by Tim Green
His daughter’s photo now lay facedown in his lap with the date marked in pen on the back by his wife, Angela. His ex-wife. He stuffed the picture into his pants pocket and got out of the car. It was good that no one was on the street. They might have remembered a straw-haired man with pale skin dressed all in black. His slick leather coat and ribbed turtleneck looked like the uniform of some dark foreign agent. Or they might have remembered the nervous way in which he fumbled with his keys, glancing all the while at his surroundings as if he expected someone to jump out at him from one of the blackened storefronts.
Despite the late hour, there were other cars on the street, mostly belonging to patrons of two clapboard bars separated by a bankrupt rental center. This was the side of town where windows stayed broken and sidewalks were allowed to buck and heave without repair. Dim lights hid behind shaded windows on the second and third floors above the empty storefronts. Dandelions sprang from the cracks and broken bottles grinned up at him, their dirty jagged teeth gleaming beneath the street lamps. Old litter lay lifeless in the fetid gutter, waiting for fresh rain to wash it into the rusty sewer grate. Rain was a long way off. The sky beyond the halogen haze of the small city was dark, clear but for the stars and a sickle moon.
Jack walked to the corner and then three blocks into the tangle of old homes, once grand, now multifamily slums. Many of the drooping porches bore the rotting furniture that migrated outside every spring and stayed until fall. The nights were still too brisk even for the stir-crazy inhabitants of the North Country to think of being out this late. Nevertheless, Jack continued an almost panicked surveillance as he plunged even deeper into the neighborhood.
Soon he came to the corner where he had spent hours, just sitting in the back of a rented van, hidden from the world but acutely aware of everything that went on around him. Between the yellow fire hydrant and a massive locust tree was the crumbling asphalt driveway and the battered aluminum door on the side of the house. The driveway hugged the massive but aging Georgian Revival and led to the garage out back. The enormous front columns were crooked like bad teeth, stained by rot. Hans Strauss, the man from the news story, lived in the basement apartment behind the cheap aluminum door.
Jack began to feel lightheaded again, and his breathing became a staccato rhythm of short heavy bursts. His heart seemed to be expanding in his chest, tightening his throat. He pulled on a skintight pair of leather driving gloves and reached inside his coat to grip the handle of his 9mm Glock. The long cool cylinder of the silencer pressed awkwardly into the back of his ribs. He remembered the long-bearded hillbilly who’d sold him this gun from the back of a van outside a gun show in Albany, Georgia.
There was no perfect crime. But there were thousands that went unsolved. Jack’s former life as an assistant district attorney had taught him that. And the hardest ones to solve were the ones that simply possessed no obvious connection between the victim and the killer.
Jack had never spoken to Hans Strauss. He had never written to him or been seen with him. He didn’t live in this small town of Oswego, New York, nor had he ever even crossed paths with the man whose life he hoped to now end. Strauss had never done anything to harm Jack Ruskin or anyone he knew.
Jack crossed the street, skirting the cone of light from the street lamp above, and walked up the driveway. The lights in the apartments above Strauss’s were dark, as were the windows in the house next door. Only Strauss’s window, a rectangle cut into the house’s foundation at ankle height, glowed red in the night. A blanket had been hung over it from inside the subterranean hole. Strauss was awake. He stayed up late and went to work each day at eleven.
The screen from the outer aluminum door hung limp, a casualty of anger or stupidity, possibly both. Jack took out his wallet from the breast pocket of his leather coat. He held it in his left hand and, as it fell open, a silver badge glowed pink in the faint red light from the basement window. With his other hand Jack removed the pistol and pressed it as inconspicuously as he could against his leg. With the back of his knuckles he knocked softly on the metal door frame and waited. He scanned the neighborhood, then knocked again, this time louder.
