Darkness, Take My Hand

  She pressed her head and shoulders into the pillow, crooked the phone between ear and shoulder, raised her lower back and ass off the bed, and pulled the underpants back up to her hips.

  “And I am glad you’re okay,” she said. “But, Phil, can’t we talk in the morning?”

  The leaves scratched the window again, and I found my boxers, pulled them on.

  Angie’s palm caressed my hip absently and she turned and gave me a “Can you believe this?” roll of her eyes. She suddenly squeezed the flesh over my hip, where she’d claimed I had love handles, and she bit her lower lip in an attempt to keep from smiling. She failed.

  “Phil, you’ve been drinking. Haven’t you?”

  Scratch. Scratch.

  I looked at the window, but the leaves were gone, bowing back in the dark breeze.

  “I know that, Phillip,” she said sadly. “I know. And I’m trying.” Her hand fell away from my hip and she turned toward the phone and stood up from the bed. “I don’t. I don’t hate you.”

  She stood with one knee on the bed, looking out the window, the phone cord pressed against the backs of her thighs, and worked her way back into her T-shirt.

  I got out of the bed, too, tossed my jeans and shirt back on. The house was cold without the press of body heat, and I didn’t feel like crawling back under the covers while she chatted with Phil.

  “I’m not judging,” she said. “But if Arujo picks tonight to come after you, wouldn’t you rather have sharp wits?”

  The white beam of light crested her shoulder and the glow of candlelight and blinked three times against the upper wall in front of her. She had her head down and didn’t notice, so I left the bedroom and walked down the hallway, hugging my arms against the cold and watched through the living room window as Tim Dunn crossed the street toward the house.

  I reached to deactivate the alarm, saw that it had lost its power in the blackout.

  I opened the door before he could ring the bell.

  “What’s up?” I said.

  He had his head down against the moisture sweeping off the trees and I realized he was looking at my bare feet.

  A walkie-talkie squawked from the living room.

  “Cold?” Dunn said and tugged his earlobe.

  “Yeah. Come on in,” I said. “Shut the door behind you.”

  I turned in the hallway and Devin’s voice burst over the walkie-talkie: “Patrick, get the fuck out of the house. Arujo set us up. Arujo set us up. He’s not in Nahant.”

  I turned back as Dunn raised his head and Evandro Arujo’s face stared out at me from under the cap brim.

  “Arujo’s not in Nahant, Patrick. He’s right here. In the rest of your life.”

  34

  Before I could speak, Evandro pressed a stiletto against the skin under my right eye. He dug the point into the socket bone and closed the door behind him.

  There was already blood on the knife.

  He noticed me looking at it and smiled sadly.

  “Officer Dunn,” he whispered, “won’t be turning twenty-five, I’m afraid. Bummer, huh.”

  He pushed me backward by digging the point in harder against the bone and I took a few steps down the hallway.

  “Patrick,” he said, his other hand on Dunn’s service revolver, “if you make a sound, I’ll pluck out your eye and shoot your partner before she’s halfway out of the bedroom. Understood?”

  I nodded.

  In the faint light from the candles in the bedroom I could see he wore Dunn’s uniform shirt; it was dark with blood.

  “Why’d you have to kill him?” I whispered.

  “He used gel in his hair,” Evandro said. He held a hand to his lips as we reached the bathroom, midway down the center hall, and motioned for me to stop.

  I did.

  He’d shaved the goatee and the hair peeking out from under the cap brim was dyed a honey blond. His colored contacts were a faded gray, and I assumed the inch of sideburns by each ear were fake, since he didn’t have them when I saw him last.

  “Turn around,” he whispered. “Slowly.”

  From the bedroom I could hear Angie sigh. “Phil, really, I’m very tired.”

  She hadn’t heard the walkie-talkie. Fuck.

  I turned around as Evandro placed the flat edge of the stiletto to my face and allowed it to slide with the skin as my head turned away. I felt the point skip across the back of my neck and then bite into the hollow space under my right ear, in the gap between my skull and jaw.

