The Death of Wendell Mackey (35 page)

Two blocks up and the streets got brighter and busier. It was all frenetic: swollen traffic signs and street lights like sunbursts poured past him in a metallic river. Faces blurred, the shapes of cars and bus benches stretched, the world for a moment manic and unanchored. His head swam.

“You were going to kill them,” she said.

“Yes I was.”

Honks. Screeching tires. A pedestrian nearly hit by Agatha’s side mirror screamed profanities at them.

“I’m that valuable,” Wendell said.

“What?”

“Enough for them to do all this. Enough for them to kill you.”

“Wendell…”

“Had to send a platoon of men after me.”

“I have to wrap my mind around this.”

He laughed, which sounded strange. “Somebody out there loves me.”

She took a left, then hit the gas, humming under a yellow light.

“Let’s just get some distance between us and them,” she said.

“They gotta be dead.”

“Back at the apartment?”

“Yeah. How did you get out before it all blew?”

She looked at him. “Somebody up there loves me.”

Two blocks up, then a right turn. Another two blocks, a run through a red light, and then a left. A street sweeper puffed in plaintive sighs as it worked a street’s gutter. The next left had them running up on a group of young men congregated in the middle of the street; they scattered as Agatha hit the gas and barreled down it. She passed a car taking its time getting to the intersection and then hooked another right.

After a mile on the same street the traffic slowed. Wendell shrank down in his seat, keeping his eyes only high enough to peer out through his window. Even with his head still spinning and the colors of the street running together, Wendell was able to recognize some things: yellow awnings now gray in the early morning darkness, the Mortimer Cinema on the other side of the street, the bird-dunged mailbox. He sat up in his seat.

“Why are you taking me back?” he asked.

“I’m not.”

“The apartment building is just over there.” He reached for the door handle.

Agatha appeared unconcerned. “Middle of the night,” she muttered, “and they’re likely still prowling the streets.” She huffed at the cars and the men on the sidewalks. Three heavily painted women, shaky on their high heels, ventured out from the front doors of the cinema.

“But why did you drive—”

“Relax, Wendell. It’s the easiest way to the highway. Just one block over.”

Agatha followed the traffic to the end of the street and waited at a red light. She began to talk about the women outside of the cinema and the men who used them, about disease and drugs and abandoned children, but Wendell tuned her out when something entered his periphery. Something incomprehensible. He blinked twice, hard. It couldn’t be this way, it couldn’t
be
.

“This isn’t happening,” he said, his voice fading.

Agatha continued to talk as the light turned green and the car moved forward.

Leaning up against the mailbox, as he had been before, his hands in his pockets, was a dead man. The knit cap hadn’t drifted down the gutter. It was there, where it was meant to be, atop that wiry mesh of black hair.

The car went through the intersection, and Wendell twisted his neck around. He saw the cap bobbing up behind a crowd gathering in front of the cinema, and then nothing. The man was gone, like smoke blown by the wind.

“He’s supposed to be dead.”

“What?” Agatha looked at Wendell.

It was someone else. It had to be. Wendell remembered the man’s body, lying in the alley like something inside of it had exploded. He saw the pond of blood, and the lines of viscera spilled out like mutant octopus tentacles. It couldn’t be him. But his eyes weren’t lying.

Or were they? His eyes
had
been betraying him. And his brain felt like it had been stuffed in a loaf pan and cooked.

No, I’m seeing this, I’m seeing him. He’s there, he’s there, he’s gotta be…

“Stop the car,” Wendell whispered. Then louder: “Stop the car.”

“What?”

“Just stop the—”

He reached out and touched Agatha’s hand on the steering wheel.

Don’t let her stop,
he thought.

“No,” Wendell said, with urgency, “no, no no, just go, just get to the highway. Just
GO!
”

Agatha was still staring at him as she hit the gas, bumping the car in front of her and then scraping along its bumper as she moved past it on the right and sped down the street. She took a right turn and headed for the highway on-ramp two-hundred yards down.

“What’s wrong? What did you see?”

“Nothing,” he responded. “Didn’t see anything.”
What I saw I didn’t see
, he told himself. Whether it was real or not,
wanting
it to be real had a strong allure.
It’d mean what Scotia said is right and I’m batshit crazy. It’d mean that it’s all in my head. It’d be so much easier that way
.

It would mean that one end of Mortimer Street still had its knife-wielding junkie, and another street—and he knew this would have to be true, if the knit cap man were alive—would have that bald monster, Drake, wearing a sandwich board or passing out flyers, or gathering a group of his fellow racist dung worms to look for and split the skull of poor little Wendell. What Agatha said about Drake’s death would have been fabricated in his head too. They would both be alive, and Wendell would be insane. Yet with insanity came no guilt.

But that thought—pleasant and relieving for only a moment—brought back the metallic taste of blood to Wendell’s mouth, the knit cap man’s blood. That hadn’t been imagined, nor had the blood covering Wendell’s shirt and limbs like paint. His mind was throwing tantrums, and seeing that ghost on the street was the human Wendell’s last attempt at rebellion.

Agatha was still talking, but now not about the city or about Wendell. Praying. Repeating the same line, first in Latin, and then in English.

“Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto,” she whispered to herself.

“If only,” Wendell intoned, “if only it was still a hospital, a loony bin. I’d just be psycho. No killer.”

“…et nunc, et semper, et in sæcula sæculorum…”

Wendell leaned towards his window, afraid to look out and see Drake, or even
her
, up from her hospital bed and dragging along IVs and wires like marionette strings and breathing like she was sucking air through a straw.

“No. She’s dead. So’s he. Gangland thing, prison thing. But dead is dead.”

