Jack of Spades

by James Hankins

  “You want to sit down for a few minutes?” Olivia asked.

  “It’s Friday night. You don’t have a date or anything?” He tried to keep his tone light, the question innocent.

  “Not tonight.” He sensed something in her response. She paused and he sensed something in that, too, but he couldn’t tell what it was. “I was just going to have a glass of wine. Care for one?”

  She’d kept her tone neutral, too, he noticed. She was trying to sound like a friend, like an ex-wife. Not a woman offering a potential romantic partner a drink.

  “Sounds nice, thanks.”

  She padded out of the room on her sexy little bare feet and Spader tried not to notice. He hadn’t really spent much time alone with her since the divorce. It was more painful than he’d expected, made even more so by the domesticity of the atmosphere—a glass of wine in what used to be their home together. But she’d moved on, and he was trying to accept that.

  Olivia returned with two glasses of red wine. Merlot, maybe, or a cabernet. Spader didn’t know wine. He liked the taste of it well enough, though. He took the glass from her and when she sat on the sofa and tucked her legs under her, he sat at the other end and fought the urge to put his feet up on the coffee table.

  They made pleasant small talk for a while, but after a few minutes Spader had to ask, “Am I still public enemy number one on David’s list?”

  “We both were for a while, but you beating him up the other night earned you the top spot, I think.”

  “Olivia, I didn’t mean to, but when I saw—”

  “Relax. David told me what happened. He wasn’t happy, but even with the spin he was putting on it I could see why you did what you did.”

  “I’ve called him a couple of times a day since that happened, but he doesn’t answer my calls. I don’t know if he’s even listening to my messages anymore. He hasn’t responded to texts, either. I don’t suppose he’s home tonight?”

  “He’s never home anymore. He left right after dinner, wouldn’t say where he was going. He’ll probably roll in at three or four in the morning. Sometimes he doesn’t come home at all.”

  Spader sighed. “Wonder how long he’s going to hate us.”

  She shook her head. “Until we either change our minds or he sees we’re right.”

  Spader blew out a breath. “Gonna be a while then, I guess.”

  They moved on to other, less unpleasant topics, catching up on people who used to be joint friends of theirs. They soon exhausted that subject, but neither seemed overly anxious to end their impromptu evening, so they sipped their wine in comfortable silence until Spader finally said, “I don’t want to pry, but when I first got here you said something about how you probably won’t be showing Jason your photos. Everything okay there?”

  Again, he tried to keep it sounding innocent. She regarded him a moment, then said, “Just a little argument. Nothing major. My comment to you was an overreaction, I guess. I’d just hung up the phone with him when you called.” She fell silent, seemed to be weighing whether to say what she was about to say. “When I said I was away for a few days, well, that’s who I was with. Jason had a two-day conference in Las Vegas and he asked me to go. So I postponed my scheduled showings for a couple of days and went with him.” He didn’t say anything, so she continued. “Let’s just say our first trip away together could have been a bigger success. But we’ll get over it, I suppose. And you don’t want to hear this anyway.”

  He didn’t. He would have, of course, if the rift between Olivia and the new guy had been more serious, but apparently it wasn’t.

  “So what’s he do again?” Spader asked. “I just remember that he’s a loser of some kind.”

  “Loser? He’s a doctor, doing important research.”

  “How important?”

  “He’s on a team of specialists and experts trying to find a cure for ALS. You know, Lou Gehrig’s disease?”

  “Yeah? And has he found one yet?”

  “A cure? Of course not.”

  “Probably been at it for years, right? And no cure yet? Sounds kind of like a loser to me.”

  Olivia gave him a hard stare, then smiled. He smiled, too. “Well,” she said, “he tells me he’s only a few days away from wiping out the disease entirely. And did I mention that during his lunch hours he’s been putting the final touches on his cure for cancer? Oh, and he took care of Parkinson’s over coffee with his assistant this morning.”

