Hangman (29 page)

“Justice is bleeding,” I muttered.

Let it bleed, I thought.

My footsteps echoed in the great hall as I too walked toward the thirty wide steps that descended to the main doors. As my foot touched the bottom step, a drenched figure in a raincoat with the hood pulled up approached the law courts. The doors slid back to let it in, the swishing of the traffic beyond bursting in with the cold. As I U’d around to the left to make my way past the escalator to the hall that would lead me back to the barristers’ lounge, I was followed by the dripping form.

Wet rubber soles squished on the hard floor.

Squishh. Squishh. Squishh.

The shadow of the hooded figure closed around me.

The Reaper? I thought.

The shadow of Death?

Then I laughed to myself when I smelled garlic on its breath.

At least it’s not a vampire out for—

Whack!

The blow to the back of my head hit as I was skirting the mouth of the escalator. The force of it dropped me to my hands and knees on the cold concrete floor, and my chin struck the edge of one of the planters that lined the escalator’s base on its open side. The Hangman slipped the noose about my neck when my head bounced back.

The rope cinched tight to cut off my air. Before my senses could recover from the shock of the blow to my skull, I was caught in a desperate tug-of-war for my life. My heart was pounding, but no blood rose to my brain. I tried to gasp for oxygen, but the noose was strangling me. My frenzied fingers clawed at the rope with no success. It was buried deep in the flesh of my neck.

The shadow of the Hangman darkened the floor. It was cast by a light above the escalator. The moving steps were conveying the killer up. I thought I saw a hook at the end of the rope in the shadow’s hand, and thought I heard the clang of metal striking metal, then—confirming what I feared—the noose jerked me back and up.

The rope was somehow hooked to the rising mechanism!

Like a marionette dancing on a string, I was yanked from my knees to my feet. I tried to scream, but only mewling came out. I tried to gasp, but all I heard was gagging. Dangling over the open side of the escalator, I was dragged along the floor below as up, up, up slipped the Hangman and the secured end of the rope. With one hand gouging into my flesh to get a grip on the noose, and the other hand raking the slick surface of the escalator’s flank, I had to rise up on my tiptoes to keep from being hanged.

Glass …

Stainless steel …

And smooth drywall …

Everywhere my hand clutched, it failed to find a grasp.

Then up, up, up, and I too was in the air.

Bulging like those of a fish, my eyes bugged out of my head. Flopping around on my lip, my tongue stuck out of my mouth. A sign for the Law Courts Inn leaned against the escalator. I kicked it over as my feet thrashed about, snapping fronds off the ferns in the line of planters. My heels tried for a foothold on the side of the escalator, but, where it angled up to the next level, a cubbyhole was recessed into its base. The only foothold was air.

The killer had me suspended several feet off the floor and must have hit the emergency button to stop the upward glide. I was in the angle where the escalator ended at a wall, from which my spastic kicks were knocking photos of judges.

The blood engorging my head burst a vessel in my nose, and life trickled down my lip to wet my wagging tongue.

My ears filled with the surf of a calling sea, then a death rattle gurgled in my constricted throat.

I began to convulse.

I was passing out.

In my dying consciousness I must have grasped the rope, for there it was in the clutch of my clinging hands. With every fiber of strength muscled into my arms, plus that shot of adrenaline that squirts when death is at your throat, I yanked on that line like I used to do in my high-school gym.

Not many people can climb a rope hand over hand. Never had I been this glad to be an East End kid, for if you want to survive in a place ruled by the law of the jungle, you learn every Tarzan trick you can. The noose around my neck stopped pulling as I climbed the rope, and soon I was able to hold myself up with just one hand, freeing the other to slacken the strangling cord around my throat.

I slipped the noose from my head.

My grip on the rope let go.

And like Tarzan in the movies, I pounced out of my “hanging tree.”

The Hangman fled while I lay gasping for breath beneath the noose, scared off by a gang of skinheads coming down from the trial above.

Stalked

Vancouver

November 16 (Tonight)

Zinc was parked across the street and half a block down from where he had watched Ethan Shaw park his Ford at a meter beside the law courts. Stepping out into the teeming rain, the lawyer had pulled a hideaway hood out from the collar of his coat to protect his head against the downpour, then had run toward the rear doors of the building. It was too risky to follow him in, so instead the Mountie sat back in the driver’s seat of his car to reflect on the good times he and Alex had shared. It was a memorial service of sorts, for on the floor of the passenger’s seat she had once graced sat a funeral urn filled with his love’s ashes. When this was over, when she had justice, he would return Alex to Cannon Beach, Oregon, and give her remains to the sea to rest in peace. Until then, she would stay with him, and the seat she once occupied would be cluttered with an array of high-tech surveillance hardware supplied by Special Eye.

