by Brian Hodge
Two minutes later he had his answer: The door was locked, the CLOSED sign was displayed, with no sign of Janika, and some husky guy coming out of the stockroom. Couldn’t really see his features, the window must have been smeared, but —
Andrei terminated the call and made his next one to the police.
Could everything really be resolved as simply as that?
Maybe it could…if only for tonight and not in the grand scheme, but tonight would be enough, no victory too small.
“Tell me the truth about something,” he said to Manon. “You kept insisting you could help me. And you did, you really did, you kept me sane while we were waiting for something to happen, but…that’s it, isn’t it? You couldn’t really do anything beyond that…could you?”
“Yeah. I could’ve, I think. I can, if you still need it. But there’s a catch.” Wasn’t there always. “If I do, you’ll probably never see me again.”
“You don’t mean…dead, do you?”
She snorted. “Of course not.”
“Then why do you say that—never again?”
She took her eyes off the road and he didn’t even care, because maybe there were worse things than a car wreck. “Because it’s true, you idiot. Things have prices.”
The thought hit him like a nail in the heart: Life without Manon. Life after Manon. Life as though Manon had never existed. He detested them all, instantly, wanted to do everything in his power to negate them.
He’d always sensed that she was a wanderer at heart—if not running from something, then toward it, whether or not she might recognize it when she found it. In casual conversation, out would slip another reference to someplace she claimed to have been for a time: her native France, of course, and Australia, and Ireland and Italy and Mongolia and now the States, and a heap of other points on maps that he couldn’t recall right now. She couldn’t have stayed in any of these places for very long—she had old eyes, maybe, but certainly not an old face, and her body moved like blooming youth itself.
So what to make of the fact that she had stayed here in Pittsburgh, working for Janika, for the past three years? It didn’t seem to fit Manon’s pattern, or at least the pattern that he’d put together from the bits and pieces she’d shared with him. One or the other of them had been waiting for something, he supposed, except he wasn’t sure which one, or for what. Either she’d been waiting for him to show evidence of turning back into a whole person again, or he had been waiting for her to come into the shop one day and announce that she was moving on, so he could beg her to reconsider and use the threat as unprecedented motivation to put his fears behind him.
It now looked as though he knew which of them had cracked first.
“Do you want to go away, and not ever see me again?” he asked. “Because I would really hate that.”
“I’ve done lots of things I didn’t want to do. I still did them because I knew that want and need aren’t the same thing.”
“That’s no answer.”
“Of course it is. It’s just not as straight as you would like it to be, and it’s the best answer I know to give you.”
“Then I guess there’s no point at all in my asking—again—what it is you think you can do to help me in case the police don’t.”
“No point at all, no. Especially not when we’re almost there.”
He sank back into his seat and found that maybe he needed to continue picking away until he found something they could really argue about, because it would at least be better than sitting in silence hoping he still had a sister.
Instead, he stared out the windows again at the neon and streetlights and the whirling dead leaves as they churned past the windows. How had he thought of them earlier? Right—ghosts of another life.
Did Manon even realize that he’d had one? Did she know that he had majored in Media Studies in college, dean’s list every semester? Did she know that between graduation and the time the memories began to break through, he had worked as a promotions coordinator for a video gaming company headquartered in Philadelphia? That he’d been engaged, even if now he could barely remember the girl’s face?
He used to think of those eight years between the accident and the wearing away of his amnesia as his real life, a far-off land to which he could eventually find his way back if he tried hard enough. His college years and early twenties sat behind him like a gulf, and he stood on either side, the Andrei of today staring back across the chasm at his stupid teenage self, recognizing him and his every fear and hesitation and uncertainty about the future. He felt so much more kinship now with that hapless seventeen-year-old than he did the honored graduate.
Because the years in between weren’t his real life at all, but a dream, a delusion built on lies. How could his life have meant anything when, at its end, he was destined to be nothing more than something’s statistic, a poker chip, a gold coin. The idea of nothingness would have been far easier to deal with—neither punishment nor reward, just the snuffing out of his life like a candle at the end of its wick. He could’ve found comfort in that, actually, compared to the monstrous greed of the Heaven for which he’d been groomed since birth.
Believe in something else, Manon had suggested, and maybe that would be enough to carry him somewhere else.
Right now, he’d have to say that he believed in the redemptive power of rage.
No telling where that might take him.
* * *
Manon parked at the opposite end of the block, the street in front of Global Village drenched in the swirling lights of three patrol cars. The air, damp and chilly enough to scrape bones after a warm October, crackled with their static and crosstalk.
Andrei and Manon had to shoulder past knots of onlookers gathering along the sidewalk—ghouls hoping to see a body, probably. He showed his ID to a uniformed officer, who radioed inside for permission to let them enter, but by then, Manon was already tugging on his arm and pointing through the plate glass: a glimpse of Janika in a gap between pairs of shoulders.
Alive.
His gut loosening and chest lightening with relief, Andrei glanced around to see if someone was sitting captive in the back of one of the squad cars. When he found them empty, he widened his search to see if anyone appeared to have been handcuffed. But no—no prisoners anywhere.
