A Killer in the Wind

  “What’s the point?” I said. “Look, it’s no secret: You grow up how I grew up, it does something to you. You’re never entirely comfortable in your own skin.”

  “I know that.”

  “Maybe nobody is. I’m not complaining. It was what it was. I got myself straight in the Army and now . . .”

  She stroked my back. “Now what?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I just want . . .”

  “Me to leave you alone?”

  “It’s not that exactly. It just does no good for me—always talking about everything, thinking about everything. What good does it do? When things are over, they’re over, you can’t change them. I just want to go about my life, go about my business.”

  “Agh, Dan!” She came up on her knees and wrapped her arms around me. It was a pleasure to feel her press against me. “You’re such a great guy and you’re so exasperating!”

  “Am I?”

  “You make me so crazy! Couldn’t you just . . . ?”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. Let me in? Just a little. You don’t have to love me, sweetheart. Really. Just let me in.”

  I started to say something. I don’t know what—some dodge or other. Luckily, I was rescued from the whole business by my phone’s ringtone.

  Then it’s hi-hi-hey—the Army’s on its way . . .

  The phone was in the pocket of my slacks. My slacks were lying on the floor. I had to root around for them, and then root around in the pocket. During the whole process, the phone sang and sang.

  For where e’er we go, you will always know, that the Army goes rolling along . . .

  “Damn it.” I couldn’t get it. Finally, just as I managed to yank the phone out of the pocket, the singing stopped. The readout showed it had been Sheriff Brady calling. “Oh, hell.”

  “What?” said Bethany.

  “It was the boss. Something must’ve happened.”

  I was about to dial him back when the phone started ringing again. Then it’s hi-hi-hey . . . I answered before the first verse finished.

  “Hey, Sheriff, here I am,” I said.

  “We just got a 911 call,” said Brady. “Floater in the Hudson just south of the picnic grounds. Figured you might be at Bethany’s, nearby . . .”

  “Yeah, I’m, like, a minute away. I’ll be right there.”

  “Send that good woman my apologies . . .”

  It really was barely a minute’s drive from Bethany’s place to the river. I got there just behind the sirens. The blue and red lights of a couple of cruisers and an ambulance were flashing as I pulled to the curb. The deputies and EMS workers were already climbing out of their vehicles in the shifting, colored glow. More sirens sounded, more lights flashed against the night as two more cruisers came racing to the scene.

  Walking quickly, I passed Hannah and Mike from the EMS as they paused to snap open their rolling stretcher. I stepped onto the asphalt of the river walk. Deputy Stinson, a husky veteran, was already there. He was shepherding the small crowd of onlookers over to one side. I stood and looked down the dirt slope toward the water. The moon was almost full. It hung directly above me. A line of its silver light lay glittering on the river’s surface. I scanned the water for a moment, searching for the body, but there was nothing there.

  Then Deputy Holbein, walking ahead of the EMS stretcher, lifted a handheld spotlight and turned it on.

  There she was. Lying not in the water but on the narrow bank. Sprawled stark naked and facedown, one foot in the water, one hand stretched out over the grass in front of her, as if she’d been trying to climb onto the land when her strength gave out. I could see in that first instant that she was beautiful—strikingly white; pearly white . . . and beautiful, the shape of her as full and graceful as a statue.

  Carrying an oxygen canister, Hannah raced ahead of the stretcher to get to the body. She knelt down beside it and felt around its neck and spine.

  “Hold that light steady,” I said to Holbein. Then I stepped down off the walk into the broad misty glow of the spot.

  I was standing right above the woman when Hannah turned her over. The spotlight was shining on all three of us, catching us in its ghost-white beam. The light transformed the deathly pallor of the nude body into something resembling marble. But she wasn’t marble. When Hannah turned her over, I saw her flesh ripple and flow.

  I caught my breath. I felt the blood drain out of my face. I looked—I stared—I gaped down at the body. An involuntary noise—an unspoken word, choked off in my throat—escaped through my parted lips. I heard it as if it had come from someone else, as if it were the sound of someone else’s wonder and amazement.

