Mortal Fear (65 page)

Yes.

Very big?

Yes.

Thats only natural. You want to touch me, dont you?

Yes.

You need to.

Yes.

Do you see where?

Yes.

Do you know what its like there?

A hiccup of silence.
I

Its wet there, Edward. Burning.

Please come out...

Look, Edward. LOOK!

Shifting the phone from one hand to the other, Drewe lets the robe slip off her shoulders as casually as if she were stepping into the shower. A gasp of disbelief bursts from my lungs. I back far away from the wall, aiming the pistol at the crack of glass between the window frame and Drewes side, waiting for her signal.

She shakes her hair into a fiery riot of copper and gold, then stands straight with her arms at her sides, as if to display every atom of her being in shameless pride. Her skin glows like veined marble. As when I saw Erin so many years ago, I cannot process the entirety of her nude image. I see her calves, the backs of her thighs, the small dimples above her rump, her shoulder bladesthese are enough to hold my eye from its assigned task. Berkmann must be rooted to the ground.

Jesus Christ! I hiss. What are you doing?

Edward?

Yes....
A ragged whisper.

Drewe moves her free hand around her hip, out of my sight. All I see is the muscle moving in her upper arm.

Help me, Edward. Show me your power.

With my gun arm quivering, I edge forward toward Drewe. I keep the .38 aimed just to the left of her hip,
through the window, into the waiting dusk. As my pupils dilate I discern the silhouette of the Acura. Its closer to the house than I remembered. Maybe thirty-five feet. My Explorer sits ten yards to the left of it, parked nose-in. The Acura is the natural vantage point for someone watching the window.

But I see no one.

In the near field of my vision, Drewe suddenly spreads her arms like wings and plants her bare feet apart. Her hands close into fists and her muscles go rigid, her body a hard quivering X in the lighted window. My heart thunders with fear and awe at the specter she has not created but
is
woman revealed, the hidden unveiled, purity and carnality fused with power enough to stop the male heart.

As I stare openmouthed, her right hand flattens against the window and begins rattling like a superheated kettle on a stove. I focus on the hand, then realize shes trying to signal me with an arm incapacitated by terror. In the instant I look back through the window, Edward Berkmann rises above the roof line of the Acura, his enraptured face shining like an earthbound moon in the darkness.

Time blurs, stops. We both stand transfixed, paralyzed by the realization that Drewe is everything he imagined in his messianic fantasies, and more.

Edwaarrrd!

Drewes scream jolts me back to myself. As I aim for Berkmanns face, she hurls the cordless phone through the windowpane in an explosion of glittering glass. I shoulder her out of the way and open fire.

My first shot is high and wild.

The second punches a hole in the Acuras door.

Berkmann drops.

Screaming like a lunatic, I fire two more rounds, then scoop up Drewes robe and throw my arm around her waist as she comes up off the floor. I try to pull her toward the door, but she wont budge.

Did you hit him? she asks, her eyes white and round.

I dont think so!

Get the light! Then shoot me!

After a stunned instant, I turn, steady the pistol, and
blow the halogen lamp off my desk, throwing us into darkness.

Edwaarrrd!
she yells, her voice ringing across the yard.

I fire my last bullet in her direction, and watch in horror as she flies backward like a GI taking a round in house-to-house fighting.

The silence is absolute. Not even crickets cheep in this strange lacuna of time.

Then Drewe is beside me again, naked in the dark. Lifting her robe toward her, I sense something like a horsefly beside my left ear and swat at it even as the tranquilizer dart
thwack
s into one of my guitars, filling the room with jangling noise.

We hit the floor and crawl like alligators toward the office door. I feel a strange weight in the robe. Its Drewes .25. I pause, raise the gun, fire two quick rounds through the intact front window, then feel my way to the door. When I look back, the bright amber message on the screen of the Gateway 2000 floats in the darkness like a tablet of fire brought from a mountaintop. Just as it should.

What did you do?
Berkmann asks, his voice a fusion of fear and fury.

Drewes hand grips my shoulder like a claw.

Its the answering machine! I whisper, at the same time noticing the faint glow of the EROS screen to my right. While Drewe ties on her robe, I raise the .25 and fire through the EROS monitor, shorting it out with a shower of sparks. Now the Gateway screen is the only light.

Holding the hot pistol to my chest, I switch off the hall light, then slide Drewe around in front of me. Ready?

