That Darkness

by Lisa Black

  But when he pulled it back for another blow he pulled her up as well. She gripped his wrist with both hands and would not let go. Only keeping that knife from her chest would allow her to live for another second or two.

  She dug her elbows into his chest, trying to beat him back as best she could, but it did not have much effect with her hips still pinned to the floor and brought the knife too close to her face for comfort.

  He stabbed downward again, pushing her back, and this time she could not deflect the knife hand far enough. It hovered over her chest and her grip on his wrist slipped with their combined sweat.

  She tried to lift up with her legs, maybe kick at his head, but that would not be an option with her thighs still pinned. She couldn’t relax long enough to breathe and it was taking everything she had just to keep that blade from her heart. She couldn’t hold out forever. He had a hundred pounds on her, and a murderous rage behind it.

  The knife slipped another inch closer.

  Chapter 28

  Friday, 7:17 p.m.

  Jack couldn’t believe the little shit had actually stabbed him. The vest had absorbed most of the blow, kept the blade from hitting anything vital—or so he hoped—but the shock of it had forced him back just long enough for Dillon Shaw to shut the door. Jack had thrown himself against it, but the bolt had already turned. The bastard was fast.

  And now Shaw, an experienced, violent rapist, was locked in a room with Maggie.

  Jack pounded on the door—futilely, ridiculously, more to blow off his fury than any expectation that it might give. He shouted Maggie’s name.

  Then he pulled out his gun to shoot off the bolt—

  —and hesitated.

  He needed the door to function properly. No matter what happened next, he had Maria Stein to take care of before he fled—and he would have to flee, with Maggie having figured him out and Riley maybe interviewing the homeless Clyde. The game had ended, at least in this city. If he could just take out Maria Stein before he left, he could lie low for a long, long time, maybe retire his ways altogether. As long as first he finished what he had begun, and to do that he would need to keep both Dillon Shaw and Maggie Gardiner out of his way.

  Maggie could survive for another three minutes. That would be all he needed. Then he would rip Dillon Shaw apart with his bare hands, make a hole in that skull with his own fingers—

  Jack ran out of the building, his shoes squeaking against the tile. He hit the door with a solid thunk and burst into the alley—still, luckily, empty. A precious few seconds were lost as he dug the car keys out of his pocket, pressing the Unlock button four times in frustration before jerking the passenger door open and hitting the concrete steps with its edge. It left a smear of dark blue paint on the cement. More trace evidence for Maggie Gardiner to collect for a trial that would never occur.

  He opened the glove compartment and pulled out a stream of insurance certificates, oil change receipts, and the owner’s manual, spilling it all onto the floorboard and then having to search through it again to find the tiny manila envelope with the spare keys. One fit the outer door, which he had so cavalierly let slam shut behind him like the idiot he was.

  He should have abandoned the plan the moment he heard her voice. He should have stashed Dillon back in the car and made up some story for being in the alley, let her think he had picked up a hustler or was buying drugs or any sordid reason at all other than having a connection to the Johnson Court building. He should have said he had never been there before, had no way to get in and they would have to check it out the following day, after he had finished with Dillon and scrubbed the room clean. But no, he had tried to bluff it out, knowing bloody well that unlike Jack’s clients, Maggie would be able to fact-check anything he said. This was all his fault, and Maggie, one way or the other, would now pay for it.

  He had been so careful, so perfect, for so long. How did it all go to hell?

  He should have let Dillon Shaw go, let his future victims fend for themselves. He, Jack, couldn’t save everybody. He knew that. He should never have tried—

  He slid a key into the outer door’s knob. It didn’t move.

  He tried the other key. The latch caught and turned.

  He pounded back up the hallway, focused on not mixing up the two keys again. If that one opened the outer door, then—

  He heard Maggie scream.

  The knife didn’t hurt as much as she expected, not at first. When it entered her shoulder it felt more like a punch, and the shock of the idea rather than the reality dumped an extra dose of adrenaline into her bloodstream so that she pushed his knife hand back an inch. So the blade slid out, and the stinging started.

  It could not have gone in far. The blade wasn’t that long to begin with, and her leather jacket had slowed it down, and she hadn’t lost the use of her left arm, so it couldn’t be that bad, right?

  He snapped his hand back, trying to pull out of her grip and also to get some momentum for a downward thrust. One she would not be able to hold off. Her hands and arms were already feeling like jelly. If only she could twist—

  He raised the knife.

  She heard a thundering roar, and a red mist exploded from his head, just above the ear. The knife arm went slack. Dillon stared at her for another moment or two, the lines in his face smoothing out to a childlike bewilderment, and his spine crumbled. Then a hand came out of nowhere and shoved him so that he fell off her to the side instead of covering her body with his.

  Maggie didn’t even look at Jack, didn’t take her eyes off the now-dead Dillon for the fraction of an instant. She scrambled backward, crab-like, kicking his leg where it crossed over hers, until she had put at least seven feet between herself and her now-dead attacker.

  Then she was grasped anew. Jack hauled her to her feet and turned her head to the side to see her neck, speaking so fast she could hardly understand him. “Are you hurt? Are you okay? You’re bleeding, your neck is bleeding, the shoulder, too, let me look at it—”

  She shoved him away with enough force to make her stagger backward. “Get your hands off me!”

