Acceleration

“Okay.”

  “You need it done now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where?”

  THIRTY

  Two double-chocolate brownies and thirty-five minutes later, Wayne shows up. It's started raining, and I’m waiting under the awning of the coffee shop. Spotting him across the street, I sprint over to him.

  “It takes you half an hour to get here?” I say.

  “You interrupted my nap,” he tells me, using his hand to squeegee the rain from his bald head.

  “Never mind, let's go.” I’m impatient and jumpy from all the caffeine.

  “Wait up. What's going on? What's the story?”

  “Third house down on the side street there.” I point it out. “I need to have a quick look inside.”

  “Why?”

  Why will take forever to answer, so I give him the ultra-condensed version. “There's a guy who lives there who's a major psycho. He's planning to kill a woman. Don’t ask how I know, but I do know this. He's gone right now, and I need to have a look around.”

  Wayne takes a moment, looking back and forth between me and the house on Cedar. “You’re screwing with me, right?”

  “This is for real,” I tell him. I guess there's something he sees in my eyes, desperation or determination, because he loses his doubting look.

  “Is this what you’ve been doing with Vinny?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You guys have been hanging out a lot, looking at maps and books and stuff. Then you shut up when I come around.”

  I underestimated Wayne, thinking he was too busy slacking and goofing off to notice anything was up.

  “Me and Vinny have been trying to track this guy down,” I say.

  He uses his finger to flick some rain off his forehead. “What about me? You only bring me in when you need criminal help? Am I an idiot or something?”

  “No. What are you talking about? It's just, everything's been happening so fast. And you’ve been working.” What else can I say? True, I didn’t think he’d be much help doing the heavy mental lifting. But there's no time now for hurt feelings or whatever. So I say, “Sorry, okay?”

  He grumbles and shrugs. “Okay, I guess. But you owe me.”

  We start up Cedar. I take one last look down Faywood in the direction Roach left, but I don’t see any buses coming. Both our shirts are wet now, and the storm's starting to kick it up a notch. I tell him how I saw Roach leave forty minutes ago. There's no way to know how much time we have.

  In and out, I tell myself. This will be quick and painless.

  “Anybody else live there?” he asks.

  “Ahhh.” I hadn’t thought of that. The guy's a loner, but what about the grandmother? Is she still in the picture? “Yeah. There might be an old lady. His grandmother. I’m not positive.”

  Wayne takes the lead, climbing the stairs to Roach's house. He goes straight to the door and knocks loudly.

  “What are you doing?” I ask.

  “Knocking. I’m not going to give some old lady a heart attack.” He sniffles and wipes his wet hands on his T-shirt. “Never do a house unless it's empty. You'll live longer.”

  We wait half a minute; then Wayne pounds harder. Another minute passes. No response.

  “Okay, keep your eyes open,” he tells me.

  Reaching down, he pulls a pair of metal tools out of his sock. They look like instruments from a dentist's office. One's about five inches long, thin and bent at the tip. Wayne sticks it in, feels around, and wedges it into place. I study the houses across the street but don’t see anybody watching. It's a sleepy little neighborhood where nothing ever happens. The second tool I recognize as something he made in metal shop, short with a blunt jag on the edge. This he uses more like a regular key, jiggling until it falls into place, then turning it clockwise.

  The lock clicks and the door opens inward. Wayne disengages his tools, wipes the knob down with the end of his T-shirt, and motions me in.

  I turn and say, “I'll take it from here.” But he pushes me ahead and squeezes inside next to me.

  “You don’t have to—” I start to whisper.

  “I know,” he says, silencing me. “Make it quick.”

  It's a two-floor house, old and shabby. The carpets are worn; the paint shows some peeling on the ceiling. The smell of ammonia is in the air; someone's been cleaning. I move in, hyper-alert, my heart seizing up with every step. Around the corner at the end of the hall is a little kitchen/dining room with a table and two chairs. Across the hall from it there's a door with a padlock on it. The doorjamb is painted white, standing out against the older yellowy beige of the walls. Somebody did a repair job here.

