A Killer in the Wind Read online

  He kills them, I thought.

  It came to me like that, all at once. Emory said he would find me someone completely safe . . . No history. No future. She’ll exist only in your moment of . . . absolute delight.

  Right. Because when I was done with her, he would kill her. Because murder—that was his absolute delight. He sold his victims to his customers to earn back the Fat Woman’s purchase price—and when the customer was done, he killed the victim for his own pleasure. Maybe he watched the customer at work first, maybe that was part of it too, but it was the killing he lived for. I was certain of it.

  The boy—the dead boy; the ghost I called Alexander—gazed and gazed at me from across the street, from out of his limbo-world of unforgivable suffering and injustice. I had the powerful urge to cry out to him through the rush-hour traffic, to cry out words that came into my memory out of nowhere, words one of my foster mothers had read to me from the tattered Bible open on her kitchen table.

  I wanted to cry out to him: Vengeance is mine. I will repay.

  But before I could speak, a bus came between us, rumbling uptown. When it passed, I saw that the dead boy had vanished.

  After that, a week went by—more than a week, ten days maybe. Nothing happened. No calls from Emory. No meetings. Not a word. A sickness of suspense and revulsion gripped me. It was my constant state of feeling. There was no relief from it. I spent every day at the cover apartment on Fifth Avenue. Every evening, I took the Z. I knew what it was doing to me, but I couldn’t stop . . .

  She’ll be completely safe. No history. No future. She’ll exist only in your moment of . . . absolute delight.

  I’d seen a lot of bad stuff, a lot of bad stuff. I didn’t know why this time should be different, but it was. This time, I couldn’t face the evil without the drug.

  One night, the final night of waiting, I woke fully dressed, sprawled in a plush chair in the living room. The lights were on. The room was full of smoke. I knew—I could tell—that the smoke was in my mind, that my mind was swirling and unclear, and yet I could also see the smoke in the room: twisting tendrils of gray mist expanding into a general fog. It was as if the smoke itself obscured the borderline between the world as it was and the world inside my brain.

  There was something else too. I had heard something. Just before I woke up, there had been a noise. A strange, piercing cry of a sound. Was it in my dream? In reality? In reality, I thought. Somewhere in the apartment . . .

  Yes. Someone was there. Someone else was in the apartment with me. Living or dead. Someone.

  When I stood up, I stumbled, my legs weak under me. I reached for the holster in the small of my back, but it wasn’t there. I had taken the gun off when I came in that evening. It was in the bedroom, on the bedside table.

  I took an unsteady step toward the bedroom door. It shifted in the smoke as the smoke shifted. The dark rectangle of the doorway faded in and out of my vision. The whole room tilted and I nearly went falling across the floor toward the windows. The damned drug. I grabbed hold of the back of the sofa to steady myself. I pulled my way along it, making for the bedroom through the smoke.

  I reached the tilting door. I braced my hand against the frame to keep myself upright. The bedroom was dark. I didn’t want to go into the darkness. I reached inside and found the light switch. The light came on. I stepped in. The smoke was in there too. I could see the bed only hazily, coming in and out of view. I didn’t want to look up but I couldn’t help it. I raised my eyes to the ceiling.

  The cherubs grinned down at me, their sharp teeth bared.

  I made a gagging sound and put my hand up to my brow, shielding my eyes from the horrible sight of them as I tumbled through the doorway, stumbled through the smoke toward the bedside table. My gun and holster lay there, next to my cell phone. Shielding my eyes from the grinning, feral cherubs on the ceiling, I reached forward through the smoke. My fingers touched the table. Touched my holster. I grabbed my gun. That was all I wanted. I had to get out of there.

  I spun back around—and the dead boy was standing right in front of me. He was holding out his arms to me as if he wanted me to lift him up. He stank of the grave.

  I cried out and reeled back through the smoke toward the bed. The blood-eyed cherubs reeled through my vision, laughing. That sound that had awakened me—that high cry—pierced the room.

