A Killer in the Wind (23 page)

“Everyone’s been looking for you,” she said. “Grassi’s been here twice. The bastard.” She moved me up the two steps to her front door. She was practically holding me upright, practically lifting me, carrying me. I don’t know how she managed it. We spilled together into the lighted foyer.

“Close the door,” I said—or thought; I don’t know whether I said it out loud. Either way, she let me go and closed the door. I stumbled to an armchair in the living room and dropped into it. Now there was a new smell. That musty, purple smell of the house and furniture Bethany’s mother had left her, the smell of Bethany’s girlhood, thick and warm and comforting. It was dangerous, that smell, I thought. It could make me relax. It could make me forget we had to run—and then Stark would be there while I was still too weak to fight.

But another moment went by and I smelled the house and I couldn’t remember what was dangerous about it anymore. I just sank into the softness of the chair and breathed in the homey atmosphere gratefully.

Bethany was hovering over me now. “Dan, Dan, what happened?”

My head lolled on my shoulders. I had to fight to keep my eyes open. That comfortable, musty, purple smell. The smell of Bethany as a little girl, dreaming. The sweet smell of Bethany as she hovered over me. The silken touch of her hair falling on my face. Her green and tender eyes.

“Hold on,” she said. “Let me get some stuff to clean you with.”

There were so many thoughts crowding my mind, so much I wanted to tell her. I thought I understood now how Samantha had come to wash up on the riverbank in Gilead. I didn’t have all the answers—not even close—but I thought I had some. They had come to me during the long weary hours it had taken me to get here. The Starks’ cabin had been somewhere in Jersey, it turned out, more than a hundred miles south. I had run and trudged to get to a road, then hitched a ride on an eastbound truck, and made my way north on foot until I could flag another truck—a journey of long, weary hours. Miles and miles through the dark, my thoughts racing, jumbling . . . I wanted to tell her about the racing, jumbling thoughts . . . Because now I understood . . .

The Fat Woman had hired Stark and his brother. I remembered the hideous sight of her on the computer in his cabin.

Are you there, Stark? Have you got him?

She had hired the death-headed killers. Why? I wasn’t sure. To find me? Maybe. Maybe she wanted vengeance on the undercover cop whose name hadn’t been revealed to the media, the man who had killed her customer Martin Emory, who had come so close to finding her. Maybe. But whatever the reason, she had set the Starks loose, and they had gone after Samantha first. Why? Who was she? I didn’t know. But somehow she understood their assignment and had made her way to Gilead to try to warn me about it.

They’re coming after us.

But Stark and his twin had been on her trail. They had followed her and attacked me outside my house.

It made sense, so far as it went. But who was Samantha? How had I dreamed her, hallucinated her three years ago as I kicked the drug, the Z? How had I fallen in love with an illusion only to have her come to life?

I lifted my head on the chair. Stared around me, blinking. For a long moment, the room, the night outside the windows—the world—all seemed to telescope away from me into a distant unreality.

Was it
all
an illusion? I wondered. Was it all a dream—even this?

Then Bethany was there again. A warm washcloth moved gently over my face.

“Hold still.”

“Bethany . . .”

“You need a doctor.”

“No.”

“You need stitches for that cut, sweetheart.”

“No.”

The warm washcloth went over my face and blocked my view of her eyes. I wanted to look at her gentle eyes. I tried to see them around the washcloth.

“Who did this to you?” she said.

“A killer. A hired gun.”

“Hold still.

“I shot his brother. He’s after me.”

“Okay. We’ll call the police.”

I caught her wrist. Held the washcloth away so I could see her eyes. They were beautiful. “No,” I told her. “No police.”

“Dan . . .”

“They’ll just arrest him. That won’t stop him.”

“What are you talking about? What are you going to do?”

“No police, Beth.”

“That’s crazy! What . . . ? You can’t just kill him.”

“I can. I will. It’s the only way.”

She didn’t answer. Gently, she pulled her hand free of my grasp.

“Hold still,” she said.

She went back to washing the blood off my face. Frowning, her eyes dark.

“Look,” I told her. “We can’t call the cops here. Grassi’s got it in for me. He’s just looking to tie me up. You know he is.”

“Well, forget Grassi then,” she said primly. She disapproved of my plan. “We’ll go to the sheriff.”

“The sheriff is nothing against this guy. He’ll wind up doing the same thing—tying me up, holding me back—even if he doesn’t mean to. Even if they believe me . . .”

“They’ll believe you, Champ. Look at you.”

“Even if they do, even if they arrest him, it won’t stop. He’ll still kill me. He’ll kill you too, Beth.”

“Me?” She pulled back, her eyes widening.

“I’m telling you. I shot this guy’s brother. He wants to hurt me. Torture me. He said he’d kill everyone I love.”

She was silent again. She knelt down beside me. She held my hand. She began to wash my hand with the warm cloth. She washed each of the fingers, one by one.

“We’ll go to New York,” I told her. “I have a friend there. He’ll put some cops on it but he’ll leave me free to do what I have to do. Okay?”

I heard her make a noise. I looked down at her. She turned her head away. I thought she had started crying but then I realized, no, she was laughing. Shaking her head, laughing.

“What?” I said.

She couldn’t stop giggling, like a kid. “That
would
be the way I’d find out you love me,” she said. “‘Why are you murdering me, Mr. Bad Guy?’ ‘Because Dan Champion loves you.’ ‘Oh, that’s sweet! I never knew he cared!’ Next time, Champ, could you send me, like, flowers or something? A greeting card . . .”

