The King

by Steven James

  He stood stoically, gun raised, still aiming at the place where his bullet had met the dog in midair.

  Twenty meters away. Quite a shot.

  Then I saw it.

  “Ralph, behind you!”

  He whipped around as the pit bull sprang at him and latched onto his right forearm. He raised his arm to lift the dog off the ground where he could control it and grabbed its collar with his free hand. The porch light flicked off before I could squeeze off a shot.

  “I got it!” he hollered. “Go!”

  I trusted him and, flashlight on, dashed toward the house.

  My heart was churning in my chest, the adrenaline taking me to another plane, an elemental high, as I threw open the front door and swept through the entryway and into the living room. In my flashlight’s beam the room came into view. Couch. Recliners. Lamps. Magazines on the end table.

  A woman and a girl lay bound on the floor. From the photos in the case files, I identified them immediately as Saundra and Noni Weathers.

  Secure the scene.

  I quickly checked the adjoining rooms, saw no one, and rushed back to Saundra and Noni, removed their gags, and slit the ropes with the automatic knife I carry. “Are you hurt?” I asked Saundra.

  “No, we’re okay.”

  “How many people?”

  “Just one, I think. Basque. I don’t know if there’s anyone else here.”

  He’s worked with partners in the past.

  “Where did he go?”

  Even as she spoke, I heard the engine of a car firing up.

  “That’s him.” She pointed toward the window where the taillights of the squad outside were visible.

  I rushed toward the front door, snapping on the living room and porch lights as I flung it open. “Don’t leave the house.”

  Outside, Ralph had made it to the porch and was facing the police cruiser that was careening away from us through the mud. He fired three times but the squad’s windows were bulletproof.

  His right forearm was bloody, chunks of meat gouged out from where the pit bull had attacked him. The dog lay dead in the yard.

  “Saundra and her daughter are inside. Stay with them.” I sprinted past him. “Clear the house. He might not have been alone. I’ll get Basque.”

  With my car blocking the road, there wasn’t enough room for Basque to get by on either side, but in the slick mud, if he had enough speed and hit the side panel just right he might be able to nudge it out of the way and get past it.

  As I bolted through the rain toward the squad, Basque backed up to gain enough speed to ram my car.

  I closed the space between us as he gunned the engine, and, fishtailing in the mud, roared forward and slammed into the front passenger side of my car. The vehicle moved, but not enough for him to get past. It looked like the squad’s driver’s door might have banged open for a moment.

  His tires spun determinedly and started sinking in the soft earth. Both cars were sliding slowly toward the embankment.

  I skidded in the mud on the way to the driver’s side, almost slipping down the bank into the marsh stretching away from me into the darkness. I stood back from the door so I’d have a clean shot. From this angle I couldn’t see inside the driver’s seat. The headlights from the car cut a glowing swath of light through the rain.

  “Hands out the window!”

  Nothing.

  “Hands out! Now!”

  The squad’s tires were spinning in the mud. With the loose embankment giving way, my car was starting to tilt off the road, and I realized Basque might just get past it.

  Whipping my gun forward, I threw open his door and saw that he wasn’t inside.

  There was a metal accelerator bar pressed against the gas pedal, the other end Velcroed to the steering wheel.

  Lien-hua had said he’d have an escape plan. He was ready for this, he was—

  I spun to search the night, but even as I did, he emerged from the shadows and was on me.

  The impact of his fist against my jaw threw me backward and I smacked into the car. A burst of pain shot through my face, and then I was raising my arm to fire when he grabbed my forearm and twisted my wrist backward to go for my weapon.

  51

  Basque’s grip was like steel, and when he cranked my wrist sideways he was able to wrench the gun free. My SIG dropped to the mud.

  Don’t let him get it, Pat. Do not let him get it!

  Hurtling forward, I threw my arms around him and drove him toward the marsh. His legs smeared out from under him and we tumbled backward, landing together in the mud and rolling down the embankment toward the water. The Mini Maglite that I’d somehow managed to hold on to sent light spinning and flickering through the rain-drenched darkness until I lost hold of it.

  When we hit the water he was on top of me.

  I snatched in as much air as I could before my head went under.

  Struggling to get free, I tried to disentangle myself from him but he squeezed my neck with both hands to hold me under, then repositioned himself to straddle my chest.

  Grabbing at his hands I tried to pull them off my throat, but he had the leverage and I couldn’t peel his fingers away.

  I thought of Tessa and of Lien-hua, of the picnic we’d had, the hope of a future together, then of getting the news that Lien-hua had been attacked, of seeing the look on Tessa’s face when I told her.

  Every moment.

  So brief.

  So unfathomable.

  He was choking me just as he’d done with Lien-hua with the belt. She shot him in the right side when he did. She had—

  Yes.

  I didn’t know exactly where the wound was, but I went for it and landed a series of fierce blows against his side; it only served to weaken his grip a little.

  The world was growing dim, and what little air I had left in my lungs escaped in one sharp, final burst of bubbles.

  While we live.

  Let us live.