  They made more small talk, moved on to a second glass of wine, and, despite this moment being very nearly what he’d been hoping for for months, he felt his mind drifting to the Galaxo case, to the lunatic in the yellow mask, and to Stanley Pendleton, who Spader believed was that lunatic. It was a little early yet to check in with the officer watching Pendleton’s house, but Spader couldn’t help but wonder what Stanley was up to. Was he feeling the pressure at all? Did he know he was being watched? Was he going to wait for the heat to dissipate before he struck again? Or was he, at that moment, planning—

  “And there it is,” Olivia said.

  Spader blinked and found himself back in the moment. “What? There’s what?”

  “The thing you’ve never been able to understand, never been able to see.” She looked at him over her wineglass from the other end of the couch, a wistful smile shaping her pretty lips. “One of the main reasons things didn’t work between us.”

  Spader opened his mouth to speak but said nothing. He knew what she meant. And he knew she was right. He smiled ruefully.

  “Olivia, I can’t help it that I don’t punch a clock. Mine isn’t a nine-to-five job. I may leave work at six o’clock, but my mind’s on the job all the time. It has to be.”

  “I understand, John. I’m not blaming you. I’m just telling you that your focus, your dedication, those traits that help make you such a good cop…well, they don’t help make you a terrific companion sometimes.”

  He almost protested, then countless moments flashed through his mind, moments when Olivia had said something and he hadn’t been listening because he’d been running facts of a case through his mind, moments when he’d missed a comment or joke because he’d been somewhere else mentally, moments when they’d been in a public place but he’d been lost in private thoughts. At first, Olivia had admired his dedication. After a while, it became a joke between them. Not long after that, it was a tired joke. Toward the end, it was a source of tension. But Spader couldn’t help it. He didn’t know if he could be the cop he wanted to be if he was able to shut it down completely in the evenings and on weekends. He was dedicated. He had to be. He even thought of the last time he’d been with Hannah, when he left her right in the middle of sexual intercourse after a call came in on the Galaxo case. If he ever needed proof that his job came first, that was it.

  “Is that it?” Spader asked. “That pretty much the reason we’re not together?”

  She frowned, thinking for a moment. “Not the whole reason, but a big part of it. You remember how I always told you I felt more like a mistress than a wife.”

  “Not the ‘married to the law’ thing again.” He shook his head but smiled slightly.

  Olivia smiled a little, too. “I thought the analogy was apt.”

  “It was apt to drive me nuts every time you used it.”

  Olivia was still smiling, but she grew serious again. “And don’t forget, John, things were rough between us when that Eddie Rivers thing happened.”

  Spader nodded. He could never forget that. If he had to be honest with himself, he was surprised she put up with him after that for as long as she did. But those days were gone. Eddie Rivers was out of their lives. He polished off his second glass of wine in one big gulp, then put the glass on the coffee table. “You ever wonder if we made a mistake?”

  “Getting married?”

  He smiled sadly. “I meant splitting up, but I guess you just answered my question.”

  “John…”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

 
“No, listen. The answer’s yes. I have wondered if we made a mistake splitting up. I’ve thought about it. But in the end, I usually think we did the right thing. You’re a good man, John, a great cop, and a caring father. You just weren’t the best husband in the world.”

  He nodded. “I’m sorry.” And he was, more than she could possibly know.

  “Me, too.”

  She looked like she meant it. She also looked as beautiful as she did the day they met. He wanted to lean over and kiss her. It would be a mistake, he knew, but he was thinking about doing it anyway when his cell phone vibrated against his hip. Olivia heard it and smiled slightly, maybe sadly. His phone vibrated again. He suddenly felt like this was a test. If it was, it was a stupid one. He had a job to do. He answered the phone. Olivia stood and left the room with their wineglasses. He figured they were heading into the sink rather than returning with a refill. Spader’s caller ID told him it was Dunbar calling.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “John, you check in with the uniforms watching our boy?”

