A Reason to Live (Marty Singer1)

by Iden, Matthew

  My fingers were numb, almost dead at the ends. I shifted my gun to the other hand and rubbed them together, then shook my whole hand to try and get some feeling back. I gave up, took a new grip on the SIG, then slipped through the fence and into the backyard, Kransky on my heels.

  We kept under the shade of the maple in case Lawrence was on the second floor looking down, but eventually had to break cover to pull up against the house. I counted to three, then crossed the five or six yards quickly. I didn't run, trying to keep my movements quick but steady. I got to the house and put my back to the off-white siding. I listened.

  Nothing.

  The back door was probably locked, the windows were too loud and too noisy, and there was no simple way into the basement. I eased down the side of the house until I could see around the corner. A white panel van sat in the driveway. Its passenger's side window gave me a marred, shadowy reflection of the front door, which hung open. I could see the frame was splintered around the lock.

  I froze as a car came up Willow, made the right onto Macomb, and moved on. When my heart slid back down my throat, I peered around the corner again.

  Nothing.

  I wiped my face, gripped my gun in both hands, and was getting ready to slip up to the porch when Kransky barreled past me like I wasn't there, knocking me off balance, and headed straight for the front of the house.

  I squatted there, stunned. He moved through the door before I could say "Kransky!" in a hoarse whisper, my teeth clenched. Ignoring me, he darted through, his gun up and ready. By the time I sprinted after him and got inside--crouched, gun swinging to cover the doorways left and right to the living and dining room--his back was disappearing down the hall towards the steps to the second floor.

  I followed, whipping my SIG back and forth, hoping Ferrin wasn't right here on the first floor, ready to lean out from behind a door and take both of us out with double taps to the back of the head. I jumped as a scream tore through the house, coming from the second floor.

  I chased down the hall towards the steps, picking up blurred impressions of sleek, modern furniture and bland colors on the walls as I ran. The decorations were different, the smell and feel completely changed, but the general layout had remained the same and I had trouble remembering if it was me, now, or me, twelve years past. I shoved the memories away and hit the steps running, taking them two at a time. There was a long hall at the top, with four doors along its length, two to a side. The first two were shut, the last two open. The one on the right had been Brenda Lane's bedroom. A trail of blood led into it.

  Another scream split the air and followed by a sob. Kransky, already at the end of the hall, turned into the bedroom on the right. I followed.

  A man, tied and gagged, lay bleeding in the far corner of the room. The trail of blood led directly to his body. A middle-aged woman, also bound with her hands behind her back, lay next to him, screaming, "Jerry!" A piece of duct tape dangled from one cheek, waving crazily as she cried.

  The room had been torn apart. It was still a bedroom, but it was obvious the furniture wasn't right. The bed had been shifted so that the headboard was against the far wall, and a chest of drawers had been pushed into its place. A memory tugged at me and in that instant I saw myself standing there, twelve years earlier, with my finger held in front of me like the barrel of a gun. The bed now occupied the same spot as the bed then. The chest of drawers that blocked my view into the room now was in the same spot the stereo had been a dozen years ago.

  On the bed, turning the memory to nightmare, was Amanda. She appeared to be alive, but gagged. The right side of her face was bright red where she'd been hit and a thin line of blood ran from above her cheekbone to her jaw. She was bound in a painfully intricate position, her head falling off the edge of her bed and her arms sprawled across the pillows in an awkward pantomime of sleep or death. The job had been done with clothesline, so much of it that she looked as if she'd been caught in a spider's web. It was an elaborate but sloppy job, done in haste. Yards of it crossed the room and hooked onto door knobs, furniture, and bedposts, tied so tightly that she couldn't move her head or arms. Only one foot was free to move a few inches and she kicked at the sheets, but it didn't do anything to dispel the illusion: she was bound in exactly the same position as her mother the night she was killed. Dozens of white petals dotted the room, covering the bed, Amanda, the floor.

  Kransky was halfway across the room, maybe to help Amanda, maybe to untie the couple, when he stopped and turned, eyes darting, scanning the room. I had started to move as well when it crystallized for me--Amanda, the recreation of the murder scene, the trail of blood leading conveniently into the room--in the space between heart beats. At the end of that one second interval, I began to turn, knowing we'd been had.

