A Killer in the Wind (16 page)

If someone had told me that those three years had been a lunatic’s delusion, that this, this now, was a lunatic’s delusion and I was really in some institution somewhere, straitjacketed and howling in a padded room—well, I would not have dismissed the idea out of hand.

I trudged up the stairs. Trudged down the landing to the bedroom. The damage there seemed worse than in the rest of the house. It was as if this had been the main focus of the killer’s search. The mattress was upended, half on the floor, half on its frame. Slit in a dozen places, the foam torn out in handfuls, strewn around. My clothes had been dumped out of the dresser and the closet. The dresser drawers had been pulled out and hurled across the room—hurled so hard that one of them had broken and splintered when it smashed against the wall. There was a hole kicked into the wall too, down near the base.

Skeleton Two had found my spare piece, of course—a Glock 19, same as my service gun. I kept it in a metal lockbox, on the floor of the closet, by my shoes. I don’t know how he’d managed to pry the box open—it had a strong lock—but he had. He’d tossed the gun and its holster and magazine aside, torn up the foam in the box, and left everything on the floor, where it got buried under a bunch of shirts and sports coats.

I unearthed the weapon and slid it into the holster under my jacket. I wondered if the deputies had also found the gun when they went through the place last night. I doubted it. Grassi probably would have ordered them to take it if they had.

I found my gym bag and threw some clothes into it. Threw in my toiletry kit and so on.

Then I stood a moment and surveyed the shambles. What had they been looking for? It made no sense. Just craziness. All of it.

I went downstairs, got in my car, and drove out of the county, heading for Manhattan. I needed some answers, Grassi and the sheriff and the grand jury be damned.

“This is Monahan.”

I smiled at the sound of his voice coming over the G8’s speakerphone. It reminded me of the old days. I hadn’t spoken to Monahan in over a year.

“It’s Champion,” I said.

“He-ey! There’s a voice from the past.”

“How you been, buddy?”

“Good. Great. Cheryl’s great. Got a new kid.”

“Jesus! What’s that—seven?”

“Four. Five—something like that. How about you? How’s life in the boondocks?”

Outside the windshield stretched the pale spring day, the sky pale blue, the sun pale yellow, the trees’ new leaves pale green. The highway wound south. It was lined with dense stands of willows, elms, and maples. I could catch only brief glimpses of the suburbs gathering behind them.

“I need help,” I said.

“I sorry. I no speak da English so good.”

“Very funny.”

“What do you need?”

“I killed a man last night.”

“Again?”

“Once you get started, it’s hard to stop.”

“Yeah, I’m like that with peanuts. So what’re you calling me for? Don’t they have anyone in Mayberry who knows how to plant a throwaway?”

“Believe me, I didn’t need a throwaway with this guy. He put a slug in a porch post half an inch from my ear. I can still hear the wood splintering.”

“Okay.”

“I need an ID on him.”

“He’s dead, right? Check those little finger thingies at the end of his hands. They usually have prints on them.”

“They’re not gonna find anything off a print—and if they do, they’re not gonna tell me.”

“Uh-oh.”

“I’m pretty sure you’ll only need to make a couple of calls to get everything there is on the down-low.”

“All right. Give it to me. What’ve you got?”

I flashed back on the moment I turned the porch light on. That grinning face. The knife coming at me . . .

“There were two of them,” I said.

“Two? Good shooting. You killed them both?”

“No, one got away.”

“That’s not like you, Champion.”

“I think they were brothers. They had to be. Maybe even twins. They looked like skeletons.”

Monahan didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.

“They really did, buddy, I’m not kidding you,” I said. “Pale, bony, bald, sunken cheeks. Probably ex-military. Definitely professionals. Crazy as cats on fire, the two of them. Totally nuts. The one who got away? Swore he’d come for me. Swore he’d kill me slow by way of revenge.”

“It’s nice when brothers love each other.”