  “You fuck with me,” he whispered in my ear, “and this point comes out through your nose. Take small steps.”

  “Phillip,” Angie said. “Please…”

  The bedroom had two doorways. One fronted the hall, the other, six feet beyond, led into the kitchen. We were four feet from the first doorway when Evandro pressed the stiletto point into my skin to stop me. “Ssh,” he whispered. “Ssh.”

  “No,” Angie said and her voice sounded weary. “No, Phil, I don’t hate you. You’re a good man.”

  “I was twelve feet away out there,” Evandro whispered. “You and your partner and poor Officer Dunn chatting about securing the house against me, and I’m crouched in the neighbor’s hedge. I could smell you from there, Patrick.”

  I felt a small popping sensation as the stiletto point broke the skin at the edge of my jaw like a pin.

  I couldn’t see my options. If I tried for an elbow to Evandro’s chest, which would be the first thing he’d expect, there was still more than a fifty percent chance he’d be able to shove the knife through my brain anyway. All other possibilities—fist to the groin, foot brought down hard on his instep, sudden pivot to my left or right—carried the same likelihood of success. One of his hands held the knife, the other the gun, and both weapons dug into my body.

  “If you’d just call back in the morning,” Angie said, “we’ll talk then.”

  “Or not,” Evandro whispered. He nudged me forward.

  At the edge of the doorway, he suddenly jerked the gun from my side. The point of the knife left my ear and dug into the back of my head where my spinal column and the base of my skull met. He spun in front of the doorway with my body blocking his.

  Instead of standing by the bed where I’d left her, Angie was gone. The phone lay off the hook in the center of the bed, and I could hear Evandro’s breath quicken as he craned his head over my shoulder to get a better look.

  The sheet on the bed still bore the imprints of our bodies. Her cigarette fed ash into the ashtray and a pirouette of smoke into the air. The candle flames glowed like the yellow eyes of jungle cats.

  Evandro looked toward the closet, saw that it was filled with enough clothes to hide a body.

  He nudged me again and I again considered elbowing him.

  He pointed Dunn’s service revolver over my shoulder at the closet, pulled back the hammer.

  “She in there?” he whispered, shifting his body to my left as he drew a bead on the closet and dug the knife harder against my skull.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  I heard her voice before I even knew she was there.

  It came from two inches behind me and it was preceded by the hard metal crack of a pistol hammer pulling back.

  “Don’t. Fucking. Move.”

  Evandro twisted the point of the knife into the base of my skull so hard that I stood up on my toes and felt a stream of blood flow down the back of my neck.

  The movement turned my head to the left and I could see the barrel of Angie’s .38 sticking out of Evandro’s right ear, see how white her knuckles were around the butt.

  Angie knocked the gun out of Evandro’s hand with a quick swipe. When it hit the floor by the footboard, I expected it to fire, but it lay there, hammer cocked, pointing at the vanity chest.

  “Angela Gennaro,” Evandro said. “Nice to meet you. Very slick pretending you were still on the phone.”

  “I still am on the phone, asshole. It look hung up to you?”

  Evandro
’s eyelids fluttered. “No, it doesn’t.”

  “What does that tell you?”

  “It tells me someone forgot to hang it up.” He sniffed the air. “Smells like sex in here. The commingling of flesh. I hate that smell. You enjoyed yourselves, I hope.”

  “The police are on their way, Evandro, so put the knife down.”

  “I’d love to, Angela, but I have to kill you first.”

  “You won’t get both of us.”

  “You’re not thinking clearly, Angela. Must be the sex making you foggy. It’ll do that. It’s the stench of cave-dwellers really, the stink of sex is. After I fucked Kara and Jason—and believe me, it wasn’t my choice, it was theirs—I wanted to cut their throats then and there. But I was convinced to wait. I was—”

  “He’s trying to lull you with talk, Ange.”

  She shoved the gun harder against his ear. “I seem lulled to you, Evandro?”

  “Remember what you’ve learned over these last few weeks. I don’t work alone, or did you forget that?”