She nods.

The second I jerk open the door she scrambles up the hallway toward the kitchen, but I force myself to walk, backward, keeping the .25 pointed at the front door in case Berkmann comes through it. When I reach the kitchen, I turn and run to the washroom where Drewe waits. The smell of gasoline is strong here too. Drewe leans into me, clutching my shirt like a child.

Maybe we should stay here, she says in a meek voice.

We cant. I hug her tightly. Her whole body is shaking, as though the bravura performance at the window drained every bit of courage out of her.

With the .25 I part the curtains that cover the small window in the back door. The yard looks blue-black in the moonlight. The long tin roof of the toolshed gleams, beckoning. My eyes move lower. There is a man lying flat on his back just outside the door. His eyes are closed, and there is a screwdriver handle sticking out of his right upper chest. I let the curtain fall closed.

Drewe, theres a man on the ground outside. Its Detective Mayeux from New Orleans. Hes probably dead, but we only heard one shot. He could be alive.

Ill get my bag, she says automatically, as though someone had just passed out in church.

I squeeze her arm. We cant help him. Im telling you so youll step over him.

She blinks rapidly.

When I open this door, were going to run straight back to the cotton field and keep going. Okay?

She nods once.

Gripping the .25, I unbolt the door, then freeze as a high brittle plea crosses the space between us. Dont let him get close to me, Harper.

I wont.

Her fingernails dig into my arm, causing me to twist sideways. If he hits you with a dart, and you cant see him anywhere... shoot me.

What?

You do it.

With that appalling request ringing in my ears, I turn the knob and launch myself into the sweltering night.

I am leaping over Mayeuxs body when two gunshots boom through the night. I whirl and take Drewes weight full in the face, and we crash to the ground beside Mayeux.

Where is he?
she hisses in my ear.

Front, I groan, rolling her off me. Run!

Whats he shooting at?

I dont know! Go!

I know I should run, but Mayeux is half covered with gasoline. I find his carotid artery with my left hand. Theres a pulse. Drewe is still beside me.

Go, damn it! I hand her the .25. Behind the toolshed!

She takes the gun but doesnt run. Suffused by a wild anger, I lean over and put my right shoulder into Mayeuxs belly, then heave myself over so that he is lying across me. From there its a matter of brute strength, working the leverage until I get my legs under me and hes lying sacklike over my shoulder in a firemans carry.

With Drewe covering the corners of the house, I half stagger, half run across the grass to the toolshed and collapse under the fig trees behind it, depositing Mayeux on his back. Drewe hands me the .25, then begins testing the screwdriver handle sticking out of Mayeuxs chest. Having an immediate emergency to deal with seems to have restored her composure.

Youre going to leave that in him? I ask, as she checks Mayeux for other wounds.

Better for him, she says, probing gently under his head. What makes the printer explode?

Before I can answer she says, Look, and pulls a short, feathered barb from Mayeuxs neck.

Itll go off when Berkmann prints your message, I tell her, peering around the corner of the shed. The yard is empty, the house silent. When I look back, Drewe is staring at me as if Im an idiot.

Why should he print the message? He can just
read
it.

Not without scrolling to the next screen.

So?

That keyboard is programmable. If you want your comma key where the semicolon key is, you can have it that way. All it takes is a few keystrokes.

I still dont get it.

I reprogrammed every key that can take him to the next screen to issue the same command: Print Screen.

The down cursor?

Every
cursor. And PAGE DOWN. Since you snipped off the mouse, he has to use the keyboard. The second he does, six hundred volts will zap through the printers corona wire, which is cut and buried in the black powder. A spark will arc between the wires, and good-bye Edward.

Drewe stares blankly, as if trying to compute the odds of success. Wont he be suspicious? Expect some kind of trap?

Probably. And if your message told him to print it, or tried to trick him into printing it, hed never do it. But he wont see this coming. The only question is, will he try to read the whole message?

She nods. Hes addicted to it. The computer is his fetish. He may search the whole house first, but hell read that message.

What did you put in it?

Just what you told me to. I

Shh! Listen!

What? Her eyes wide with fear, Drewe cocks her head, listening for the wrong things.

I close my eyes and try to gauge the distance; in the Delta some sounds carry for miles. Siren, I tell her, even as the sound fades.

