Black Lightning

by John Saul

  The incident. He kept going back over the whole experience. It wasn’t a complete blackout, for he remembered being awake for a while in the ambulance. After all, if he wasn’t awake at least part of the time, how had he been able to hear the paramedics talking? And he had heard them; even now he could clearly remember their voices.

  “Put it up to three hundred joules and hit him again.”

  “That’s the way.”

  “Try again at three-sixty.”

  “Joules.” That was an electrical term. Someone had said to “put it at three hundred joules and hit him again.”

  When it struck, the truth crashed into Glen’s consciousness like surf hurling against a rocky cliff. He hadn’t been awake at all.

  He’d been dead. He’d been dead, and the paramedics had been fighting to make his heart begin beating again, to make him start breathing again.

  Glen felt an icy sweat break out on his skin, and for a moment he was afraid he might have a second heart attack. He reached for the buzzer to summon the nurse, but the wave of terror eased, and he let his hand drop back onto the thin blanket that covered him.

  He hadn’t died, and he wasn’t going to.

  But it had been close. A lot closer than he’d realized until just that moment.

  Was that why he’d felt different today? Disconnected? Was that why he’d had a hard time concentrating on what Anne and his children had been saying?

  He lay back on the pillows and turned to gaze out the window as he thought about it. Of course he felt different now—how could he not? When you come that close to dying—

  His thought broke off as he spotted someone on the street below, the shadowy figure of a man moving along the rain-slicked sidewalk across the street, and for a moment had the feeling he knew him. But then, when the man looked up—almost as if he’d felt Glen watching him—his face was briefly illuminated by the yellow glow of a streetlight and Glen realized he’d been wrong.

  The man was a stranger, someone he was certain he’d never seen before.

  A moment later the man looked away again and quickly disappeared into the shadows of the street.

  CHAPTER 17

  All day long the fantasy had been growing inside the man, and all day long the pressure to act on the fantasy had been building. When it got to the point where he was starting to feel like he might explode, the man decided to go for a walk. At least he could breathe some fresh air, and in the dark he’d be by himself.

  No one would recognize him.

  No one would ask him questions.

  But even going outside didn’t work, for he wasn’t on the sidewalk more than thirty seconds before he felt someone watching him.

  When he looked around, sure enough, someone was staring at him out of one of the windows of the hospital.

  Maybe he ought to just go up there and pull the guy’s plug. Wouldn’t that be something? Just to walk into the room, tell the guy off, then jerk the plugs out of the wall and watch him die?

  Yes, just watch him die!

  In the cool damp of the evening the man felt a shiver go through him, a chill that wasn’t brought on by the weather at all.

  It was brought on by the fantasy that had been growing in his mind until he finally knew he was going to act on it.

  But not with the guy in the hospital room. Not where there would be lights, and people, and he would be caught so soon he wouldn’t even get to enjoy what he’d done.

  The man walked on up the sidewalk, finally cutting over a block, then zigzagged north and west until he finally came to Broadway. A lot of lights there, and a lot of people, but it didn’t matter because he fit right in with the rest of the crowd. Broadway was humming with people tonight, but that was good, for it meant he would be only one more anonymous face in the crowd. He threaded his way along the sidewalk, ignoring the teenage panhandlers with their green hair, black lipstick, and pierced lips, brows, and ears.

  When he saw the person he was looking for, he would know.

  Two men holding hands came toward him. The man’s eyes fixed angrily on them, but at the last second he stepped aside to let them pass, only to turn and glower at them once again when he heard them laughing as they walked away.

  Laughing at him?

  His fingers clenched with sudden fury, but when they didn’t turn around to look back at him, he forced his anger down and continued on his way.

  Covertly, his eyes searched the crowd.

  He was almost up to the QFC supermarket when he saw her.

  About thirty, with blond hair cut short, and a skirt that was even shorter than her hair.

  She was on the other side of the street, going the same way he was, and it didn’t look like anyone was with her. In fact, it looked like maybe she was doing the same thing he was doing.

  Looking for someone.

  The man crossed the street, increasing his pace until he was only a few yards behind her, then slowed, keeping the distance between himself and the girl steady.

  She kept heading north, finally turning in at the DeLuxe Bar & Grill.

  The man slowed, then loitered outside until he saw her all but disappear into the darkness at the back of the café. Only when he was certain she hadn’t met anyone did he go inside himself.

  She was sitting alone at one of the small tables for two.

  The man, his heart suddenly pounding with anticipation, lowered himself into one of the chairs at the next table, choosing the one that would let him make eye contact with her.

  His skin began to tingle and he felt a glowing ember of excitement ignite in his belly as he thought about what he was going to do.

  His excitement growing, the man searched his memory, dredging up the minutiae of what the other victims had suffered, struggling to recapture all the details of what Richard Kraven had been accused of doing.…

  An hour and a half later, when the woman finally got up to leave the DeLuxe, the man still hadn’t spoken to her.

  He had contented himself with watching her, with imagining what would happen later, when they were together, when he’d finally made himself known to her.