Rat-a-tat-tat, the rain drummed a military tattoo on the roof.

Tapping the steering wheel in time made the cut on his finger hurt.

The Mountie mourned and waited.

The way he had it figured, the surviving brothers were in this together. For Steven Mark Haddon—Justin Whitfield—the vendetta against those responsible for the wrongful hanging of his brother was motivated by a warped sense of twin bonding. For Ethan Quinn Haddon—Ethan Shaw—the vendetta was the outburst of a ground-down drunk. Whatever unresolved turmoil made him drink, it was channeled into revenge against those who had destroyed his mom by lynching the brother Ethan never got to know.

Together, they were the Hangman.

The perfect alibi.

One or the other—or both—had used Halloween to hang Mary Konrad. To mask the fact that they were out to hang jurors in Seattle, one or the other—or both—had hanged Jayne Curry in Vancouver. Not only did that expand their spree to embrace all perverse jurors, and thus turn what began as a vendetta into a crusade, but that blind bought them time to get Bart Busby. One or the other—or both—had hanged him in Seattle while the smokescreen distracted police.

Very clever.

Mix-and-match killers.

One could forge an ironclad alibi while the other was on the hunt, then they could reverse roles to alibi-up the one who had no alibi for the prior killing.

The Hangman was actually Hangmen.

Like the Hillside Strangler(s).

Peter Haddon’s brothers were a killing team.

Ethan was the weaker link because he was a drunk, and Ethan drank too much that night on the boat. Something Alex said caused Ethan to snap, and in a drunken stupor, he killed her in his cabin. Did Justin go down to the cabin after Alex was dead and stumble upon the mess that could send them both to the gallows? With no time or opportunity to cover up, did he do the best he could with the situation? For all those reasons the lawyer argued in court, did Justin turn it into a Hangman crime Ethan wouldn’t commit? Then, to put any doubts to final rest, did he hang the Greek while Ethan was in jail?

That Ethan was the Hangman, Zinc had no doubt. It was too great a coincidence that he was Peter Haddon’s brother, and that he lived in the same city as the smokescreen victim, and that he was found in the cabin where Alex Hunt was hanged.

No, he was guilty.

And he was free.

And Zinc had insufficient reason to arrest him or his older brother.

But he would get it.

No matter what the cost.

Zinc sat up when he caught sight of Ethan rushing down the street, hood up and shoulders hunched against the rain, the trees on either side of the walk as bare as skeletons. The lawyer had exited from the courts by the main doors at the corner of Hornby and Nelson, not by the rear doors through which he had gone in. Was he rushing because of the rain or something else?

Something like going to meet Justin?

From pool of light to pool of light, Ethan dashed to his car. Unlocking the door, he climbed in and soon drove away. From one of the Special Eye devices on the seat beside him, the Mountie could hear his quarry breathing in the Ford ahead. The bug would catch any talk in Ethan’s car.

The Ford angled east on Georgia Street and drove past the fountain out front of the old courthouse, the spray foaming with soap suds someone had tossed in for a prank. The Hudson’s Bay Company and the central post office, the dual coliseums of the new library and the arena where the Canucks play—all approached and passed the spattered windows of both cars. They left the uptown core by the Georgia Viaduct to reach the darker part of town: the squalid East End. Through the dismal streets the game of cat and mouse continued until Ethan’s Ford finally stopped out front of a small bungalow.

Zinc knew the address.

The home of Ethan’s mom.

Into which the lawyer vanished to escape from the wet and the cold.

The only light on inside was behind the window to one side of the door. No others came on. Zinc wondered if Justin Whitfield was in that room, waiting with his mother for his brother to arrive. If so, what they had to say was what he wished to hear, so Zinc pulled into the shadows directly across the street and rolled down the driver’s window of his car.

From the spy gizmos supplied by Special Eye, Zinc selected the laser-bounce listening device, then aimed it so the beam hit the window at a right angle to turn the pane of glass into a microphone. Voices within the house vibrated the window, and the laser bounced those vibrations back to Zinc’s car, where the receiver next to him converted them into words.

He wondered if this drizzle would play havoc with the beam?

*    *    *

The Hangman watched as the lawyer limped out from the great hall, and contemplated gunning him down in a drive-by shooting. That, however, would merely end his perverse career, without tying the means of his death to the motive for it. So instead of killing Kline here and now, the Hangman followed him to his car and waited for him to get in, then followed that car along Georgia Street and across the Viaduct to the East End, where it drove to a dilapidated house and parked in the driveway along one side.

