Blue Avenue

by Michael Wiley

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Why did you do this to me?’

  ‘Why not?’ he said. ‘You were perfect. I turned down the job when I found out that your old girlfriend was at Melchiori’s party. But then Godrell Graham told me how much he’d pay and I thought, hell, I’m not getting any younger. At that point picking you was logical and also a practical necessity. I knew that you’d never rest until you caught Belinda’s killer and I knew that when she died you would be an obvious suspect to Daniel Turner.’

  ‘But we’re friends.’

  ‘I’m not your friend, BB,’ he said. ‘I’ve been many things to you but never a friend.’

  ‘Did you kill Jerry Stilman?’

  ‘Of course. Graham paid me to. He found out that Stilman was working with the DEA. Later he found out that Melchiori and his friends had killed his daughter. He has enough money to buy the kind of justice that courts don’t understand.’

  ‘Your kind of justice.’

  ‘Yours too, BB. Don’t forget that.’

  ‘I’m not the same as you, Charles.’

  ‘The biggest problem with you is that you’ve always lied to yourself,’ he said. ‘You think you’re better than me. That makes you vulnerable. I once had high hopes for you.’

  ‘I’m not done yet, Charles.’

  ‘Actually you’re wrong. You were done before you even knew this had started.’ He hung up on me.

  I went to the living room, kneeled on the hearth and picked up the metal, plastic and glass from the camera. I removed the memory card and broke it in half. There was a Bic lighter in a kitchen cabinet. I brought it to the fireplace and burned the photographs, then held the flame under the pieces of the memory card until the plastic dripped on the hearthstones. Charles said he had other copies of the pictures. Undoubtedly he knew how to plant them so that they would look like I’d taken them.

  Do just enough to do the job. His motto. I hadn’t done enough. Probably never would do.

  As I stood, Thomas’s cell phone rang.

  The screen said the call came from my house.

  I answered and Susan said, ‘BB?’ She sounded upset.

  ‘Yeah. Did Thomas come home?’

  ‘There’s someone outside.’

  ‘Thomas?’

  ‘No—’ Something slammed. ‘Jesus, BB—’

  ‘Who?’

  The line went dead.

  I had no doubt. Charles was inside my house.

  I sped across town. The sun was rising and the sky hung thin and gray as if it hadn’t yet sorted itself out from the blackness beyond. Cars began to appear on the roads, driven by men and women in business suits, drinking coffee from travel mugs or wearing exercise clothes as they headed to the gym before work. I yelled and steered around them, shot into the oncoming lane and on to the shoulder. I leaned on the horn and punched the accelerator to the floor. The car lifted over the railroad tracks a half mile from my house. I slowed for a commercial strip, blew through a red light in front of a pickup truck and turned on to my street.

  A car was parked in front of the house. A blue Honda Pilot. My heart slowed and I eased my foot from the gas. Daniel Turner’s wife had said that was one of their cars. Maybe Susan had heard Daniel outside, not Charles. But the illogic struck me at the same moment as the hope that Susan was safe. Daniel wouldn’t have broken in. The phone wouldn’t have gone dead.

  I looked farther up the street. Another car was parked four houses away. Charles’ Dodge Charger.

  Daniel was lying on the front porch with blood on his chest. Next to him lay a plastic-sheathed morning newspaper. He was alive. His belly heaved with each breath. His eyes were glassy and bloodshot. I reached toward him but he shook his head and muttered, ‘Inside.’

  ‘Charles?’

  A bitter, gruesome smile formed on his lips. He clenched his teeth and closed his eyes.

  I stepped over him, turned the doorknob and threw my shoulder into the door. It swung open into the dark, empty living room. I went inside and yelled, ‘Charles!’

  ‘Up here,’ he called.

  I ran up the stairs. On the stairway walls he’d tacked copies of the pictures of the women he’d killed. On the landing he’d left more.

  He sat on an armchair in my bedroom, a large pistol resting on his lap. Susan lay next to him on the bed, wrapped in a clear plastic bag, naked, her legs tucked over her head, her mouth gagged, her ankles lashed behind her neck with clothesline, her wrists bound beneath her. The bag heaved as she struggled to breathe.

  ‘Jesus, Charles, what are you doing?’

  He shook his head. ‘Sometimes you say the dumbest things.’

  I rushed toward him.

  ‘No,’ he said distractedly and he held the pistol to Susan’s head.

  I froze.

  The window shades were down and lamps burned on the two bedside tables.

  Charles said, ‘The police will find you here beside your wife. Dead. Self-inflicted gunshot.’

  ‘I don’t like guns.’

  ‘Susan will be dead too,’ he said, ‘raped by you, a man who, as everyone in town knows, couldn’t get his wife to do him. With your background they’ll know what you did. They’ll know you’re the killer. They’ll find Daniel Turner dead on your porch where you killed him. Too bad Thomas isn’t here. I had ideas for him. But I’ll hunt him down later. Loose ends and all.’

  ‘Why me?’ I asked again.

  He stood up. ‘You let me down.’

  ‘This won’t work,’ I said.

  He smiled. ‘It’s already done. I’m already gone.’

