Next to Die

by T. J. Brearton

  He closed the distance, wrapped his arms around her.

  They had to stretch across the seats and it pinched his sore neck, but it was worth it.

  Totally frigging worth it.

  Fourteen

  Connor kissed her then withdrew and examined her face. “What’s the matter?”

  “My pager is going off.”

  “Well, that’s a good thing, right?”

  Bobbi playfully squeezed his shoulder and stepped out of the kitchen, went through the living room. Jolyon was on his stomach reading a graphic novel, his legs bent and swinging, oblivious to the surrounding world.

  It continued to peck at the back of her mind: this sense of major responsibility she’d be taking on as any sort of significant person in Connor’s and Jolyon’s lives. With everything that was going on it felt like bad timing for complex new thoughts and feelings.

  On the other hand, maybe it was the job. For six months she’d seen people screw up with their kids, and perhaps it had jaded her.

  She closed the door in the bedroom and called the state registry.

  Two minutes later she walked back into the living room, both Connor and Jolyon smiling at her from the couch, where Jolyon read. They looked sweaty. “Sorry it’s so hot in here,” she said.

  “Oh, I can hook you up,” Connor said, getting to his feet. “I got a buddy who does air-conditioning.”

  “I can’t afford that.”

  They met in the middle of the near-empty room. “I could get you one used, cheap. And your utilities are included, right? No landlord expects someone to suffer through the summer in a third-floor walk-up without… Hey, you gotta go or something?”

  “Yeah, maybe. I’m waiting to hear back from the police.”

  “Everything okay?”

  “Just work.”

  She glanced at the clock – almost seven. “I’ll need to get ready, though, in case I have to go. Really sorry about this.”

  He put up his hands in a sign of peace. “Hey, it comes with the job. I get it. You’re like Batman, or Batwoman. When the signal is in the clouds, you gotta go.”

  He smiled, but his eyes stayed serious. She gave his arm a stroke, then grabbed him, led him into the bedroom. He sat on the frameless bed as she pushed around some hanging garments in her closet, trying to find something professional yet breathable. Finally, she selected an outfit and draped it over the bed, started to undress.

  Connor drew close. “I’ll take Joly fishing or something tonight, so don’t worry about it. Anyway, it might not take long, right?”

  “Could be quick. I don’t know.”

  “Well, however long. But maybe if it’s not too late, then afterward…?”

  She stood on the balls of her feet and kissed him. “I will. I’ll text you.”

  * * *

  Bobbi drove down the long driveway of a rundown Victorian house at the bottom of a wooded escarpment, crowded with an old pickup truck, an immobile camper van, and piles of scrap lumber. There was a fenced garden with proud green veggies poking up in the fading light.

  The place belonged to Anita Richardson, would-be mother-in-law to Carrie Lafler. But Carrie had never married Anita’s son, Roy – instead, she’d left her two small children behind while she took a wild trip out west. Now she was back, and Anita didn’t like her showing up at the house, even if the kids were biologically hers. The state had placed them in Anita’s care.

  Deputy Shoreman stood on the porch talking to Anita, whose gray hair clung to her sweaty forehead. Anita glared at Bobbi when Bobbi got out of the car, the humidity like a wet blanket, bugs homing in. Waving them off, she walked to the porch. Two little faces peered down from an upper bedroom window.

  Then Bobbi saw Carrie pacing by the garden. She smoked a cigarette and held her cell phone in the air like she was trying to get a signal. Another deputy with the sheriff’s office, a woman named Moore, kept an eye on her.

  “Hello, Ms. Noelle,” Deputy Shoreman said. He led her inside so Bobbi could talk to the kids.

  They were both happy, healthy, well-fed. The house was clean, safe, and the children – a boy and girl – each had their own room. After about forty minutes, Bobbi left. Deputy Moore had spent the time talking to Carrie, explaining that for now, she had to depart the premises. Carrie was upset, but Bobbi arranged to meet with her later in the week, get her started rehabilitating herself as a parent, and that seemed to mollify her.