  It was the phone. I saw it light up on the bedside table. I saw it plainly—and when I looked around the room, the smoke was gone. The air was clear. The boy had vanished.

  I dared—just barely dared—to look up at the ceiling. The cherubs were cherubs again, overcute, chubby angels gamboling among the dawn-lit clouds.

  The phone went on ringing. I snapped it up.

  “Tomorrow night at nine.” It was Emory. He told me an address in the suburbs, a landmark to look for. Then he hung up.

  I sat on the edge of the bed, my head hung down, the gun dangling from my hand.

  The next night, I was in a car, the green Lexus we had borrowed from Narcotics. I was driving up Interstate 95, the streetlights glaring, the city skyline at my back.

  “I don’t know,” Monahan was saying. “I’m looking at a lot of manpower for just a hunch.”

  He was stationed at the address already, out in the woods with the statie tac team and the rest of the task force. His voice came into the Lexus over its speakerphone. It was a comforting presence as I maneuvered through the night. It tethered me to reality, kept me from floating away.

  “It’s not a hunch,” I said. “I’m telling you: He kills them.”

  “Because he said they were ‘completely safe’?”

  “Yes. And had no future. And because I just know.”

  “That sounds suspiciously like a hunch to me.”

  I didn’t answer. I drove on. The city fell away. I traveled into Westchester. The highway grew darker. I blinked hard, trying to clear my vision. My head was foggy from the Z. Sometimes the fog came out of my mind and drifted through the night on the far side of the windshield. The cars around me would dim and waver like they were underwater. White headlights and red taillights would turn distant and gray. The sounds of the ride would grow muted and soft. Then after a mile or two, the mist would dissipate and the scene would snap back into clarity. The rumble of the engine and the rumble of the tires on the road and the steady sough of the air passing would rise and surround me again.

  And there was Monahan’s voice on the speakerphone: “You know what I think?”

  “I care very deeply what you think, Monahan. Never doubt that.”

  “Yeah, I think Vice is getting to you.”

  “Nah. Vice is nice,” I said. It’s what we always said because the work was so much cleaner and safer than in Narcotics.

  “Vice is nice,” said Monahan, “but it gets to you. The perps and their shenanigans. They’d get to anyone.”

  “Shenanigans,” I muttered. The highway seemed to telescope away from me and snap back. The hallucination was so real and sudden it nearly made me gasp. I shook my head to clear it. The damned drug.

  “And you, with nothing else,” said Monahan. “No life to distract you. That’s the problem right there.”

  “This again.”

  “You need a life, Champion.”

  “I have a life. This is my life.”

  “You need a girl.”

  “I have girls.”

  “Your girls,” said Monahan. “You take ’em to dinner Saturday night. Monday, we bust them on the street.”

  I laughed. It made my head hurt. “Combining work and pleasure —it saves time.”

  “You need a real girl. A wife,” said Monahan.

  Monahan had a wife. Cheryl her name was. A little Italian whirlwind. Came up to his belt buckle. Always had two of his kids under her feet and one on her hip. Always shouting at someone. She made these pasta dinners that could’ve sunk an aircraft carrier. You could’ve put a plate of her lasagna on the deck of the USS Ronald Reagan, the Reagan would’ve
just upended and sunk to the bottom, blub blub blub, with all hands lost. Two days in a row with Cheryl and I’d’ve gone nuts, but Monahan loved her.

  “I don’t like New York women,” I said. “They’re too . . . busy. Noisy.”

  “Eh. New York. Women are women. They’re all noisy. But the good ones, you treat ’em nice, they’ll do anything for you.”

  “I’ll have to try that sometime. Here’s my exit.”

  I left the highway. A couple of turns, a couple of miles of driving and I dipped down onto a narrow lane through the woods. It was dark here, really dark. No houses in sight. No lights. No moon visible through the heavy cloud cover. The forest on either side of me seemed dense and impenetrable. A drizzle started and as I turned on the wipers, a mist trailed up off the black pavement in front of me. I couldn’t tell anymore whether the mist was real or in my mind.