  It was Samantha. The woman lying on the grass was Samantha.

  There was no mistake, no possibility of a mistake. It was her, all right. I had never forgotten those features. How could I have? I had dreamed about them every day for years, preserving every detail in my memory.

  Now I stood staring down at her in something like shock. It was impossible. How could it be possible? She wasn’t real. She never had been real.

  Dumbstruck, I stood and watched as Hannah—with what seemed to me dreamy slowness—pressed the oxygen mask over Samantha’s mouth, then raised her free hand in a beckoning wave to her partner Mike. She shouted at him to bring the stretcher.

  I just went on staring. Staring and wondering how it was possible, how it could be possible . . .

  And then Samantha opened her eyes.

  “Good God!” I said.

  The words broke out of me. I sank to one knee in the grass beside her. I gazed, still gaping, at that sweet, pale, beautiful face. I watched as she struggled back to consciousness.

  Her eyes moved back and forth above the oxygen mask, searching the scene around her, searching the faces that were hovering over her.

  She came to my face. Her eyes stopped moving. Her gaze rested on me.

  I stared and stared down at her, stunned into silence.

  After another moment, Samantha’s white hand lifted weakly. She pulled the mask away from her mouth. She turned her head and coughed up water.

  “Samantha,” I heard myself say.

  She turned back to me weakly, her eyelids fluttering.

  And then—so softly I could barely hear her—she whispered, “They’re coming after us.”

  6

  Death and Death

  NOW I WAS in the hospital, sitting in a plastic chair against the wall. The dead glare of the lights made the hallway seem sterile and spiritless. The nurses and aides went back and forth in front of me. They looked like silent figures in a white, white dream. Sitting against the wall across from me was Deputy Holbein. He had been assigned to guard Samantha’s room. He was drinking coffee, lifting the paper cup to his lips. He stared into space as he drank, saying nothing, as if he were some kind of automaton. The soft sounds of gurney wheels and opening doors, elevator tones and footsteps, even the occasional sound of voices—they all struck me as flat and mechanical, as if I were inside some gigantic machine.

  I was stunned and dazed, I guess. Everything seemed far away and alien. Ever since I had seen Samantha on the riverbank, I had felt like this, like a stranger in the world. I kept thinking and thinking about it, but I couldn’t get it to make sense.

  “Champion.”

  I looked up. Grassi was standing over me. Despite the colorful sports coat, his usual sinister energy seemed dimmed. His mean-boy smile was nowhere in evidence. His eyes were dulled—with alcohol, probably. With his hands in the pockets of his slacks, he looked here and there over the hallway, as if he were bored, fitful, searching for a way to escape. Well, it was late.

  I managed to lift my chin to him by way of greeting.

  “How’s the girl?” he said.

  I shrugged. “We’re waiting to hear.”

  “Boss says you know her?”

  “Not sure. She looked familiar. I may have met her once.” In a hallucination, I added bleakly to myself. “I don’t remember
where.”

  “You don’t remember.”

  “No.”

  “You know her name?”

  “I think her first name is Samantha. That’s all I know.”

  “Amazing though. Right? She washes up in Gilead. You’re in Gilead. You maybe know her. What’re the odds?”

  “None,” I murmured. “She must have been looking for me.”

  “Or you tossed her in the drink in the first place. You didn’t toss her in there, did you, Champ?” There were those white teeth of his now. Because he was only pretending to joke about it. He had his suspicions—or maybe his hopes.

  “Yeah. When did I do that?” I asked him with a weary sigh. “I was drinking with you all night.”

  “Oh, what, I’m your alibi now? Hell, I never saw you before in my life.”

  “Then after Sal’s, I went home with Bethany.”

  “Ooh, lucky man.” He pumped his hips obscenely with a mirthless laugh. But I could see he was still turning the whole thing over in his mind—the woman in the river; the fact that I had spoken her name—he was trying to find some way to make trouble for me. Then, as if it were an afterthought, he muttered, “Oh—the boss says you should head in and make a report. I’ll take lead here. Since you know her and all.”