  And froze when the touch of a gun barrel to the back of my neck--so cold--told me I was too late. Way too late.

  "Easy, Marty," a voice said. "Take it easy. There are good ways to die and bad ways to die, right? Don't be stupid."

  "Lawrence," I said.

  His lips made a wet sound as he spoke. "This whole thing would've been a lot easier, Marty, if you would've just stayed retired."

  My heart drummed in my chest. It took everything I had not to go for the gun pressing into my spine. It would've been suicide. Lawrence knew what was in my head as much as I did. Kransky was no help; he'd half-turned when I'd entered the room, but he was stuck, like I was, helpless. "Sorry to disappoint," I said.

  "Kransky, too?" Lawrence said. "This is getting better and better. If only Mike was still around, we'd have ourselves a reunion."

  I said, "Nice setup, Lawrence. Like Wheeler did it, that night."

  "Wheeler?" Lawrence laughed. "I guess you still haven't figured that one out. Still playing at being a detective, Marty? Star of the MPDC? Only now you don't have the badge, just the gun."

  "Why don't you fill me in?"

  "I think you've probably guessed most of it out." His breathing sped up, moist and hot on the back of my neck. "My tastes are simple. I only wanted Amanda. She's all I ever wanted. Thinking about her, dreaming about her. It's what got me through ten years, hard time. Not easy, being a cop on the inside. But I had something to look forward to, right?"

  His voice changed again, dropping to a growl. "But, Mike, now, Mike had a real thing for the mom. Showing up at all times of the day and night. He was as creepy as they come. But, it's funny, for all that attention he paid her, it wasn't Mike she was getting it on with."

  "Shut your mouth," Kransky said. His eyes were like pieces of glass.

  "See, this is what drove Mike crazy. The bitch obviously had a thing for cops, but she wouldn't give Mike the time of day. It was Kransky that she jumped into bed with. Mike couldn't stand it. He dragged me over there with him that night, talking big like he always did, bigger than he could act. When it came down to it, though, he couldn't do it. So, here's the big secret, the one we've all been waiting for." He leaned forward, so close his lips brushed my ear while his gun rested against my neck, and said, "Mike didn't do it. I did. I killed her. I killed Brenda for him."

  Wet lust filled his voice. I could feel the thrill in him, the carnal satisfaction he had both in the killing and in revealing it to me, transferred from his mouth to my ear. I tilted my head away and he laughed, then grabbed my hair with his free hand and twisted it, yanking my head back. "Thing is, Marty, I realized after I got out that loving Amanda is where everything went wrong. I'd always been sick. But it was Amanda that brought the sickness out. I could've lived with it, hidden it, led a normal life. Instead, the whole ugly side of me that I'd been trying to punch down for all those years...it blossomed when I saw her. And my life has been nothing but misery because of it. The longing and the frustration and the imprisonment. But if I get rid of her, here and now, I get to set things right. I get to start over. Right…where…it…all…began."

  I felt, rather than heard, the hammer being cocked on the gun in his hand, the cylinder turning
. And I felt his excitement and his expectation of a new life thrumming through him, coming to me by way of the obscene connection of the gun barrel to my skin. I closed my eyes.

  But he was so keyed on the scene in front of him, so utterly absorbed with himself and his plans, that he was deaf to everything else. A voice from the hall yelled, "Lawrence!" and he shifted his weight, as if to turn. The tip of the gun left my neck.

  I was frighteningly lucid. I could feel the indentation in my skin where the barrel had pressed. I could feel my blood pulse through my body, my breath coming in quick gasps, the sweat trickle down my spine. And what became clear to me in that infinite moment is that, ironically, a man with cancer has more options than one that doesn't. Having already stared my own mortality in the face, I couldn't really be threatened with death. I lunged down and to the left.

