The Killings (23 page)

“No.
Noooooooo!
” Robert sobbed. He wept for his lost humanity. He knew now that what the Fury had unleashed had been his true nature. He was a killer. At his core, at his deepest darkest inner-being, he was a murderer of women - and children. That force that controlled him, that sank its talons deep into the darkest part of his psyche and took advantage of it - it was him. Whatever Grandma Sable had done to him had only set free what had already been inside him.

The Fury laughed and renewed its encouragement.

Kill the whore! Rip her apart, Robert. It’s what you want!
The Fury shrieked. Only now, the voice sounded like his own.

“I ain’t goin’ do it!” Robert cried. He sat up, leaning against the counter. He was breathing heavy in short, steady breaths. “I ain’t
never
goin’ do it again. I don’t care
what
you want. You ain’t goin’ get it from me no more!”

The Fury howled, and this time the blast was so severe that Robert cried out from the intensity of it. He fell over on his side, crumpled in a fetal position against the pain. He couldn’t hold it in any more. It was getting too strong, too demanding, and its hunger was unquenchable. It wanted blood and it wanted it
now
. Robert knew that if he didn’t let the Fury out, didn’t let it control him, didn’t let it feed off his own lust for mulatto women, turning his desire for them into something fatal, it would tear him apart, but he didn’t care. He had to stop it. This had to end.

Images of pretty women with caramel-colored skin screaming for mercy as his blade ripped through them, spilling red and purple innards and thick, red blood, bloomed to his senses. The visions were so sudden and vivid that they overwhelmed him with their intensity. Mixed with these images were others; of those same pretty women dressed in garments of silk, their tongues darting between their lips in invitation to his caress, inviting him with their eyes, the swell of their breasts, telling him they wanted him and they wanted him
now
!

“No!”
Robert yelled, breaking the illusion. He could dimly feel his penis throbbing in his slacks and he knew the Fury was working at getting its fingers into him again. It howled in protest and another wave of pain slammed into his head, this one almost knocking him out completely. But Robert wasn’t going to be overtaken this time. He was going to make the fury suffer. If he could starve it, maybe he could kill it. If he denied it access, maybe that would be the thing that drove it away.

“I ain’t goin’ do it,” Robert muttered, his voice shaking. “You can’t make me.”

But the Fury was desperate now and Robert could sense it. Robert had been denying it now for the past two weeks. It had tried every trick. It had reached its breaking point.

Robert’s arm shot up and his hand began to grab at the counter. The Fury yelled in protest.
“No!”
It knew what Robert was intending. It could not stop him. Robert ran his fingers over combs, brushes, and finally, one of his straight razors.

His fingers grasped the pearl handle.

“No!”
Robert gritted his teeth, summoning all of his strength as he brought his hand down and over his body.

“Leave me now or I’ll kill myself and you’s gon’ die with me!”

He could feel a new emotion wafting off the Fury: fear, panic.

“Leave me now, ya hear!”

Sweat beaded on his face as he brought the hand that held the blade and centered it first over his throat and then over his stomach. The Fury strained with all its power to put his arm down, to uncurl his fingers in order to release the straight razor. The Fury was desperate, but it was weak. It could threaten. It could spew lies and promises and fill Robert’s head with all manner of thoughts, but it couldn’t truly control him. The decisions were always his own. Every killing, every horrible crime, had ultimately been Robert’s choice. The Fury instigated and encouraged, it tricked and manipulated, but Robert had been the one who’d done the killings. Robert and Robert alone. And ending it now would be his choice as well.

His hand grasped the handle of the razor tightly and ripped the blade across his stomach.

Robert was surprised he’d had the courage; right up until he’d done it, he hadn’t known if he’d be able. The Fury was surprised as well. It wailed in his head, screaming in outrage, and then it was gone. Where it had been was now just a great emptiness. Robert was free. He smiled and laughed and then looked down at his bleeding stomach. The cut had not been deep enough to disembowel him, but he’d cut into the muscle and it was bleeding profusely. If he didn’t stop the bleeding quickly, he would bleed out and die on the barbershop floor. He stood, wincing in pain, and grabbed a handful of cotton balls from a jar on the shelf and pressed them to the wound. Next he wrapped a towel around his stomach. He staggered forward a few steps. Spots danced before his eyes and the room began to spin. He knew that if he blacked out, he would die.

