A Killer in the Wind (5 page)

He was. He opened the door. He was wearing a plaid bathrobe.

“What on earth are you . . . ?” he said.

I stormed in past him.

“Shut the door,” I told him.

“The doorman didn’t ring. How’d you . . . ?”

I went back to him and took the door out of his hand and shut it forcefully. I put my face close to his. I made myself look afraid. Maybe I really was afraid.

“That thing I said to you. At the club the other day.” When he hesitated, I said harshly, “You remember.”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes. Of course.” He was being cautious, watchful.

“Well, forget it. I didn’t mean it. It was a joke.”

“What’s wrong? What’s the matter?”

I wiped my mouth with my hand, really playing it, really looking panicked, tapping into that tension, that buzz that was all through me whenever the Z wore off. I dropped my voice low. “Someone’s been watching me. Staking out my apartment. Must be the cops. Has to be. Who else could it be?”

It took a moment before Emory understood what had happened. Then his pale, flaccid face relaxed. He smiled a superior smile.

“Oh, no, no, no. Relax, relax.” He said it singsong, as if he were talking to an old woman or a child. “Don’t be so paranoid.”

I pretended his attitude was a revelation. “You already knew! Did
you
send him?”

“No, no, not me. But the people I deal with . . . They’re cautious. They have protocols. You have to expect that. It’s only reasonable.”

I paced, pretending to think it over. Paused. Stared at him. “These are, like, your suppliers?”

“Don’t look so worried. It’s all right. You check out just fine.”

I stared at him another moment, then let a breath out as if I were relaxing. “You should’ve told me.”

“Now that would have spoiled the whole idea, wouldn’t it,” he said—and once again, he wrinkled his nose, cute, an old woman talking to a poodle. My stomach turned over. “I’m surprised you spotted him. They tell me he’s very good.”

“Look, this isn’t . . . ? I mean, you’re not some sort of . . . ?”

“What?” he said. “Policeman? Please! Of course not. You came to
me
. Remember?”

I hesitated—then I nodded.

“All we’ll require now is a money transfer,” he went on. “One computer to another, easy as that.”

I nodded again, looking antsy—feeling antsy.

Emory took a step toward me. He put his hand on my shoulder and gave it a reassuring squeeze. I wanted to rip his arm off and beat him to death with it. Him and his sick desires. “It’s all right,” he said again. “You’re nearly there. You’ve almost arrived. You’ve come to the right place, found what you’re looking for.” The green eyes buried in the soft folds of his pale skin gleamed out at me and I remembered the imps on the ceiling of the bedroom. He went on in a soothing, hypnotic voice: “No more half-starved, half-drugged yellow trash. What we’re talking about is white. Fresh. Safe. Completely safe. No history. No future. She’ll exist only in your moment of . . . absolute delight.”

It was an effort to keep the expression of horror off my face but I managed it. I managed somehow to manufacture an expression of rapt expectation instead.

“You’ll be receiving a call,” Emory said majestically.

And with a friendly pat on the arm, he sent me on my way.

The street outside Emory’s building—the little branch of 52nd dead-ending at the river—was quiet. A cab was making a U-turn. A doorman was pacing. The day was cold, gray, windy, heavy with the threat of rain. I stuck my hands into the pockets of my overcoat and ducked my chin into the collar as I walked to First Avenue.

When I reached the corner of the avenue, I paused and scanned the scene. An instinct. To see if the thug was still tailing me. The avenue was where all the action was. The morning rush hour: yellow cabs packed tight curb to curb, delivery trucks double-parked and blocking traffic. On the sidewalks, pedestrians were passing in a steady flow. Men and women carrying briefcases and coffee cups. Working guys with crates in their arms. Older ladies walking little dogs.

My eyes went over all of them—then stopped. I lifted my chin. My mouth opened and I felt a catch in my throat.

The dead boy was standing by a lamppost across the street. The boy I’d seen in the apartment: Alexander. He was just standing there, gazing at me. I could see him clearly in the gray daylight. He was small—maybe eight years old, but small even for his age. And frail—underfed. He wasn’t wearing a coat or anything, just a thin button-down white shirt and grimy corduroy pants, a pitiful pair of worn-out sneakers that had once been red. He had thick black hair and a narrow, emaciated face. Big eyes—giant eyes above those gaunt, sunken cheeks. And he just stood there. Watching me. Without expression. Without movement. Just watching.

He kills them,
I thought.

It came to me like that, all at once. Emory said he would find me someone completely safe . . .
No history. No future. She’ll exist only in your moment of
. . .
absolute delight
.

Right. Because when I was done with her, he would kill her. Because murder—that was
his
absolute delight. He sold his victims to his customers to earn back the Fat Woman’s purchase price—and when the customer was done, he killed the victim for his own pleasure. Maybe he watched the customer at work first, maybe that was part of it too, but it was the killing he lived for. I was certain of it.

The boy—the dead boy; the ghost I called Alexander—gazed and gazed at me from across the street, from out of his limbo-world of unforgivable suffering and injustice. I had the powerful urge to cry out to him through the rush-hour traffic, to cry out words that came into my memory out of nowhere, words one of my foster mothers had read to me from the tattered Bible open on her kitchen table.

I wanted to cry out to him:
Vengeance is mine. I will repay
.

But before I could speak, a bus came between us, rumbling uptown. When it passed, I saw that the dead boy had vanished.

After that, a week went by—more than a week, ten days maybe. Nothing happened. No calls from Emory. No meetings. Not a word. A sickness of suspense and revulsion gripped me. It was my constant state of feeling. There was no relief from it. I spent every day at the cover apartment on Fifth Avenue. Every evening, I took the Z. I knew what it was doing to me, but I couldn’t stop . . .

She’ll be completely safe. No history. No future. She’ll exist only in your moment of
. . .
absolute delight
.