  As I fell, I saw Kransky's arm swung up. I could tell he was calculating, making the minute corrections that would turn a wild snap-shot from the hip into something more than a prayer. But the barrel of his gun was only halfway to level when a deafening clap exploded next to my ear and a blood-red rose bloomed in the center of Kransky's chest. His hand spasmed and the gun went off once, twice into the floor as he was knocked backwards with a look of sad surprise on his face.

  From the ground, I twisted to face Lawrence, trying to bring my gun up. It was incredibly slow, infinitely clumsy. I knew it was futile. You could be the fastest draw in the West, but there is no way to beat the speed of a finger pulling a trigger. I could almost taste the bullet that surely had to be on its way through my face and out the back of my head, sending me on my descent into darkness right after. But as I swung the barrel around--so slow--I heard a sharp electrical crack from the hallway. Lawrence screamed.

  Images of his face and body imprinted themselves on my mind, details I would only remember later. His head was shaved bald and his body was thin to the point of emaciation. An indigo prison tattoo of a web ran up the side of his neck and over part of his head. His eyes were wide, the irises a manic blue, the whites bloodshot and veiny. Black jeans and a t-shirt emphasized his pallor; the shirt clung so tightly to his chest that I could see his sternum through the fabric. Two thin wires trailed from his back like marionette strings. He stood there, his face contorted and twisted, hoarse screams coming from his mouth while his body shook like a tree in a storm.

  From the ground, I pointed my gun at him. Lawrence's arm twitched at his side and the black barrel of his gun jerked upwards. We shot at the same time, the mingled reports sounding like two schoolbooks hitting a classroom floor. My shot took him low center mass, knocking him backwards into the hall and out of sight, but pain erupted in my left shoulder like it had exploded from the inside out. The SIG dropped from my hand as I was punched back to the floor by the force of the shot. I contracted into a ball, cupping my shoulder. I gasped, dragging air in through my open mouth and making animal noises while tears flooded my eyes.

  The pain was all I had for what seemed a long time, but then I became aware of a shape coming close. I raised my head, expecting to see Lawrence, who had somehow survived the shot. But the image resolved into someone else, a forty or fifty-something guy with salt-and-pepper hair. Taylor. My mouth opened, trying to form words, to ask for help. Taylor looked at me, his face devoid and as emotionless as a snow bank. He stayed that way for a moment, as if searching for something, then left my field of view.

  Time collapsed inward. I thought I heard sirens, once a welcome sound, now unknown. Amanda screamed through her gag--maybe had been screaming the whole time--and distantly I knew that she was experiencing her own personal hell, a sickening re-run of the worst event of her life. The woman on the floor was sobbing words and sounds. The screams and the cries and the wail of the sirens braided together oddly and I felt like someone should be doing something to help them before they both went insane. But Kransky was gone and I was bleeding onto the rug of the nice people who owned the house and there wasn't much I could do for any of them as I went into shock, wondering listlessly how many cancer victims died of a gunshot wound before their disease had a chance to claim them.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  The house was thirty minutes north of downtown DC in the town of Potomac, the land of newly minted internet and real estate millionaires. The old money, disturbed by the invasion of the noveau riche, had left for horse farms and polo grounds in central Virginia, Kentucky, or Tennessee. New money spent as well as the old, though, and my taxi drove past gates and wrought-iron fences so far from the homes they protected that I had to guess that there actually were homes somewhere at the end of those long, serpentine driveways.

  The precise rows of pines and swards of dead grass rolling by the window had a calming effect on me, though the Demerol I was popping every few hours probably had more to do with my pleasantly fuzzy outlook than the scenery did. The only distractions from the view were my ultimate destination and the fact that my shoulder was held up by one of those metal props so that it stuck straight out from my body, making it hard to get comfortable. The brace was to keep my shoulder immobilized, or so the doctor who had reconstructed it said.

  I needed help taking the edge off the memories and the pills helped with that, too. I'd been filled in by the combined stories of the cops on the scene, Julie, and Amanda. A neighbor had seen us skulking around the Lane house with our guns out and called the MPDC. But Kransky had died before the ambulance had gotten there, his blood pumped out in a pool around his body. I wasn't sure how Amanda was holding herself together. It was too early to tell what the experience might mean for her tomorrow, or the next day, or the rest of her life. And, of course, I wasn't in great shape myself. There was nothing I wanted more than to go home and start the healing process, to apologize to Amanda, to pick things up with Julie, to find my equilibrium. But there were loose ends to deal with that could still wind up killing all of us if I didn't take care of them now.