  I couldn’t work up the energy to protest. What was I going to say? I don’t know her. I only dreamed her. Anyway, Grassi was just passing on the sheriff’s orders. I’d take it up with Brady later.

  “Go on, get out of here,” Grassi said. “After all that wrestling with Bethany, you must need the rest.” He pumped his hips again.

  “I will,” I said. “I just want to wait until we find out how she is.”

  “I’ll call you, let you know.”

  “I’ll wait.”

  It wasn’t long. I stood up when I saw the doctor push through the swinging door into the hall. Dr. Owens. A tiny caramel-colored woman. Looked competent and either humorless or exhausted beyond any emotion at all, I wasn’t sure which.

  Grassi approached her and I hovered behind him.

  “She’s going to make it,” Dr. Owens said—and I let go of a breath I didn’t know I was holding. “It was close though. She almost drowned, almost froze. But yeah, she’s going to pull through.”

  “Can we talk to her?” said Grassi.

  Dr. Owens shook her head. “She’s intubated and under sedation while we bring her temperature down. It’s going to be hours before she’s awake. You might as well come back in the morning.”

  “Awright.”

  “She say anything?” I asked.

  “No. Not a thing. She’s been unconscious since she got here.”

  “Well, I guess there’s not much point in hanging around then,” said Grassi. It was late, like I said. He wanted to go home.

  “Any other injuries?” I asked.

  “Plenty. Cuts, bruises, contusions. She was all banged up.”

  “From the river or did someone work her over?”

  “I was focused on trying to keep her alive. I didn’t do an inventory. But I didn’t notice anything either—anything specifically handmade. Be hard to tell.”

  “No handprints or ligature marks or anything like that.”

  “No, I’d’ve noticed that,” Dr. Owens said.

  “All right,” Grassi said, stretching his shoulders back. “I’m lead here now, Champ. You’re supposed to go back and file. I’ll take over.”

  “I want to see her,” I said.

  She looked like a corpse in the morgue—or no, like a corpse in some kind of horror show medical experiment. Lying on her gurney in her little cubicle off the ER. Marble-skinned. Still. A white sheet over her, ankle to throat. Tubes running into her nose and her arm and down below. Big tanks of fluids hanging above her. Like some sort of macabre experiment where they preserve the body alive in order to do who the hell knows what to it.

  I remembered her as I’d seen her last—or as I’d imagined her last—back in my apartment in Jackson Heights. I remembered her sitting on the edge of the sofa, looking down at me sweetly, laying her cool hand sweetly on my feverish forehead. And as I stood over her now, my hands in my pockets, my mind in outer space, that memory, that dream, whatever it was, seemed almost more real and alive than the bloodless, motionless creature lying on the bed in front of me.

  Back at BCI, I typed up my report in the same stunned daze, with the same weird distant quality of mind. I obsessively went over everything that had happened, trying to piece the puzzle together. It frustrated me at every try. Any way I arranged it, it wouldn’t work, wouldn’t make sense. It couldn’t be an accident, her washing up here. She had to have been looking for me. But how could she have known me? How could she even be here when she wasn’t real? She had to have been real then, right? Back at the first when she came to my apartment. But that didn’t work either. There was no pull-away panel in the wainscoting. No hole behind it. No candle damage on the tabletop. I had cleaned the apartment. I had cooked the eggs. And what about Ed Morris downstairs? She said she was living with him but he had never seen her. She said she knew who I was, but she couldn’t have. It was possible she had lied, possible she was part of some sort of bizarre plot against me—but I didn’t believe it . . . None of it made sense.

  They’re coming after us.

  And yes, there was that too. Those words she had spoken on the riverbank. If she had spoken them. It was after midnight now. At that foggy hour, in my foggy brain, I was no longer sure I had heard her right. Hannah, the EMS girl, had been shouting to her partner Mike at the time. She hadn’t heard a word. Maybe I’d imagined it. I was no longer sure. I was no longer sure of anything.

