Thr3e (21 page)

It’s light outside—he knows this because of the single crack in the corner. Samantha has taken Kevin and gone into hiding. Which means that after all these months, she’s learned something new.

Slater hums softly and walks toward a small vanity. The secret of being the Dark Man is not looking like a dark man at all. That is why the world looks at stupid little teenagers with rings in their noses as idiots. It’s like walking around school, stripped to the waist in a Charles Atlas pose all day. Please. Too obvious. Too stupid. Too boring.

Now the angel of light routine—those who pile on the white to obscure the Dark Man, like Sunday school teachers and clergy, like priests—not a bad instinct really. But these days, a white collar is no longer the best disguise.

The best disguise is simply obscurity.

Slater sits and tilts the mirror so that it catches enough light from the bathroom to cast his reflection. You see, now there is a Nobody. A strongly built man with blond hair and grayish eyes. A wedding band on his left hand, a closet full of pressed shirts and Dockers and a silver Honda Accord out on the street.

He could walk up to any Betty in the mall and say, “Excuse me, do I look like the Dark Man to you?”

“What on earth are you talking about?” she would say. Because she wouldn’t associate him with a name like Dark Man. She, along with ten thousand other mall flies, would be fooled. Blind. Shrouded by darkness.

That is his secret. He can walk under their noses without the slightest hint of guilt. He is virtually transparent, for the very reason that he is so much like them. They see him every day and don’t know who he is.

Slater frowns at himself and wags his head in mockery. “I like you, Kevin. I love you, Kevin.” Sam can be such a cockroach. He should have killed her when he had the chance, long ago.

Now she’s in the thick of things again, which is good because he can finish the job, once and for all. But her audacity makes him nauseated.

“Let’s run away and play hide-and-seek,” he mocks again. “What do you take me for?”

The fact is, Sam knows more about him than any of the others. True, her little disappearing act will gain them nothing, but at least she’s made a move, which is more than he can say for the rest. She’s trying to flush him out. She might even know that he’s been under their noses all along.

But the Dark Man isn’t that stupid. They can’t hide forever. Kevin will eventually stick his slimy head out of his hole, and when he does, Slater will be there to bite it off.

He leans the mirror against the wall and crosses to the room he’s prepared for his guest. It is slightly larger than a closet, encased in concrete. A steel door. Leather restraints lay on the floor, but he doubts he’ll need them. The game will end here, where it’s been designed to end. The rest of this cat-and-mouse foolishness is only a smoke screen to keep them in the dark, where all good games are played. If the newspapers think they have a hot story now, they are about to be reeducated. The occasional destruction of a car or bus by way of explosion a story hardly makes. What he plans will be worthy of a book.

“I despise you,” he says softly. “I loathe the way you walk and the way you speak. Your heart is vile. I will kill you.”

The anger had worked its way up to a seething through the night. Kevin tossed and turned in a fitful attempt at sleep. Sam’s optimism sat like a light on the horizon of his mind, but as the night wore on, the light grew dim until it faded altogether, obscured by bitterness toward the man who had stomped into his life uninvited.

Fury
was a good word for it. Rage. Indignation. They all worked. He relived that night twenty years ago a hundred times. The boy sneering at him as he turned the knife in his hands, threatening to shove the blade through Sam’s chest. The boy’s name was Slater—had to be. How he’d escaped was beyond Kevin. Why he’d waited so long to come after him made no sense either. He should have killed Slater then.

His pillow felt like a wet sponge. His sheets clung to his legs like mildewed leaves. He couldn’t remember a time when he was so upset, so distraught, since the boy had first threatened him so many years ago.

Sam’s plan was brilliant, except for the obvious fact that it only delayed the inevitable. Slater wasn’t going away—he would wait out there in the dark, biding his time while Kevin slowly dehydrated beneath the sheets. He couldn’t do this. He couldn’t just wait and waste away while Slater chuckled under his rock.

The idea ignited in his mind with the sky’s first graying.
Buy a gun.
His eyes sprang open. Of course! Why not? Become the hunter.

Don’t be absurd.
He closed his eyes.
You aren’t a killer.
The discussion with Dr. Francis was one thing—all that talk about gossip and killing being the same thing. But when it came right down to it, he could never kill another human. He couldn’t line up a man in the gun’s sights and send a slug through his head.
POW!
Surprise, creep.

Kevin slowly opened his eyes. Where would he get a gun anyway? A pawnshop? Not with today’s laws. Not legally, anyway. On the other hand, for the right price . . .

Forget it. What was he going to do, shoot the phone if Slater called again? The man was too good to walk into danger. How could he lure Slater into a confrontation?

Kevin rolled over and tried to put the idea from his mind. But now the notion began to grow, fed by his own loathing. In the end Slater would kill him—nothing else made any sense. So why not take the fight to him first? Why not demand a meeting? Face me, you slime bucket. Come out of the shadows and look me in the eyes. You want a game?

Suddenly the thought of anything less seemed weak. He had to at least try.

He wrestled off the sheets and slid to the floor. Sam wouldn’t agree. He would do this without her, now, before she awakened and stopped him. He quickly pulled on his jeans and a T-shirt. The details didn’t seem so critical at the moment—where he’d find a gun, how he’d hide it, how he’d use it. With enough money . . .