  * * *

  Bobbi had been thinking about Terry and Victor since the memorial service that morning. Since she was already out and it wasn’t too late – not quite 8 p.m. – she thought about paying them a visit.

  Terry Fogarty, a man without his wife. Victor without a mother. Every time she thought of them alone in their house it made her sad. And she regretted how she’d behaved at the memorial – she’d been frightened and filled with guilt. It wasn’t who she aspired to be.

  But she’d promised Connor they’d hook back up after her work was complete.

  On the phone, he said, “No, I think it’s very thoughtful – I’m sure they’d love to see you.”

  “I just want to… I don’t know. I feel like we do all this stuff when someone dies, there’s this rush of a couple days, everyone shows their support, then it’s over and they go back to their lives.”

  “I think you should definitely do it. And if it feels wrong, or something, after you get there, so what? You go home. Just showing up like that is probably more than most people would do.”

  She felt a swell in her chest – maybe pride, maybe even the beginnings of love for Connor. She said, “It’s just… It might be getting kind of late if we’re there, and we get talking or something…”

  “I get it. I’m here, come by whenever; or if not, that’s okay. This week I’m working over around Moody Pond. So, getting off work at a decent time, picking up Joly. We can get together another time. But listen – so what do you think? I could get the unit dirt-cheap.”

  “The air-conditioning?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Connor, you don’t have do all this stuff, do all these nice things…”

  “Yeah I do. I want to.”

  She sighed, thought to tell him more about how she’d been feeling, but stopped herself. Maybe later. “I’ll text you when I’m done, okay? See how this goes.”

  “You got it. Take your time.”

  He was almost too good to be true.

  * * *

  Clay cranked the engine, backed up a bit, pulsed the gas. The balding tires kicked up rocks and dust as he shot out onto the road. He took the direction she had gone.

  Roberta Noelle.

  Bobbi, to her friends and co-workers.

  Bobbi.

  He turned on the stereo, poked in the cassette already there, and then listened to the gears. A moment later, The Doors started to play.

  He rolled the window down, let the wind thunder in the gaps as he cruised along and Jim Morrison crooned from the speakers about the soft parade, about cobras and leopards and engines humming.

  Clay felt his own engine humming, and he sped through the twilight.

  * * *

  The Fogarty’s place was on Averyville Road, a section of Lake Placid with rolling hills, deep farmhouses, big fields, a narrow, potholed road winding through it all.

  Bobbi drove past the trailhead for the Northville-Placid hiking trail, sparking the memory of a trip from years past she’d taken with her family, when she’d fallen in love with the region.

  There were several cars parked at the trailhead, people scattered around, likely returning from a hike, the sun almost gone for the day. A hiker could go for a casual walk down the trail and double-back, or they could take a seven- or eight-day thru-hike all the way to Northville, 122 miles away. Beside the trail was the Chubb River, bubbling along beneath the bridge as Bobbi drove over.

  The trail wound through the heart of the Adirondacks, traversing several wilderness areas. Bobbi had considered it herself at one
point, and done a little boning up – supposedly there were several lean-tos scattered along the length of the trail, but the local motto was, “Don’t count on anything; be prepared.”

  She tried to live her life that way. Her foster brothers – just some of them, not all of them – could get a little carried away, and since dating Jamie, she’d learned the hard way what an abuser was like, and she’d grown determined to take care of herself. Connor was lovely, trying to fix her fridge, or obtain an air-conditioner, but as good as he seemed, she didn’t need a man to take care of her.

  This whole thing with Harriet had thrown her, for sure – it would have thrown anyone. It reminded her that self-reliance and facing fears didn’t happen on their own. You had to double-down, roll up your sleeves, and wade into the—

  Bobbi realized she’d driven past the turn for the Fogarty’s, hit the brakes, did a multipoint turn in the narrow road, and backtracked. There was one set of headlights oncoming as she reached the spot and turned in.