  They’re coming after us.

  What could it mean? Who was coming after us? And who the hell were us? Me and her? What did we have to do with each other? How would she know if someone was after me? How could she know anything about me at all?

  She wasn’t even real. She had never been real . . .

  As I signed the report, a wave of nausea went over me. More than that. It was as if the floor beneath my feet had turned to water. As if the desks and chairs and clocks and flyers of the BCI cop shop had become watery and transparent. It felt, for just a second or two, as if I were trapped in a dream.

  And I thought: Maybe I am.

  I drove home slowly over a winding, silent two-lane. Nothing but forest on either side of me—forest and then, sometimes, open rolling fields, or sometimes a single house on a high hill, black against the moonlit sky. I lived in Hickory, a dying town. It was zoned and regulated for rich weekend people from the city. They owned those houses on the hills. They didn’t want any industry or development tainting their air or blocking their views so there were lots of woodlands and open spaces, but no jobs or housing for the residents. What had once been the main street—Post Street—a series of local shops by the railroad station, was now a row of boarded storefronts. I lived on the little dead-end lane just past that, just by the train tracks.

  I lived here because it was cheap and private, but it wasn’t much of a neighborhood. There were only four houses on the lane. One was empty, with broken windows and dust blowing through abandoned rooms. One was trashed with the husks of cars and dead refrigerators strewn over the uncut grass. Some hungry-looking longhair lived there. I’d see him give a paranoid peek out his screen door from time to time and I knew that one of these days, I’d have to get around to busting the knucklehead for whatever it was he was up to. In the next house, there was an old lady. She kept a defiant patch of garden in one corner of her crabgrass yard. I’d see her there sometimes, kneeling in the dirt in her faded pastel dressing gown. She always said a pleasant hello whenever I went by.

  My house was the last one on the block, pressed up against hedges and a concrete wall that marked the border of some rich guy’s scrubland. The place was a rental and the rent was low for all the obvious reasons—plus there was the fact that freights went screaming by in the middle of the night three times a w
eek after the passenger runs were finished. The glare of the trains’ headlamps would go through every window, the wheels’ thunder rattling the panes, the whistle shrieking. Still, the house had its charms. It was a tightly made two-story clapboard with a covered porch and a pitched roof. Big and rambling inside, with high windows that let in plenty of sun during the day. It had come furnished with lots of stuffed chairs and sofas so I could wander through it and sprawl with a beer in any room and watch whatever view presented itself. I felt comfortable there somehow.

  I parked the G8 at the curb out front. Went wearily up the path. Wearily up the stairs onto a porch sunk in deep shadow. The outside lamp had a pull-chain so I could turn it on and see to fit my key in the front door. I reached for the chain and pulled it down.

  The light came on—and there was a man who looked like Death standing next to me. He was thrusting a knife blade toward my ribs.

  He really did look like Death—like a living skeleton. Tall—as tall as I am—but starvation-thin, with a bone-white, skull-shaped face, the eyes enormous, yellow and glowing. He was grinning like a skull grins too, staring at me with insane fascination as if he couldn’t wait to see what I would look like when the knife went in and the life bled out of me. He was wearing black, a black windbreaker over a black T-shirt and black jeans. It set off the strange pallor of his skin, made it seem almost incandescent.

  The sight of that gleaming death’s head might have hypnotized me while he stabbed me, but the blade caught the porch light and it flashed and I saw it. My hand—the hand holding my key—was still on the light chain. I swept it down fast, and turned the knife thrust aside. The blade cut through my shirt and sliced my side, then went past me, into my jacket. I jabbed with my keys—fast—hit the skull-man with the key-point close enough to his eye to make him flinch and stumble back. That gave me time to grab his wrist and twist it. The bloody knife fell, clattering on the porch floor.

  You wouldn’t think a man that thin would have any strength in him but he did. As I twisted his hand harder, working to bend him over, he punched me, a swift, expert left in the temple. The pain and impact rocked me and I let him go, reeling backward against the porch rail. He was off-balance too and stumbled against the front wall.