  This must be the door to his cage, the one he broke through years ago. The padlock is cold and heavy in my hand. I pull on it. Locked. He's got his own key to the cage now.

  Wayne moves on past me, following the hall to what looks like the living room. I’m still studying the basement door when out of the corner of my eye, I catch him freezing suddenly. He shoots a look at me over his shoulder, then points into the living room and backs up a few steps.

  Wayne flattens himself against the wall as I edge past him.

  The TV is on. Sitting in an easy chair in front of it is a white-haired woman with her back to us. The grandmother.

  Panic paralyzes me. My heart's beating so loud I’m sure she'll hear it. The TV's showing an episode of Judge Judy, only the volume is muted. A chill runs through my gut into my chest. She's the one who locked Roach up, the one he said has blood like acid. Seconds pass and nobody moves.

  The crazy thought enters my head that she's dead, that he's killed and stuffed her, set her up like a mannequin in front of the TV. I’m about ready to bolt when she coughs. The sound is like a shock of electricity through me, and I can’t help gasping.

  I’m focused on the back of her head, expecting it to whip around any second and spot me.

  Something flickers on her TV and my gaze shifts momentarily. I notice text scrolling at the bottom of the screen, large white words against a black background. It takes me a moment to realize it's the closed-captioning subtitles.

  I move backward until I’m even with Wayne, leaning in close to whisper to him. “She's deaf.”

  His eyes are wide and the sweat is running freely down his face. He starts to retreat.

  “This is too much,” he breathes. “Even for me.”

  I can tell from the tremor in his voice that he's completely freaked. And there's nothing I want more right now than to make a run for it. But I can’t. Not yet.

  “Okay. Okay,” I tell him. I stop by the basement door. “Just— I need you to open this lock.”

  He looks at me like I’m nuts and glances toward the living room.

  “What?” he whispers. For a moment I think I’ve lost him. Then he shakes his head. “Right. You watch her. If she twitches from that chair I’m gone.”

  I move over to the corner to keep an eye on her, and Wayne gets his tools back out.

  A commercial comes on, but the grandmother makes no move to get up. From my vantage point all I can see of her is thinning white hair and the wrinkled gray skin of her neck. A deaf old lady watching TV. I’d almost feel guilty breaking in, but I know some of the things she did to that kid who became Roach.

  “Come on,” Wayne mutters, trying to work the lock with his sweaty hands.

  A long minute stretches to the breaking point before I hear the click we’re waiting for. Wayne looks over at me.

  “Done,” he says, and jams the tools in his pocket, wiping down the lock. “Now I’m gone, man.”

  I nod. “Okay.”

  “I'll wait for you out on the corner.”

  And he disappears down the hall without another word. Seconds later, I hear the door quietly open and shut.

  I can barely breathe. There's no air in here.

  Get a grip! Make it quick.

  One last check on the grandmother, then I go to the door and pull the lock off the brac
ket. The door opens to darkness. Reaching in, I feel around on the walls for a switch. My fingers find it, and I send up a silent prayer.

  A short staircase leads down to a low-ceilinged basement. I take the lock with me, and after a moment's indecision I close the door behind me. In case Granny gets up. The air's cooler underground, and there's a stale chemical kind of smell. The stairs don’t creak, thank God. Not that there's anybody to hear me.

  Let's make this fast! I tell myself.

  The low-wattage bulb in the ceiling casts the place in a dim gloom. Boxes are piled beside the stairs. A long wooden table is set against the wall, covered with papers and electrical equipment. A brighter light sits on top of a stack of books, shining on some kind of half-dissected speaker.

  I peer around into the corner shadows, expecting—but dreading—to find something human there.

  Nothing.

  On the table stands a row of jars. That's where the smell is coming from. It's formaldehyde. Suspended in yellow liquid inside them are unidentifiable animal parts and whole corpses. Cats, small dogs, rodents—who knows? They’re all drained of color. Tacked to the wall is a row of pictures that look like they’ve been torn from medical textbooks, showing anorexic women with protruding ribs, tight skin pulled over the bumps of their spine.