  He took a step toward her, but when this made her back up again, nearly to the wall, he stopped. “I’m sorry, Maggie. I’m really sorry about this. But let me look at your shoulder—we need to get pressure on that wound.”

  “You let me worry about my wounds!” she shouted, knowing that she must sound hysterical and hating it, yet finding a little hysteria perfectly reasonable under the circumstances. She sucked in a shallow, ragged breath, and after a moment she could ask: “Is he dead?”

  Jack turned and stalked back to the inert form lying on the floor in the corner of the room, between the desk and the window. He leaned over and for a moment the room had no sounds at all.

  Then he pulled the gun from his holster and quickly fired another round into the back of the man’s head. The sound shocked her more than the sight, and the echo seemed to bounce from corner to corner, rattling in her brain.

  Before he straightened up, he plucked the knife and her cell phone from the floor beside the fallen man and dropped them into a hidden pocket of his blazer. She did not know if the call had been completed but even if it had, the older model did not have the GPS function turned on for the 911 operator to locate.

  Jack straightened and turned to her.

  Perhaps the brain-rattling had cleared out a few cobwebs. She stared at him, openmouthed. Then she said, “It’s you.”

  “Yes, Maggie,” he told her. “It’s me.”

  Chapter 29

  Friday, 7:31 p.m.

  “You’ve been killing all those men,” she said.

  “It’s not what you think,” he said, then seemed to realize the absurdity of the statement. “I mean—it is, but not the way you’re thinking it. I’m not crazy. I’m not a serial killer.”

  Maggie took a deep breath, her first in what seemed like hours; her lungs felt starved for oxygen. She had to stay calm. He hadn’t shot her yet. “No offense, but th
at’s exactly what you are.”

  “Okay, but”—Jack moved to avoid a crimson pool spreading from the dead man’s head. “Damn. My issued weapon is forty cal, higher power, that’s why it exited. Makes a mess.” He leaned over the dead man and his residual lifeblood to open a bottom drawer of the desk, then pulled out a small, white, first aid kit.

  “Now let’s look at that shoulder.”

  She skirted around to the door, her hand rattling the knob even as she thought that if he wanted to kill her, she’d be on the floor with Dillon. The knob turned but the bolt held. The keyed bolt.

  He had taken the time to relock the door behind him, before killing her attacker.

  Somehow this detail, this cold-blooded focus, frightened her more than anything else that had occurred that evening. She pressed her back to the door. “Stay the hell away from me. And open this door now.”

  He stayed by the table and seemed to be trying to keep calm—without a lot of success, since his voice grew more strident with each word. “Listen to me carefully, Maggie: I don’t have time for this shit. I need to take care of one thing and then you will be free to go and to tell everything you know to everyone you like. You can post it on Facebook for all I care. But you are not going to stop me so you can sit here and bleed or you can listen while I get a bandage on that wound. If I wanted to hurt you, I’d have done it already. Plus I just saved your life, so you could at least hear me out.”

  “I wouldn’t have been in danger if it wasn’t for you!”

  “If you lose too much blood you’ll pass out. Let me get a bandage on those wounds.”

  “You know who bandages things very nicely? A hospital.”

  “Well, that’s not going to happen in the next fifteen minutes. I said I won’t hurt you, Maggie, but I’m still the guy with the key. And the gun.”

  She could have sobbed out of sheer frustration, but the fear of becoming unconscious, of losing whatever tiny bit of control she had left, won out. She moved away from the door, step by inching step, with each one wavering between who she hated more at the moment, Jack Renner or herself.

  He retrieved the hand sanitizer from the counter and rummaged through the open kit, avoiding her gaze, letting her settle herself on the table with her feet on the bolted-down chair. Then suddenly his fingers were on her neck, wiping at the shallow slice with sanitizer on a gauze pad. It stung, and he wasn’t particularly gentle.

  “Who was that?” Maggie asked, gesturing toward the man on the floor.

  “Dillon Shaw. Suspect in twenty-seven rapes, convicted on one. He was good at not getting caught. This isn’t very deep. Probably won’t even leave a scar.” He still sounded as if he were trying to sound calm, and still without success. His words were clipped and furious; the professional colleague had disappeared, completely replaced with the violent quarry she’d been hunting.

  “You’re sure he did all those things?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  Yes, now, she thought. “You brought him here to kill him?”

  “Yes.”

  She had thought she could not feel more afraid; she’d been mistaken. A cold fear blossomed outward from her heart and spread slowly to every cell in her body. Nothing had changed and she had learned nothing she hadn’t already guessed. But his matter-of-fact confession chilled her to the bone.

  And yet she still lived. She sat there and breathed instead of lying on the floor with Dillon Shaw. Jack had a gun and she had been wearied by the struggle with her would-be rapist; he could easily snap her neck if he wanted to. He had some sort of plan in mind. All she had to do was figure out what it was.

  She concentrated on that. “If I collected debris from this floor, I’d find granite dust, blue polyester, asbestos, and white cat hair?”