  The driver let me know when we were nearing our target and he slowed down long enough for me to grunt yes or no as we passed more imposing gates and red-brick driveways. On the fourth look, a drive fitting the description I'd been given came into view. I told him to pull in. He pressed the button at the gate. The little box buzzed, then the black iron fence rolled away and we drove up the long asphalt driveway.

  The drive threaded through a front lawn that the Redskins could've used as a practice field. With room for the Cowboys to do their drills on the other side. The mansion at the end of the drive had three floors if you didn't count a turret that jutted up above the roof. I could make out three more buildings in the back that constituted the rest of the compound. Stables or garages or shooting ranges, I supposed. The front door was an oak and iron monstrosity that could've been stolen from a Moorish castle and was large enough to drive the taxi through.

  As we neared the house, two guys in suits came out and took up positions near the door. They had wide, blocky bodies and watched us as we drove up. As we got closer, I could see the suits, though tailored with impeccable care, were too big even for these gorillas. Meaning they had more than pop guns under there. I told the taxi driver to pull up by the door and wait for me. I slid over and got out, then leaned back in, trying not to bump the shoulder cast.

  "I, uh, wouldn't get out of the car, if I were you," I said, with what I hoped was an apologetic tone. "Just sit tight."

  I approached the door, looking from one guy to the next.

  "Mr. Singer?" the one on the left said.

  "In the flesh. More or less."

  "This way, please," the human block said, gesturing towards the entrance.

  Half of the towering front door opened and the guards escorted me into the foyer. We stopped and they motioned for me to put my one good arm up. They did a thorough job frisking me, then ran a wand over and around my body. It went off with a discreet beep when it neared my shoulder.

  "It's the prop," I said, gesturing to my shoulder.

  "Take it off," the one w
ith the wand said.

  I gave him a look. "That and a couple of titanium bolts are all that's holding my shoulder together right now. I couldn't take it off if I wanted to."

  The two glanced at each other.

  "Look, I'm not here to shoot your boss and he knows that. Call him and ask. Or I get back in my taxi and we'll reschedule. Except you get to tell him that."

  A minute later, we crossed the wood-paneled foyer, through a salon that would've made the Sun King proud, and into a drawing room featuring overstuffed furniture and trays with decanters and brandy snifters. On the far wall was a small door, carved with intricate scrollwork featuring a tangle of flowers and vines. The guard knocked once, opened without waiting for an answer, and gestured me through. He held it open, watching as I sidled past, then closed it behind me.

  Beyond was an office that was decorated in the spirit of the rest of the house. In other words, like a medieval hall--or a madman's vision of one. There were heavy oak chairs that could pass for thrones. Tapestries of hunting scenes hung on the wall, the hounds and the bleeding deer locked together forever. A leather and wood globe, badly out of date two hundred years ago, sat on a pedestal in one corner. On the far wall, a fancy arrangement of shields and crossed swords hung above a large fireplace, in which burned a log the size of my torso.

  But the cheery fire and faux Old World furnishings couldn't mask the smells that reached me from the far side of the room. There was the sharp, sterile tang of disinfectant and the musty odor of bodily fluid, covered up but never totally removed. And the underlying stink of death, which really has no description, but you know it when you smell it.

  Sitting in a reclining chair lined with sheets was a small, stick-like man. He was ancient, the skin of his bald head discolored in patches. The few wispy hairs remaining to him were long and white. He was staring into the fire and plucking at the lapels of a flannel robe. In the back of the hand not doing the plucking was a needle with a line running to an IV stand. Next to him was a man dressed in scrubs, fiddling with the valve on one of the lines. Their heads turned as I came in and stopped. The old man, irritated, waved at me to come closer. I crossed the parquet, my footsteps sounding like measured knocks on a door. The nurse dragged over one of the ridiculous wooden chairs for me, then retreated to a corner, out of earshot but not out of the room.