Jack heard movement inside the apartment below and then the clump clump of Strauss ascending his wooden stairs. Jack’s heart raced; each breath now seemed pitifully short and bereft of oxygen. A globe of light beside the door suddenly burned up his cloak of darkness. Jack shifted from foot to foot, the gun now naked in the light. He hugged the weapon to his side and did a half turn to hide it. The lock on the wooden door rattled. The handle turned and Hans Strauss opened it a crack.
CHAPTER 9
Who are you?” Strauss asked. His voice was gruff, and he peered suspiciously over the chain. He was a tall man, big and sloppy. His strangely wide forehead was crowned by curly brown hair. He looked ten years younger than the photo in the newspaper, and for a brief moment Jack wondered if he was the right man.
Jack held his badge up to the crack in the door.
“Police,” he said, trying to disguise the quaver with gruffness. “Are you Hans Strauss?”
Strauss’s eyes widened at the sight of the badge.
“Go away,” he said, slamming the door.
Jack felt his nostrils flare.
“You haven’t done anything wrong, Mr. Strauss,” he said. He wondered if his voice sounded calm through the door. “I just need to ask you a few questions about—”
“About what!” Strauss said. He yanked open the door with a scowl. In a voice now laced with growing anger he said, “I won’t let you in. I don’t have to. I haven’t done anything. I have a lawyer, you know. You can’t talk to me without a lawyer! I have a lawyer . . .”
Strauss examined Jack’s face, as if to read the effect of his words.
“I know,” Jack said. He dug hard and fast into his brain for the name of the man who ran the ice rink where Strauss emptied trash cans.
“That’s okay,” he said. “You don’t need your lawyer . . . I’m sorry it’s so late. You haven’t done anything. I promise . . . This isn’t about you, Mr. Strauss. It’s about Mr. Sempleton; he’s in some trouble. Frank Sempleton . . .”
Strauss’s eyes widened, and Jack saw the flicker of satisfaction. Strauss was the kind of criminal who believed in his paranoid heart that the world was pitched against him. People like him took pleasure in seeing someone else twist under the law. And this wasn’t just anyone, but the man who ordered him to empty other people’s garbage day after day.
“Sempleton?” he asked.
“Yes.”
The chain rattled and the door opened, revealing the inside of an apartment whose walls were covered with nude pictures of young girls.
To make room on the small landing, Strauss had taken two steps down the stairs. As Jack entered, he drew the gun up from his leg and moved toward Strauss.
Strauss saw the gun. He lunged at Jack with a growl.
Jack stepped back, banging the door shut.
He pulled the trigger, ripping off several shots in succession before Strauss got his hand on the gun and yanked Jack toward him and down the stairs.
The two of them crashed through the flimsy banister and down to the carpet. Jack grasped the gun with both hands, letting his head, shoulders, and back take the brunt of the fall, but still holding the gun.
“I’ll kill you!” Strauss yelled, kicking, biting, and scratching.
The gun fired over and over and things around the filthy apartment began to erupt from the impact of the 9mm slugs—a plastic lamp, a smoky mirror, a box of cereal on the table spraying cornflakes across the kitchen.
As Jack began to rise, he slipped on something like jelly and struck his head against the staircase. Strauss was on top of him now wrestling for the gun. He came up with a shoe. He began to beat the side of Jack’s head with its wooden heel, screaming as he swung the makeshift weapon in vicious wide arcs.
Jack inched the gun, trembling, toward Strauss’s face, and the moment he thought it was
close enough he took a deliberate shot, punching a hole into Strauss’s neck and knocking him backward.
Jack jumped to his feet and emptied what was left of the gun into the man’s chest and head until the metallic clicking of the trigger told him the gun was empty.
Everything was quiet, but only for a moment. Jack heard the pounding of feet and the shout of voices from the floor above. They were coming for him.
CHAPTER 10
Jack froze. He was helpless. He heard a door in some upper part of the house open and slam shut. He heard footsteps on the blacktop outside as they came from the back of the house toward the front. He stared in alarm as the faint shadow of legs appeared and then disappeared in the basement window that was hung with the red blanket.