  My SIG was still by the car and all I had for a weapon was that automatic knife in my pocket, but the way I was positioned I wasn’t sure I could get to it. Desperate for air, I dug my right hand into my pocket while I tried to peel his fingers off my neck with my left.

  The world was becoming a splintered hungry darkness and as I was starting to fade out for good, I managed to pull the knife free. I flicked out the blade, pictured where his neck would be, and then, with all the strength I had left, I stabbed it fiercely at his throat.

  I missed, but hit the side of his face.

  My hand slammed into his jaw, the blade sliced through his cheek and into his mouth, probably also smashing through his teeth.

  His grip loosened and I pushed him back. I wrestled free from his weight, scrambled against the mire that tried to hold me down, and managed to get my head above water.

  I gulped in a mouthful of air.

  Stood to fight him.

  The headlights from the squad on the road above us gave me enough light to see Basque. The knife was still protruding from his jaw, dark blood draining in thick streaks from his mouth. Off to my right, more clumps of loose soil were cascading down the embankment and my car was teetering on the lip of the bank.

  Basque grabbed the knife and drew it out of his jaw without even flinching, then spit out a mouthful of blood and fragmented teeth. He looked more savage than ever, like some kind of primal beast moving through the marsh toward me in the driving rain.

  As he swiped the knife at me, I dodged to the side and then threw a punch at his bloody mouth and connected hard. His head snapped backward. Before he could turn toward me again, I tugged my feet free of the mud, grabbed him, and threw him under the water.

  He went into the marsh face-first, and I scrambled on top of him and, pressing him down, grabbed his arms, got the knife from him, and cuffed his wri
sts behind him.

  I didn’t pull him out of the water, but held him there, kneeling on his back, forcing his face into the muddy bottom of the marsh.

  There is a dark side to justice.

  And it calls to us all.

  This man deserved to die.

  And he was going to.

  Sirens whined faintly in the night. Backup. They were on their way, but they weren’t close enough to save Basque.

  Beneath me, I could feel his body start convulsing.

  End this.

  For all the times you’ve wanted to stop him, vowed to stop him.

  End this.

  Lien-hua’s question about whether I wanted to catch Basque because of justice or revenge wedged itself like a thorn in my mind, and Tessa’s query about what I would do when I found him—if I was actually going to bring him in—came crawling back to me.

  Basque’s body stopped spasming.

  A few more seconds just to make sure.

  It can end right here, right now.

  Justice doesn’t always have clean hands.

  All I had to do was let go of him and he would never rise, never breathe again. That was justice on behalf of all the people he’d killed, all the lives he’d destroyed.

  I stepped back and caught my breath.

  Apart from the ripples from my movement and the unrest caused by the fearsome rain, the water in front of me began to become calm.

  Basque did not rise.

  You did it. You stopped him. You killed him.

  I tried to catch my breath.

  The shift in the headlights caught my attention as the bank gave way. My car came rolling toward me in a landslide of mud and uprooted marsh grass. Instinctively, I grabbed Basque’s body and lurched backward in the mud, dragging him to the side as the car sluiced down the bank and landed with a thick, heavy splash in the marsh almost exactly where we’d been wrestling with each other.

  Basque was a big man, and it wasn’t easy getting him to shore. At last, I flopped him onto the bank and stood peering down at his motionless body.

  The squad remained at the top of the embankment, but the headlights had stopped moving and I assumed the cruiser must have become lodged against one of the trees bordering the road.

  There was just enough light to see the outline of Basque lying at my feet.

  The sirens drew closer.

  I could remove the cuffs. No one needed to know exactly how this had all played out. My report could simply state that we struggled, that as we fought he tried to drown me and though I was able to free myself, he was killed in the process.

  When I’d first captured him fourteen years ago, I’d told the truth but not the whole truth about what had happened in that abandoned slaughterhouse. I’d let my most basic instincts of violence and fury take over and found pleasure in giving them free rein.

  The battle I’d been fighting inside of myself ever since that day raged inside me still.

  Revenge isn’t your duty, justice is.

  I knew that, yes, I knew it but—

  I stared at Basque, lying dead at my feet.

  And, as much as I wanted to, as much as the shadows called to me, I realized I couldn’t do it, not again. I couldn’t let the truth get blurred, not like it was the first time when I caught him.

  Not again.

  Justice doesn’t always have clean hands.

  But it should.

  So, in the mud and in the rain, I knelt, and I shoved at his abdomen until the water spewed from his mouth, and I did chest compressions and resuscitation breaths against his shattered, bloody mouth—made even harder by the wound in his jaw—and after about thirty seconds, I brought him back, turned him onto his side so he could cough up the marsh water and blood without aspirating on them, and I brought Richard Basque, the man I’d wanted for so many years to kill, back to life.

  To prove to myself that I wasn’t like him.

  Or at least, to attempt to.