“Right. He meant it too. It wasn’t just the usual I’m-gonna-torture-you-to-death chitchat. My friends in the Sheriff’s Department are investigating whether I dotted my i’s before I blasted Skeleton One, meanwhile I’m gonna wake up one night tied to my bed, Skeleton Two standing over me with a syringe and a skinning knife.”

Monahan chuckled. I’m not sure why. “Anything else?”

“I got the number off his burner.”

“Excellent.”

I gave it to him. There was quiet while he wrote it down. I watched the clustering trees at the side of the highway. They parted like a curtain at an exit, giving me a view of gas station signs and stores and streetlamps. The city was less than an hour away.

“All right,” said Monahan finally. “I’ll make some calls. And don’t worry. If this guy is really a professional, he’s not gonna expose himself by torture-killing a cop.”

I nodded. I guided the G8 over the twisting pavement.

“Consider me reassured,” I said.

I stopped off in Queens to visit my old apartment. The house in Jackson Heights was just the same as when I lived there: a gray and white two-story clapboard, a flight of stairs going up the side to the second floor. There was a fresh paint job but otherwise nothing had changed. Made me feel for a moment like I could walk right back into the world I’d left behind.

But that feeling went away fast when I knocked on the door downstairs and Ed Morris opened it. The old man had withered, as if he’d aged fifty years in three. He’d always looked like he was deflating downward into the ground, but now he was collapsing inward too. Gaunt, sunken, his clothes baggy around him, most of his iron hair gone.

“Well, well, well,” he said—his voice was hoarse and more gentle than I remembered it. It was almost as if he were pleased to see me. “Detective Champion. You look like someone been beating on you, boy.”

“Must’ve been something I said.”

“I’ll bet it was.”

“How about you, old man? How you doing?”

“How I look?” he said, and laughed and coughed.

“What, you sick?”

“Oh, yeah. I’m dying, Champion. Just a few months left, they say.”

“Ah, shit, man. I’m sorry.”

“Me too.”

He led me into the living room. The curtains were drawn. It was dimly lit. The air smelled two weeks old. He settled himself carefully in an aging armchair. It had a brace on the arm supporting a metal tray. There was medicine on the tray and water and a bowl of half-eaten soup. The television was playing some god-awful thing—women screeching their stupid opinions at one another, I don’t know what. Ed only just managed to gesture with a trembling hand toward a worn green sofa. I sat down on the edge of it.

“So? What you want?” he said. “You didn’t come to see my—” he coughed roughly—“smiling face.”

“You remember that time I was sick upstairs?”

His sallow eyes shifted, searching for the memory. “Yeah. Just at the end of you staying here. Yeah, I remember.”

“You remember I came down here afterward and asked you about a girl.”

He searched the corners again, vague, thwarted. “My memory . . .”

“A pretty redheaded girl named Samantha. You said you didn’t know her.”

“Nah . . . Oh, wait. Back in the kitchen there. Yeah. Yeah. I didn’t know her.”

“That’s what you said. I gotta ask you something.”

“All right. Go ahead.”

“Did anyone make you say that? Threaten you? Offer you money?”

“Money? What do you mean?”

“Did someone tell you to say you didn’t know the girl, that you’d never seen her? I’m sorry, Ed, I need the answer. Were you telling me the truth? You really never saw her?”

It took him a moment to grasp what I was asking him, but then he did. “Nah. Nah. No one threatened me. Or paid me. That’s crazy.”

“There was just no girl.”

“There was never any girl. I swear it. You must’ve been seeing things.”

“You never saw two guys, twins. White men. Scary-looking. Like twin skeletons. They never came here. You never saw them.”

He shook his head. “Nothing like that.”

“No one’s ever threatened you . . .”

“Who could threaten me now? Or buy me either? What I got to lose or pay for? Wives don’t talk to me, kids don’t talk to me. I’m dying alone here, Champion. I got no reason to lie to anyone anymore.”

