Dead Last (40 page)

He took out Buddha’s phone and tapped it until he came to April’s cell number. One more tap and he could be sure that all was well. He looked up at the dark house but hesitated. Didn’t want to wake her. Didn’t want to arouse alarm. He held the phone at his side and looked around at the dark drive and yard and the river behind the house.

For Mankowski the grilling had not gone well. She must have honed her interrogation approach on people who had terrible secrets to hide or something big to lose. But Thorn had neither. The woman had tried and tried to chip away at his story, chip and circle and fake and bully and backtrack, trying everything in her arsenal, but none of it had had any effect on Thorn.

He answered every question he knew the answer to, doing it succinctly and without hesitation. Anything he didn’t know, he admitted and refused to speculate. He didn’t give her any smart-ass answers, didn’t try to sugarcoat anything. He confessed to breaking into Matheson’s house because he had reason to believe the young man had been Buddha Hilton’s attacker. What was that reason? The way the killer held the baseball bat. The knuckles, the loose wrists, the cock of his arms.

Knuckles?

Mankowski shook her head. It seemed to be the one bit of body language she allowed herself. She did it a lot. Thorn seemed to bring that out in certain people, that same head shake of disgust or disappointment or amazement. People were always shaking their heads at Thorn.

When she took a break to consult her notes, or sip coffee, he repeated to her the question he’d asked Frank. Why did Matheson bother to follow Thorn and Buddha to the Waterway Lodge after seeing them in Poblanos? It was a simple question, but a pivotal one. If they couldn’t explain why he’d followed, then they couldn’t fully believe Matheson was the Zentai Killer.

Despite the bodysuit found in his truck and the bloody shoes. Despite the altar he’d built to worship Flynn. And the latex replica of Flynn’s face. Despite his presence on the high school baseball team. And the general creepiness of the guy. Despite his confession.

Thorn wanted to be sure, but he wasn’t. Not yet.

He tapped April’s cell number. After three rings she answered, groggy.

“I woke you.”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“Where are you?”

“In your driveway,” he said. “I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

She was quiet for a moment, then said, “Was it really Jeff?”

“That’s how it seems.”

“You’re not sure.”

“Let’s sleep on it. Maybe it’ll be more believable in the morning.”

“You sound worried, Thorn.”

“I’m glad you’re okay.”

“I’m fine.”

“Is Boxley in there?”

“At the foot of my bed.”

“Maybe I should sleep in the parlor tonight. Between Boxley and me, we should be able to handle whatever comes up.”

“Then you don’t think it was Jeff.”

Thorn looked up at the window of her bedroom. Still dark.

“It probably was,” Thorn said.

“I thought he confessed?”

“I’ll feel better when he gives them something specific that only the killer could know.”

The curtain moved aside in her bedroom. She looked out at him with the phone at her ear.

“You have your key, right?”

“Yeah, I’ll let myself in. Go back to sleep. That couch in the parlor looks long enough for me.”

She was silent.

“It’s going to be all right,” Thorn said. “I’ll stay here as long as it makes sense. Nothing’s going to happen tonight. Go back to bed. Get some rest.”

She pressed her hand against the window glass like an inmate at the end of visiting hours saying farewell to a loved one. Thorn kept looking up at her until she lowered her hand and let the curtains fall back in place.

*   *   *

The darkness permeates you and you permeate it.

You are quiet, waiting. Everything is in order. Everything laid out. You have worked to put each beat in the correct position, so the music will rise and fall, will spin and leap, will shoot forward, then march in short steps, short hard claps of thunder. You have written the script, applying your intelligence and your heart, and your sense of the mythic needs of the story, and all your actors are behaving as you designed. Everything is happening as planned.

You wait in the darkness. The darkness waits in you.

THIRTY-FOUR

THORN STOOD OUT IN THE
shadows listening to the distant highways hum. A screech owl trilled a block away. The clouds were dense, the air as thick and breathless as mud. A bat whisked overhead through the dark, its silent flicker invisible against the sky.

He headed up the stone stairs to the garage apartment, to wash up, put on a fresh alligator shirt for the long night ahead.