  Now, as she passed through the front door, he dropped some money on the table to cover the cost of the single beer he’d nursed through the ninety minutes, and followed her out into the night. For a moment it seemed as if the woman had vanished into the darkness, but then the man caught sight of her walking west toward the Harvard Exit theater. Following her as he had earlier, keeping several yards between her and himself, the man tracked her two blocks west, then turned south to follow her down Boylston. When she finally turned to go into one of the anonymous two-story buildings that lined the block, she paused, looked back, then cocked her head and smiled at him.

  She’d known.

  Known he was watching her, known he was following her.

  But she didn’t know what he wanted, what he intended to do.

  And when she spoke, the glowing ember of excitement in the man’s belly flared into burning anticipation. “It’s okay, fella. I’m kind of lonely, too.” The man said nothing, but moved slowly toward the girl, whose smile widened as she nodded toward the building. “Want to come up for a while?”

  Inside the woman’s apartment, the man looked around to see a space not much different from the one he himself lived in a few blocks away. The once-white paint was dirty and starting to peel, and a few pieces of tired furniture stood on a worn carpet. The coffee table was piled with tabloid newspapers, and in the corner was a dying ficus tree, most of its leaves scattered on the floor around its pot.

  “How come you didn’t say hi at the DeLuxe?” the woman asked, going into the kitchen, pulling open the refrigerator and holding up a beer. “Want one? No extra charge!”

  For a brief moment the man wasn’t quite certain what she meant, but a second later she cleared up the confusion. “How’s fifty for two hours?” she asked. “I usually get a lot more, but it’s kinda slow tonight, and you seem like a nice guy.”

  The m
an glanced quickly at the windows. The curtains were drawn; not even a crack of light showed through from the streetlamp outside.

  Perfect.

  He rose to his feet and moved around into the kitchen. “That’ll be fine, I guess,” he said. He was standing right behind her now, looking over her shoulder as she pulled open a drawer to get a bottle opener.

  The tool she was looking for sat in the midst of a jumble of other utensils, but the one that caught the man’s eye was a knife.

  A large butcher knife whose blade glinted hypnotically.

  The man’s fingers began to tingle once again, and the fire moved from his belly to his groin as he made the final decision. “But I don’t think I’ll really need two whole hours,” he said softly.

  Then, in a movement executed so swiftly that she had no time even to scream, let alone struggle away from his grip, the man’s right arm slid around the woman’s neck, catching her head in the crook of his elbow. As he jerked hard and twisted to one side, he felt the crunching of bones in the woman’s neck as her spine was twisted beyond its limits. Then she went limp and the man lowered her to the floor.

  He stared down at her.

  Had he killed her?

  He could hardly believe it—it had happened so fast he could barely remember what it felt like. Then, as he watched, the woman’s lips suddenly began to work and a tiny sound bubbled up from her throat. Her eyes, wide open, stared up at him, and now he could see that she wasn’t dead at all. He had broken her neck.

  He had paralyzed her.

  But he hadn’t killed her.

  He stared at her for a moment, anticipating what would come next, the fire now raging within him. He reached for the knife.

  At last, savoring the moment he’d been anticipating for what seemed an eternity, the man set to work.

  The woman, utterly paralyzed from the moment the bones in her neck snapped, felt nothing.

  And, blessedly, she died quickly, unaware of the carnage the man was inflicting on her body.

  CHAPTER 18

  The Saturday morning that arrived two days later was one of the dull gray Seattle dawns that carried a chill far greater than the temperature warranted. It was on mornings like this that Anne Jeffers’s dedication to retaining the body she’d graduated from college with was sorely tested, for getting up to join the parade of joggers in Volunteer Park was hard enough even when the weather was perfect. Actually, it wasn’t even this hard in the depths of winter, when you knew each consecutive morning was going to be as clammy as the last. But Friday had produced one of those deceptively warm afternoons that promised—generally falsely—a long and sunny summer. Even the evening had stayed clear and warm, and when they’d walked home from visiting Glen in the hospital, she and the kids had cut over to Broadway to get ice cream cones and watch the passing parade. Now, as she lay in bed gazing glumly out the window, she realized she’d been suckered again. It wasn’t summer yet; in fact even spring appeared to have decided the whole thing had been a mistake and invited the gloomy winter skies to take over again. Offered the opportunity, the clouds had quickly gathered, and were now occupied with drizzling their contents onto the city with, Anne suspected, the deliberate intention of drowning the good mood that had spread along Broadway last night.

  Well, the hell with it, Anne decided. If it wasn’t enough that Glen wouldn’t be out of the hospital for another week, that she had so far turned up nothing at all in the files she’d been exploring in the basement of the Public Safety Building, and that Vivian Andrews had pointedly asked her yesterday how she was coming with a story, there was also the fact that she was finding sleeping alone in the big bed in the creaking old house a lot harder than she’d thought it would be. For this morning, her body could damn well take care of itself. She rolled over, snuggled deeper under the down comforter and closed her eyes. But instead of sleep, all that came to her was guilt.