  “Your guys ready?” I said.

  “You should see this army,” said Monahan. “After we arrest this guy, I think we’re gonna invade New Jersey. Right now, you’re the safest guy in America. Press your thing.”

  I felt my pocket. I had a key chain in there with a flashlight about the size of a quarter. If I pressed the flashlight button, it lit up like a regular flashlight—but it also sent a radio beacon to the task force. I pressed the button through the cloth.

  “There you are,” said Monahan. “Every fifteen minutes, right?”

  I was going into Emory’s place without a wire or a gun. Emory was careful, suspicious. I knew he’d search me. The flashlight-beacon was the only way I had to call the cavalry. One signal meant I was okay, two meant it was time to launch the invasion. If they didn’t hear from me after fifteen minutes, they’d come in without any signal at all. That was just in case Emory took the flashlight away.

  “Every fifteen minutes,” I said.

  The drizzle grew heavier. So did the mist. I leaned forward, squinting, trying to see. The headlights picked out the end of the pavement. The next second, the Lexus was juddering over a dirt road. I felt the forest pressing in on me. I saw it moving at the edge of my vision—I thought I saw it; I thought I saw it creeping up to the windows of the car. When I turned to look, the trees were still, but the spaces between the trees were so black that the darkness seemed almost a solid wall.

  Once, deep in that darkness, I saw a figure—the figure of a little boy—standing amidst the trees, watching me go by.

  When I looked ahead, the mist was everywhere, clinging to the pavement, to the windshield, to the air. The rain on the windshield made streaks on the glass.

  Then I saw an old stone root cellar to my right—that was the landmark Emory had told me to look for. To my left, hidden in the bushes, a driveway wound down away from the road.

  I turned the wheel. The Lexus came bouncing off the rutted dirt onto the smooth pavement of the driveway. Now the trees really did close in around me as the car descended into a narrow forested valley.

  “I’m signing off,” I said.

  “Go with God,” said Monahan.

  I disconnected. I felt the solitude flutter down on me like a shroud.

  I came around a long curve and the forest fell away. The driveway continued to descend over a great sweep of sloping lawn. The house was at the bottom of the hill. It was a vast place, a mansion. Three stories of red stone. Roofs, gables, chimneys—I counted four chimneys—and graceful balconies. White pillars holding up the porch roof. More pillars supporting a round conservatory or something off to the side. The newspapers next day said the place had been built in 1900 in the Colonial Revival style, whatever that means. To me, it just looked pompous and grand—and grandly secluded too, sitting down there at the bottom of the hill with the lights from the windows dying into the blackness of the woods on every side.

  As I traveled the last few yards of the drive, I saw something that I would remember later. A light went out somewhere. A yellow glow went out on the lawn, right where the lawn met the base of the house. I hadn’t even noticed the light until it snapped off, and then I couldn’t see where it had come from. There was no window there. There was nothing. I would remember that.

  I felt my throat go dry as I rolled up to the four-car garage on the right. My head seemed to expand painfully, then snap back into place painfully. I was nauseous and woozy and I cursed the drug.

  The rain grew heavier. It pattered on the roof of the Lexus. The fog was encroaching on my vision again. I blinked it away but it kept returning. I switched off the engine and sat taking deep breaths. Finally, I popped the glove compartment and checked one last time that my Glock was there. Then I pushed open the door.

  I had to concentrate hard to walk steadily over the wide slate path across the lawn to the front steps. The rain dampened my hair, rolled down my face. The rain felt thick to me; gelatinous.

  I climbed heavily into the darkness of the porch—and as I did, the lights just behind the front door came on. The mist seemed to swirl away for a moment so that I knew it was only in my mind. I checked my watch. Nine exactly, right on time. I reached into my pocket. Pressed the button of the flashlight. Fifteen minutes.

  Now the huge front door swung open. Emory stood there. He was dressed almost formally for him, wearing slacks and a turtleneck and a navy blazer. His bland face creased with a bland smile. He stepped back to let me enter.

