A Killer in the Wind (13 page)

“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 week 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.

We faced each other. The split second froze. Everything was pulse and action inside me, fear and racing thought.

I saw his hand go into his jacket. I went for my gun. He drew out a Glock and I drew out mine at the same instant.

I shouted, “Drop it!”

He leveled on me. I pulled the trigger.

There were four deafening blasts, rapid-fire. I put three slugs in his chest. He let off the fourth as his arm flew up and his hand spasmed. The porch post near my ear splintered as his bullet went in. Then, like a puppet with its strings cut, the skeleton-man danced and collapsed in a heap. I fell back against the railing, panting, stunned beyond fear, stunned beyond anything now but the electric pounding moment.

Slowly, the heap of the skeleton-man keeled over. He let out a long, long, rattling breath and lay still.

I kept the gun on him as I edged forward. The muzzle of his pistol—a .45-caliber Glock 30—was sticking out from under his crumpled form. I put my foot on it and tugged once, twice, until I pulled it free of his weight. I picked it up and slipped it into my jacket pocket. Then I knelt down beside the still killer. I put my hand on his neck. His flesh was uncannily cold. I felt for a pulse. There was none. He was dead.

I hesitated a moment, crouched there. Then I started running my hands over him, feeling through his clothing for a wallet. I knew I should’ve waited for the inspector on the case, but I figured what the hell. They were going to put me on administrative leave now, take my gun and badge away at least until a grand jury ruled on the shooting. The case would go to someone else. I’d have to finagle for information. I didn’t feel like finagling. The man had tried to kill me. I wanted to know who he was—now.

I found his wallet in his pants pocket, front right. Worked it out. Opened it. Cash inside. A lot. More than a thousand dollars in hundreds and twenties. A driver’s license. John Jones. Sure. Nothing else. Not a single thing.

I put the wallet back and felt around his pockets some more. Found a cell phone in the other front pants pocket. It was a burner, a throwaway. I turned it on and took note of the number. I didn’t have time to do more than that. I put the phone back too.

A whistle screamed in the distance. Freight train on the way. I stood up and holstered my 19. The movement made my side flare with red pain. I looked down and saw the bloodstain spreading quickly over the side of my shirt. I parted the torn cloth with my fingers. The skull-man’s knife blade had lanced a red gash in my side. The pain flared again. I flinched and released a breath.

Moving carefully, I drew my phone out of my pocket and called dispatch. The night dispatcher was named Hillary.

“I need backup and an ambulance,” I told her. “Some clown just tried to kill me. I’m cut and he’s dead.”

I lowered the phone with a shaking hand. I was feeling the effect of adrenaline now. I was shuddering head to toe. Images were flashing in my head. The knife coming at me. The grinning man. His eyes. All the ways it might have gone down. All the ways I might have died. I looked at the corpse as I slipped the phone into my pocket.

They’re coming after us
.

Right,
I thought. Like Grassi said: What were the odds? What were the odds this was unconnected to Samantha’s warning? None. Not the way I figured it.

The freight whistle blew again. I saw the first glow of its headlamp through the hedges. The slice in my side was really beginning to burn. My damp shirt clung to the wound uncomfortably. I needed to get inside. Find a towel or something to stop the bleeding.

Where was my key chain? I’d dropped it in the fight, not sure where or when. I looked around and there it was, by the dead man’s knee. Holding my side, gritting my teeth against the pain, I bent down and swept it up. My eyes came level with the dead man’s eyes. He was still staring at me with fascination, still grinning. I straightened and moved around the body to the door.

I worked the lock and stepped into the house. It was dark inside but the moonlight shone in from the rear and filled the living room with shapes and shadows. As the door closed behind me, the whistle of the freight train shrieked once again. The train came nearer. I could feel the vibration of it in the floorboards. I could see the first out-glow of its headlamp. It came through the window and sent the shapes and shadows of the room into swirling motion.

And out of that light, and out of those shadows, a man who looked like Death—the same man who lay dead on the porch behind me—rushed at me, screaming.

It was the same man, so help me, only instead of that eerie grin of fascination, his skull-like face held a wide, shrieking grin of rage. He screamed and the train whistle screamed and the white of his face and the black of his outfit reeled out of the reeling white of the train lamp’s glare and the reeling black shadows—and I was so startled and so confused by the impossible sight of him that he was on me before I had a chance to react at all.

He hit me hard in the face and body, then carried me down to the floor. His hand was on my throat. His knee was in my belly. I smacked down against the thin rug, the air going out of me. That screaming skull loomed over me as the train screamed again and the lamplight flared over us and the shadows swirled.