Kevin grabbed his wallet off the nightstand and fumbled through it. It would have to be cash. He’d stuffed his emergency cash, the four hundred dollars from under his mattress, into his wallet before leaving the house. Still there. Surely with that much he could buy a gun on the black market.

Kevin eased out of his room, saw that Sam’s door was still closed, and walked for the door before pulling up. He should at least leave a note.
Couldn’t sleep, went to put a slug in Slater’s head, be back soon
.

He found a pad of paper with the hotel’s insignia stenciled across the top and scribbled a note.
Couldn’t sleep, went for a drive, be back soon.

The morning air felt cool on his clammy skin. Six o’clock. The underworld was undoubtedly still stirring. He had to get out before Sam awoke or he wouldn’t be going anywhere. She would worry if he didn’t return quickly. As soon as the night crawlers made their appearance, he would pull over and ask one of them the dreaded question: Where can I buy a gun to blow away the man who’s after me?

He started the car and headed south.

And what if the night crawler recognized him? His face had been plastered on the news. The jarring thought made Kevin flinch. He swerved. A white sedan on his tail flashed its lights. He quickly pulled over, as if it had been his intention all along. The car sped by.

Maybe he should have brought a sock to pull over his head. Kmart special over here—one bad man with a stocking over his head, holding up a night crawler with a wallet. Give me your gun, buster.

Twenty minutes later he emerged from a
7
-Eleven with a pair of dark glasses and an orange Broncos baseball cap. With a day’s stubble, he looked nothing like the man he’d seen on television the previous day. But he decided to take the drive up to Inglewood just to be sure. Probably more guns to be had up there anyway.

An accident on
405
stretched the hour trip into two hours. It was eight-thirty before he’d pulled onto Western Avenue in Inglewood. He had no idea where to begin looking. Sam would be up now.

He drove aimlessly, palms sweaty on the steering wheel, telling himself he had no business asking anyone where to buy a gun, much less buying one. If he headed back over to Hawthorn and headed south, he could be back in Palos Verdes in under an hour.

But Palos Verdes was within spitting distance of Long Beach. And Slater was waiting in Long Beach. He had to find himself a gun. Maybe a knife would be better. Definitely easier to find. Then again, killing with a knife somehow felt more evil than killing with a gun, and harder, assuming he could do either.

What would Jennifer say to this sudden madness that had overtaken him? Take him out. No, that was figurative, Kevin. He swallowed, suddenly swamped with the foolishness of what he was doing. He didn’t even have a plan!
God, help me.

For someone studying to be a priest, he sure hadn’t prayed much in the past two days. He’d been too busy confessing his sin to the world. He wasn’t sure he even believed that God
could
save him. Could God really reach in and save his people? He imagined a huge finger flicking the head off Slater’s shoulders. For that matter, what did it take to become one of God’s people? How was the soul truly regenerated? Through the sinner’s prayer?
Take my heart, take my soul; wash my mind as white as snow. And if anyone comes after me with a gun, please put him in a place where there is no sun—preferably six feet under in a concrete tomb.

He’d never really prayed like that. Oh, he’d prayed plenty in church. He’d committed himself to vocation and to ministry. He’d said what he needed to say to become who he was trying to become, and he was doing what he needed to do to help others become like him. But he was no longer sure what he’d become. He’d broken with his past and started fresh.

Or had he?

Sure he had. Out with the old, in with the new, yippee-kie-ay, yabba dabba doo.
Are you regenerated, Kevin? Are you saved? Are you worthy of feeding at the trough with the others in the flock? Are you fit to shepherd the sheep grazing in God’s green pastures?

I was three days ago. At least I thought I was. At least I was successfully pretending to think I was.

Praying to a heavenly Father filled his mind with images of Eugene, dressed in his riding boots, issuing commands in a phony English accent. Fathers were silly men who went about pretending they were important.

Kevin cleared his throat. “God, if anyone ever needed your help, I do. However you do it, you have to save me. I may not be a priest, but I do want to be your . . . your child.”

Tears filled his eyes.
Why the sudden emotion?

It’s coming because you never were anyone’s child. Just like Father Strong used to say. God’s waiting with outstretched hands. You never really took that seriously, but that’s what becoming a child is all about. Trust him at his Word, as the good reverend would say.

Kevin pulled into a Burger King. Three young men walked out in baggy jeans with chains that hung from their belt loops to their knees.

A gun. Right now he didn’t need God’s Word. Right now he needed a gun.

Jennifer picked up her phone, dialed Kevin’s number, and let it ring a dozen times. Still no answer. He’d been gone since five o’clock last evening, and she had hardly slept.

They had set up audio surveillance with a single laser beam, which when placed on any one of Kevin’s windows could turn the glass into an effective diaphragm for sounds beyond. Slater had probably used a similar device. The problem with the laser technology was that it picked up sounds indiscriminately. A digital-signal processor decoded the sounds and filtered voice, but the settings had to be adjusted whenever the operator changed windows, or when conditions—such as the closing of drapes—changed sufficiently to interfere with the acoustics of the room. For some reason Kevin had decided to close the drapes just before his departure.

A young agent named McConnel was resetting the laser receiver when Kevin had come out. McConnel said he heard a barrage of static in his earphone and looked up to see the garage door open and the rented Ford Taurus pull out. He’d reported the incident immediately, but his hands were tied. No following.