It must be pretty far away.

It is. But Berkmann will hear it soon. Hell run.

I get to my feet. Im not sure why, but doing something
always feels better than doing nothing. Even if youre doing something stupid.

What are you doing? Drewe asks.

He could take one of our cars... make it to the plane. Im not letting him get away now.

You stay here!

I cant leave Drewe without a gun, but I cant go after Berkmann without one. Mayeuxs shoulder holster is empty. Im almost resigned to waiting when an idea hits me. Dropping beside the unconscious detective, I pull up one of his trouser legs. Nothing but a hairy ankle. But when I pull up the other, I see the duct-taped grip of a snub-nose .32 revolver tucked snugly in a velcro ankle holster. Mayeux carries a throwdown. After verifying that the cylinder is full, I hand the pistol to Drewe.

Youre not leaving me here, she says.

I dont even try to argue. After switching guns, we cross the yard in a quick soundless rush, the grass damping the beat of our feet. At the back corner of the house, we pause in a pungent cloud of gasoline vapor.

I still dont hear the siren, she whispers.

The house is blocking the sound.

Maybe
we
should light the gasoline.

Are you nuts? Its our house!

With Mayeuxs .32 in my right hand, I sprint along the side of the house, nearly stumbling on a coil of garden hose. When I make the front corner I hear the siren again.

Drewe collides with me from behind, a soft impact of breasts and hands. The yard is pitch dark, the drive still. Only the sound of crickets breaks the silence. Where our driveway meets the road, the deputys car sits motionless. Nearer to us, the Explorer and the Acura offer concealment. But I know Berkmann has left them behind.

I think hes inside, I whisper. Im going to look.

Wait

Dont worry, Im not going in. Listen for doors or windows. He may come tearing outside when he hears the siren. Youd better take off that robe. Its like a neon target out here.

Drewe shakes her head violently.

If you hear him, you take it off.

My back pressed to the clapboard, I edge along the front of the house holding the .32 against my right thigh like a quarterback running a bootleg. As I near the broken front window, I step into what feels like a draft of sea wind. Its the conditioned air from the house, draining into the hot night like water from a leaking barrel.

Berkmann must have heard the siren by now. I try to maneuver beneath the window to look through it, but theres too much broken glass on the ground. Weaving around the fragments, I cover the ten feet to the second window, rise to the sill, and peek over it.

Edward Berkmann is sitting at my Gateway 2000, his Byronic profile hauntingly illuminated by the amber glow of the screen. He leans slightly forward, facing right to left across my visual field, peering at Drewes message as though it holds the key to some eternal mystery.

Berkmann hasnt heard the siren because there are other sounds inside the office. The hum of the computer. The drone of the refrigerator. The hissing of the central air conditioner. He must have read the first screen of the message by now. Yet still he sits, staring. What is he doing?

Hes thinking. The man who developed a world-renowned computer model of the human brain is exercising his own to solve the oldest problem in the world. Survival.

Berkmann is less than ten feet from me, the printer less than two feet from him, at the level of his chest. Theres a gun beside the computers keyboard. Nickel plated. Just the flashy kind of piece Buckners deputies carried. But that gun cannot protect Berkmann from the printer.

My mind is telling me to raise my gun above the window sill, but instinct stops me. The slightest movementeven lowering my head out of sightcould catapult Berkmann out of that chair with the gun in his hand.

As if in response to my thought, he lifts his head like a bird-watcher detecting a faint call, and turns slightly to his left. Toward me.

A bolt of pure terror strikes my heart.

He hasnt seen me. Hes heard the siren. But instead of jumping up in panic, he turns back to the screen, settles
deeper into my chair, and closes his hands around its arms. Is he actually waiting for me to come back and try to kill him, as the message promises I will?

Theres more than one siren now. Several dissonant notes have separated themselves from the general whine, made Doppler-distinct by changing distances. Berkmann swivels my chair to the right, toward the wall that holds my guitars. What rogue impulses are firing through the synapses in that head? He could be guessing my next move or wondering what happened to his favorite eighteen-thousand-dollar urinal. Every fiber of my brain tells me to run, but instead I bring up the .32 with shaking hands and wait for him to swivel back to the left.

He does, but the rotation stops with him facing the computer screen. With a deliberation that sets my trigger finger quivering, Berkmann reaches out and touches a key on the right side of the keyboard.

