Killer (12 page)

chapter 20

present

I woke up with my head splitting. Squeezing my eyes hard against the sunlight drenching the room, I lay immobilized for a long minute before I sat up slowly, making sure to move at a glacier’s pace to keep those tiny silver daggers from ripping into my brain any more than they were. Once I maneuvered myself into a sitting position, I cradled my head in my hands until I thought I could move. I realized then my cell phone was ringing but there wasn’t a chance I’d be able to reach for it. Instead, each ring sent those daggers ripping deeper into my brain. When I could finally get off the bed, I stumbled to the bathroom and splashed cold water on to my face. I was still doing that when my cell phone rang again. Grabbing a towel to dry off my face, I went back to get the phone.

My eyes weren’t functioning well enough for me to read the caller ID and I croaked into the phone instead, asking what the fuck the person wanted.

“Dad, is that you?”

It was my son, Michael. I sat on the edge of the bed and carefully massaged my eyes with my thumb and forefinger. I apologized to him for the way I answered the call.

“This guy keeps calling and making vague, tough-guy threats,” I explained. “I thought it was him calling again.”

“Are you okay?” Michael asked. “You don’t sound good.”

“I’m okay. I just get these headaches. Today it’s worse than usual.”

“How long have you been getting them?”

“A long time. Years. It’s nothing to worry about.”

His voice flat, he said, “I’m not worried. I saw you on the news last night.”

“I thought you don’t watch TV?”

“Usually I don’t. A co-worker called me to tell me about it.” There was a pause, then, “If you want to meet me, I can do it today at twelve-thirty. Well?”

“Sure, I’d like that.”

“I’ll give you an address then, where we can meet.”

“Okay, sure, let me get a pencil and paper.”

Opening my eyes against the light was agony as a flood of tiny silver daggers emerged and went flying through my eyeballs and into my brain, but I ignored them as best I could and fumbled around the apartment until I found a pencil and some paper to write on, then had Michael give me the address of a coffee shop in Medfield. I knew nothing about Medfield other than that it was a good twenty miles away.

I asked, “Is that where you’re living now?”

“No, but it’s not too far from where I’m working. You should call the police about those phone calls you’re getting.”

“Yeah, I’ll probably do that.”

There was a click then as my son got off the line. I waited until my eyes could focus enough for me to dial, then I made several calls to find out how I could take the bus from Waltham to Medfield. It was going to require two bus transfers, which would leave me in Walpole, and from there I’d have to either walk four miles or take a cab, but I’d be able to get there by twelve-thirty. I made my way into the kitchen area where I poured several large glasses of lukewarm water down my throat, made a mental note that I needed to buy myself a coffee maker, then stumbled back to the bathroom. After stripping off my underwear I stood under the shower until my head started feeling more normal. At one point I tried lifting my right arm. My shoulder was sore as hell, but I was able to lift my arm higher than I could the other day, which was about all I could ask for.

When I got out of the shower I didn’t have much time before I needed to catch the bus to meet my son. Despite how empty my stomach was feeling I didn’t have time to make myself breakfast, so on the way to the bus stop I stopped off at a convenience store and bought a large coffee, a box of chocolate-glazed doughnuts and a newspaper.

I wished I had remembered my baseball cap and sunglasses, but I’d been in too big a rush and had left them back in my apartment. There weren’t a lot of people on the sidewalk, but most of those that were turned my way as I went past them, and from the way their jaws dropped, there was no question that they recognized me. I was in too much of a hurry to care. As it was, I barely caught my bus. There was an empty seat in the back row that I took, and as was common with people who regularly take public transportation, most of the riders already sitting didn’t bother looking up as I walked past them. The few that did didn’t pay enough attention to recognize me.

Once I was seated I wolfed down two doughnuts and half the coffee. It made me feel a little better, my headache more its normal dull ache than the stabbing torturous pain it had been earlier. I reached into my pocket for my bottle of aspirin and realized I’d left that back in the apartment as well. Fuck it, I decided at this point it didn’t matter. I’d be able to make it through the day okay without it.

As much as I was dreading it, I looked at the newspaper. Sure enough, I was back on the front page, and of course they had to prominently display a photo of me taken from the video that had been made. It was a long article which carried over to several pages. I tried reading it but the text blurred too much. I drank the rest of the coffee, sat back and closed my eyes. Ten minutes later I tried again. I had to hold the paper a few inches from my eyes, but this time I was able to focus enough on the print to read it.

The article dredged up all the stuff from the previous weeks, but grudgingly labeled what I did the other day “heroic”, especially after finding out about the arrest records of the two Mueller brothers, who turned out to be fraternal twins. At nineteen they had robbed a liquor store and pistol-whipped the owner and two customers, and each ended up doing a four-year stretch for that. The police were now looking at them for a recent robbery in Watertown where the perps wore ski masks and an employee at the liquor store had been shot and beaten unconscious.

I went through the article carefully. There were quotes from Captain Edmund Gormer, all complimentary to me, and no hint that at any time I’d been a suspect. The paper had to counter all of that with past quotes from my victims’ relatives. I guess it’s easier going from hero to villain than the other way around. Anyway, I got some mild satisfaction from a picture that they included of the Mueller brothers as they were being booked for a host of offenses, both with the same fixed empty gazes in their eyes that you see on every hardened con.

When I was done with the article, I put the paper down and closed my eyes, and tried to remember what Michael looked like. For the life of me, all I could picture was the way he was when he was five years old and I took him to his first Red Sox game. Back then I spent whatever free time I could with him and Allison.