  Near the jars, an empty Slurpee cup sits beside a few crumpled Mars bar wrappers.

  I look up at the blackened windows. On the ledge are half a dozen cleaned rodent skulls.

  What at first glance I assumed was some kind of radio turns out to be a police scanner. There's a list taped to it of different frequencies for different agencies: police, fire, paramedics.

  On the tabletop there's a mess of papers, covered in the same scrawled handwriting I know from the diary. I dig through them a bit and find a set of photos.

  Some are blurry, and some only catch half a face. But they’re shots of women, obviously taken without their knowledge, in public places. He's stepped it up since the last entry in his diary. Gone from choosing targets to fully documenting them.

  I’ve seen enough. There's nobody here. Time to go.

  My foot is on the first stair when I catch sight of another door off in the corner of the basement. My eyes shift from that door to the stairs and the quick escape they promise.

  I have to force myself to go over and look in the corner.

  On either side of the doorjamb a metal bracket has been bolted into the wall. These brackets hold a four-foot, round metal bar that blocks the door. Better than a lock, this setup would keep a linebacker from breaking out. No doorknob. There's a rectangular hole cut in the wood at knee level, like a letter slot. Or an opening to shove a plate of food through.

  God, no. Please no.

  I crouch down and try and see through to the other side. But it's black in there and the dim light doesn’t help.

  I have to try and swallow a few times before I have enough spit to speak.

  “Hello?” I say through the slot. “Somebody there?”

  No sound from inside, not even breathing. But I don’t know if I could hear anything past the blood pounding in my ears. I stand up.

  “I—I’m going to open the door, okay?”

  The bar has some heft to it. I lift it off the struts and hold it in one hand, resting the end on the floor. I use my other hand to pull the door open. There's no knob, so I have to stick my fingers in the letter slot to get a grip. I’m shaking, expecting something on the other side to grab me.

  I swing the door open, jumping back.

  Empty. Nothing but shadows. My head is pounding, nerves shivering, waiting for the shadows to move.

  There's nothing but an empty plastic bucket on the cement floor. The space is clean but doesn’t smell disinfected or anything. Looking at the inside of the door, I don’t see any stains, no blood or splintering. It hasn’t been used yet.

  I let out a shivering breath. My sweaty T-shirt sticks to my back like a second skin.

  Get out! Let's go.

  Reaching out to shut the closet, I lift the bar to set it back in place. Then I hear a faint click come from the top of the stairs. I freeze with the bar in my hands. I’m in the corner, out of sight of the basement door above, but I can tell from the extra light spilling down that it's been opened.

  I don’t breathe. I don’t blink. Twenty seconds pass before someone starts slowly down the stairs.

  There's no time to move for cover under the staircase. I’m trapped in the corner like an insect. There's only one place left to hide. Stay in the open and I’m easy prey. As I move, my brain is screaming at me not to go in there. It's insane. But there's nowhere else.

  So I slip inside the closet with the steel bar in my hand, pulling the door shut silently. The sudden dark almost pushes me over the edge, and it takes all the restraint I have in me to slow my breathing and keep quiet.

  There's a faint shaft of light coming through the slot. Crouching on my knees, I peer out of the hole. The shadowed figure is halfway down. For a wild second I think it might be Wayne, coming back to get me. But the shadow's too tall. There's only one person it can be.

  As he reaches the bottom of the stairs, I see him in the light. Roach's head swivels around, scanning the room. He walks around the staircase, giving the pile of boxes a wide berth in case someone's hiding there. In his right hand, I see the thin flash of a knife blade catching the light for an instant. When he's done looking at the boxes, he goes over to his table and examines his things. It was a mess when I got here, but it must have been his own particular mess because he reaches straight for the photos I uncovered. He knows they’ve been moved.

  Roach turns with his back to the table and looks out over the basement, his head tilted up just a little, as if he's a rat tasting the air. Then his gaze settles on the closet door. And I’m dead.