  ‘What about the car in your garage? What about the little things that you’ve left behind?’

  ‘I leave nothing behind. Ever. If they look for the car they won’t find it. Or if they do they’ll connect it to you.’

  Susan was struggling inside the bag. Her breath had fogged the plastic over her face. I couldn’t see her eyes and for that I was grateful.

  ‘What now?’ I asked.

  He offered me the chair he’d been sitting in. ‘Why don’t you take a seat?’

  ‘I’ll stand.’

  He pushed the pistol against the plastic so that its muzzle pressed into the skin on Susan’s forehead. ‘Please,’ he said.

  He tied my wrists and ankles to the chair with clothesline. He cut another length, wrapped it around my throat and tied it to the chair back so that I would garrote myself if I leaned forward.

  When he was done he asked, ‘You keep a toolbox in your garage?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Do you or don’t you?’

  ‘Go to hell.’

  He left the room.

  I spoke to Susan. ‘If there was a way that I could …’ I stopped. There wasn’t a way and never had been. But for a moment she ceased struggling and I felt that in that moment there was forgiveness.

  Charles returned from the garage with a long-shafted screwdriver. He sat on the foot of the bed opposite me and looked me in the eyes. He touched the sharp tool-end to my chin and forced my head up. Sweat formed on my brow and ran down the back of my neck.

  ‘Now, say you’re sorry for failing to live up to my expectations,’ he said.

  ‘They were unreasonable,’ I said.

  He increased the pressure so the straight steel edge pushed into my skin. ‘Say you’re sorry.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘for failing to live up to your expectations.’

  He removed the screwdriver from my chin. ‘Ah, that’s all right,’ he said, then flipped the tool and punched a hole through my right hand.

  I screamed.

  He yanked the screwdriver out and punched another hole.

  I screamed again and blood splattered his white shirt. He regarded it and said, ‘Now that makes me mad.’ He plunged the screwdriver again.

  Tears and sweat erupted from my face. ‘Don’t!’

  He looked sincerely perplexed. ‘Why not?’

  And suddenly I didn’t have a good answer. Why no
t stick a tool into my hand? Why not? I said, ‘The police will wonder why my own hand.’

  He yanked out the screwdriver and plunged it into my other hand. ‘I’ll leave a note for you that explains it,’ he said. ‘It’s an act of expiation. Four hundred years ago sinners did it all the time. Margaret Mary Alocoque carved the name of Jesus into her breasts when she was younger than Thomas. Not many people do this kind of thing anymore, which is a shame.’

  He yanked out the screwdriver and plunged it again. It hit bone.

  When I stopped screaming, Charles shook his head. ‘Be a man, BB. Nothing more. Being a man is enough.’ He yanked out the screwdriver, leaned back in his chair and surveyed the room like a bored child looking for a new toy.

  Susan had stopped struggling. She breathed slowly. The bag heaved gently. Charles smiled. ‘You’ve got yourself a smart wife, BB. She’s conserving her breath. Not that it’ll do any good in the long run.’

  She grunted through her gag and struggled again.

  ‘Or maybe she was just in shock,’ he said.

  Outside the room, footsteps climbed the stairs – slow, heavy footsteps, pausing, persisting. ‘Now who the hell is that?’ Charles said.

  Daniel appeared in the doorway, his chest bloody, his skin pale.

  ‘Hey,’ Charles said happily. ‘You’re still alive.’

  Daniel stepped into the room, his face haggard but his eyes furious.

  ‘Oh, stop,’ Charles said.

  Daniel shook his head. ‘You … can’t …’

  Charles casually lifted the gun from the bed and casually pulled the trigger. The report shook the walls. Daniel spun and fell on his face.

  Charles shrugged, then looked at me level. ‘Should we finish this? Do you want to do Susan? Or d’you want me to do her after I kill you?’

  I spit at him.

  ‘I can’t believe you did that,’ he said and he held the gun barrel to my head. ‘But things are as they are.’

  A figure stepped into the bedroom doorway.

  Thomas.

  His eyes were wild and terrified and innocent. He wore green shorts, a brown soccer shirt and white tennis shoes. He held the shovel that I’d used to bury Fela.

  ‘Well, hello,’ said Charles.

  ‘Run,’ I yelled.

  Thomas walked into the room. He glanced at his mother on the bed and me in the chair. His eyes turned to Charles.

  Charles seemed pleased to have him join us. ‘Come in, come in,’ he said. ‘I’d been thinking I would need to go out to find you. I was just offering your dad a final shot at your mother. He wasn’t interested. How about you?’

  Thomas lifted the shovel above his head and swung it at Charles.

  Charles threw an arm up and grabbed the shovel. He pushed it and Thomas stumbled back. Thomas looked startled but then he grinned at Charles and Charles laughed. Thomas swung the shovel again, and again Charles grabbed it. Then he aimed his pistol at Thomas’s chest.

  I begged. ‘Run.’

  Charles grinned. ‘Did you hear him, boy? Your daddy said to run.’

  An anger arose in Thomas’s face that I’d felt course through my own blood but had never seen in another man. Not even Charles. A terrible anger that transcended all impulses of fear or weakness.

