I turned and moved toward the sound of his voice again, walking right into him and feeling another glancing blow against my forehead. I went down and rolled away from him. When I got back to my feet the room was spinning, and it took a long moment to determine up from down.
I took one more step backward, then another, until I sensed the stairwell right behind me, giving him his opportunity, hoping for one last chance to draw him out of the shadows.
Come on, you’ve got me cornered here. Finish me off.
He stepped forward, a dark silhouette against the dim glow from the flashlight.
That’s right. Give me one more shot. Just one more.
He took a swing, and I felt one more blow across the top of my head. I went down to one knee again, and I knew he had me on the next swing. But then he paused. To line me up better, or to say one last thing, I didn’t even know or care because it was an opening, and as I came up and put my good shoulder into his stomach, I drove him across the room until both of our bodies crashed into the stack of plastic boxes. There was a sound like many brittle sticks all breaking at once as I clasped both hands into a double fist and hit him in the face, putting everything I had left into it. He let out a cry of pain as I hit him again, then again, until he grabbed for my right shoulder and it lit me up like a fifty-thousand-volt shot from a Taser.
I felt his fingers grabbing at my face, until I tore them away with both hands and bent them back, trying to break as many as I could. He let out another cry of pain and swung with his other arm, so hard I heard it before I felt it, just under my left eye, making everything go white.
A moment later, I was on my back, looking up at the rough wooden ceiling and the cobwebs that shone in the dim light. Then I saw Livermore’s face, looking down at me. He came closer, and I felt his weight on my chest.
I tried to reach for him, but he had my arms pinned down, making my right shoulder burn with a white-hot pain. He leaned more weight into it, and I felt myself losing consciousness. Then he eased back.
I spit blood in his face, tried to get free again until he put his weight back on my shoulder. As he bent down closer to my face, I could feel his breath on me, see his eyes and that little half smile that I hated so much.
He picked up the flashlight and shined it in my face. Then he raised the weapon above his head. I still couldn’t see what he was holding.
He raised his hand higher. I could see it in his eyes. This was it.
“This is how it ends, Alex.”
After everything I’ve been through. Every mile I’ve chased him.
This is how it ends.
But then his body stiffened. The expression on his face went from smug satisfaction to surprise, and a thin trickle of blood leaked from his mouth. Jeannie’s face appeared over his shoulder, pale and streaked with tears.
As he turned to look at her, I saw the knife sticking out of his back.
“What did you do?” he said to her, and then everything froze. Jeannie stood there with her hands over her mouth. There was a rope around her neck.
“You bitch!” he said as he reached out for her, the blood running down his back. “You stupid whore!”
He grabbed the rope and pulled her toward him. She screamed, and as he lifted his weight from my body I rose and brought my hands up together, looping them around his head and bringing the chain between the handcuffs against his throat. I pulled back and felt him falling against me, my head hitting the concrete again, but I kept the chain against his neck, pulling as hard as I could and working the knife deeper into his back.
A strangling sound came from his open mouth as I kept pulling the chain against his throat, feeling the handcuffs shredding through the last of the skin on my wrists, but it didn’t matter anymore because everything I had was focused on those few links of chain that were stretched across his throat, as he flailed his arms back at me and caught me in the face with one fist after another, but I didn’t let up.
I held on as he threw his body from one side of me to the other, one last desperate chance to break free, to breathe.
I held on as he tried to hit me in the face again. The punches getting weaker and weaker.
I held on for Jeannie, for the woman hanging in the hotel room, for the woman tied up and burned alive. For the woman in the refrigerator and the woman he violated in that bedroom while a video camera recorded every second. For all of the other women he’d killed. For Agent Halliday and the other men in the canyon. For Agent Larkin. I thought about each one of them as I held on tight, feeling the convulsions rippling through Livermore’s body. Even as he stopped breathing, I held on.
I’m not letting go, Livermore. Not until I can see you burning in hell.
I would have held on for another hour, just to make sure he was dead, that he was really gone, but my arms finally gave out, and my whole body went limp.
I couldn’t move for a while, until I finally heard Jeannie crying softly. I looped my arms back from Livermore’s head and pushed him off me. He rolled onto his back, his eyes still open. Staring back at me.
I crawled over to Jeannie, found her sitting on the blanket. I pulled the rope from her neck, saw more ropes around each wrist, took those off and let them drop to the floor. She was shivering so hard now. I tried to wrap myself around her, but I couldn’t make the convulsions stop. I sat there with her, catching my breath, until the shaking in her body finally eased and I was able to stand up and pull her to her feet. I wrapped the blanket around her, and as I grabbed the flashlight from the floor, the beam settled on the contents of the box we had fallen into.