The house was dark.

No one home.

Except the lawyer, who kept the headlights shining so he could see while he limped to an overgrown flowerpot beside his car and lifted it to remove the spare key hidden beneath.

Hobbling to the front door, he cranked the key in the lock, then limped back to replace it under the pot. After dousing the headlights and locking his car, Kline returned to the house and disappeared inside.

The Hangman’s car was parked down the street.

Streetlights in the East End were few and far between.

While Kline was unlocking the house, the Hangman was watching him from behind the darkest tree.

Tick-tock …

Tick-tock
…

The killer went for the key.

Vigilante

Vancouver

Tonight

The pistol in my hand is an eight-shot, 7.65 caliber Mauser semiautomatic, taken as a trophy off a dead Nazi in the Second World War. I have no idea who that Nazi was, nor do I know how many people were killed with this gun. Every time I see a movie set during that war, I imagine the nastiest Nazi in it carrying this Mauser, so it has built up quite a history over the years. Gram got the gun as payment for blowing a junkie war amp back when she was a young whore working the skids. It scared the crap out of several johns who tried to beat up Gram for an extra thrill, and when the angels finally called her to that cathouse in the sky, the Mauser passed from her to me.

My nerves are calm.

My hands are steady.

The walnut grip is cold in my grasp and the barrel aims at the door.

I’m waiting for the Hangman.

The end is near.

The price of winning a cause célèbre is that it brings out the nuts. No cause was more célèbre at this moment than me freeing the Hangman on a technicality, so that meant I was public enemy number one, and that drew the ire of the nuts in anonymous crank calls. Some sounded like nuts ready to crack, so that’s why the Mauser was in my car—and would have gone into the law courts if not for security checks.

The gun isn’t legal.

This is Canada.

The first thing I did once I had recovered enough to function after the attempt on my life was gather up the rope the Hangman had left behind. Then I limped to my car on Hornby Street and withdrew the Mauser from its hiding place. Tucking the pistol into my belt so it was close at hand, I checked the rear-view mirror as I drove away, and continued to check it as I headed east.

I was being followed.

I sensed the eyes behind.

So I led the Hangman here, and now I wait, the gun in one hand and a bat in the other, lurking in a dark nook just inside the door.

My grandmother used to have these books by Ellery Queen. She picked them up at a swap meet in the Ritter Project.
The Greek Coffin
, and
Dutch Shoe
, and
Chinese Orange
, and
French Powder Mystery.
You came to a point in each novel where the story stopped and a “Challenge to the Reader” by the author appeared. It was time for you to solve the whodunit, if you were out to beat the player on the other side.

If this were a novel, that time would be now.

But of course, it isn’t.

This is real life.

My ears listen intently for any sound outside.

My eyes watch the doorknob for it to turn.

Yes, there it is.

The snicking of the lock.

The Hangman has found the key outside.

The knob is turning.

The door is easing open.

A dark figure steps into the dark hall.

Another step.

The bat is in a swing.

Time to take justice into my own hands.

This is the East End.

This is my turf.

And this is what we do to fucks who fuck with us.

Too late, sucker.

Such were the thoughts, memories, daydreams that passed through his brain as Jeffrey Kline relived the past sixteen days while standing in that black hall waiting for this moment. The baseball bat clipped the Hangman’s skull and sent the intruder flying into the foyer. From the shiver up the handle and the crack of the blow, Jeff knew his stalker was knocked out cold. The lawyer used the handcuffs the Hangman had brought to return that favor, then dragged the shackled killer up the foyer stairs.

It took a few minutes to rig up the gallows, but by the time the Hangman came around from the blow, it was ready for the drop.

The house was a rundown two-story from the early days of the city. The foyer off the entrance hall was chilly with drafts. The rickety staircase ascended up one wall, then angled at the upper landing to create a stairwell. The plunge from the narrow balcony backing the stairwell was a good twelve feet down to the main floor.

The noose around the Hangman’s neck was a double strand. The slightly shorter length was fashioned out of piano wire so it would yank a foot before the hemp rope, slicing the flesh of the neck down to the bones of the spine. The hard jerk of the hemp rope a split second later would sever the vertebrae exposed by the previous cut, tearing the head of the Hangman off the still-plunging body.

The drop from here to there was greater than any used by official hangmen.

This gallows might as well be a guillotine.

Kline was standing on the safe side of the upper rail. The Hangman sat slumped unconscious on the rail itself. All that kept the killer from taking a plunge into eternity was the lawyer’s grip—and the urge the lawyer felt to say a few last words.

The Hangman came around.

Tick-tock
…

Tick-tock
…

Time was running out.