  52

  Over the last couple minutes, half a dozen police cars and two ambulances had arrived. Basque had been loaded onto one of them, his wrists and ankles strapped down securely. Two officers sat beside him to make sure he didn’t somehow pull free and escape. The stab wound in his jaw was not life-threatening, but was undoubtedly painful. The gunshot wound in his side was bleeding heavily, having ripped open during our struggle.

  Well, too bad.

  After confirming that they weren’t going to take him to St. Mary’s, the hospital where Lien-hua was, I retrieved my SIG from where it’d fallen on the road when I was fighting Basque, then I went back to the house and found Ralph sitting on the porch with a paramedic kneeling beside him inspecting the jagged, gaping bite wound on his right forearm.

  Through the living room window I could see Saundra and her daughter sitting on the couch, a female officer with them, no doubt asking the kinds of questions it would have been awkward for a male officer to ask.

  While the paramedic tried to convince Ralph to ride back to the hospital with him, I watched the taillights of the police escort and the ambulance carrying Basque rumble away in the rain, down the road that led alongside the marsh.

  We had him, finally had him, the man who’d taken the lives of so many, the man who’d tried to kill Lien-hua. And even though we’d managed to get here in time to save Saundra and her daughter, sadness still weighed down on me.

  We’d discovered the body of the missing Maryland State Police officer in the trunk of the squad. And we received word from the Chesapeake Beach Police Department that the two agents who’d been stationed outside Saundra’s house were both dead.

  In just the last few hours, Basque had taken the lives of those three men and he had been about to cannibalize and kill a mother and her little girl.

  I tried to hold myself back from asking the obvious question—“Why?”—but it was hard. Motives are so indecipherable, so elusive. And yet, it’s human nature to try to figure out what they are.

  And despite myself, I found that I was doing that now. I kept coming back to the fact that we were dealing with an elaborate chase reaching back at least to February, to Brandi Giddens’s death.

  Her prints were on the novel in the car.

  Her body was left in the park where Basque tried to kill Lien-hua.

  It was a long, convoluted trail that ended here tonight.

  A chase through time and space.

  The hound and the hare.

  Tessa was always trying to get me to learn investigative techniques by studying Edgar Allan Poe’s fictional detective Auguste Dupin, and now I thought of something Dupin had said in one of Poe’s stories.

  In “The Purloined Letter,” when faced with an inexplicable crime that had completely baffled the police, Dupin noted that the most frightening criminal of all is “an unprincipled man of genius.”

  That was Basque: a man of sweeping intelligence, but with no conscience, possessed only by the insatiable desire to kill.

  An unprincipled man of genius.

  “I’m fine,” Ralph was telling the paramedic. “My wife’s a nurse. She can look at this when I get home. I’m not gonna go to the hospital.”

  “Agent Hawkins,” the EMT argued futilely, “I really think—”

  But Ralph raised a hand to cut him off. “Just clean it out and wrap it up so it doesn’t bleed so much. It’s just a scratch.” A ragged chunk of meat was missing from his arm. It was not just a scratch.

  I figured this argument might go on for a while.

  “I’m going inside for a minute,” I told him.

  • • •

  The lights in the house were on, and the entryway felt almost cozy and inviting—until I remembered whose house I was standing in.

  In contrast to the squalid apartment where he’d taken Lien-hua, Basque’s home here
on the edge of the wetlands was clean, neat, and rustic, with handmade cherrywood furniture that matched the log cabin–esque feel of the place. The soft smell of pine and a hint of fireplace smoke gently permeated the air.

  I stepped into the hall.

  Thinking about the vile things Basque had done over the years, what he was capable of, sent a shiver running through me. He was a psychopath, or a sociopath, or whatever term you preferred, yes, he was that, but he was not some kind of fairy-tale monster, he was just as human as anyone.

  And that was the most troubling part of all.

  At times each one of us pokes around the rubble of our dark desires, seeing how far we can wander into the nightmare and still remain who we are.

  Like I had in the marsh not more than ten minutes ago.

  It would be easy, so easy, to get lost there in the shadowlands that lie inside of me.

  When you spend as much time as I have tracking people through the territory of the damned, you can never entirely shake off the shadows—they become part of you. And sometimes it’s hard to find your way back home again.

  The thought troubled me deeply.

  I told myself once again that I wasn’t like Basque, that no one was.

  But, in a sense, I am, we all are.

  Saundra and Noni were still seated on the couch, the female officer speaking softly with them.

  Miss Weathers looked shaky and had one arm around her daughter, who was leaning against her side staring wide-eyed around the room.

  The officer, a slim woman with deeply concerned eyes, looked my way. Her name tag read T. Kayne.

  I indicated toward Saundra and Noni. “Can I speak with them for a moment, Officer Kayne?”

  She hesitated at first but then nodded and went to join two officers who were standing in the kitchen, staring uneasily at the refrigerator, waiting for the crime scene investigators to get here to process the house.

  When I was in high school I’d known Saundra only in passing. Earlier I’d seen her photo in the case files—gentle features, auburn hair, that serious but thoughtful face. Russet eyes. She hadn’t changed much.

  “Agent Bowers. Thank you. For catching him.”