Everything began to blur, like he was looking at the world through a foggy pane of glass. He crumpled to the floor and everything went dark.

It seemed like a day had passed before he awoke. That emptiness was still there, only now he could feel it slowly filling with feelings of regret. He’d killed so many women. But worse than that, he regretted what he’d done to Henry. He’d promised his old friend that he’d return with help and instead had left him there. He’d heard rumors that Henry had taken a terrific beating at the hands of the police. Robert had tried to visit him, but the police had refused all visitors. That remorse now echoed through the hollow spaces in his soul. Even greater than that was the regret he’d felt for killing his only sister. His mother was inconsolable when she’d heard the news. She’d sunk deeper and deeper into depression from which she’d never emerged. One day, Robert found her hanging from an oak tree in the cemetery where his sister was buried. It had been his fault and he hadn’t even cried at her funeral. He had been too filled with anger and self-pity.

Robert had lost a lot of blood while he was unconscious. The white towel he’d wrapped around his waist was now a dark, brownish red. He sat up, and pain lanced through his stomach and his wound began to bleed again. His eyesight blurred once more and it took every ounce of will within him to keep from blacking out again. If he lost consciousness again, Robert knew he would bleed to death.

The front door opened and someone walked in.
I thought I’d locked the door,
Robert thought. Robert could barely make out the person’s features, but he could tell by the silhouette that it was a man.

“Help me!”

The man stepped closer.

“You know who the fuck you are now, Robert Jackson?”

It was the old bum in the confederate uniform. He stepped forward and knelt down beside Robert. The old wino retrieved the bloodstained razor from the floor where Robert had dropped it.

“I know who I am. I’m Wilson Allen.” He leaned in closer, so close that Robert could smell his rotten egg stench and the odor of alcohol and halitosis wafting from him. He whispered in Robert’s ear.

“It’s you. It’s you. Help me. Get me to the hospital.” Robert’s voice was hoarse and weak.

The old wino smiled.

“The Fury says hello.”

There was no pain, at least not at first. Robert gasped as he watched the old wino’s hand move the blade up over his stomach toward his sternum, the razor sliced deeper into his flesh, parting muscle, sinew, and skin, tearing his makeshift bandages to ribbons. He felt the cold, biting sharpness of the blade as it sliced through his guts, bisecting the muscles of his abdomen like a butcher cutting ham. Robert screamed his throat raw. The shallow wound he’d cut hours ago was being widened into a gaping maw through which he could now see his own intestines. Blood rained from the hole in his stomach like water being dumped out of a barrel, flowing out of him like a river.

“I know who I am, Robert Jackson. Who the fuck are you?”

Robert gasped as Wilson’s left arm rose. Powerless, he watched in horror as the wino’s hand shot into the slit in his belly. Robert grabbed Wilson’s arm with both hands, but he was weak from losing so much blood and the old wino was impossibly strong. Wilson’s grimy, soot-and filth-crusted fingers slid into the wound. Robert tried to cry out for help but couldn’t. His voice was frozen in his throat.

The hand holding the razor cut deeper into his belly, this time slicing downward. This time he could feel the blade open something inside him. He felt something warm and wet spill out of him and he felt the entire lower portion of his body grow suddenly warm, as if he were immersed inside a warm tub of water. The thick smell of blood rose in the air along with something else: the scent of bile, of stomach acid. The wino’s left hand grasped something wet and slippery and began to tug it out. That was when the first stab of pain began in his gut.

Robert howled in pain as nauseous agony twisted through his entrails.

The last thing Robert saw before losing consciousness was Wilson Allen’s black eyes staring down at him. There was no emotion in those eyes. They were stygian holes, completely empty. They looked so familiar. If only Robert could remember where he’d seen those eyes before.

TWENTY-NINE

September 3, 1911, Atlanta

“Jesus, what a mess!”

Detective Douglas could only agree. He’d been called down to Jackson’s barbershop around ten this morning after a call to the station from a frightened patron who alerted them that Robert had committed suicide. Douglas had been the fourth law enforcement officer to arrive.

