Bad People (40 page)

She shook her head. And why would she have? It’s not like they did a whole tour of the house. The thing she had noticed was that her friend had his father’s old hunting knife in his hand and was sitting in a pool of his own blood. No, she didn’t notice any missing comic books.

“I did. You know Jay Porter. Or rather,
did
you know him?”

Again Connie shook her head. “I might have heard the name, but I….”

“You
have
heard the name. From
me
. He was a friend of mine. He owned the comics shop on Twelfth. He was a guy I knew, but was he a friend? I don’t know.” All past tense.

“Barry, did something happen between you and him?”

“Something happened
to
him. Yes, something did. And what, I really don’t know. I mean, I really
don’t
know about that, Connie. I don’t.”

“Okay….”

“But whatever happened to him happened. I sold all my comics to him. Do you know why?” He waited for her to answer, but she didn’t. She waited to hear what he had to say. No more quizzes. She was done reacting until he came out with it.

“To be a better man. To put away those things and grow up.”

She thought better than to tell him that he could start being a man by shutting up and sucking up. Comic books had nothing to do with it. She was trying hard to have pity for him but none came to her, forced or otherwise.

She heard someone coming down the steps at the other end of the lobby behind her, and she made a motion to turn around. This person would want to got out the front and this afforded her the perfect opportunity to break the moment with Barry, which he would not appreciate now, but in the end would serve him better.

She turned and saw that it was only Luke. She smiled out of reflex. Barry screamed.

The scream stunned her; it was like the cry of a wounded animal. Barry turned and bolted away.

“Barry!” she cried. She looked at Luke again, almost embarrassed now, not knowing what to think. What exactly had happened?

Luke brushed past her and went out. Now she found herself calling after
him
.

This all happened so fast she hardly knew how to process it. She was aware finally that her mouth had dropped open, and she closed it. She felt a chill and she closed the door. She stepped back. Both Luke and Barry were out of sight. She waited. Was Luke coming back?

Was
it Luke?

It seemed crazy, but the person who she had just seen certainly looked like Luke. He had barely glanced at her, but in that glance—now that she began to processes it—she saw something more chilling than the air outside.

Luke’s face had shown not only an absence of acknowledgement, but almost an absence of
anything
: the face of a store mannequin—humanoid, handsome even, but bereft of life-force. Like he had turned off. And Barry, what about that? He’d reacted instantly. And if it upset him to see Connie with a friend so relatively soon after Robb’s death (the reaction she always half-expected—even from strangers), that still could not account for a his scream. It had come even before he could have seen that she and Luke knew each other. Luke could have been any stranger just entering the lobby.

Or
did
Barry know?

Who else knew and might have told him?

She hadn’t really told anyone, but she and Luke had probably been seen out. Erika could have told Barry. But still, how would Barry know Luke’s face? She went up to the lobby door and looked out again. She hadn’t brought her keys down with her, so she couldn’t go right out and look for them without locking herself out. She waited.

Was he coming back?

Was
Luke
jealous of
Barry
? That didn’t make any sense either, but it was the only plausible explanation for
his
bizarre behavior.

He was miffed that his special night was ruined—or no.

More likely he had just—in the few minutes he had upstairs alone waiting will she talked to Barry—in those few minutes Luke had pieced together exactly what she had started to say to him when the buzzer rang. That was it.

She headed back upstairs. Halfway up she had another thought, and hoped that Luke had not pulled her door shut. It locked automatically, a feature that she did find helpful—
ever
—and without her phone or her keys on her, she would likely be locked out in the hall until S/D turned up. Would have been smart to make friends with her neighbors here.

All was well on that end however. Her door stood open at the end of the hallway when she got back up to her floor. Though she was relieved, she did exhale and shake her head at the thought of what Luke had done. Walking out, and leaving her door standing open? Or was he merely being thoughtful and courteous in his sudden departure, knowing she wouldn’t have a way back in if he had shut it?

She had to be thankful, that if Luke
had
stormed out, and all this was not the result of some other strange character quirk that she did not understand, that at least he’d stormed out thoughtfully.

Inside the apartment, any possibility of thoughtfulness on Luke’s part was put to rest.

The countertops were clear of all the plates and food, but everything had been scooped into the sink, a deep green and brown sludge of uneaten Asian fusion.

That, and the cold expressionless way he had ignored her at the door, those were the symptoms of an angry man. She had never seen this side of him, she was sure of it, and now she searched her memories of the past few weeks—no, the
months
she had known him off and on, for any clues she had missed.

She found nothing.

No clue.

And that made her heart start to pound.

Her throat constricted, and she realized she wasn’t breathing, she was panting, but without taking in any air.

Just like with Robb.

Just like it.

She was still too stupid to live. She grabbed the sink counter, and squeezed until her fingers were white.

She needed to breathe.

She’d figured out enough to not force it. She had to will herself to stop hyperventilating. Panic attack.

Nothing. Nothing. It didn’t matter. He was gone. She was overreacting, she had to be. Luke was a brat, it turned out, but that was all.