Bones.
When I moved the beam, I saw another box that had been knocked over. Another skeleton. Then another and another until I finally came to the half-decomposed body in the fifth box. I took the light away from it and had to bend over and hold my knees.
“Get me out of here,” Jeannie said, the words barely audible through her trembling lips. “Please, Alex . . .”
“I got you,” I said, putting my left arm around her. “Let’s go. Right now.”
We went up the stairs, taking each one carefully. I could feel fresh blood coming from my right shoulder. More blood was running from my forehead into my eyes.
When we got upstairs, I did a quick scan of the kitchen with the flashlight, saw Livermore’s coat draped over one of the chairs. I checked the pockets and found my phone.
Jeannie sat down on the floor. I didn’t want to stay in this house anymore, but we didn’t have a choice. I wasn’t going to make her walk through the snow, and I didn’t think I could carry her, not all the way back to her house.
I sat down next to her and dialed 911. When the operator answered, I gave her every piece of information I could. Robinson Lake, west of White Cloud. Then I told her to have the responders work their way around from Jeannie’s house, the only house with lights on. I knew they would find us eventually.
When I put the phone down, Jeannie looked at me. Really looked at me for the first time since I’d gotten there, and as I looked back I finally got the chance to see that she was still the same person I had married all those years ago. Those same eyes, the same mouth. Everything I had fallen in love with, just a few years older.
“He shot you,” she said, looking down at my shoulder. “You’re bleeding bad.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “We’ll both be fine.”
I turned off the flashlight and pulled her closer. We sat there together in the darkness, leaning against each other, waiting for the rest of the world to find us.
EPILOGUE
ON OUR SECOND NIGHT in the hospital, Jeannie found me.
I was still recovering from the surgery, my right shoulder wrapped up and immobilized. They’d taken out the nine-millimeter slug from Livermore’s Walther PPS. It was the same shoulder that had been hit on that summer night in Detroit. I also needed seventeen st
itches to close up the cut in my forehead, another dozen or so in each wrist, and my left knee still hurt whenever I tried to put weight on it.
Jeannie had frostbite on her toes and fingers, severe scrapes and bruises on her elbows, knees, and chin. But that was the least of it. Most of the trauma she’d suffered had been inside her own head. The kind of wounds you can’t sew up with stitches. The kind of wounds nobody will ever see.
And will take a lifetime to heal.
She stood in the doorway and watched me for a while. When I opened my eyes, she was there. I didn’t know if her room was down the hall or on the opposite end of the hospital, but I was glad to see her. They’d even let her put on real clothes. I was still in my gown, still had an IV stuck in my arm.
“Every time I close my eyes,” she said, “I see him.”
I knew what she was talking about. I had seen him myself, more times than I could count. That face would wake me in the middle of the night, and I’d sit up trying to reach for him, feeling the pain ripping through my shoulder.
“Come here,” I said.
She came to the bed, and I pulled her close. She collapsed against me, the dam breaking all at once. I held her while she cried, and we both ended up falling asleep together, right there in my hospital bed. When I woke up the next morning, there was a nurse in the room.
For the second time in my life, Jeannie was gone.
* * *
—
FIVE DAYS LATER, I was out of the hospital and sitting on an airplane. A commercial flight, back to Phoenix, in the daytime, surrounded by normal people escaping the cold weather. Agent Madison was waiting for me when I crossed over the security line.
We spent the rest of the afternoon at the FBI office on Deer Valley Road, sitting in the same conference room where he had first interviewed me.
“Agent Larkin is still recovering in St. Louis,” he told me after I’d gone through everything, every detail I could remember. “He’ll have to live with some of the internal damage for the rest of his life, but it could have been a lot worse.”
I remembered that night, how he’d told me to walk away before the cops caught up to me. To go after Livermore on my own. I knew I’d have to find him someday, to thank him for that.
“There’s someone else who would like to see you,” Madison said.
I couldn’t imagine who it would be, until he took me to another room and I saw a young couple with a baby fast asleep in a carrier. Madison introduced me to Agent Halliday’s daughter, his son-in-law, and his new grandson.
I remembered the message he had given me. Tell them I’m sorry. Tell them I love them.
I wasn’t sure what else I could say to them. The baby woke up and started crying. I shook the son-in-law’s hand and nodded to the woman as she took the baby out of the carrier and left the room with him. She didn’t seem to want anything else from me, and I couldn’t blame her for wanting to leave when I was done delivering her father’s message.