“—world without end…world without end. Amen,” Agatha said.

She accelerated up the on-ramp. The highway was empty save for a few lonely cars.

“I really did do it. Kill them. I’m not crazy.”

“Please, Wendell.”

“We can leave, but it won’t change anything.”

Agatha remained silent for a moment. “Everything’s changing,” she said. In trying to change the subject, she added: “We’re going somewhere safe. Somewhere where I can get you the right kind of help. Where there will be doctors—all kinds. And I can call the police.”

“And you’ll tell those police what I did? That I killed them?”

She looked at him, at once nervous and reassuring. But she didn’t respond.

They drove the next few miles in silence, and Wendell watched the raindrops on his window narrow and run under the car’s speed, cohering into larger and longer bullets, detaching and flying off behind them into the darkness.

“I have a friend in a diocese a few hours outside the city,” she said. “The Sisters of St. Francis have a convent out there. The church runs a hospital, has a network of doctors in the diocese that we can contact, everything we need. They’ll know what to do,” she said, sounding hopeful. “They’ll get you what you need.”

“You shouldn’t be doing this,” Wendell told her. “You’re probably breaking the law by helping me.”

“Let me worry about that, Wendell. Just try to rest.”

Wendell sat back in his seat, staring at the dashboard, afraid to fall asleep. He looked at Agatha, who had pulled her rosary out and had it draped over one of her arthritic hands gripping the steering wheel. She was praying again.

“—among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus—”

She was halfway through her second round, or third. Wendell couldn’t remember, but found her rhythm calming. He turned back to the dashboard, let his eyes go out of focus, and listened to her pray.

In a wave of lurid lights, the city receded behind them, sinking in the distance, letting the earth swallow it whole.

Wendell felt the engine slow. He opened his eyes and pulled himself up in his seat. Agatha hit her blinker and eased the car into an exit lane.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s just a rest stop. I need to make two calls: one ahead and one behind.”

Wendell stared at her blankly.

“Where we’re going,” she added, “and back to the city. I need to know about Santos.”

Santos, that mountain of a man crumpled in the corner of the stairwell, looking up at him like it was the first time he had ever been afraid.

“Did I do that to him?” Wendell asked himself, aloud.

The car slowed, and something in the front end began to whir as Agatha turned right and coasted to a stop on the edge of an empty parking lot.

“If you had hurt him, Wendell, then you would have hurt me by now too.” She shifted the car into park, turned the key, and turned to Wendell. “Get some air, but don’t go far. No one seems to be here,” and she looked around out the windows, “but it’s best we be careful. We have a ways to go.”

Agatha stepped out of the car, walked around the front, and opened Wendell’s door.

“Hold tight,” she said as she grabbed her purse in both hands and walked towards the only building on site, fat and short and made of concrete brick painted beige with two bathrooms, two vending machines between the bathroom doors, and a pay phone bolted to the wall.

Wendell undid his seatbelt and slid down deep into his seat, his legs curled up, facing the open door.

Bats flitted around the humming parking lot lights. Radiating from each light’s base like little fault lines were cracks filled with grass and dandelions closed upward and waiting for first light. Behind him were soft traffic noises. In front of him, a line of concrete parking stops, random bursts of grasses unkempt and windblown, and different shades of endless, quiet night.

It was quiet enough to hear Agatha’s voice, muffled, as she spoke hurriedly on the phone. Listening to her, listening to the intermittent heartbeat of the highway, Wendell let his eyes adjust to the darkness.

At one edge of the lot, he saw a tiny shadow emerge and hop over a concrete stop, followed by a line of even smaller shadows. A duck stuck her bill into a cone of light from one of the lot lights. The duck stepped in, followed by a line of five ducklings. She was cautious, her head darting back and forth, but the feel for security came quickly, and she led her ducklings onto the tarmac, walking in a small circle, either to assure her that the line was complete, or wholly for Wendell’s amusement. The line straightened out and bisected the cone of light, leaving it and becoming shadow again, only to regain its color as it bisected the next cone. The ducks continued this, adding in another circle every few minutes, as they moved away from Wendell, eventually hopping a line of parking stops on the other side of the lot, and disappearing into the darkness.

Wendell watched the spot where the ducks exited, waiting for a return. He first heard Agatha’s footsteps, and then her door open.

“Still alive?” she said.

He felt her sit down and close her door.

“Yeah. Still alive.”

“They’ll be waiting for us.”

“They.”

“Yes. I told them it’ll take us a few hours, maybe a little past dawn. But they’ll be waiting.”

Wendell didn’t turn around. His wings trembled, but didn’t move.

“Santos is at the hospital,” she continued. “Broken bones, a concussion, but he’ll be all right. And it wasn’t you, he said. It was them. They came at him in a blur when he confronted them in the stairwell.”

“You talk to him?”

“No. Just a mutual friend. She says cops and firefighters are all over the place. A number of apartments were destroyed in the fire, including mine. But as of right now, they’re investigating why so much activity was going on in a supposedly vacant apartment. The landlord has a lot to answer for, with likely civil suits due to that apartment being a tinderbox just waiting for a match. She’s not sure how many of those men survived. But she did see the police lead some people away in cuffs. I guess that’s some good news.”

Wendell kept his eyes on the parking lot. Moths were congregating in clouds under the lights.

“Wendell, are you with me?”

“Hear it,” he whispered.

“What?”

“Can you hear it?”

“Hear what?” She paused. “No.”

“
That
. All of that.” He brushed his claws through the air absently. “It’s quiet, all quiet.”

“It’s not the city.”

“Yeah. Finally.” And then he turned to her, pushing himself up in his seat. “I’ve never been out here.”