  He looked at his watch. Nearly ten thirty. He’d been with Olivia for almost two hours, but it felt like twenty minutes. “I was just about to. I’ll call you back if there’s anything worth reporting.”

  He snapped the phone closed as Olivia returned to the room, empty-handed, as he expected. He stood up.

  “Duty calls?” she asked without any bitterness or sarcasm.

  He didn’t have to go. He had a phone call he wanted to make, to check in with the cop watching Pendleton’s house, but he could make that later. But, he knew, if there had been a moment between them a few minutes ago, and he wasn’t certain there had been, it was over now. So he just smiled and headed for the door.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  He turned. “What do you mean?”

  “This case. The articles in the paper. The news stories. I remember what happened…before. I remember what the Rivers case did to you. What the media did to you. And now they’re at it again, giving you a hard time again, even though it’s a different killer out there, which is bullshit.”

  “I stopped reading the papers.”

  “I just wonder how you are. I worry about you. What they’re doing to you isn’t fair. I want to know you’re okay about all that.”

  “I’m okay,” he said. “Thanks for the wine.” He was a lousy liar, so he turned toward the door when he added, “Hope you patch things up with Jason.” Then he was out the door and she closed it behind him.

  Once he was back in his car and on the road again, he called the Beverly police and was patched through to the officer watching Pendleton’s house.

  “What have you seen?” he asked the cop.

  “Not much. They spend a lot of their time in the TV room, I think, which is toward the back of the house. I’ve seen Pendleton wheel from one room to another a couple of times. I’ve seen the mother walking from room to room, too. That’s about it. Nobody’s visited. Nobody’s left the house.”

  “Okay, thanks.” He ended the call.

  What was Pendleton doing? Was he waiting for the cops to back off? Had he chosen his next victim? Did he already know exactly how he wanted to torture that person? Most importantly, could Spader stop him before he got the chance?

  TWENTY-FOUR

  There it was again. A faint creak. Madeleine Wollner knew every sound her house made, every single one, and she’d never heard that one before. She felt for the remote control beside her on the couch and muted the CD player, silencing the Beatles in the middle of “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” She leaned forward and put her wineglass on the coffee table in front of her. Something wasn’t right. Then she sensed someone else in the room with her, to her right, probably in the doorway to the kitchen. Were she not totally blind, she would have turned her head to see whoever had entered her house. With her unusually strong hearing she could hear him breathing now, an unnatural breathing—like the breaths of a person on the other end of a telephone line. Her heart began to beat alarmingly fast. How could he have gotten in, gotten past their security system? She lunged to her left, fumbling for the phone on the end table. Unhurried footsteps thumped toward her—sneakers squeaking on her hardwood floor—footfalls approaching in measured steps. There was another sound as well, beneath the sound of the footsteps—faint, hard even for her to hear, a metallic sound, getting closer. Her hand closed over the telephone receiver at the same instant something touched her neck, then she felt her skin catch fire and all her muscles burn, muscles she suddenly had no power to control. She felt her body contort in ways she was powerless to prevent. A strange and terrible voice, unnatural and alien, said, “Let me end that for you.”

  She smelled it before it ever came near her nose, a sickly-sweet, chemical odor. Then a soft cloth soaked in the stuff was jammed against her nose and she couldn’t even raise a hand to try to push it away. She tried to hold her breath, but it was too late. She breathed in the chemical and the darkness in her eyes spread to her mind.

  The first thing she heard when she awoke was that strange sound again, so very faint, like the blades of scissors opening and closing. She heard it once, then twice, as footsteps sounded. The next sensation she experienced was the unmistakable smell of a man. His shampoo, soap, a slight body odor beneath deodorant.

  “Ah, you’re awake,” the voice said in a mechanical, high-pitched tremolo.

  She knew then who her intruder was. She’d been following the stories in the news. She recognized the voice from TV commercials, from her niece’s video game. She couldn’t see the mask she knew the man was wearing, of course, but she knew it was yellow, a color she remembered well from the time before she lost her sight to a rare eye disease.