Madison took me back to the airport, driving in silence most of the way.
“I’m on my way to Japan tomorrow,” he finally said. “NPA came back to us with three missing-persons cases. The methodology is different, but that may have evolved over time. The time frame fits on all three cases. And close enough to Nagano. Maybe it was Livermore. Maybe not.”
I knew what that meant. Three families in Japan who might never get answers.
But I couldn’t do anything about that.
“You call us,” he said after another few minutes of silence, “we take him alive.”
“I call you, Jeannie’s dead. You’ll never convince me otherwise.”
He didn’t bother to argue. He dropped me off at the airport, told me he’d be in touch if he had any more questions.
“One more thing,” he said. “There was a two-million-dollar reward on Livermore’s head.”
“That’s for information leading to his arrest,” I said. “Not for killing him.”
“I believe it still qualifies. And you are a fugitive recovery agent.”
“Not anymore,” I said. “If there’s money coming, give it to the families of Livermore’s victims.”
I watched him think that one over for a few moments.
“I’m serious,” I said to him. “Tell me you’ll make that happen.”
When he finally nodded, I got out of the car and closed the door behind me. As I walked into the airport, I heard him driving away.
* * *
—
JEANNIE WAS BACK HOME in Grand Rapids. She’d just started a new job as a paralegal in a law office. A long way from her major in art history, but what the hell, it probably paid a little better. I was back in Paradise, plowing out my road, getting the cabins ready for a new batch of snowmobilers. I went down to the Glasgow Inn every evening and sat by the fire. Jackie would have the Red Wings on the television over the bar as usual, the sound turned down low. Vinnie would come by after his shift at the casino and sit in the other chair by the fire.
My shoulder and my wrists were still taped up. My left knee still hurt whenever I tried to get up. They left me alone, let me drink my Canadians and stare into the flames.
My old partner Leon came by one night, just to catch up with me. That’s when I told all three men what had happened. Sat them down by the fire and gave them the whole story, from the plane ride on a cold night, all the way to the desert, to the basement of a house on a tiny downstate lake they’d never heard of. I told the story once, leaving nothing out, so I’d never have to tell it again.
Two weeks after Jeannie and I said goodbye to each other, my phone rang late at night. It was Jeannie. She asked me how I was. I told her I was fine.
She didn’t believe me, and we both knew it.
“I’ve been talking to somebody about what we went through,” she said. “You should probably do the same.”
“They told me that the first time I got shot,” I said. “Sent me to the department shrink.”
“Alex . . .”
“I’m fine, Jeannie. But it’s good to talk to you.”
She didn’t press me on it. I was glad I didn’t have to have an argument with her, because I knew she was right. I had spent a whole year destroying my own life after getting shot and watching my partner die on the floor next to me. My own life and my marriage to this woman. She told me she was still seeing Livermore’s face when she closed her eyes at night. I didn’t even have to tell her I was having the same experience. Seeing the same face, and hearing his voice whenever the wind blew outside my lonely cabin in the woods.
I would still wake up in the middle of the night, reaching for him.
Trying to kill him, again and again.
The Livermore who lived inside my head would never die.
“Someone came into the office today,” she said. “This woman, Alex, I could tell as soon as I saw her. She’s living in fear. Believe me, I know what that feels like now.”
“Could the lawyers help her?”
“No, they couldn’t.”
“What is she afraid of?”
“I don’t know, Alex. She wouldn’t tell me.”
I could hear something in her voice. And after what she’d been through, I knew it would take a hell of a lot to rattle her.
“But you know it’s bad,” I said.
“Yes.”
“And that’s why you’re calling me.”
“You might be able to help her,” she said. “Who else am I going to call? And besides . . .”
“Yeah?”
“We promised to stay in touch,” she said. “You haven’t called me yet. A man should keep his promises.”
I was sitting in my little cabin in the woods, three hundred miles away from her. But it felt good to have this woman in my life again.
“So tell me everything else you know ab
out her,” I said. Because she was right, this woman I had once promised to watch over for the rest of my life.
A man should keep his promises.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steve Hamilton is the New York Times--bestselling author of fourteen novels, most recently Exit Strategy and The Second Life of Nick Mason. His debut, A Cold Day in Paradise, won both an Edgar Award and a Shamus Award for Best First Novel. His stand-alone novel The Lock Artist was a New York Times Notable Crime Book and won an Alex Award and the Edgar Award for Best Novel. Hamilton attended the University of Michigan, where he won the Hopwood Award for writing, and now lives in Cottekill, New York, with his wife and their two children.
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