  “I’d say you’re alone now, Evandro. So put the fucking knife down.”

  He dug it deeper and a white flash erupted in my brain.

  “You’re out of your depth,” Evandro said. “You think we can’t beat you both, but instead you can’t beat both of us.”

  “Shoot him,” I said.

  “What?” Evandro said wildly.

  “Shoot him!”

  To our right, from the kitchen, someone said, “Hello.”

  Angie turned her head, and I could smell the bullet when it hit her. It smelled like sulfur and cordite and blood.

  Her own gun went off between Evandro and me and the muzzle flash was like fire in my eyes.

  I jerked forward and felt the stiletto pop back out of my flesh and clatter to the floor behind us as Evandro’s nails tore across my face.

  I drove my elbow back into his head and heard bone break and a scream and suddenly Angie’s gun roared twice and glass shattered in the kitchen.

  Evandro and I wrestled our way blindly into the bedroom and then shapes began to take form again through the blaring white in my eyes. My foot hit Dunn’s service revolver and it discharged loudly and skittered out into the kitchen.

  Evandro’s hands clawed at my face and I dug my hands into the flesh under his rib cage. I spun, tightening my fingers on his lowest ribs, and hurled him over Angie’s vanity chest and into the mirror.

  The flash of white disappeared as I watched his slim body crest her makeup and crash through the glass. The mirror cracked in large, jagged pieces the shape of dorsal fins and the candle flames sputtered, then flared as they fell to the floor. I dove over the bed as he came down and the entire vanity came with him.

  I grabbed my gun from Angie’s nightstand as I went over it, came up on the other side of the bed and fired without hesitation at the place where I’d seen him last.

  But he wasn’t there anymore.

  I turned my head, saw Angie sitting up on the floor, one eye squinting as she aimed down her barrel and steadied her arm, a fallen candle burning on the floor beside her. Footsteps paused on the kitchen floor, and Angie pulled the trigger.

  And then she pulled it again.

  Someone in the kitchen screamed.

  And I heard another scream from outside, but it was the scream of metal, the howl of an engine, and suddenly the kitchen exploded in bursts of angry fluorescent, and the hum of electrical appliances followed.

  I stamped out the candle by Angie’s arm and stepped out into the hall behind her, pointed my gun at Evandro. His back was to us, his arms held down by his sides. He swayed from side to side in the middle of the kitchen floor, as if to music only he could hear.

  Angie’s first shot had found the center of his back and a large hole was torn through Dunn’s black leather patrolman’s jacket. As we watched, it filled with red, and Evandro stopped swaying and dropped to one knee.

  Her second shot had blown off a flap of his head just over his right ear.

  He raised his gun hand to it absently, and Dunn’s service revolver fell and skittered across the linoleum.

  “You okay?” I said.

  “Stupid question,” she groaned. “Jesus. Get in the kitchen.”

  “Where’s the guy who shot you?”

  “He went out through the kitchen door. Get in there.”

  “Fuck that. You’re hurt.”

  She grimaced. “I’m okay. Patrick, he can still pick up that gun again. Will you get in there?”

  I came up behind Evandro and picked up Dunn’s service revolver, came around to face him. Evandro stared at me as he gingerly fingered the place where a piece of his head used to be, his face bathed gray in the sputtering fluorescence overhead.

  He wept silently and the tears mixed with blood flowing down his face and his skin was so pale I was reminded of the clowns from long ago.

  “It doesn’t hurt,” he said.

  “It will.”

  He stared up at me with those confused, lonely eyes.

  “It was a blue Mustang,” he said, and it seemed important to him that I understand that.

  “What was?”

  “The car I stole. It was blue and it had white leather bucket seats.”

  “Evandro,” I said, “who’s your partner?”

  “The hubcaps,” he said, “gleamed.”

  “Who’s your partner?”

  “Do you feel anything for me?” he asked, his eyes wide and his hands held out like a supplicant’s.

  “No,” I said and my voice was flat and dead.

  “We’re getting to you, then,” he said. “We’re winning.”