Inside the shop, Janika broke away from the police and met him halfway. He hugged her tighter than he had in maybe forever, burying his face into her hair and shoulder so he could breathe her in. His eyes could be fooled, and his arms lose all feeling, but they’d had each other’s scents since they were children.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered in her ear, hoping she might know just how much ground those two little words covered…and maybe she did, because she punched him in the back as if to tell him that none of it mattered, now or ever again.
She pulled back and he got a look at the reddened patch on her chin, deepening into a bruise. Her face seemed elongated, pulled down and hollowed, and absolutely full of dread.
“Corey…” she said, in a voice that made his heart break all over again.
It was another tense few minutes until they got word from the patrol cars dispatched to his restaurant that he was going to be all right too, nothing worse than a hard knock on the head…and from that point, it was nothing but questions, and plenty of them, first from a uniformed sergeant and then from a detective that arrived from the Major Crimes unit.
As he got a fuller picture of what had happened this evening, the less sense her attacker’s strategy made to him. First going to Corey’s place in the afternoon, shutting it down between the lunch and dinner crowds—apparently for no other reason than to have something with which to wield leverage over Janika—then coming here, the guy had gone to an awful lot of risk, trouble, and exposure for…nothing.
As soon as Janika had made the call, he’d popped her on the chin hard enough to put her out for a minute or two, then dragged her into the stockroom, lashed her to a chair with bonds improvise
d from sleeves ripped from blouses grabbed out front…and then he had left. Through the front door, too, rather than sneaking out the back. It hadn’t been in response to a threat, either, forced to deviate from his implied plan of waiting for Andrei to arrive. Janika swore that she’d regained consciousness before the man had even gagged her in the chair, and that she’d heard him exit the front door a good five minutes or so before she’d heard the approaching sirens.
He seemed to have accomplished everything he’d set out to—doing no one any permanent harm, taking nothing, and leaving nothing behind other than puzzlement and fear. Had he gotten Andrei and Manon to vacate the house so he could break in and wait for them there? No, that made even less sense. He would have to know that, after this, the police would be escorting everyone home tonight, making sure they got settled in safely, and maybe even standing guard for a few days.
The detective escorted Janika away so she could work with a sketch artist at the bureau house on Western. Andrei promised that he would meet her there as soon as possible, and on the way out she turned over her keys to the shop so he could lock up after everyone was through—the crime scene techs weren’t finished yet.
Later, back out on the street, the moon was high and the gathered crowd had lingered, nothing to see here but they hung around anyway, steam rising from a couple dozen coffee cups. Somebody was doing good business tonight, at least. He and Manon were halfway back to her car when one of the onlookers, a broad-shouldered guy wearing a thick stadium jacket, fell into step beside them and then, once they were in a clear stretch, moved into their path.
“Well that was predictable,” he said, and nodded to the patrol cars, where the uniformed officers were preparing to clear out after their canvass of the block. “Thanks for doing the predictable thing tonight and making it all so easy, Andrei.”
He knew he should have shouted for help, but his voice stuck in his throat. Him…this was him, the monster who’d killed Kimmy, who’d pretended to be someone she knew, trusted, and who had opened her up like a medical school cadaver.
“This must be the farthest you’ve been from your crowbar in over a week.”
Andrei looked at Manon, who didn’t appear to have seen this coming either.
“I’m here, you’re here, and they’re here.” Another nod to the police. “You want to turn me in, have me arrested? Make sure you can sleep safe tonight? I’ll do you one better. I’ll turn myself in, right this minute, right here in front of God and everybody. Pay close attention, now, you don’t want to miss anything, and I don’t want you to, because then I’ll just have to set something else up and maybe next time I won’t show as much restraint.”
He headed straight for the nearest cop.
“Manon…?” Andrei said. “What the hell is happening here?”
“Shut up and watch,” she told him, then her voice dropped to a murmur, and the next thing she said might not have even been to him, but to herself: “I’ve only heard of this, I’ve never seen it.”
Nor could he hear what the guy in the stadium coat was saying to the cop, but from his body language, it seemed clear enough. He was confessing, doing everything short of assaulting the officer to get taken into custody…slapping one hand against his chest as if to say he was the one they were looking for, even pushing both hands toward the cop, palms up, as if begging for the cuffs. And it wasn’t working. The cop, with a patient but I-don’t-need-this-crap expression on his face, patted the guy on the shoulder and firmly sent him on his way.
He returned to where Andrei and Manon waited, in the strangest blend of defeat and triumph Andrei had ever seen.
“I don’t know what he saw,” the guy said. “I don’t know what any of them see, ever. But it isn’t the real me.” He smiled a smile of carnivores. “I think of it as the light of Heaven. It reflects back something else whenever I need it because there’s a risk. I wanted you to see that demonstration of it so you don’t have to waste your time or mine from now on by calling in the boys in blue. Who look to be doing a fine, thorough job tonight. But they. Can’t. Help you.”