  She got up, pulled on her clothes, and went downstairs. Both the kids were already up, Heather on the telephone, Kevin staring at the television set. She went into the kitchen, poured a cup of coffee from the pot that had already been brewed—one of the less doubtful advantages of having a daughter old enough to start sopping up caffeine like a true Seattleite—and was just wandering back into the living room as the morning news came on. The face of Janalou Moorehead filled the screen, and since Anne had never been a fan of what she and the rest of the Herald staffers thought of as empty heads with nice voices, she picked up the morning paper. But today Janalou’s seductive voice caught her attention: “Murder on Capitol Hill tops our report this morning,” the woman said, putting a suitably serious expression over her normally smiling visage. “The body of a thirty-two-year-old woman has been found in an apartment on—”

  Not waiting for Janalou Moorehead to finish her sentence, Anne sprang from the sofa, relieved Heather of the telephone, offered an unceremonious good-bye to the friend her daughter had been talking to, and pressed the button to end the call.

  “Mother!” an outraged Heather exclaimed. “That was—”

  “I don’t care who it was,” Anne told her. “That’s why we gave you a phone of your own in your room. I have to—” But before she could finish what she was saying, the phone came alive and she instantly released the button. “Yes?”

  “Who the hell have you been talking to?” Carl Waters, the weekend editor at the Herald, sounded even more annoyed than usual. “If you’re going to sit on your phone all morning, at least turn on the cellular, okay?”

  “I’m sorry, Carl,” Anne said, knowing an explanation was neither expected nor wanted. “I just heard Janie-Lou Emptyhead. What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know much more than she does,” Carl replied. “We caught the dispatch on the scanner half an hour ago, and I’ve been trying to get hold of you ever since.”

  “What’s the address?” Anne asked. “And who’s already there?”

  Carl Waters gave her an address on Boylston, no more than ten blocks from where she was. “A photographer’s on his way. If you head out now, you should be able to get there about the same time.” Anne was about to hang up when Waters spoke again. “Anne, there’s something funny about this one, which is why I kept trying to call you. The police dispatcher gave the address, then told the unit that maybe they sent Blakemoor and Ackerly home too soon.”

  Anne’s fingers tightened on the phone. “Blakemoor?” she repeated. “They couldn’t have been talking about the Kraven task force, could they?”

  “They didn’t take me into their confidence,” Waters replied archly.

  Anne was careful to betray nothing of the excitement she was suddenly feeling. “All right. I’m on my way.” Hanging up the phone, she glanced around the room, but the big leather bag that was halfway between a grip and a satchel wasn’t on the sofa where she was sure she’d left it. “Where’s my gritchel?” she asked.

  Kevin glanced up from the TV. “Under the coffee table,” he told her. “You covering the murder?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Can I go with you?” It was a request he always made, and his mother always denied. Still, he figured it was always worth a shot. Just once, he’d love to get in on the excitement, maybe even get a look at a real dead body …

  “No, you can’t,” Anne told her son as she quickly rummaged through the jumble in her gritchel, checking for her tape recorder, notebook, and the camera she always carried, just in case. “And you can’t go wandering over there on your own, either. Okay?” Kevin looked annoyed, but sighed his agreement. “You going to visit Dad this morning?”

  “I don’t know,” Kevin began. “Me and Justin were gonna play ball in the park, but—”

  “Tell you what,” Anne interrupted. “I don’t know how long I’m going to be stuck on this story this morning, so if you’ll visit Dad for me, I’ll spring for a movie tonight. Okay?”

  “Justin, too?” Kevin bargained.

  “Why not?” Anne agreed. She dug into her large leather
bag once more, produced a ten dollar bill and handed it to her son, “Call the hospital before you go, and find out if there’s anything Dad wants.”

  As his mother disappeared out the front door, Kevin gazed at the ten dollar bill in his hand. If his father didn’t want anything, was he going to be allowed to keep the ten?

  By the time he walked into Room 308 at the hospital an hour later, though, most of the ten dollars was gone, spent on the magazines his father had asked for.

  “So what’s this big story your mother’s working on?” Glen asked as his son handed him the copies of Architectural Digest and Newsweek, the two magazines that had nearly depleted the ten dollars. “I thought she was still rooting around in the basement down at the police department.”

  Kevin flopped into the chair at the foot of his father’s bed, his eyes scanning the monitors on the wall above the bed. “It’s a murder,” he reported. “Something about the guy they electrocuted last week.”

  Glen’s eyes clouded. What was Kevin talking about? What could a new murder have to do with someone who’d already been executed? “Richard Kraven?” he asked.

  Kevin shrugged. “I guess. Mom said something about the Kraven task force, so I guess she must have been talking about that guy, huh?” When his father said nothing, Kevin shifted gears. “Hey, Dad? When are you coming home?”

  Glen ignored his son’s question, instead reaching over to pick up the remote control from his bedside stand and flip on the television, surfing through the channels, then stopping when he saw an image of an ugly three-story apartment building. The sidewalk in front of it was cut off by bright yellow police tape, and a crowd had gathered across the street. An off-camera reporter was trying to fill a lot of time with very few facts. “The victim is Shawnelle Davis, an unemployed woman who lived alone in an apartment on the second floor. Early reports are that the body was mutilated in the same fashion as the victims of Richard Kraven, and that—”