The cab driver recognized me. He was about my age; wispy gray hair framing a square-shaped skull, thick caterpillar eyebrows, rubbery features, near-impossible-to-understand Russian accent. I think he smelled even worse than I did when I first got out of prison. When I entered the cab, he explained away his bad body odor by telling me that he was in the middle of a second straight shift. “Thirteen hours so far in car,” he announced proudly in his thick accent. Soon after we drove off, he started glancing at me through the rear-view mirror, his eyes befuddled under those massive eyebrows.

“You the person on TV,” he said. “One who caught two hoodlums. Beat them up good too.”

I didn’t say anything.

He nodded to himself, sure of his recognition. “I saw you on TV, right before I start driving last night,” he said. I caught the shift in his eyes as he remembered the rest of the story, about what I had done before and all the people I had murdered. He didn’t say anything after that, and I could see the tremor in his hands as he gripped the wheel. Mercifully, it was a short cab ride. When I paid him the fare he avoided eye contact with me, and kept his lips pressed shut when I stiffed him on the tip.

From what I could tell of the little I saw of Medfield it appeared to be a quiet, quaint town. At one point it must’ve been mostly farmland, and still had a country feel to it. The coffee shop I was let out in front of was a modest, brightly yellow-painted Colonial that was probably until recently a family residence, and inside it looked more like an antique store than a coffee shop. Michael sat at a table facing the door, his features tense, his eyes fixed on me as I walked in. He had two cups of coffee in front of him, and he picked both of them up as he came to meet me. Before entering the shop I’d been debating whether to try for an embrace or to offer a handshake when we saw each other, but with both his hands full neither was possible. I followed him outside to an antique-looking cast-iron bench by the side of the building where we could talk without being overheard.

After we both sat on the bench he handed me one of the coffees, and I offered him a doughnut, which he accepted.

“Why’d you do that yesterday?” he asked. “Was it to impress me and Allie? Or were you just trying to get yourself killed?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know, Michael. When I saw those two men standing outside the liquor store, I knew what they were going to do, and knew how it could turn out, and it just seemed like something I had to do. I wasn’t trying to impress anyone or get myself hurt, it was just something that happened.”

He sat quietly digesting what I told him, then said, “You wanted a chance to talk, so go ahead.”

Even without the way he had been anxiously waiting for me inside the store, even without any clear memories of him except as a five-year-old child, I would’ve recognized him from Jenny. As soon as I saw Michael memories flooded back to me of how Jenny used to look. He had so much of my wife’s soft features in his face. On Jenny, they were attractive and added to her femininity, on him they didn’t look so good. They made him look weak, especially having Jenny’s delicate mouth and slight chin. And with his ill-fitting suit and two days’ stubble he looked shabby. I didn’t mention any of that. Instead I told him it was good to see him.

“So it’s good seeing me, what else do you want?” he demanded with some anger, his eyes hard glass as he looked at me.

“For Chrissakes, Michael. It’s been over fourteen years. Give me a break here. I just want to know how you’ve been.”

He took a long sip of his coffee before saying under his breath, “How do you think I’d be? How do you think anyone would be finding out at nineteen that their emotionally distant father was a cold-blooded psychopath and mass murderer?”

I sat back trying to make sense of this. It was hard to imagine that anyone would let their father’s crimes against total strangers have such an effect on their own life, and it was even harder to imagine that someone with this much weakness and self-pity could have my blood in him. I felt an overwhelming sadness as I looked at Michael and knew that I was responsible for him being like this. He was a quiet kid, always serious-minded, but also good-natured. Physically he took after Jenny so much that I knew I needed to shelter him. That was why when he was four I moved the family to an upper-middle-class neighborhood, and that was why I sent him and Allison to private school. Because of that Michael didn’t develop any toughness growing up and never had to learn how to fight. All of this weakness that I saw in him now was my fault.

“I wish your mom hadn’t told you about what was in my confession,” I said. “She should’ve just told you I was arrested for that extortion racket.”

“And that would’ve been so much better, just thinking that you were a violent criminal? But for your information, Mom didn’t tell us about any of that. FBI agents questioned all of us after you gave your statement. They were the ones who let us know about the people you murdered. I guess they thought it was part of their due diligence in verifying what you told them.”

Jenny had never told me that. I couldn’t help feeling some anger thinking about what the FBI did.

“I’m sorry that’s the way you had to find out about me,” I said.

“And what would’ve been a preferred way?” Michael’s eyes had been fixed on me since we’d been sitting. A weariness dimmed the anger in them and he looked away from me, lowering his stare to the floor.

“To answer your question,” he said, his voice showing the same weariness that had taken over his eyes, “I’ve been in and out of therapy for fourteen years, my marriage dissolved after three years, I have a kid that I’m not allowed to see, and I’m a recovering drug addict. It’s only been in the last two years that I’ve gotten any sort of life together. So that’s how I’ve been.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said, “I tried to give you a good home. And I made sure there would be enough money for college—”

“You don’t get it,” he said, his voice rising as he interrupted me, his eyes once again meeting mine. “How the fuck can you explain to me what you did?”

“It was a job—”

“Murdering people is a job? That’s how you’re going to explain it to me?”

I felt tongue-tied as I tried to come up with something to tell him. “These weren’t nice people that I took out,” I stammered out. My voice broke on me and I had to stop for a moment to take a sip of my coffee. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, then looked back at Michael and saw how still he had become as he stared back at me. I looked away again, and after clearing my throat, continued.

“They were all in the life,” I half mumbled, half said. “They knew the risks and dangers, just like I did. If I didn’t take them out, Lombard would’ve hired someone else to do it. I was just doing a job, that’s all.”

“You’re going to use the old Nazi excuse, that you were just following orders? That would’ve made Grandma proud, wouldn’t it!”