  “Who’s we?” I said.

  He blinked at the blood and tears. “I’ve been to hell.”

  “I know.”

  “No. No. I have been to hell,” he screamed and fresh tears poured out of his eyes as his face contorted.

  “And then you created some for other people. Quick, Evandro, who’s your partner?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Bullshit, Evandro. Tell me.”

  I was losing him. He was dying in front of me as he placed his palm on his head and tried to staunch the flow of blood, and I knew he could go any second or within a few hours, but he was going.

  “I don’t remember,” he repeated.

  “Evandro, he left you behind. You’re dying. He’s not. Come on. I—”

  “I don’t remember who I was before I went in that place. I have no idea. I can’t even remember—” His chest heaved suddenly and his cheeks puffed up like a blowfish and I heard something rumble in his chest.

  “Who’s—”

  “—can’t remember what I looked like as a child.”

  “Evandro?”

  He vomited blood onto the floor and looked at it for a moment. When he looked back at me, he was terrified.

  My face probably didn’t provide much hope because as I looked down at what had just left his body, I knew he couldn’t live long without it.

  “Oh, shit,” he said and he held out his hands and looked at them.

  “Evandro—”

  But he died that way—staring at his hands as they dropped back to his sides, one knee bent to the floor, his face confused and afraid and utterly alone.

  “Is he dead?”

  I came back into the hall after stepping into her bedroom long enough to stamp out a single candle trying to burn through her floor. “Oh, yeah. How’re you?”

  Her skin glistened with fat beads of sweat. “I’m sorta fucked up here, Patrick.”

  I didn’t like the sound of her voice. It was much higher than usual and there was a keening to it.

  “Where you hit?”

  She lifted her arm and I could see a dark red hole just above her hip and below her rib cage that seemed to breathe.

  “How’s it look?” She lay her head against the door jamb.

  “Not bad,” I lied. “Let me get a towel.”

  “I only saw his body,” s
he said. “The shape of it.”

  “What?” I pulled a towel from the rack in the bathroom, came back into the hall. “Who?”

  “The prick who shot me. When I shot back, I saw his body. He’s short but built. You know?”

  I pressed the towel into her side. “Okay. Short but built. Got it.”

  She closed her eyes. “Screavly,” she said.

  “What? Open your eyes, Ange. Come on.”

  She opened them, smiled wearily. “’S gun,” she said, “’s heavy.”

  I took the gun from her hand. “Not anymore. Ange, I need you to stay awake while—”

  There was a loud crash at the front door and I spun in the hall, took aim at Phil and two EMTs as they burst inside the house.

  I lowered my gun as Phil slid to his knees in the hall beside Angie.

  “Oh, Jesus,” he said. “Honey?” He wiped wet hair off her brow.

  One of the EMTs said, “Give me some room. Come on.”

  I stepped back.

  “Honey?” Phil screamed.

  Her eyes fluttered open. “Hi,” she said.

  “Step back, sir,” the EMT said. “Step back now.”

  Phil fell back on his haunches and slid a few feet away.

  “Miss,” the EMT said, “can you feel that pressure?”

  Outside, patrol cars screeched to a halt and bathed the windows in lights the color of raging flame.

  “So scared,” Angie said.

  The second EMT dropped the wheels to a stretcher in the hallway and flipped up a metal rod by its head.

  A sudden rattle erupted in the hallway and I looked down and saw Angie’s heels hammering the floorboards.

  “She’s going into shock,” the EMT said. He grabbed her shoulders. “Get her legs,” he shouted. “Get her legs, man.”

  I grabbed her legs and Phil said, “Oh, Jesus. Do something, do something, do something.”

  Her legs kicked into my armpit and I pressed them between my arm and chest, held on as her eyes rolled back white in the sockets and her head slipped off the side of the doorjamb and banged into the floor.

  “Now,” the first EMT said and the second one handed him a syringe and he plunged it into Angie’s chest.

  “What’re you doing?” Phil said. “Jesus Christ, what’re you doing to her?”