  “Yes.” He thought. “I’m disturbed about the asbestos, to tell you the truth.”

  His touch grew more gentle as he dabbed ointment on the gash and wrapped a strip of gauze around her neck like a choker. Apparently she hadn’t opened enough drawers, not that it would have made a difference. Dillon would have been on her long before she’d dug the scissors out of the small kit, and the blades were only an inch long, anyway. Jack lied about the scar, of course. She would carry the thin white line across her throat for the rest of her life.

  However long that turned out to be. “And the Lakeshore Boulevard building?”

  “A setup, yes. I tried to frame the poor innocent structure.”

  “You took debris there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Whose blood is it?”

  “A rat’s.” Watching her, he added, “I didn’t kill it. It was already dead.”

  As if that would reassure her of his benevolence. “Unlike, say, Marcus Day.”

  “Day beat one of his twelve-year-old runners so badly that the kid lost the use of one arm. He cut his coke with lidocaine and killed at least five of his customers before adjusting his formula to include scouring powder instead. He shot a teenager and his girlfriend to death while ripping off their stash, then left their bodies in her own car on her own stoop for her father to find. I can go on.”

  “I’ve seen his record.”

  “So you see. How long would he have stayed inside, if I’d arrested him instead? You know how it goes. When the case actually gets to trial it turns out that the eyewitness testimony comes from people who are as unreliable as the defendants, victims are too terrified to be much help, and jails are overcrowded.” He pulled open her jacket.

  She glanced down, saw half her shirt soaked in blood, and stopped looking.

  “Can you take your shirt off?”

  “No.”

  “Suit yourself.” He used the tiny scissors to cut from the neckline ribbing to the mid-shoulder, exposing a still-oozing vertical wound about an inch long. “This isn’t too bad. Good thing your collarbone didn’t break—it stopped the blade.”

  She agreed but didn’t say so, here in a room with her very own version of Death Wish. Jack had grown to enjoy his work, as well. He certainly didn’t voice any regrets about it, or even toss Dillon Shaw a second glance.

  This time the sanitizer stung like hell, as if it had burrowed into the bone in order to radiate pain outward. When he pinched the cleaned flesh together it hurt just as much but in a different way. Then he leaned in and blew on her flesh, drying it so that the bandages would stick. Maggie sat as still as stone, so close to this man who had murdered at least four people that she knew of. Five, if she included the one on the floor.

  “Why are you doing this?” she asked.

  “Because someone has to.”

  “No, I mean—why are you patching me up?”

  He looked directly into her eyes. “I never wanted you to get hurt.”

  “You’re hurt, too,” she suddenly remembered. “He stabbed you.”

  “Vest took most of it. The rest is just a scratch.”

  She wondered if that were true or if he didn’t want her probing for weaknesses. Certainly he didn’t seem to be in any distress—angry, certainly, but focused.

  He helped her off the table, which she didn’t need, unobtrusively feeling her up to see what she had in her pockets. Unfortunately for her, the contents amounted to a small billfold and a set of keys to her apartment. Nothing that would help get her out of there.

  Now they faced each other, the slowly cooling body off to the side, its pooling blood filling the air with a dirty, metallic scent.

  “You wanted to explain, Jack. So explain.”

  “I wish I could,” he said.

  Chapter 30

  Friday, 7:42 p.m.

  “But I don’t have time,” he finished. “There’s something I need to get done before you go spilling all my secrets.”

  She ignored this. “So you decided that none of them deserved to live?”

  “It’s not a question of deserving. They all deserved to be born into loving, supportive families. They all deserved to have a childhood free of poverty. They deserved to experienc
e all the factors in life that would have turned them into decent human beings. I’m not dishing out what people deserve.”

  “Then what are you doing?”

  “My job.” She simply waited, and he went on: “I protect society. That’s why cops exist, isn’t it? That’s our first and largest priority. We protect the average person from harm—and when I’m done these people will never hurt anyone again. Ever.”

  “Who are you, Jack?” Maggie asked him. “What happened to you? Why—”

  “Why? Okay—because one day I caught someone up to her neck in cruelty. She walked right through the court system and out the back door and I realized that laws can only do so much. People have to do the rest. Tell me I’m wrong, Maggie.” His voice grew strident, and the calm, laid-back detective disappeared as if he had never existed—and indeed he had been a ruse all along. His hands went to her shoulders, gripped them as if he might snap the bones, but she refused to pull back in fear. “Tell me you haven’t thought of doing exactly the same thing when you’re looking at the bruises a guy left on a girl’s body or the hairs ripped out by the neighborhood bully or the broken glass left on a pedestrian’s clothes after they were run down by a drunk driver. Whoever did it will do it again. Don’t we owe it to their future victims to take action before they have to be traumatized for the rest of their lives? You’d do the same if you could, if you took ten seconds to think about it and stopped hiding behind the rules.”

  “Don’t tell me what I think!”

  He let go of her. “Fine. Then tell me yourself—what do you think? Because your college professor was right, you have to come to a conclusion. You don’t get to waver back and forth with all your examples and ifs and ands and buts. You don’t get to throw up your hands and say there is no solution. There is a solution, and I’m it.”