He unlocked the door and stepped into the darkness and patted the wall for the switch, flicked it, but nothing happened.

Retreating a step onto the porch, Thorn waited, worked to hear any foreign sound, catch the trace of an intruder. He held still for a full minute, waiting, listening, and hearing nothing.

Then remembered. The ceiling fan’s light fixture had a two-foot pull cord. This morning he’d tugged it on his way out.

Thorn was losing it. Spooked by shadows.

He stepped back into the apartment and raised his hand high and swished it back and forth, feeling for the cord. The single streetlamp that lit the driveway and the front of the house left the garage apartment in total dark. As his eyes attuned to the gloom, his fingers ticked the cord and sent it swaying.

He waved his hand some more and brushed the cord again and thought he had it, when across the room, on the queen-size bed, a blue screen lit up.

Cocked against a pillow, Buddha’s electronic tablet was playing a video, the music set low, an eerie string quartet.

Thorn lowered his arm and took a half step forward. In the blue halo he saw the ball gloves, the two duck eggs, and a baseball spread out across the bedspread where he’d left them this morning.

On the tablet’s screen was the TV scene Buddha showed him in Key Largo in their first few minutes together. A murder from
Miami Ops.
The Zentai Killer was moving up behind the black man who was working late in his office. The reflection of the killer appearing in the picture window for a split second before he slipped his wire over the businessman’s head and strangled.

Thorn pivoted to his right and slung a fist into empty space.

Ducking into a crouch, he took a step backward. The video ended and a second later the light winked out and the room was black again.

In his own house, Thorn could sprint its length with eyes closed and never bump a wall or piece of furniture. He could locate any drawer and choose a spoon over a fork without fumbling. But this room, though cramped, was still foreign to him. The narrow hallway ended in a bathroom. The double closet doors where the baby raccoons had been trapped were two steps from the bed. A slim space ran between the other side of the bed and the wall. Behind him was the small dining table where he’d eaten his fish sandwiches beside a window that looked west.

To start the electronic tablet, the intruder had to be standing beside the bed. But which side? Thorn chose the right, the side nearest the bifold doors, and stepped forward into the darkness, his hands open, held chest high, ready to defend, punch, or wrestle. To his right he thought he heard the dry brush of fabric against fabric and cut in that direction.

But somehow the Zentai man slipped behind him and struck. At first it registered as no more than a hard tap on the meat of his right shoulder.

Thorn swung halfway around to face his foe. Who wasn’t there.

By then the puncture wound was starting to buzz in his flesh, a hot patch of inflammation spreading across his right shoulder blade, numb and fiery at once, as if he’d been set upon by a gang of hornets.

He rotated the shoulder and felt the deadened joint, a sting flaring through his right arm, echoing in the elbow joint like a well-struck gong, vibrating in the wrist, dulling the sensation in his right hand.

To his right he saw the shape. The Zentai man, blacker than the darkness around him. A missing cutout of the night, and the quick glitter of metal in his hand. An ice pick. The weapon April had ordered up had arrived a few days early.

The Zentai man moved right, cornered by the bed on his right, the closet doors on his left, and Thorn in front of him. In Thorn’s shoulder the ache was taking root, its deadening tentacles piercing the layers of flesh below.

Despite the pain, wading forward into battle was his first impulse. All the pent-up rage, the hurt, the loss had him leaning forward, ready to leap into the phantom’s embrace. But for once, just this once, he caught himself.

With only the vaguest plan, he took an oblique angle, two steps to his left, hopped up on the bed, snatched one of the ball gloves, and slipped it on his left hand.

He bounced on the bed. His right arm flopping at his side as useless as a stocking filled with dust. He thought he saw the Zentai figure moving onto the open floor, and he bounced once more and launched himself at the black body.

His dead arm clipped the Zentai man, and Thorn was butted sideways into the closet doors. He twisted hard, kept his feet, and saw the glint of the ice pick coming, and tried to smother it with the glove.

It glanced off the heavy leather and nicked Thorn in the cheek. A second strike came quick, but Thorn blocked that too, then a third wild swing dug deep into the glove’s webbing. His attacker breathing hard.