  I shift back so he won’t see my eyes in the slot. But it's no good. He's moving toward me now. It takes forever for him to cover the space between the table and the door, like he's trying to catch a mouse and doesn’t want to scare it off.

  I rise, gripping the bar in my hands like a baseball bat. My palms are slick with sweat, but I’m clenching the steel like rigor mortis has set in.

  The light filtering through the slot blacks out and I can feel him on the other side of the door. I press myself into the back of the closet and suck in a last breath.

  There's only one way out, and that's through him.

  Launching myself with all the momentum I can gain in this small space, I explode through the door right into him. Roach stumbles back a few feet into a shoulder-high pile of boxes. I’m thrown off balance and fall to one knee. While he steadies himself, I get up and back toward the stairs.

  Roach moves to block me with his arms out at his sides, the knife in his right hand, six inches long and flashing a dull silver in the gloom. I tense up on the bar to try and keep him at bay. There's no way I can make a break for it up the stairs, because even halfway up he’d still be able to slash my legs out from under me.

  Behind those thick lenses, his eyes study me with a cold curiosity. In the dim light his pupils look huge, the size of dimes, taking over the color of his eyes as if they’re sucking in all available light to see me better. He twitches his knife hand and I flinch a half step to the side. Easy to see who's in control here. He gets closer without even seeming to move his feet.

  I edge away. In my peripheral vision I can sense the table behind me. I’m running out of room.

  Roach moves into the light spilling from the hallway above, becoming a silhouette, the featureless shadow from my nightmares. My knees feel watery, like they’re going to betray me and fold. I take one more step back, and my foot lands on some paper fallen on the floor. I lose my footing and my butt hits the table hard.

  He lunges at me, a shadowy blur, and I kick out, leaning my weight on the tabletop. I only graze him, but enough to change the angle of the slashing knife. He falls into me and I slip away before he can grab hold.

 
Raw panic flows through me, the pulse of adrenaline making everything louder and brighter.

  Swinging the bar with everything I’ve got, I catch him in the shoulder. He grunts, and I haul back and whack him in the ribs. I pull back again for another swing, but he leaps away from the table and slashes out, cutting a line of fire into my left forearm. I let out a strangled gasp and drop the bar. The steel hits the cement floor with a loud clang.

  As I stagger back I see he's half bent over, one arm shielding his side. The back of my ankle connects with the bottom stair, and before he can move or I can think, I swing around and scramble up the stairs. I take them three at a time, feeling the phantom pain of his knife cutting into my legs.

  At the top of the stairs I sense him right behind me. I explode into the hallway, bouncing off the wall and racing around the corner for the front door. I yank frantically at the doorknob until my fear-blinded brain remembers to flick the lock. It pops and I throw the door open, hearing a yell of animal rage behind me.

  But I’m outside on the porch before he can catch up, and I leap the four stairs to the ground, crashing to my knees. Cutting across the lawn, I bolt down Cedar Road, my feet moving faster than my brain can register. The rain is falling hard now, slicking the sidewalk. I don’t even think of glancing back until I hit Wilson Heights Boulevard. Pausing at the corner, I catch sight of the blood pouring out of me, so much of it that even the heavy rain isn’t watering it down as it runs off my fingertips. I’m barely even feeling it. It's like somebody else's arm. Stunned by the sight of the open gash in me, I look up to see Roach coming on fast, twenty feet away.

  I break into a run, sprinting down the block, confused about where to go, which direction will give me an escape.

  Don’t look back! I tell myself. Don’t look!

  Two blocks later my lungs are burning. I’m way out of shape.

  Where's Wayne? The question flickers through my brain, but there's no time to think. It's just me and Roach now.

  There's a momentary break in traffic, so I cut across the street, trying anything to shake him. Before I get to the other curb I hit a pothole puddle and roll my ankle. The pain shoots up my right leg, cutting through the shock and adrenaline. I do a couple of hop steps onto the sidewalk, quickly testing it out. My ankle's screwed. I lean on the chain-link fence that runs beside the sidewalk, twisting to see where he is now.