The Follower (45 page)

God, he sounded totally unstable now, like he could snap at any moment.

“See?” he said. “You’re not even denying it. This is all total fucking bullshit!”

Trying to stay calm, but not doing a very good job of it, she said, “I can understand why you’re upset, but it’s not true. I do love—”

“Shut up, you stupid fucking bitch!” he screamed so loud it actually hurt her eardrums. His eyes shifted toward her for a moment, looking away from the road, right at her, and she knew she’d miscalculated this situation big-time. She wasn’t special to him at all. She was as meaningless as any other person.

“Admit it,” he said. “You fucked both those guys, didn’t you? They had their scummy cocks in your mouth, didn’t they?”

“That’s not true,” she said.

“Bullshit! I saw the pictures! He had his tongue down your fucking throat. I know you had his cock in there, too!”

Katie was thinking,
Pictures? What pictures?

Then she noticed Peter was reaching down to his left for something. A moment later he was holding the knife.

“It wasn’t supposed to end like this,” Peter said. “Creative visualization is bullshit. I visualized the ending. I visualized it a million fucking times and it didn’t go like this.”

“P-p-please,” Katie stammered. “Just put the knife down. You’re wrong. I’ll show you how wrong you are. Just put the knife down.”

“It’s too late,” he said. “Everything’s too fucked up now.”

Peter waved the knife, the blade inches away from her neck, and she grabbed his forearm. She had to get the knife; it was her only chance. But it was hopeless—he was too strong. He jerked his arm back and she let go, and then the car swerved. They were going very fast downhill, around a bend, and the brakes screeched as they went off the road, onto the shoulder. Then they were tumbling, the car upside down, and Katie’s head crashed against something.

When she opened her eyes, she didn’t know what was happening. She was confused, dizzy; her head hurt like hell and her left arm killed, too. She couldn’t move at all and it took her a few seconds to realize why. The air bag had deployed and she was wedged between the bag and the seat. There were
flames coming from the car’s front end, which was mangled. The car was on its left, so Katie, on the passenger side, was suspended several feet off the ground.

Katie was starting to struggle to free herself and get out of the car, then she looked to her left, or really down, and saw, in the flickering light from the flames, that the driver’s air bag had also deployed, but the damage was much worse on Peter’s side. The door was pushed in and mangled and he seemed to be wedged in worse than she was. There was blood on his face and he seemed dead or unconscious.

Then Katie smelled gasoline and feared the car might explode. She searched around for the door handle. Finally she found it, but the door wouldn’t open. She continued trying, with no luck, and thought this was it, she was going to die. She yanked and pulled the handle several more times, but it wouldn’t budge, and then she tried the window switch. She did this out of total desperation—she didn’t think there was any way it would possibly work, but remarkably the electrical system in the car was still functioning and the window opened all the way.

Now all she had to do was free herself. As she was undoing the seat belt, she saw why her arm hurt so much. Two jagged bones were jutting through the skin below the elbow. Using her other arm, her right one, she was able to wriggle her body enough to create some room between herself and the air bag and was able to inch her way toward the window. But the flames seemed to be getting more intense and she didn’t think she’d be able to make it out.

She was dazed, disoriented. She had no idea if she had been struggling to make it through the window for one minute or ten minutes, but she was finally able to hoist herself and, by grabbing onto the roof of the car with her good hand, she made it partway out.

“Wait.”

She looked back over her shoulder and saw Peter. His eyes were starting to open.

“Help me,” he said weakly. “Please…p-please…help me…”

Katie’s instinct was to go back, try to save him. He would die if she didn’t, and she couldn’t let another human being die.

The pain in her arm was nearly unbearable; it was hard to think straight. She started to go back toward Peter, when she thought about the people he’d killed—Andy, Will, and God knew who else. She didn’t know if Peter really had killed Heather’s boyfriend, but he probably had. And what about his own parents?

“I’n sorry,” Peter said. “I’n so, so sorry. I didn’t mean anything I said before…I was just angry because…because you hurt me…but I won’t hurt you…I promise I won’t.”