  Then she bumped down the long, crushed-stone driveway toward the brown house in the distance.

  * * *

  Clay drove more slowly until he saw her car again. What a sight, that rustic little house set back from the road, big sky above. Powerful thunderheads were turning into pink anvils, the sun melting into the ridge of mountains – a late storm in the making – and Bobbi was making her way to see Dead Harriet’s husband.

  He drove on, parked up the road at a trailhead for Pine Pond. There were a couple of other cars in the dirt lot; typical – a Subaru with a bike rack, a Jeep with a canoe mount and mud splattered on the sides, a pickup truck, a sporty little Honda Fit. His own vehicle would have been out of place if it weren’t for the rest of the people in the Adirondacks like him, riding the poverty line or close to it, driving cars that didn’t look like ads for rich people cramming in their outdoor recreation because it was trendy to “love nature.”

  He walked along the edge of the road, almost fully dark now, watching the lightning flash as the clouds merged into a serious black mass. Within a few minutes he was at the mouth of the driveway. A mailbox listed to one side, FOGAR Y, spelled in white reflective letters, missing the T.

  The wall of clouds rumbled, throbbed with internal flashes of light.

  He thought about Jim Morrison wandering the western landscape in his early, pre-Doors days, writing poetry, taking mescaline. These people in their normal, everyday worlds, they didn’t have the first clue about the true nature of the universe. He hummed along to a track in his head as he turned down the driveway.

  He was out of sight from anyone in the distant house. If Bobbi were to leave while he was still walking, the woods would provide easy cover, just have to hop in amid the trees, disappear.

  Creeping closer, though, he saw shapes in the lighted windows: people moving around.

  Bobbi was in there – what was she doing? She was making nice with them, perhaps, showing them her pity.

  Clay stopped, having gotten halfway along the driveway, sticking close to the trees.

  There was a smell in the air – what was it? It tasted like metal. Like pennies…

  The first of the rain fell, like a spray from an ocean wave, followed by a swift downpour, a change in pitch as it hit. Clay turned his face toward the sky. The drops were warm, the warmest they would be all year long…

  * * *

  What was he thinking?

  He remembered: Alison Hadley. The girl who thought she was better than him. Who thought she was a fucking princess, above it all, just like Bobbi Noelle.

  He started walking again.

  Hadley had never seen who he really was because she’d never given him a chance. She’d judged and dismissed him. Maybe that was what high school was like, but maybe, too, she’d been an uppity cunt.

  Those old moves, four years of wrestling, you just couldn’t help yourself. It was so easy, and Hadley was so little, like a doll, nothing to her, barely able to resist him. He could have taken it all the way but she’d raked him with her fingernails – that had been the worst of it. He still even had the scar.

  Not that anyone ever noticed.

  Nobody ever noticed anything that wasn’t in their self-interest.

  As he made his way closer to the house, he let rain wash away the memory of Hadley’s bitchy ways. The first girl he’d ever tried to ask out, and her callous rebuff, the humiliation. Fuck all that. Now there was Bobbi Noelle, and Bobbi was a lot like Hadley, and it had struck him that she was a new chance for him to be seen.

  A dog barked when he was halfway down the Fogarty’s long driveway. Dammit. The Fogartys had a dog and the dog had caught his scent.

  Clay scrambled up the short embankment, into the woods, maneuvering a bit so he could see out and still have an angle on those windows. The way he was crouching, though, the knife sheath jammed into his calf muscle a bit. He shifted his weight and peered at the house.

  The dog was joined by another – two of them barking at shadows now. He waited for a porch light to come on, or an area light, maybe over that saggy-looking shed beside the main house, but nothing happened.

  Stupid. Should’ve known they had dogs. He saw people-shapes moving in the windows again, was pretty sure the shape looming near the corner of the house was that of Terry Fogarty. But then the shapes went away, and the dogs stopped barking.