He could hardly have the influence on her life that the death of a husband of almost twenty years had had. Rationality told her that she was overreacting. This was another of those, what had the trauma nurse called it that one time?

Another of those delayed stress reactions.

Connie realized that tears were streaming down her face, but that she was also breathing now. Taking in bug gulps of breath, in fact. The tears felt good. They felt right, and cleansing.

She let herself cry for a few minutes more and then went into the bathroom to wash up—which she couldn’t do in her own kitchen because of the goo Luke had dumped in the sink.

In the bathroom she wiped her tears and examined her face. She looked fine. She
was
fine.

In fact, maybe this was a blessing, the way it had turned out.

This side of Luke—how would he have reacted once she’d told him it was over? Just the two of them in the room together?

Now it was finished. He might call her, but the message had already been delivered.

That was that. Done with Luke. Better for all concerned, and she wouldn’t have to feel guilty around Stephen-David either.

She blew her nose, blew it twice, good and hard, to ensure her voice would sound clear, then she went back into the living room and got her phone, to call Stephen-David.

Getting late, she needed to find him.

He might not answer, but that would have to change soon. She had a lot of repairing to do there. This had been a harder year for him than she could have ever imagined her son would have to endure in his life. Certainly not at his age. The unfairness of it. But they had to go on. Be a family.

She scrolled down on her phone and dialed her son’s number. She was about to hang up on the fourth ring, when someone answered.
Some
one. She didn’t know who because the person didn’t speak.

She heard the open line, and a breath taken in, but that was all. Yet she had the distinct impression that it was a female breath. A girl had answered the phone. “Hello?” said Connie quietly.

The line went dead.

She put the phone in her sweater pocket.

Stephen-David might very well be seeing a girl that Connie knew nothing about, but why she would be answering his phone, or rather,
picking it up and not saying anything
, about
that
behavior she did not have a clue.

Connie went down the hall toward S/D’s room. She didn’t know what she planned to do there, search it?

Look for a stack of love notes?

No, any correspondence between S/D and a sweetheart would be in the form of texts on his own phone. Probably not even email anymore. Kids didn’t use email.

In the hall, she saw that S/D’s door was closed, nothing strange about that. However, her own bedroom door was closed as well, and that was wrong. She never closed her door when she left the bedroom.

But Luke did.

He hadn’t been in there with her tonight. He had only just come in and started opening all the food. He hadn’t been in there, unless he had gone in there while she was down in the lobby with Barry.

Slowly, she advanced on her own door, as if she had no idea what was behind it.

She opened it and saw nothing disturbed. Nothing but a presence. She checked her bathroom too. Nothing different. Yet she could almost
feel
a difference. Something
had
happened. She studied her bedcover, looking for so much as an unfamiliar wrinkle.

Her dresser top. Nothing disturbed, yet still the presence lingered. A violation.

She saw it.

The carpet in front of her desk.

A double impression in the carpet, one where the front desk leg rested, and another just a fraction of a space inside of that, where the desk leg
had
been resting previously. The bottom drawer had been opened and pushed shut hard enough to move that side of the desk back that tiny bit. Could have happened anytime, and yet…

She opened the drawer.

No gun.

The phone in her pocket rang. She jumped.

She scramble to pull it out of the folds of her sweater, hoping it was Stephen-David. She answered without paying any attention who was calling. “Stephen-David, where are you?”

It was Barry.

Chapter 44: Barry

Barry ran for his life, bypassing his car, and headed for the lights of the nearest shopping street. There he got lucky and found a cab that two well-dressed men were exiting. He brushed past them, practically climbing over them to get into the cab. They commented on his rudeness and told him he should learn how behave in public. He pulled the door shut and barked his home address to the surprised, but ultimately indifferent, cabbie.

Sweat poured off his forehead, stinging his eyes. He told the cabbie to shut the heater off, but the cabbie claimed it was not even on.

The more Barry sweated and breathed the hot stuffy air, the more the cabbie kept looking back at him. Barry began to fear the cabbie would pull over and put him out on the curb. He couldn’t have that.

But the cabbie kept driving.

The cabbie could be an agent, he realized. Abruptly, a few blocks from his house, Barry told him to pull over. He tossed a twenty over the seat and got out. He had already given the cabbie his address; he could not take that back; so if the cab was going to report on Barry there was no help for it. However he only planned to stop home long enough to pack a bag, his knife, and pick up the cash in the false bottom drawer that Luke hadn’t taken.

He approached his house stealthily.

Dark. The way he had left it.

But if more agents were waiting inside, they wouldn’t have turned on the lights anyway.

After peering in his window, and then putting his ear to it to listen, he was confident enough to risk it, and he went inside. He performed a room-by-room search of the downstairs. All clear. He went up.

What had Luke, Luke the killer, been doing in Connie’s building? She seemed to recognize him, and when he looked back Luke was out on the sidewalk walking toward him. Somehow he was connected with Connie, and that made no sense. Or did it?

She knew him. And he knew her. The scales fell from Barry’s eyes.

It had been Connie’s plan from the start.

Somehow she had worked it, manipulated him into thinking it was his own idea to hatch the murder plot.