He held out his hand toward her. She was about to grab it when her better sense returned and she thought,
He’s so full of shit
. She started to pull her arm back when Peter lunged toward her, grabbed her wrist, and pulled her toward him.

“Where the fuck were you going?”

He didn’t sound so weak anymore.

“Noplace. I was just g-gonna help you.”

“Bullshit. You were gonna leave me here.”

“I wasn’t—”

“Stop bullshitting me!”

In his other hand, he was holding the knife.

“I’ll help you,” she said. “Just let me go.”

“You think I’n a total idiot? If I let you go, you’re gonna run out of here and let me die.”

“I won’t. I swear.”

“How could you do that to me? How could you just leave me?”

He was crying.

“Please,” she said, “just let me go. I’ll get us both out of here, I prom—”

He swiped at her right arm, the one that wasn’t broken. The blade tore through her sweatshirt, into her skin.

“I didn’t want to do this to you,” Peter said.

Peter swiped at her arm again, higher up this time, closer to her shoulder. She made no attempt to stop him; she didn’t even flinch.

“Maybe it’s better this way,” he said. “We can die together,
like Romeo and Juliet. It would be tragic, but romantic. Yeah, I kind of like that.”

“Please, don’t,” she said.

“I have to,” he said. “Don’t you get it?”

He would kill her now. He would come at her with the knife again and this time he’d slash her throat.

But when his arm moved, she grabbed it with her right hand and held it back. She was surprised she was able to do this, especially with the gashes.

She continued to hold his arm back, as the blade remained poised, ready to go into her neck the instant she stopped fighting.

“Give up,” he said. “Dying doesn’t hurt. Trust me.”

“Fuck you,” she said.

She continued struggling, but he was too strong. Even in his awkward position, it was getting harder and harder to hold him back. In the light from the flames, she saw the blade, getting closer and closer to her neck. Then she leaned in and bit his face as hard as she could. He screamed in her ear and there was blood in her mouth and she kept biting, knowing this was her only chance. He tried to push her away, but her teeth remained clenched and then she felt the knife drop onto the seat. She went for it right away, releasing her bite. He was in shock and couldn’t defend himself as she drove the blade into his neck. She kept removing it and sticking it in again, and then she totally lost it and started slashing his face. Even when it was clear that he was dead, she continued to attack him, wanting to cut him to shreds.

Finally she stopped, staring at the bloody mess. Then the strong gasoline odor and the flames reminded her she needed to get the fuck away. She managed to hoist herself out and then she fell to the ground. She got up and started running as fast as she could, away from the burning car, into the darkness. Then she heard the explosion, looked back and saw the red fireball and all the smoke. She was exhausted, in agonizing pain, and very disoriented. She ran along a grassy area, then she saw headlights to her left, and veered in that direction.

She screamed and waved, but no cars stopped; none even
slowed. Staying on the shoulder, she continued running and shouting for help.

Eventually, she reached a house. She banged on the door. A girl, a teenager, answered. Katie fell onto the floor, clinging to the girl’s legs and sobbing.

John Himoto felt a tug on his
line and the guy next to him said, “Looks like you got a big one.”

It felt big all right. When he was reeling it in, he had to give it some slack to run with, and the way his whole rod was bent, it seemed like he was going to pull in a twenty-or thirty-pounder. Everybody on his side of the boat was looking over, watching, and the guy with the net was waiting, ready to scoop up the sucker as soon as John lifted it out of the water.

John, sweating and breathing very hard, was finally able to reel the fish in at a good clip. And, yeah, it was a biggee—a striped bass that looked about three feet long. People were applauding, and it was by far John’s biggest catch ever.

Too bad it wasn’t his catch.

As the guy was taking the fish out of the net, John noticed that his line was tangled with another line that seemed to be attached to a rod on the other side of the boat. When the lines were untangled, it was discovered that the other guy’s hook was in the fish’s mouth, not John’s.

The other guy, who was out fishing with his young son, was cool about it. He suggested that he and John cut the fish in half, split it fifty-fifty, but John didn’t think that was right.