  The rain continued to pound him, the woods a rush of water smacking the leaves, and he was soaked through to the skin. It was just a reconnaissance mission, just a chance to watch Bobbi for a while, to “get the feels” as the kids liked to say, and it had run its course.

  But.

  But the dogs gave him an idea. The knife, uncomfortably jamming into his body, gave him an idea, too. He drew it out, turned the blade over in the rain and thought about how he’d love a rifle.

  A rifle would take care of anything in his way, like dogs. Pop them both off from a distance. Rifles couldn’t be too hard to figure out, a couple of YouTube videos would do it, and he was always a fast learner. Not that these particular dogs would be a problem – Fogarty’s house wasn’t part of the plan – but the DSS employees always had someone around now. Cops were going with caseworkers to home-fucking-assessments. They might as well have been dogs.

  Like the tall one, the one who looked like a city-slicker. Nelson. Mr. “Call me Mike.” He had that I’m-better-than-you vibe written all over him, just like Bobbi.

  Mr. “Call me Mike” was probably already patting himself on the back, thinking this was a “knife killer” at work, or something.

  But this was Clay, and clay was mutable.

  Clay was a shapeshifter.

  He moved back toward the main road, keeping to the trees. His hands were soon sticky with sap and leaves, his boots squished. The rain was almost blinding, the thunder right above him, but he was content to marvel at how his plan kept growing, evolving, getting better.

  Maybe there was no God, but as he slipped back out of the woods, looked over his shoulder at the dark house in the rain-blurred distance, he thought maybe there was a secret to things, a life hidden behind the masks we wear, and once you got in touch with that secret, gave over to it, once you felt the thrum of its power shaking the ground beneath your feet, you were invincible.

  He bet Jim Morrison had felt that, at least once, too.

  Fifteen

  “Why do you want people to call you by your first name?” Overton lay beside him in the motel room bed.

  Mike looked up at the ceiling, hands nested behind his head. “Just a habit.”

  “Okay, Mike.” She put out her hand. “Call me Lena.”

  He laughed and shook it.

  She propped up on her elbow, her face close. “That’s not what I heard.”

  “Oh no? And what did you hear?”

  “I heard it was an interview tactic. That you’re good in the box – you get called in for assists all the time, got quite the confession record.”

  He didn’t say anything
for a couple of seconds. “I don’t know. I never really thought about it.”

  “Uh-huh… Okay, so your dad worked in the Seven-Seven back in the eighties. Uniformed? That had to be a hell of a time to be working New York.”

  “He worked anti-crime, plainclothes division. There was a big corruption scandal when I was a kid.”

  “We read about it in college,” she said. “Cops working with drug dealers. What was the big organization going on?”

  Mike sat up a little, fixing the pillows. “La Compania. Guy named Chelo ran the outfit like the military. His guys had all kinds of hardware – street-sweepers, you name it. He put out contracts on cops. I mean he would literally chase the cops, cook off a few shots in broad daylight. That’s how it was. And he had pros coming up from the Dominican Republic just to take people out.”

  Mike thought for a minute about the Harriet Fogarty crime scene, the only trace evidence a couple of bloody shoe prints. Then he got back to the story and said, “My dad was killed. Could’ve been Chelo, but…”

  Lena’s eyes got big and she spoke through a hand covering her mouth. “How old were you?”

  “This was in ’84, so – nineteen. I wanted to go down there the next day, sign up, get to working the Seven-Seven, and not stop until I found his killer.”

  “But you didn’t go…”

  “Mom pleaded with me. She’d had a hard enough time letting me go down there when I was growing up. And these contract killers they just… you know. After the job, they’re gone. So. I was ready, though. I was ready to take on Chelo myself.” He laughed a little, but it didn’t feel funny.

  After a moment Lena asked, “Where’s your mother now?”

  “North Carolina. With my sister, Kim. Couldn’t take the winters anymore, either. A warm-weather type, like your son Avery. I mean, this summer, though – it might as well be Florida.”

  “She never remarried?”