So that was what death looked like—anything it needed to? Funny, he’d known that all along.
“What’s stopping you from gutting me right here on the street, then?” Andrei said.
“Nothing. But I did promise your sister something earlier: that I wouldn’t hurt you unless you asked me to.”
“You’re gonna be waiting a long time, then.”
“That was your sister’s reaction, too, more or less. Hey, well. Live and learn. Die and learn more.” He shrugged. “There’s just one thing for you to remember while we’re waiting: You’re the one who laid down the terms of this challenge. Not me, you. The exact terms.”
Andrei was still trying to puzzle that one through when the guy pulled a hand from his pocket. The last thing Andrei expected to see was a cell phone. The guy extended his arm, almost a friendly gesture, and held it there until Andrei accepted the phone.
“The person that used to own that doesn’t need it anymore. It should be good for a few days of use. Keep it handy. I’ll check in with you. Soon. We’ll see where we stand then. I can’t guarantee there won’t be other calls coming in on it, so you can deal with those however you want.” He began to move to the side, a lateral fade, whatever thugs like this did to disappear once they were satisfied they’d made you shit your pants. “Until then, make sure you keep up on the news.”
“Don’t be in such a hurry,” Manon said. It appeared to take him by surprise, something not in his script. She pointed at the next storefront down. “You can spare enough time for a coffee, can’t you?”
He looked skeptical, and in fact it was the first that he’d appeared to really take notice of Manon. “The three of us sitting down for a chat about all the good times we’re going to have? I don’t think so.”
“No. Just me. You and me.”
He considered, reconsidered. “Okay. You have me curious, I admit.” Now he looked almost amused. “Sure. Why not.”
“Manon…” said Andrei. No matter what she’d said, what she thought she could accomplish, he did not like the idea of the two of them heading off together, even if it was just the neighborhood coffeehouse. Size-wise, this guy made three of her.
“Just go on to the car, Andrei.” She tossed him the keys. The second set he’d inherited tonight. “If I’m not out in twenty minutes, then…”
She took him by the arm, held tight for a few moments as though wondering what to do with it, and then stretched onto tiptoes. Several times over the past days he had imagined kissing her, but never like this, with their lips so cold that at least one of them might as well have been dead.
“Then enjoy your life for as long as you can.”
X
He drank it black and scalding, no frills, as she had expected he would. For Manon, though, there was no such thing as coffee with too much chocolate.
They took a table along one wall, the place starting to fill again now that the audience had decided the street theater down the block had played itself out, nocturnal caffeine junkies wandering back in for plush chairs and books, tables and board games. Either way things went tonight, or the next few days at the very most, it was likely that this might be her last time in the place, and she knew she was going to miss it. Truth be told, though, there were a million others like it in the world, and her life was filled with places to which she had become attached, and now could scarcely remember at all.
Her companion leaned heavily on both elbows, looming across the table. “You don’t seem to be in the dark about what’s up, and that means you must know enough about me by now to…well, do I really have to go on?” he said. “So I’ve got to tell you, I’m surprised it doesn’t seem to worry you any more than it does.”
“I don’t have anything to fear from you. I’d be harder to kill than I’m sure you must think. And I have hurt much worse than what that girl in Wyoming did.”
He feigned being impressed. �
�And you’re still here to talk about it. Very good.”
Manon smiled over the brim of her mug. “And I’ll still be around to talk about it after you’re a heap of warped old bones.”
That got his attention, his slab of forehead creasing with the start of a scowl.
“You sound like someone very much used to talking without others getting in any say of their own,” she went on. “But indulge me, if you would, okay? Because you’re right—I do know all I really need to know about you. I don’t mean I know who you are, but to me you’re not so much of a who as a what…and I probably know much more about what you are than you do.”
His nostrils widened, narrowed. “This should be good.”
“My guess is you have been getting away with murder since you were quite young. Maybe even since you were a boy. By now you must have killed dozens of people, maybe more than a hundred, and for none of them have you ever been under any kind of serious suspicion. You never have felt as much as a single tiny flicker of conscience about any of them. It’s just the opposite. You’re no common killer, you’re not even an uncommon killer. You’re exalted by it. What you do, you do with the grace of God, and in contrast to most people who claim that, with you it’s not just a delusion.”
“So you can read books by FBI profilers and regurgitate a few choice fragments and tart it up with a little personal observation.” He sighed. “You’re not exactly wowing me here.”
“You have a name?” she asked. “I’m Manon, but you would’ve heard that outside. Whatever your name is, it doesn’t matter —“
“Bruce,” he cut in, as if it did.
“— because you’re probably starting to feel less and less connected to it. It’s not you anymore because you’re not you anymore. And you know why.” She set her mug down and leaned in to put her face closer to his, staring him in his hard little eyes. “Whatever you were before—‘the edge of God’s sword,’ I’ve heard it called—now you feel that you’re becoming something even more than that…being given greater responsibility. It probably started with your most recent kills. Andrei’s friend in Wyoming, or maybe one or two before that. But not long ago.”