“No, it’s yours,” he said. “It was on your line.”

“You sure?” the guy said.

“Positive,” John said. “Enjoy it. Take some pictures with your kid, knock yourself out.”

John caught a decent-size fluke later on in the morning,
and that was good enough for him. He went home, fired up the grill in the backyard, and cooked up the fish with some salty vinegar fries. The Yankees were playing the Indians and he kicked back and listened to the game on the radio as he ate lunch with a couple of ice-cold brews.

It had been five months since John had walked away from his job, and he didn’t miss it at all. When he packed it in, he’d thought there was a good chance he’d regret the decision. Louis had told him, “You’ll be on your hands and knees, begging me to take you back, you’ll see,” and John had known a lot of cops who’d had trouble moving on. They missed the constant action, the buzz of being on the force. But, so far, John had been very content to spend his days fishing, going to the racetrack, or just hanging out at home, doing absolutely nothing.

Of course, once in a while, John had a rough time. It was usually in the middle of the night, after he woke up from a nightmare. He’d think about a case from the past that had slipped through his fingers, and he’d obsess about all the would’ves, could’ves, and should’ves. The one he thought about often, probably because it had been the most recent, was the Peter Wells case. He beat himself up pretty good about how, if one or two things had broken differently, he could’ve caught on sooner and prevented the death of William Bahner.

But John tried not to let the negativity affect him too much. Every detective fucked up from time to time and every detective knew that the trick to maintaining your sanity was to not let your failures haunt you. At some point, you had to put it all behind you, move on, forget about the past, and that was exactly what John intended to do.

As Katie approached the north entrance to the Central Park Sheep Meadow, she spotted Amanda, waiting, reading a copy of
Time Out New York
. She hadn’t seen her in about six months and she couldn’t believe how amazing she looked. She was wearing tight jeans and a tight black V-neck top. She seemed to have lost about ten pounds and her hair looked
great, too. She was growing it out, and it looked full and shiny in the bright sunshine.

Amanda saw Katie coming toward her and smiled widely. After they hugged and kissed each other on their cheeks, Katie stood back and said, “Wow, look at you. You look amazing.”

“Thanks,” Amanda said. “So do you.”

“Please,” Katie said, knowing Amanda was just trying to be nice, returning the compliment. Katie had put on about ten pounds, and she knew it showed because none of her old jeans fit anymore.

“I’n serious,” Amanda said, keeping the fake, yet socially appropriate, sincerity going. “Have you been dieting?”

“No, actually, I’ve been gaining weight, but who cares? I can’t remember the last time I weighed myself. You look incredible, though. I love your hair.”

It was the first beautiful day of spring and the Sheep Meadow was jam-packed. Guys with their shirts off were tossing footballs and Frisbees, and girls were lying on blankets, reading or just hanging out with their friends. Katie and Amanda found a spot in the shade and sat down on a picnic blanket that Amanda had brought.

“So I want to hear everything about this new guy,” Katie said. “You said his name’s Steve, right?”

Amanda had e-mailed Katie and talked to her on the phone, going on about her new boyfriend and what a great guy he was. They’d met at a party, had been seeing each other for almost three months, and were talking about moving in together.

“He’s incredible,” Amanda said. “He’s smart, he’s generous, he’s supportive, he’s interesting, he has a great career…He’s the real deal.”

“What does he do again?”

“Lawyer—well, tax attorney. I know, it sounds dull, but he’s not that way at all. If you saw him you’d never guess he was a lawyer. You’d think professor, journalist, something like that. He’s really down to earth, loves just staying home, watching TV, going to movies. He’s a really good skier. In the
winter we went up to Vermont a few times and next year we’re gonna go to Colorado.”

“That sounds great,” Katie said. “I’n really happy for you.”

“Thanks,” Amanda said. “So tell me about you. What’ve you been doing? What’s going on? You look great; how’re you feeling?”

“Pretty good, actually,” Katie said. “Knock on picnic blanket.” She laughed, then said, “I’n almost done with physical therapy.”

“Congratulations,” Amanda said.