I’d seen a lot of bad stuff, a lot of bad stuff. I didn’t know why this time should be different, but it was. This time, I couldn’t face the evil without the drug.

One night, the final night of waiting, I woke fully dressed, sprawled in a plush chair in the living room. The lights were on. The room was full of smoke. I knew—I could tell—that the smoke was in my mind, that my mind was swirling and unclear, and yet I could also see the smoke in the room: twisting tendrils of gray mist expanding into a general fog. It was as if the smoke itself obscured the borderline between the world as it was and the world inside my brain.

There was something else too. I had heard something. Just before I woke up, there had been a noise. A strange, piercing cry of a sound. Was it in my dream? In reality? In reality, I thought. Somewhere in the apartment . . .

Yes. Someone was there. Someone else was in the apartment with me. Living or dead. Someone.

When I stood up, I stumbled, my legs weak under me. I reached for the holster in the small of my back, but it wasn’t there. I had taken the gun off when I came in that evening. It was in the bedroom, on the bedside table.

I took an unsteady step toward the bedroom door. It shifted in the smoke as the smoke shifted. The dark rectangle of the doorway faded in and out of my vision. The whole room tilted and I nearly went falling across the floor toward the windows. The damned drug. I grabbed hold of the back of the sofa to steady myself. I pulled my way along it, making for the bedroom through the smoke.

I reached the tilting door. I braced my hand against the frame to keep myself upright. The bedroom was dark. I didn’t want to go into the darkness. I reached inside and found the light switch. The light came on. I stepped in. The smoke was in there too. I could see the bed only hazily, coming in and out of view. I didn’t want to look up but I couldn’t help it. I raised my eyes to the ceiling.

The cherubs grinned down at me, their sharp teeth bared.

I made a gagging sound and put my hand up to my brow, shielding my eyes from the horrible sight of them as I tumbled through the doorway, stumbled through the smoke toward the bedside table. My gun and holster lay there, next to my cell phone. Shielding my eyes from the grinning, feral cherubs on the ceiling, I reached forward through the smoke. My fingers touched the table. Touched my holster. I grabbed my gun. That was all I wanted. I had to get out of there.

I spun back around—and the dead boy was standing right in front of me. He was holding out his arms to me as if he wanted me to lift him up. He stank of the grave.

I cried out and reeled back through the smoke toward the bed. The blood-eyed cherubs reeled through my vision, laughing. That sound that had awakened me—that high cry—pierced the room.

It was the phone. I saw it light up on the bedside table. I saw it plainly—and when I looked around the room, the smoke was gone. The air was clear. The boy had vanished.

I dared—just barely dared—to look up at the ceiling. The cherubs were cherubs again, overcute, chubby angels gamboling among the dawn-lit clouds.

The phone went on ringing. I snapped it up.

“Tomorrow night at nine.” It was Emory. He told me an address in the suburbs, a landmark to look for. Then he hung up.

I sat on the edge of the bed, my head hung down, the gun dangling from my hand.

The next night, I was in a car, the green Lexus we had borrowed from Narcotics. I was driving up Interstate 95, the streetlights glaring, the city skyline at my back.

“I don’t know,” Monahan was saying. “I’m looking at a lot of manpower for just a hunch.”

He was stationed at the address already, out in the woods with the statie tac team and the rest of the task force. His voice came into the Lexus over its speakerphone. It was a comforting presence as I maneuvered through the night. It tethered me to reality, kept me from floating away.

“It’s not a hunch,” I said. “I’m telling you: He kills them.”

“Because he said they were ‘completely safe’?”

“Yes. And had no future. And because I just know.”

“That sounds suspiciously like a hunch to me.”

I didn’t answer. I drove on. The city fell away. I traveled into Westchester. The highway grew darker. I blinked hard, trying to clear my vision. My head was foggy from the Z. Sometimes the fog came out of my mind and drifted through the night on the far side of the windshield. The cars around me would dim and waver like they were underwater. White headlights and red taillights would turn distant and gray. The sounds of the ride would grow muted and soft. Then after a mile or two, the mist would dissipate and the scene would snap back into clarity. The rumble of the engine and the rumble of the tires on the road and the steady sough of the air passing would rise and surround me again.

And there was Monahan’s voice on the speakerphone: “You know what I think?”

“I care very deeply what you think, Monahan. Never doubt that.”

“Yeah, I think Vice is getting to you.”

“Nah. Vice is nice,” I said. It’s what we always said because the work was so much cleaner and safer than in Narcotics.

“Vice
is
nice,” said Monahan, “but it gets to you. The perps and their shenanigans. They’d get to anyone.”

“Shenanigans,” I muttered. The highway seemed to telescope away from me and snap back. The hallucination was so real and sudden it nearly made me gasp. I shook my head to clear it. The damned drug.

“And you, with nothing else,” said Monahan. “No life to distract you. That’s the problem right there.”

“This again.”

“You need a life, Champion.”

“I have a life. This is my life.”

“You need a girl.”

“I have girls.”

“Your girls,” said Monahan. “You take ’em to dinner Saturday night. Monday, we bust them on the street.”

I laughed. It made my head hurt. “Combining work and pleasure —it saves time.”

“You need a real girl. A wife,” said Monahan.

Monahan had a wife. Cheryl her name was. A little Italian whirlwind. Came up to his belt buckle. Always had two of his kids under her feet and one on her hip. Always shouting at someone. She made these pasta dinners that could’ve sunk an aircraft carrier. You could’ve put a plate of her lasagna on the deck of the USS
Ronald Reagan,
the Reagan would’ve just upended and sunk to the bottom,
blub blub blub,
with all hands lost. Two days in a row with Cheryl and I’d’ve gone nuts, but Monahan loved her.