What Comes Next

by John Katzenbach

  He closed his eyes and heard an evil sound. A clickety-click. He did not know it was the noise made by a shotgun when a spent round is ejected and a fresh round chambered, but he understood that it was the sound of dying.

  * * *

  When Adrian had launched himself into his race across the open space, Michael had set the camera down on the hood of the truck. He’d hit the auto switch so that it would continue to film. It was like a director’s Dutch Cut, the image on a sharp angle. But it still captured the action from behind him as he stepped forward. He knew he remained anonymous. All that any of the clientele would see was his back.

  He had fired a single blast from the twelve-gauge.

  The steel pellets had caught Adrian around the thighs and hips, lifting him up and dropping him to the ground with a linebacker’s force or a professional soccer player’s violent red-card sliding tackle.

  Michael carefully ejected the shell and lifted the weapon to his shoulder, this time taking careful aim at the figure crumpled to the dirt in front of him.

  Finish this show, he thought.

  He did not hear the person behind him until the high-pitched order sliced the air.

  “Police! Freeze! Drop your weapon!”

  He was astonished. He hesitated.

  “I said drop your weapon!”

  This simply wasn’t a part of what he’d imagined.

  Thoughts pummeled him. Where’s Linda? Who is this? Number 4 is finished now. What’s going on? But the flood of questions that ricocheted off into recesses within him were empty and irrelevant. And instead of doing as he was ordered, Michael pivoted abruptly, swinging the shotgun barrel toward the strange sound of someone trying to give him commands. He had no intention of doing anything other than shooting to kill and getting back to the far more urgent and important business of completing Series #4.

  He did not get the chance.

  Terri Collins was crouched in a firing position near the back of the truck. She had both hands on her pistol and had taken careful aim. Michael seemed to her to be moving in slow motion, exchanging the broad back that she’d taken a bead on with his chest.

  She could not understand why he didn’t drop the shotgun. He had no chance.

  She fired five times, just as she had been taught. Make no mistakes. Put the subject down.

  The police detective’s pistol roared. She had not once in all her years as a member of the small college town force ever had the occasion to remove it from its holster at any moment other than practice time on a firing range. Now, at this first opportunity that it was drawn in seriousness, she was trying to remember everything she was supposed to do and to do it right. She knew from instruction that there were no second chances. But the weapon seemed to have a helpful mind of its own. It seemed to take aim and fire without her; she was only barely aware that she had pulled the trigger.

  Steel-jacketed rounds slammed into Michael. The force of the close-range shots lifted him up and threw him backward. He was dead before his eyes caught a last glimpse of the sky.

  Terri Collins breathed out hard, exhausted.

  She took a step forward, dizzy. Her head spun but every nerve within her was on some razor’s edge.

  Her eyes were locked on the figure in front of her. A huge puddle of blood had replaced his chest.

  The sight of the man she’d killed was mesmerizing. She would have remained locked in position like a hypnotist’s subject if not for the sudden scream.

  Linda took in her lover’s death from her spot at the other end of the farmhouse. A single, awful sight.

  She saw the policewoman standing above Michael. She saw the blood.

  It was as if the most important part of her had been savagely ripped from her heart.

  She ran forward, her eyes instantly filling with tears and panic, screaming “Michael! Michael! No!” as she fired off every remaining round in the AK-47.

  High-powered bullets crashed into Terri Collins. They slammed into her vest, spinning her around like a child’s top. She could feel her own weapon flying from her hand as one of the bullets crushed into her wrist. Another caught her as she tumbled, right above the top of the vest, slashing her throat like a knife.

  She landed on her back, eyes fixed up on the sky. She could feel hot blood gurgling up in her chest, choking her, and every breath grew harder to steal from the air. She knew she should be thinking of her children, her home, and all that she was going to miss, but then pain sheeted down, black and irreversible across her eyes. She did not have the time to say to herself I don’t want to die before her last breath rattled out.

  Linda was still running. She threw the machine gun aside and pulled out the pistol that Michael had placed in her jeans belt. She wanted to keep shooting, as if by rekilling the policewoman, over and over, she could somehow reverse time and bring Michael back.

  She went straight to his side.

  Linda threw herself down on her lover, embracing him and then lifting him up, like Michelangelo’s Mary cradling the crucified Jesus. She ran her fingers across his face, trying to scoop blood away from his lips, as if that might restore him. She howled with pain.

  And then her pain was replaced by blind rage. Her eyes narrowed with unrestrained hate. She scrambled to her feet and grasped her pistol. She could see where the old man was sprawled on the ground. She did not know who he was or how he’d managed to arrive there, but she knew he was totally to blame for everything. She did not know if he was alive or not, but she did know he did not deserve to be. She knew that Number 4 had to be close by as well. Kill them. Kill them both. And then you can kill yourself, so you can be with Michael forever.

  Linda raised her gun and took careful aim at the old man’s body.