Thorn bulled the man backward toward the bed, got him off-balance, and kept churning his legs till he had the guy caught against his good shoulder, driving him back onto the mattress.

They landed together in a sprawl, the Zentai man pinned on his back, Thorn’s chest pressed to his chest, his weight keeping the lighter man down. But with his right arm worthless he couldn’t bear-hug him, couldn’t pin him for long, and he felt the guy wriggling his ice pick arm, squirming it free. Felt it break loose and pull back.

Before he could jerk away, Thorn heard the crunch of the blade entering his flesh, then felt the nasty shock somewhere near the base of his spine. He grunted, slid backward, got his feet planted on the floor, and pushed himself into a forward somersault, rolling up and over the Zentai man, toward the narrow aisle on the far side of the bed.

He flattened against the wall, bobbed to his right, shed the glove, and found the bedside lamp and switched it on.

“You’re doomed,” the guy said.

Standing now, with the ice pick in his right hand, its prong bloody.

“Flynn?”

The Zentai man inched along the foot of the bed, trapping Thorn in the narrow aisle beside the bed.

“What I want to know,” Thorn said, “is where’d you learn to hit a baseball, son?”

“Fuck you.”

“Who taught you to hit like that?”

“You’re crazy. A time like this, you want to talk sports.”

“Is that you, Sawyer?”

“If you must know, one of my daddies taught me to hit.”

He kept coming. Thorn’s legs were pinned between the mattress and the wall. He tried to maneuver them in the tight space, to balance himself. Feeling the blood seeping down his legs, the throb in his shoulder, another in his lower back. More than a throb, but Thorn couldn’t find the word.

“One of those men in the photographs taught you.”

“Paulo,” he said. “His name was Paulo. Like you, he thought every red-blooded American boy should play baseball. So each time he came to screw my mother, we boys had batting practice afterward. The smell of my mother’s juices on his hands, on the balls. Wiffle balls. Softballs. Batting and batting and batting. That’s where I learned my skills. Paulo Montenegro. Wrists loose, knuckles in a straight line. Paulo hung around, then lost interest. Like the other ones. My mother is impossible to love.”

“So this is her fault? This person you are, the shit you’ve been doing, you blame April?”

“All she had to do was pick up the phone and call my father, let him know. We could have been a normal family.”

He was six feet away. Thorn’s only opening was back across the bed, but by the time he unpinned his legs from the cramped space and mounted the mattress, the kid would be on him.

“You’re Sawyer.”

“That’s a name,” he said. “That’s just a name.”

“You’re my son. My flesh and blood.”

He laughed at that.

“In case you haven’t noticed, you’re dying, old man. Your flesh and blood is leaking out inside you and it’s spilling on the floor. You’re seconds from passing out. And when your knees sag, that’s it, handsome stranger. You’re done. You’ve finished your last adventure.”

“Why, Sawyer?”

“Always why,” he said. “You’re so fucking worried about why.”

“To save the goddamn show? Is that all?”

“You don’t get it.”

“You’re not Flynn,” Thorn said. “You’re the smart guy who puts words in everybody’s mouths, moves them here and there. You sit all cozy with the script in your lap watching it unfold exactly like you made it up. God in his heaven.”

“That’s better,” he said.

“Take the hood off, Sawyer. Show me your face.”

“You’re just passing through, Thorn. You don’t get to call the shots.”

“Just passing through.”

“Like the rest of them. Here to score what you can. Then you move on to something better. Come and go. Come and go.”

Thorn felt the blood filling his shoes. He saw a yellow flicker in the light as if someone was tapping into the power line upstream.

“Is that what happened to Paulo? He went away, or did you drive him away?”

“Paulo was an asshole.”

“And the others, the other daddies?”

“They’re in the river,” he said. “Wired to concrete blocks.”

Thorn couldn’t tell if he was serious or not. It didn’t have the weight of a confession. Just a bland statement of fact.

“You’re lying.”

“Every one of them.”

“How many?”

“I haven’t kept count.”

“You got them before they could abandon you.”