The neighbor began to pound loudly on the frame of the outer aluminum screen door.
“Strauss!” the man screamed. “Strauss! What’s all that damn noise? I told you, Strauss!”
Jack didn’t move. He looked down at the gun with its silencer hanging uselessly in his hand. He lifted it. It seemed to have the weight of a respectable stone. Blood covered his shirt, and the floor beneath Strauss was a pool of deep red. He stuffed the gun back into the holster under his jacket.
“Strauss! Come out!”
Jack looked down at Strauss’s bloody corpse. His eyes were still open, the mouth hanging loose on its hinges. Blood still ran in little brooks from the black holes in his chest. The son-of-a-bitch was dead. That’s what he deserved. Still, Jack felt the stirrings of nausea.
Jack thought about one of Strauss’s victims: a girl like his own daughter when she was violated, fifteen. Fifteen years old. Strauss was a piece of shit. Jack looked down at the dead man’s face and smiled.
He put his hands up over his mouth to muffle his voice and yelled, “Fuck you!”
There was silence for a time and then, “Fuck you, too! If you don’t quit making fucking noise, I’m calling the police.”
The neighbor struck the frame of the screen door with his fist once more in frustration and walked away. Jack’s blood surged through his head. He heard the neighbor slam his own door and then begin to stomp around above his head. The toilet above flushed. There was some more stomping and then it got quiet. Jack’s pulse began to settle.
The refrigerator kicked on, humming. The blood that had splattered Jack’s face was growing sticky. He stood still for another twenty minutes before he began picking the shell casings up off the floor with his gloved fingertips. Because the Glock’s polygonal barrel left no traceable marks on the slugs, the only ballistics evidence he had to worry about were the shell casings. Without them and without any fingerprints or DNA, there wasn’t a shred of physical evidence that could link him to the crime. He felt his own head; it was bumped and bruised from the shoe, but there was no blood.
He picked up the shoe that Strauss had used to strike him and tiptoed toward the steps. He climbed them slowly and searched the entryway until he found the first few casings he’d fired. He counted the casings, pocketed them with the rest, and opened the door without a noise. The screen door he opened a millimeter at a time, minimizing the anxious squeaking of the hinges.
Jack ran for six blocks down the dark and broken sidewalk. His feet seemed to float above the concrete. They were numb. He ran until his lungs burned in his chest and then he stopped and spun wildly around, searching for any sign of another human being who might have seen him.
He exhaled great gusts of steam that glowed faintly in the light of a nearby street lamp. He spun around again, half expecting to hear sirens or the shouts of a mob coming after him on the street. With effort he was able to walk, not run, turning this way and that through a maze of streets, keeping his bearings by the sickle moon.
When he reached the corner where he’d parked his car, he looked the street over before walking up to the Taurus and getting in. He searched the street again, then started the engine and pulled away from the curb. He fought the urge to smash the accelerator to the floor. That wouldn’t help him. That would get him caught. He was still covered with blood.
CHAPTER 11
Jack arrived at the Motel 6 near the airport at three-thirty in the morning. He let himself into the room and closed the door. He took a deep breath and let it out in a slow steady stream.
On the floor a plastic tarp was waiting. Jack stood in the middle of it and stripped off his clothes, every stitch. Barefoot, he walked into the bathroom and turned on the shower. He got wet, then shut off the water. For ten minutes he scrubbed. White lather covered him from head to toe. Then he rinsed off.
When he was finished, he got out and dried off. His face stared back at him in the mirror, his hair a wild thatch of straw, and circles under his glassy blue eyes. Around the edges of his scalp the welts from Strauss’s shoe were beginning to swell and darken. He still felt dirty. He brushed his teeth, then got in the shower and washed off again.
Afterward he got down on his hands and knees and used a washcloth to clean the tub. When the tub began to squeak, he stopped and looked at the cloth. He remembered watching Sesame Street with Janet when she was about five. The count’s hands were dirty. He washed his hands. The soap was dirty. He washed the soap with a cloth. The cloth was dirty. He could never get rid of it.
