nothing else inside it . . . there was no other sound or . . . or anything . . . There was just me and her. Me and her.” She turned. She looked at me. We looked at each other. “It was Aunt Jane,” Samantha whispered. “It was Aunt Jane, Danny. It was really her.”

  “I know.”

  “And she was just . . . She was all there was. She was all I could see. And all I could do was stare at her . . . stare at her. And I was thinking, You! You! There you are. After all these years. After everything. There you really are. Right there. And she was . . . she was real, Danny. Alive and . . . she was talking . . . saying things . . . I don’t know what . . . about how I should help her, untie her . . . how she would fix everything . . . give me money. All these things she was saying but . . .” Her lips began to tremble. Her eyes filled up with tears, glistening dimly in the glow from the dashboard. Her voice broke. “But she didn’t say she was sorry, Danny! She didn’t say she was sorry!”

  “Jesus,” I muttered.

  The lights of the highway blurred a moment. The oncoming headlights, the red taillights of the trucks—they all blurred as my own eyes filled helplessly at the sound of Samantha’s pain.

  “And then I saw the gun,” she said through her tears. “I saw Stark’s gun . . . just lying there . . . just lying there on the floor . . . like it was waiting for me . . .” She pressed her hands over her nose and mouth. It almost looked as if she were praying. “I didn’t really mean . . . I don’t know what I was thinking . . . I just wanted her to see me point it at her . . .”

  “I know.”

  “I wanted to feel like I had some . . .”

  “Some power.”

  “Some power, you know? I wanted her to be . . . afraid . . . afraid of me . . .”

  “Sure you did. Of course.”

  She gulped down a sob. “But she wasn’t. She wasn’t afraid. She didn’t think I’d do it. She laughed. She said I was crazy. That’s what she said. ‘What are you, crazy?’ And then . . . That’s when . . . I heard the gun go off . . . I saw . . .”

  That was as far as she could get. The tears came hard after that. She covered her face and sobbed without stopping.

  As soon as I could, I pulled off the road. I pulled into a dusty turnout and parked. I put my arms around her and held her while she went on crying and crying.

  “I’m just so sick of being unhappy!” she said.

  She went quiet again after that. We got back on the highway and drove for more than an hour and she didn’t say a word. She was different now, though. I could tell when I glanced over at her. Her eyes, her expression—her whole demeanor was different. She was alert now. She had returned to herself. She was working it through.

  I left her to it. I drifted back to my own thoughts. Where would I go from here? What would I do? What could I do? My days as a lawman were over. I was sure of that. I would probably survive Grassi and the grand jury investigation into my killing of Stark One. I’d catch some flak for disappearing the way I did, but I’d probably get my badge back all the same.

  Still, grand jury or no, I knew I couldn’t return to being a small-town cop. Rounding up gas thieves, meth dealers, wife beaters, drunk drivers. Visiting Bethany from time to time, taking her love and secretly wishing she were someone else. It felt too much like being in exile from my own life, from the life I was supposed to live.

  I guessed I’d have to go out on my own somehow. Start my own security agency maybe. Help people out when the cops couldn’t or wouldn’t . . .

  “Can I ask you something?” Samantha said suddenly, breaking into my thoughts.

  “Sure.”

  “Do you think . . . this is finished? Really finished, I mean. Do you really think no one will come after me or question me or anything? You’re not just saying that.”

  “I’m not just saying it. It’s finished. For you anyway.”

  “You mean because big strong Danny is going to take care of it all for me.”

  “That’s right. That’s what I mean.”

  She gave a soft laugh. “Danny!”

  “What?”

  “Can I ask you something else?”

  “Sure.”

  “What do you think of me? Really.”

  “I don’t know. What do you mean?”

  “When I saw the way you looked at me, back at St. Mary’s, the disappointment . . .”

  “No.”

  “Like you thought I’d be . . . the same as you remembered. Something I can’t be. And now . . . I don’t know. Am I just a complete pain in the
ass to you at this point?”

  It made me smile. At least she didn’t sound like a child anymore. She sounded more like she had before, back at St. Mary’s.

  “You’re not so bad,” I said.

  She gave a heavy, cynical laugh. “All this time—all this time, I’ve been trying to get over my childhood. Now I’ll have to spend the rest of my life getting over tonight.”

  “Well, it’ll be something to occupy your idle hours,” I said.

  “Idle hours nothing. For me, being damaged is a full-time job.”

  “Ah, right.”

  “Ah, right, yourself.” She reached over and touched my leg—then withdrew her hand quickly, as if she hadn’t meant to do it and hoped I wouldn’t notice that she had. “You think I’m pretty neurotic, don’t you?”

  “Maybe a little.”

  She hesitated. I could feel her gaze on the side of my face. “So am I just supposed to get over it? Killing someone? Having killed someone. Is that something you get used to? My new normal?”

  I started to answer but then I didn’t, not right away. Because I realized my answer wasn’t her answer. I realized, even as I was starting to speak, that what had happened in that house tonight was a shock to her. But for me . . . Well, in some ways, it was the work I was born for.

  “You’ll learn to deal with it,” I said finally. “It’s not like you got drunk and ran over a kid in a crosswalk. You snuffed out a monster. You owed it to her and she had it coming. You can live with that, Samantha.”

  “Right.” She sighed. “Right. I guess it just goes to show, doesn’t it? All this time I’ve been trying to . . . process my anger. Learn to forgive. Learn to let go of the past. But to just put a bullet in the monster’s head—I never even thought of that.”

  “It’s quicker. Cheaper too.”

  “Mental health through assassination.”

  “Exactly.”

  I glanced over to see her smiling wryly. I felt a pang of—something . . . Loss, that’s it. A pang of loss. I found myself thinking about the little girl I used to know, the girl Samantha who built castles in the orphanage sand and told me stories about the knights and princesses who lived there . . . I wondered what that little girl would have turned into if there had been no Fat Woman, no foster fathers and all the rest. I wished I knew. I missed that girl. I missed—not just the child Samantha . . . but also the other Samantha, the one I saw in my hallucination, the Samantha she would have grown up to be. I liked this woman sitting beside me. She was tougher than she thought she was and righteous in anger and sort of funny too, though I could still see the gentleness and generosity she hid away under that. I liked her a lot.