I laughed. Looking down at the top of her head as she went back to cleaning my bloody fingers. Looking at the delicate white part in her blonde hair. Why hadn’t I held on to her? Married her? Built a life with her like Monahan had a life?

What was the point of asking? I knew the answer.

Samantha . . .

Later, I woke in the car beside her. Stiff, aching, but clean now. Showered. Bandaged. In fresh jeans and a sweatshirt and windbreaker—clothes I’d left at her house one time. I turned my head on the seat to watch her driving. I watched her profile framed against the swiftly running dark.

Then it occurred to me: my gun. I reached for my shoulder holster.

“It’s in the backseat,” Bethany said, watching the mirror, watching the road. “Don’t worry. You can still shoot people.” She smiled at me.

I sat up slowly. My mouth was sour with sleep. “I had papers, an envelope.”

“It’s all back there. I brought everything.”

I blinked. “Where are we going?”

“New York City. That’s what you said.”

I nodded. “Right, right. I remember. Stop at a gas station with a market when you see one, would you? I need a burner. A phone they can’t trace.”

I waited in the car—her car: a jazzy old Mustang—while she went into the store. I watched her move under the gas station’s bright lights. She was wearing an orange trench coat against the cool of the spring night. Her legs were bare. She had good legs.

When she was inside, I scanned the area through the Mustang’s windows. It was after two in the morning. No other cars in the lot. No one had followed us. No one was on our trail. I didn’t think they would be. Not yet. I’d scotched their plan for now, forced them to burn their safe house. They’d want to regroup before they came for me again.

Still, there was always a chance. They might act fast, hope to take me off-guard.

I stepped out of the car as Bethany came back toward me carrying the phone. I stretched. My body was aching, sore.

“I’ll drive,” I told her.

She tossed me her keys.

I drove—and as I drove, I talked to her. The broken white line of the highway zipped under the fender. The dark miles passed. In the rushing quiet of the car, I told her about being an uncle, an undercover, in the NYPD. I told her about my obsession with the Fat Woman. The sting on Martin Emory. About how I took the drug, Zattera—Z—to help me sleep. And the hallucinations that followed: the ghost of the little boy, Alexander, haunting me. Then I told her about the house—Emory’s house in the woods—and the little girl tied to the bedstead. I told her how I pumped five bullets into Emory and killed him dead.

I glanced over at her when I told her that. To see how she took it. She gazed at me from the passenger seat, her eyes flashing in the passing lights.

“What,” I said.

“Nothing,” she answered.

“He was a child-murdering son of a bitch.”

“I know that. And I know what that kind of thing does to you. When someone hurts a child—or a woman, for that matter . . . or anyone who can’t defend themselves—I know how you take it, how angry it makes you. I happen to love that about you, Champ.”

I looked away, back at the road. Made me feel funny, her saying that. Embarrassed. Exposed. “But you don’t like that I killed the guy,” I said. “You don’t like that I’m going to kill Stark.”

“I don’t care about them. I’m just afraid of what it’ll turn you into. All the killing.”

“I’ve killed before. I was in a war, remember? I’ve killed a lot.”

“I know.”

“From far away and up close. I’m good at it.”

“I know.”

I drove silently.

Bethany said, “You know what I
do
like?”

“What.”

“To hear you talking. You never talk.”

“Well . . . now I am.”

“I like it. I’m glad.”

“Okay.”

I kept driving. I started talking again. The highway wound past darkened woods, under streetlights suddenly there, suddenly gone. I told her about kicking the drug, sick and crazy, curled on the floor of my room upstairs. I told her about Samantha, about seeing Samantha, and how she was the same girl who had washed up out of the river that night I was at her house . . .

“Well, she must have been real all along then,” Bethany said. “You must have really seen her.”

“She wasn’t real. She couldn’t have been. Unless the ghost boy was real too. Alexander.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I found a picture of him hidden in Samantha’s apartment.”

“You found a picture of the ghost boy? A photograph?”

“Yeah.”

“How . . . ?”

“I don’t know.”

“He was an hallucination. He had to be,” she said.

“That’s what I’m telling you. He was and so was she. I imagined them both. Now they’re real.”

Bethany was silent. After a while, she turned to look out the window. When I glanced over, I could see her face reflected on the glass.

“What,” I said.

She shook her head. “It’s just . . . all this stuff… It’s all been in your head.” She turned to me. “All this time . . .”

I stared out the windshield. Stared out through my own reflection there on the glass. I understood what she was saying. All this time she and I had been together, there were all these things I hadn’t told her, all these things about me she didn’t know . . . I wondered if she guessed the rest of it. About Samantha, how I felt about Samantha. How I couldn’t love her—Bethany—because I loved another girl, a girl who wasn’t there. And now she was there . . .

I stole another glance at her reflection on the glass. I thought she probably had guessed it. It was the sort of thing she
would
guess, being Bethany.

“Well, now I’m telling you,” I said.

“I know,” she said.

She said it so sadly I thought she must have guessed for sure.

We didn’t talk again for miles. We sat in the car together in silence. It felt to me as if Samantha was there too, sitting between us. The trees gathered darkly on the sides of the freeway. The lights of the suburbs winked and flashed behind them. Streetlights, the glaring lights of gas stations, the dim yellow lights of houses, lights left on through the night—I caught glimpses of them through the branches and the new leaves.

After a while, I felt Bethany watching me again. I felt she’d been watching me a long time and I hadn’t noticed, lost in my own thoughts as I was.

“What,” I said.

“Well, I kind of think I get this.”

“Get what?”

“All of this. What’s happening. I mean, do you really not see it?”