  She tried to move her arms but found she was bound securely to a chair. It felt like she was taped in place. And her mouth was taped shut. Her heart began to race, thumping in her chest, like it was trying to pound its way out of her rib cage. She struggled to control her breathing. She feared that if she hyperventilated with this tape over her mouth, she could suffocate.

  “By now you might have figured out what’s happening here,” Galaxo said. “I don’t know how much you’ve heard about me, so I’ll cover the ground rules, okay?”

  And he did, telling her about a difficult choice she’d soon have to make, the time within which she’d have to make it, and the consequences of her failing to choose in time. Her eyes were fairly useless for most activities, but they could still produce tears. She felt them running down her cheeks as Galaxo spoke.

  “Do you understand the rules, Madeleine?”

  She couldn’t answer with the tape across her mouth. She couldn’t plead with her eyes. She could only cry.

  “Just nod if you understand.”

  Suddenly, all she could think about was her husband, Tom, the man who gave her all the love she ever wanted, who was her eyes when she needed them, who brought light to her dark world. She thought about how devastated he would be by what was going to happen to her. How he’d blame himself because when the call came into his cell phone from someone needing a tow out on the highway, how he hadn’t wanted to turn away either the business or a person in need, and he hadn’t wanted to wake one of his employees to do the job, so, despite the fact that she’d wanted him to stay home with her, to let someone else do the job, he’d left not long ago in his truck. Left her alone.

  “Madeleine, I’m worried that you don’t seem to be listening, and so may not understand the seriousness of the situation. Now, do you need me to repeat the rules? I want you to answer me, because I’m losing patience and I may have to do something to get your attention. I don’t know, maybe severing your Achilles tendon?”

  Madeleine grunted into the tape on her mouth.

  “I take it that means you understand me. Okay, here we go then. Your choices are, let’s see…okay, I’ll either puncture both your eardrums with an ice pick, or I’ll cut off both your hands. You understand? It’s either you lose your hearing or your han
ds. The choice is yours. When you hear the timer start ticking, you have one minute to decide.”

  She felt gloved fingertips against her cheek and the tape suddenly tore from her lips. She sucked in a huge breath. She was crying again, or still—she wasn’t sure she’d ever stopped, but she was sure crying now. Her mind was filled with sounds—the ticking of the timer, the blood pounding in her head, Galaxo’s occasional footsteps, and that strange, very faint, metal-on-metal, knife-rubbing sound.

  “Forty seconds to go, Madeleine. You need to choose before the bell rings. Your hearing or your hands.”

  She didn’t want to choose. It was an easy decision, of course. She’d coped without the use of her eyes for twelve years, but she couldn’t lose her hearing, too. She couldn’t face a world with no sight or sound to it. Still, though she knew what choice she had to make, she couldn’t bring herself to voice it. Doing so would make it real. It would happen then.

  “Madeleine,” Galaxo said in that horrible voice, “I don’t want to rush this important decision, but you only have twenty seconds left. I’d rather not subject you to both tortures, so I really hope you make a choice in time.”

  She was crying more softly now.

  “Madeleine, you have only ten seconds left. You may not believe me, but I don’t want to take your hearing and your hands. Please, goddamn it, choose, because I swear to Christ, you stupid bitch, I’ll do just what I said I’d do. So fucking choose.”

  His voice was urgent. Madeleine couldn’t speak.

  “Five seconds left,” Galaxo said, his voice harsh and angry, so strange a combination to hear in that cartoonish voice. “Four…three…”

  Finally, in a small voice, she said, “Take my hands.”

  * * *

  Spader had thought about stopping by the Green Hills on his way home from dropping off the photo albums at Olivia’s, but more and more these past few days Oscar Wagner’s gray, gaunt face would float like a ghost across his mind, and he’d started to think he was drinking a little too much. Probably had been since Eddie Rivers had done his best to wreck his life and career. So he resisted the urge to knock back a stout and headed straight home.