Im wondering which key it was when he turns in my direction. For an instant his gaze floats just above mine. Then it locks onto me like a laser, and I feel the nightmarish horror of trying to back away from some unspeakably sentient being as he rises from the chair and rushes toward me with the silver gun coming up and then disappearing in a white flash that seems to explode in silence.

I am sitting on the ground blinking my eyelids, which feel like they are on fire. Theres a piece of bloody glass sticking out of my left arm and more blood pouring from my right shoulder. I start to pull out the glass, then remember Drewe leaving the screwdriver in Mayeuxs chest.

Suddenly she is beside me. She seems to be yelling but I cant hear her. When I try to speak, I feel a dull vibration in my throat but hear nothing. A white cloud is billowing out of the window above me. This tells me the flash was what I hoped it was. Nothing smokes like old-style black powder.

Drewe takes hold of my left arm and tries to lift me. When I protest, she shouts words I cant hear and pulls harder. Then her head whips up and to the side, toward the window. Following her line of sight, I see a black
shadow arc through the smoke over my head and crash beside me in a rain of glass.

I reach instinctively for Drewe, but shes gone. I try to stand, wobbling on my knees, waiting for the black hump that must be Edward Berkmann to jump up and put a bullet through my head.

He does neither. He doubles up on the gasoline-soaked ground and, with what appears to be colossal effort, rolls over onto his back. His face is scorched black and riddled with white plastic shrapnel. His shoulder-length hair has been burned off, and blood runs from his nose and ears. His mouth opens in a wide O defined by white teeth, and the first sign that Im getting my hearing back is a high keening wail that I realize is no distant siren but a human scream.

Feeling Drewe at my side, I reach out and close my hand around hers. Berkmanns whole body is smoking, but his eyes are open so wide that the irises look like blue buttons on white saucers. Even as I see the nickel-plated pistol still gripped in his right hand, I realize that both the hand and arm are shattered.

Can you do anything for him? I hear myself croak.

I could, Drewe says. But I wont. I have other patients.

Berkmanns empty left hand jerks, and I yank Drewe back, afraid that hes trying to get the gun into his good hand. But he isnt. The scorched hand rises into the air and reaches toward us, as though beckoning to Drewe. But the blackened fingers close on nothing, and the arm slowly falls.

The instant it touches the ground, the gun in his other hand fires, igniting the spilled gasoline in a blinding blast of heat that drives us backward into the dark. Berkmanns charred body curls away from the flames like burnt paper from a trash fire. As I stare into the inferno, Drewe drags me down the drive, away from our cars. Yielding like an exhausted child, I gaze up the road at my neighbors cotton fields. A regiment of red flashing lights is hurtling toward us like a train of flaming chariots.

All I want to do is lie down.

***

Bob Anderson arrived before a single deputy. Drewe had set up shop just outside the toolshed, and was working on Mayeux and me by the light of the burning house. Bob and Patrick and Special Agent Wes Killen came charging around the house like marines clearing a hostile ville. I recognized Killen by his nose bandage.

Bob told us hed seen a man lying on his back beside Drewes Acura, but had no idea who he was. Killen was afraid it might be Mayeux. While Drewe bound my shoulder with a towel, I asked Bob whether the man was dead. I had visions of an ambulance bundling Berkmann into its antiseptic belly and spiriting him away to a miraculous recovery. Bob said the man wasnt dead but would be soon, and would be better off when he was.

I told Bob who the man was.

He stood there a moment, his mouth working silently. Then he took a deep breath and walked back toward the roaring fire.

Nobody followed him.

Patrick took over treating Mayeux, Drewe explained to Wes Killen what had happened, and by the time she was done Bob was walking back toward us, a black silhouette against the flames. We all looked quietly at him until he said, Hes dead now.

We sat some more while Drewe removed a shard of glass from my leg and Killen talked to Daniel Baxter on his cellular telephone. I asked Drewe if she could get the other piece of glass out of my right shoulder, and she told me she couldnt because there wasnt any piece of glass. Id been shot. Berkmann had gotten off a round during the second that the message was being transmitted to the printer. The bullet went clean through.

Sheriff Buckner arrived with an army loaded for bear but found the bear already dead. He might have been unpleasant about that, but Bobs presence had an amazing effect on his demeanor. He couldnt seem to do enough for us.