Detective Douglas was standing at the edge of the waiting area, close to the first barber chair. Robert Jackson was sitting on the floor with his back propped against the counter, his guts spilling out of his abdomen amid a wide pool of blood and viscera. His eyes were open and fixed on the wall.

“What would cause a man to open himself up like that?”

Douglas turned to his partner and shrugged. His partner, Hugh Adams, was a ten-year veteran. He was shaking his head.

“I don’t know,” Detective Douglas said. “This man, Robert Jackson, he was very resourceful. Very dedicated. He was coming up with some tangible leads on the Ripper case.”

“I guess he just couldn’t handle being kicked off the Negro civilian team,” Hugh Adams said. He turned to Douglas. “This is the guy who’s friends with that Parker character, right?”

“Yeah, this is him,” one of the other police officers said. Two other police officers, younger men brand new to the force, were loitering in the waiting area, leafing through the pulp magazines on the coffee table. Waiting for the meat wagon to pick up the body.

“What do you think?” Detective Adams asked.

Douglas shrugged. “No sign of forced entry. The patron who called it in saw the body through the window. He was here to have his weekly trim.” Douglas turned toward the front door where a rail thin Negro man stood, his eyes wide and bloodshot, his features plastered with fear. “Isn’t that right?”

“Yes, sir,” the man said. “I called it in.” The thin man was dressed in dark slacks, a white shirt, and black shoes. He held his brown hat in his hands, looking worried and uncomfortable. He glanced toward the body and the pool of blood. “Such a terrible thing.”

Detective Adams nodded toward the body and then turned to Douglas. “Front door was unlocked. There’s no sign of a struggle. And he’s still holding the blade.”

“That’s what gets me.” Douglas shook his head. “How can a man do that to himself? To be that engulfed with fear and despair to disembowel yourself like that. I’ve seen a lot of suicides in my time, but I’ve never seen anything like this.”

One of the officers standing near the body called out. “So you’re saying it’s suicide, Detective Douglas?”

“What else can it be? Robert Jackson had no known enemies. His friend Henry Parker is locked up for two of the Ripper murders. And the way he’s holding that razor blade, it’s pretty tight. Take a look at those knuckles.”

It was true. The grip on the razor blade was tight. Robert Jackson’s knuckles were almost white from the force of his grip on the razor.

“Sad to say, I call this a suicide,” Detective Douglas said.

Detective Adams shook his head. “Suicide,” he muttered. He turned back to the body. “Weirdest damn suicide I ever saw.”

Epilogue

September 3, 2011, Atlanta

His name was Lamont Edwards. She’d gotten his name and address from Human Resources. She didn’t know how to approach him or what she’d say when she was finally face to face again with the man who’d saved her life. She didn’t know anything about him except that he now had a permanent position at the
Atlanta Constitution
as a result of his heroism.

Carmen drove to his apartment, rehearsing her opening words out loud and glancing in the rearview mirror to make sure her expression was appropriately sincere without looking like she was coming on to him. “Hi, Lamont. I just wanted to come by and say thank you for what you did for me. You saved my life.”

That sounded too sweet. It didn’t sound like her at all.

“Hello, Lamont. I didn’t get a chance to thank you the other night for what you did for me. You saved my life.”

Now
that
sounded like she wanted to fuck him.

“Hi, I just wanted to thank you for shooting that sick bastard. You saved my life.”

Maybe?

“Lamont? Hi. I just stopped by to thank you for saving me from that twisted fuck. He would have raped and killed me if you hadn’t shown up.”

That was more like her but probably a little too candid.

Carmen didn’t understand why she was so nervous. It felt like she was going on a first date. Goosebumps dotted her arms.

Lamont Edwards’s apartment was in the Pittsburgh community near Adair Park in southwest Atlanta. Carmen had covered two police shootings in this neighborhood in the past year. The gentrification that had begun there at the start of the new millennium with the tearing down of the Pittsburgh Civic League Apartments, a low-income housing project that was an incubator for violence and crime, had been slow so far and the neighborhood was resisting, fighting back in spurts of isolated violence. The economic downturn of 2008 sealed the neighborhood’s fate. Now, it was every bit the violent slum it had been for the past forty years.