  Adrian could just see what she was doing. If he could have moved, crawled somehow to safety, or gathered his own weapon and taken aim he would have, but he could do none of these things. All he could do was wait. He thought it was okay to get shot and die right there, as long as Jennifer got away. It was what he’d meant to do to himself all along. But his suicide had been interrupted when he’d seen her get stolen from his very own street, and that hadn’t been fair, it had been terribly wrong, and so he’d done everything that his dead wife, brother, and son had wanted. It had all been a part of his dying and he was okay with it. He’d done his very best and maybe Jennifer could get away now and get to live and grow up. It was all worth it.

  Adrian closed his eyes.

  He heard the roar of the pistol.

  Somehow death did not arrive milliseconds later.

  He could still feel the damp earth against his cheek. He could feel his heart pumping and the pain from his wounds coursing through his body. He could even feel his illness, as if insidiously it was taking advantage of all that had happened and was now demanding prominence. He did not understand why, but he could feel memories slipping away and reason departing. He wanted to hear his wife just one more time, his son, his brother. He wanted a poem that would ease him into madness, forgetfulness, and death. But all he could hear inside himself was a waterfall of dementia thundering down, erasing the few parts of Adrian that grasped life.

  He blinked his eyes open.

  What he saw seemed more a hallucination than any of his dead family.

  Linda was facedown on the ground. What was left of her head flowered blood.

  And behind her: Mark Wolfe.

  In his hand was Detective Collins’s pistol.

  Adrian wanted to laugh because he thought dying with a smile made some sense.

  He closed his eyes and waited.

  The sex offender surveyed the carnage outside the farmhouse and muttered, “Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ,” over and over, though the words had nothing to do with faith or religion and everything to do with shock. He lifted the detective’s pi
stol a second time, not really aiming at anything, before lowering it, because it was obvious that he wouldn’t need it again. He saw the laptop computer on the roof of the truck and the camera that was faithfully recording everything in its view.

  The silence seemed complete. Gunshots echoed off and faded away.

  “Jesus Christ,” he repeated again.

  He looked down at Detective Collins and shook his head.

  Then he walked slowly over to Adrian’s body. He was surprised when the old man’s eyes fluttered open. Wolfe could tell he was badly wounded and he doubted that he could survive. Still, he spoke encouragingly as he bent down beside him.

  “You’re a tough old bird, professor. Hang in there.”

  Wolfe heard the sound of sirens approaching fast.

  “That’s help coming,” he said. “Don’t give up. It’ll be here any second.” He was about to add you owe me a lot more than twenty grand but he did not.

  Instead, what crowded into his thinking at that moment was a burst of pride and a truly wondrous realization: I’m a goddamn hero. A goddamn hero. I killed someone who killed a cop. They’re never going to hassle me again, for no reason at all, no matter what the hell I do. I’m free.

  The sirens whined closer. Wolfe looked away from the wounded professor and what he saw made his mouth widen in astonishment.

  A stark-naked teenage girl emerged from behind the ramshackle barn. She made no attempt to cover herself, other than to hold her stuffed teddy bear close to her heart.

  Wolfe stood up and stepped aside as Jennifer crossed the open space. She knelt down at Adrian’s side, just as the first state trooper’s squad car rounded into the farmhouse drive.

  Wolfe hesitated, but then he stripped off his lightweight jacket. He wrapped it around her shoulders, partially to cover her nakedness but more because he wanted to touch the young woman’s porcelain skin. His finger brushed against her shoulder and he sighed as he felt a familiar deep, unbridled electricity.

  Behind them police cruisers ground to ragged tire-squealing stops and officers waving weapons leaped out, shouting commands, taking positions behind open car doors. Wolfe had the good common sense to throw the detective’s pistol down and lift his hands in a surrender that wasn’t in the least bit necessary.

  Jennifer, however, didn’t seem to see or hear anything other than the raspy breath coming from the old man. She took his hand and squeezed it hard, as if she could pass some of her own youth through her skin and give him a little more strength.

  Adrian looked at her like a man awakening from a long nap, unsure whether he was still dreaming. He smiled.

  “Hello,” he whispered. “Who are you?”

  EPILOGUE

  The Last Poem Day

  Professor Roger Parsons read through the entire term paper, then read it a second time, and finally with a red pen in hand he opened to the last page and wrote Outstanding, Miss Riggins at the bottom. He took a second to consider what he was going to write next, looking up at the framed, signed Silence of the Lambs movie poster displayed on his office wall. He had been teaching his Introduction to Abnormal Psychology course for first-year potential psychology majors for nearly twenty-two years and he could not recall a finer freshman-year paper. The topic was “Self-­Destructive Behavior in Adolescent Youth” and Ms. Riggins had deconstructed several types of antisocial activities common among teenagers and fit them into psychological matrixes that were far more sophisticated than he had any reason to expect from a first-year student. Clearly, Professor Parsons recognized, the young woman who always sat in the front of the classroom and was first with quick, pointed questions during the Q and A period at the end of each session had read all the extra-credit articles and many more books besides those he had listed on the course syllabus.