Jack filled the sink, then rinsed out the cloth, draining the water several times. He walked naked back into the room and tossed the washcloth onto the pile of things on top of the plastic. He put on a new set of clothes then carefully wrapped everything he’d been wearing, as well as the shell casings and the washcloth, into the plastic tarp and stuffed it all into a green garbage bag.
The only exceptions were his gun and holster. Those he locked inside a trim metal briefcase that he removed from his travel bag. He packed the metal container into a UPS box, stuffed it with newspaper, and sealed it up. He put on a fresh coat and, with the bag in his hand and the box under his arm, went back out to his car.
He knew right where he was going. The garbage bag went into a Dumpster in back of a nearby shopping center, and the package went into a UPS drop-off box. He returned to his motel and lay down on the bed in his clothes. He felt as though a giant hand was pressing him down, squeezing him. His breath came in short gasps. His mind scrambled over the jagged details of the crime, scouring for some small overlooked shred of evidence that could lead to his arrest.
He didn’t know when exhaustion finally overtook him, but he soon found himself trapped in a dream. He tried to tear himself from his sleep, but it was no use. This was part of his punishment, the price he paid for failing to protect his little girl. He was forced to watch, caught in the nightmare that had haunted him since they’d found her . . .
It was a windy autumn day, the kind where leaves swirled down from the sky cutting through broad bands of sunlight like snowflakes. The rickety sound of their sprint across the sidewalk concealed the deadly squeal of car brakes. A van had stopped short halfway up the block, but she never noticed. She was concentrating on the cracks in the sidewalk, careful not to step on one.
In her mind she heard the singsong children’s rhyme, “Don’t step on the crack or you’ll break your mama’s back.”
Her hair was a brilliant blond and it fell in a sheet over the hood of her sweatshirt and straight to the middle of her back. It was a striking feature—her best. Why did she hesitate? Why? She should have run at the sight of the stranger with the balding head and the odd smile when he sprang from the van.
It happened so fast. All she was able to do at the last second was to throw her book bag in his direction. The man—he was so much stronger than he appeared—grasped her by the throat and snatched her into the open side panel of the van. She gasped. The air soiled by the pungent damp cloth that had been jammed into her mouth filled her lungs.
Everything went black.
When she awoke, she begged God that it was all a horrible dream.
The room was dark. She was bound down to a bed, alone in the small room. Crickets
and frogs hummed peacefully outside. The sudden scream of a jet’s engine made her start. She had no idea where she was. She didn’t know how long she’d been there.
Two leather straps bound her down. Her right wrist was handcuffed to the headboard of a sagging bed. Slowly she wormed her way out from underneath the leather straps. She yanked frantically at the handcuffs to no avail. She groped with her fingertips along the borders of the spindly wooden headboard. Panic flooded her insides. She tore at everything within her grasp. She knocked over a small table, and its lamp shattered. She ripped wads of stuffing out of the mildewed mattress.
She stopped only when her breath was reduced to short painful gasps. Then she began to work in earnest. For a long time she plied the headboard back and forth until finally the rusty screws holding it to the rest of the frame snapped. Dragging it behind her, she felt her way through a small doorway into a larger room. The quarter moon spilled in through a small square window. A rotting net hung from the wall next to curling photographs of old men proudly holding up their dead fish.
The door, warped from moisture and mold, was locked from the outside. She kicked at it until her feet were sore and bleeding. Finally it gave way and she was able to drag the headboard behind her out onto a rickety porch. Reeds sprang up from below, concealing the black pool of water beyond except for a gap where a small boat might be run up to the cabin. Another jet roared past overhead. She watched its lights flash through a filter of tears. She still didn’t know where she was.
“Daddy,” she said. It was no more than a whimper.
After a moment, she dragged the headboard to the edge of the porch and jumped in. The black water was cold, but the night air was not. She clambered up onto the headboard, keeping clear of the water as best she could.