  “You seem surprised to see me,” he said. He closed the door.

  “The house was so grand, I was expecting . . . you know . . .” He pretended not to understand. Stood with his head cocked in a question. “A butler, a maid or something,” I said.

  He gave a strangely feminine little giggle. “On these special nights, I prefer to be alone.”

  These special nights. He said the words in that way he had, wrinkling his nose, gleeful and wicked. Are we being naughty now? I wanted to clutch him by the throat. I felt a thickness in my brain like fever. The room swam in mist all around me.

  We were standing in a vast foyer. A massive chandelier with prisms sent rainbows over the walls. There was a sweeping turn of stairs in the shadows beyond the chandelier’s reach. Dark wood banisters twisted out of sight into the upper stories. Mist.

  “I’m afraid I have to search you,” Emory said.

  I rolled my eyes. That’s what I thought an innocent man would do. “You’re kidding me.”

  “I know, I know,” he said, “but the world is full of philistines and we really have to be careful. Would you mind removing your overcoat?”

  I gave an elaborate sigh and stripped the coat off and handed it to him. He went through the pockets, examined it back and front, felt the linings. He was thorough and expert. He had done it before. When he was finished, he hung the coat neatly on a hanger in the foyer closet.

  “Empty your pockets please,” he said over his shoulder.

  I gave him my wallet, my phone, and my keys. He turned the phone off and set it on top of a short bureau by the closet door. He set the wallet there too. Then he looked at the key chain, pressed the flashlight button. He was satisfied when the light went on. He put the keys on the bureau beside the wallet.

  Finally he patted me down. Again, he was thorough and expert. I’ve snuck guns past the searches of some pretty hard-boiled street characters, but Emory and his soft white hands would’ve been hard to get around.

  He smiled then. “Sorry about that.”

  I shrugged. “Whatever. Can I have my stuff back?”

  “Just leave it there for now. You won’t be needing it anytime soon.”

  I didn’t want to leave the flashlight-beacon behind but I couldn’t think of an answer that wouldn’t arouse his suspicions.

  Emory gestured toward the archway behind him. “Shall we sit and have a drink together?”

  I hesitated. The clock was ticking. Emory had pressed the flashlight-beacon again so the fifteen-minute count had restarted, but it might not be enough. I didn’t want the tac team to come bursting in before I’d had a chance to get some solid evidence agains
t him.

  I tried to move things along, pretending to be a nervous first-timer. “You know, I think I’d rather just . . . get on with it, if you don’t mind.”

  Emory laughed. “No, no, no. Don’t be that way. Everything’s fine. Now that it’s all out on the table between us, you and I are going to be good friends. Let’s get to know one another. Please.”

  There was no getting out of it. I glanced at my watch as I followed him through the archway. It was just after 9:05. Around 9:20, tac would come through that door like the Allies crossing the Rhine.

  The living room was expansive. There was one wall of high windows. They were dark except where the interior light winked off the raindrops running down the panes. The other walls had elaborate wallpaper and paintings—one green and hazy landscape after another with ruined temples on their hills.

  “Single malt, if I recall,” said Emory.

  I sat on the flowery sofa. The thickness in my head came and went and came again. The mist drifted in and out of the room’s corners. Finally, it gathered all around me, blurring the borders between my body and the room. Made me feel as if I were going to melt somehow into the fabric of the place. I shook the feeling off.

  Emory handed me a drink and took one of his own to a chair on the other side of a low coffee table.

  “To the good life,” he said, and drank. Then he laughed. “Oh, relax, really. This is part of the pleasure of it: being accepted for who you are. Not having to make excuses anymore. Not having to live a lie.”

  I barely sipped the scotch—barely sipped the sting off the surface of it—and yet it hit me instantly, hit me hard. I felt my stomach roll. I saw the world go dreamy. Thick white fog pressed hard against the windows across from me, threatening to permeate the walls, the room, my mind.