  And so he wrote: “Please see me at your earliest opportunity to discuss the psychology honors major program. Additionally, perhaps you would be interested in a summer clinical internship. Usually this goes to upperclassmen but we might make an exception this time.”

  Then he gave her the grade: A.

  He had a reputation at the university as an exceptionally tough grader, and he could recall giving out only a few such high grades in his years teaching, and never before in a freshman survey course. Young Ms. Riggins’s effort was a match for the papers he anticipated from the juniors and seniors taking his advanced Abnormal Psych seminars.

  Professor Parsons added the paper to the top of the stack he expected to return to the other students after the next lecture, which would be the last before the summer break was upon them. He was reluctant to pick up another teenager’s effort and start the assessment process again. When he did, he grimaced widely and groaned loudly, for the next paper had an obvious typo in the very second sentence of the opening paragraph.

  “Haven’t they heard of spell-check?” he muttered. “Don’t they bother to read through their work before handing it in?”

  With a flourish he circled the error in dramatic red.

  Jennifer hurried out of her Social Trends in Modern Poetry class and rapidly made her way across campus. She had a set routine that she followed every Thursday, and even though she knew there would be some necessary changes this last time she wanted to make certain she stuck to it as much as possible.

  Her first stop was a small florist in the center of town, where she purchased an inexpensive bouquet of mixed flowers. She always chose the brightest, most vibrant colors, even in the dead of winter. Whether it was bitterly cold or sunny and mild, as it was this particular start-of-summer day, she wanted the arrangement to jump out.

  She took the flowers from the nice saleslady who recognized her from her many visits but who had never asked her why she needed the flowers with such impressive regularity. Jennifer simply assumed that the lady had accidentally noticed where she placed them, and that was why she’d never intruded by asking what they were for. The saleslady thought the girl was interesting, because everyone else buying flowers in the shop was ordinarily quick to loudly state their purpose. A wedding anniversary luckily remembered. A birthday. Mother’s Day.

  Jennifer’s flowers were for something different.

  She took them wordlessly, hurried back outside into the midafternoon sunshine, and dropped them on the seat of her car. She drove directly across town to police headquarters. Usually there were parking spaces close by, and the few times the street had been crowded, patrol officers had waved her into their private lot behind the station.

  This last day she was fortunate, easily finding a spot right in front of the modern-design brick and glass entranceway. She didn’t bother to feed the parking meter; she simply jumped out, flowers in hand.

  She crossed the broad sidewalk to the front doors. Just outside there was a large bronze plaque mounted prominently on the wall. It had a glistening gold star at the top that trapped rays of sunlight and highlighted the raised inscription.

  In Memory of Detective Terri Collins.

  Killed in the Line of Duty.

  Honor. Dedication. Devotion.

  Jennifer placed the flowers beneath the plaque and took a quiet moment. Sometimes she recalled the detective seated across from her during one of her aborted runaways, trying to explain why escape was such a poor idea when clearly she didn’t really believe that herself. She would say to Jennifer that there were other routes out. All she had to do was search hard for them. This, Jennifer had learned in the three years since the detective died rescuing her, was true. So often she would whisper to the plaque, “I’m doing exactly what you said, detective. I should have listened to you. You were right all along.”

  More than one police officer had overheard her say this, or something similar, but none had ever interrupted her. Unlike the florist who expected her on Thursdays, they all knew why Jennifer was there.

  “It’s Thursday, it must be p
oem day,” the nurse said in a friendly, welcoming lilt. She looked up over some paperwork and a computer screen at the main desk inside the wide doors of a squat, unattractive cinder-block building off one of the main roadways leading into the small college town. The doors had been designed to accommodate wheelchairs and gurneys and were equipped with electric open assists that whooshed when anyone pressed the right button.

  “Absolutely,” Jennifer replied, smiling in return.

  The nurse nodded, but then she shook her head, as if there was something both happy and sad in Jennifer’s arrival.

  “You know, dear, he might not understand anything much anymore, but he really looks forward to your visits. I can tell. He just seems a little more with it on Thursdays, waiting for you to come by.”

  Jennifer paused. She turned for a second and looked outside. She could see sunlight diving between the branches of trees that swayed in a light breeze, their full green leaves wrestling with breaths of wind. From where she stood, she saw the sign outside the building: Valley Long-Term Care and Rehabilitation Center.

  She looked back at the nurse. She knew that everything the nurse said was untrue. He wasn’t more with it. He was deteriorating a little more each week. No, Jennifer thought, every hour more drops away.

  “I can tell, too,” she said, joining in on the lie.

  “So who did you bring along for today’s visit?” she asked.

  “W. H. Auden and James Merrill,” Jennifer replied. “And Billy Collins, because he’s so funny. And a couple of others, if I have the time.”

  The nurse probably didn’t recognize any of the poets, but she acted like each choice made absolute good sense. “He’s out back on the patio, dear,” she said.

  Jennifer knew the way. She nodded to a few of the other staff she passed. They all knew her as the Thursday poetry girl and her regularity was more than enough reason for them to leave her absolutely alone.

  She found Adrian seated in a wheelchair in a corner shadow.