Before I left, I went upstairs to see the old place. I’m not sure why exactly. I’m not sure what I was expecting to find. I think I just wanted to get a sense of the past, a sense that the past had really happened, that it wasn’t just a figment of my drug-addled memories.

Ed told me there was a young couple living upstairs now. Only the girl-half was at home when I got there. A skinny creature in her twenties with dyed black hair and a bad complexion. Wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt. Sporting a spiderweb tattoo on her arm, a ring in her nose, and a stud on her tongue. Cocaine eyes. And, oh, yeah, a baby on her hip.

She opened the door, took one look at me, and went blank and scared. She knew a cop when she saw one.

“Albert’s not home,” she said instantly.

“It’s all right, sweetheart,” I told her. I waggled a finger at the baby’s nose. The kid stared at it, cross-eyed, openmouthed. “I’m on personal business. I used to live here. I just want to look around.”

“Well, I’m just . . . I’m not . . .”

“It’s all right,” I told her again.

She didn’t know what to do, so she let me in.

I stood in the center of the room. The place was littered with baby stuff. A playpen, brightly colored plastic toys, stuffed animals. There was a round dining table in one corner. A box of crackers on it. Also, cracker crumbs and trace amounts of white powder.

The girl stood next to me as I looked around. She kept eyeing the cocaine residue on the table. Her aura of fear and panic was distracting. I just wanted to stand there and get a feel for the old days.

“We’re just . . . you know . . . bringing up our baby,” the girl said to me. Trying to sound wholesome. Ruining the effect with a nervous laugh.

Annoyed, I just held up my hand in answer. I wished she’d be quiet. I also wished she’d stop doing blow while she was taking care of her baby. And dump her dealer boyfriend. And go home to her mother—or any clean relative she had. But mostly I just wished she’d shut up and let me think.

I looked around the room. At the places I’d been. At the places where Samantha had appeared to me.

What the hell?
I thought. How was it possible? What the hell was happening to me?

I moved to the wainscoting, crouched down, and checked the panel—just as I had back in the day. I didn’t need to do it really. I knew there’d be no secret hiding place. There never was.

I straightened up. I thought of the woman who had washed impossibly out of the Hudson. The same face, the same hair, the same eyes. The same woman as had appeared to me in my hallucination. Samantha.

They’re coming after us.

What the hell?
I thought.
What the hell?

I was waiting for Monahan when he got home. Nice suburban house in Little Neck. Cheryl had assigned me to their front room and plunked me on the sofa by the window there with a bottle of beer. The front room was the formal living room. Clean carpeting and stuffed furniture with embroidered upholstery. Family portraits taken by professional photographers. A painting of Jesus holding a lamp—the light of the world. Putting me in there, I think, was Cheryl’s version of treating me as an honored guest. Plus the formality of the room was supposed to keep the kids away from me. That didn’t work much. Tribes of the midget barbarians kept drifting in, drifting closer, gazing at me. Man, there were a lot of them.

“Why is your face all hurt?” one of them asked me.

“I punched a bad guy with it.”

“You can’t punch with your face!”

“Oh, now you tell me. Where were you when I needed you?”

Cheryl would keep shouting from somewhere, “Kids, leave Mr. Champion alone, you know you’re not supposed to be in there!” But that would only disperse them briefly. Then the little savages would come back, drifting closer and closer, bolder with each return.

By the time Daddy got home, they were swarming over me like the bloodthirsty cannibals they were. Then Monahan stepped through the front door and I was unburied in a single sweeping rush. The kids launched a heedless charge at the thick-necked muscleman and a second later were dangling from his enormous arms and body like Christmas ornaments. Cheryl came out of somewhere too, carrying the new baby on her hip—a mess of a thing covered in some hideous green substance. Monahan nevertheless bent his big body low and kissed it and even paused down there to plant one on his wife as well. Cheryl handed him a bottle of beer.