  Charles saw it too and for just a moment he loosened his grip on the shovel. Thomas pulled it from him and drove the blade into Charles’ chest. As the blow punched the air from Charles’ lungs, a look of surprise crossed his eyes and he tumbled over the end of the bed and landed on the floor.

  His pistol fell from his hand and Thomas picked it up and pointed it at him.

  ‘Get help, Thomas,’ I said.

  He let Charles pull himself to his feet.

  ‘Get help,’ I said.

  Charles looked at the floor. He looked at Thomas’s white gym shoes and green shorts. He looked Thomas eye to eye. A grin crossed his lips again. ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ he said and took a step toward him.

  Thomas didn’t back away. He aimed the pistol at Charles, and Charles hesitated.

  ‘No,’ I said to Thomas.

  ‘No,’ Charles agreed. ‘I don’t think so.’ He stepped toward Thomas again.

  Thomas shot him in the stomach. The roar of the gun shook the walls.

  Charles looked at his belly, at the stain of blood that soaked through his white shirt, and he started to laugh but the laugh became a wheezing whine and he took another step.

  Thomas shot him again.

  Charles looked perplexed. He nodded and stepped again.

  Thomas shot him in the chest.

  Charles stumbled toward him.

  Thomas pulled the trigger but the gun didn’t fire. He pulled it again. Nothing.

  Charles reached for Thomas as if he would choke him but he just patted him twice on the shoulder. ‘You’re a good boy,’ he managed to say, and he stumbled out of the bedroom into the hall.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  That afternoon Lieutenant Denise Nuñez led a squad of seven cars to Charles’ house. They’d picked me up in a Percocet daze from the ER, saying they wanted a friend of Charles to negotiate with him to come out. I wore bandages as thick as mittens on my hands.

  A large police officer snapped the chain on the security gate with bolt cutters and we rolled up the driveway to within thirty or forty yards of the house. The window shades were down. Charles’ Dodge was parked on the spot in the driveway where he usually left it. Locusts hummed in the trees. A single cardinal flew across the driveway and landed in the branches of a cypress.

  More police cars were parked a block away on streets facing houses whose backyards touched Charles’ property. Officers had rushed to the neighbors’ houses and explained that they would need to evacuate, then accompanied them to vans that took them to wait at a community center. Only then did Denise Nuñez speak into a megaphone telling Charles to come out.

  No sound came from the house.

  The shades remained down.

  The front door remained shut.

  For an hour and a half Nuñez spoke into the megaphone and made telephone calls into the house, all to the same silent response. An officer received word that Daniel Turner had lived through surgery and probably would survive, and happiness surged through the crowd. Then Nuñez ordered tear-gas canisters to be shot through the windows. Glass broke and gas filled the house and spiraled into the yard.

  More silence.

  Another forty minutes passed.

  A tactical helicopter rattled the air overhead.

  Nuñez told a group of four SWAT members to break down the front door. They approached the front steps behind handheld ballistic shields, one of them carrying a hydraulic battering ram. They stopped and spoke to each other. Nuñez talked to one of them on a radio. He climbed on to the porch and removed something from the front door and all four backed away.

  It was a white envelope. Nuñez looked inside and brought it to me. ‘A gift for you apparently,’ she said. Inside the envelope was a photograph of me twenty years ago as I sat inside Worman’s Deli on the day that Charles introduced himself. He must have taken the picture as he’d entered, though I couldn’t imagine how without my seeing him do it. I looked young and sure of myself though I didn’t remember myself that way.

  I gave the photograph back to Nuñez. I said, ‘I don’t want to look at it.’

  The four SWAT officers crept toward the house again. They climbed the front porch steps, and the one with the battering ram positioned it so that its bolt would strike the door lock. They gave a silent count, the lead man triggered the ram and two of the others kicked the door off its hinges. The fourth covered them with an automatic rifle.

  For a moment nothing happened. Then Charles’ calico cat leaped over the threshold, dashed down the front steps and darted across the driveway. The man with the automatic rifle spun and shot it dead.

  The house was vacant. The furniture was gone. The kitchen cabinets and refrigerator were bare. The green SUV was missin
g from the garage. The counters and bathrooms smelled like bleach and industrial cleaners. The floors gleamed as if no chair had ever scraped across them. Our footsteps and voices echoed in the empty rooms and every echo told us that Charles was gone and never would return.

  ‘Damn,’ Nuñez said and turned to me. ‘Who was this guy?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Ask Daniel Turner when he wakes up.’

  She shook her head. ‘If.’

  An officer approached. ‘What about the car in the driveway?’

  Nuñez looked at me.

  ‘I gave it to him eight years ago,’ I said. ‘He might’ve decided he no longer wanted it.’

  ‘Check it out,’ Nuñez said to the officer. ‘Carefully.’

  The officer left and two evidence technicians approached. One of them said, ‘At first look there’s no trace of him. Not a drop of blood. Not a hair.’

  Nuñez smiled grimly. ‘Why am I not surprised?’

  The technicians went to make a second sweep. I gazed out the front window and discovered that Charles had left a second gift in the Dodge Charger. As the officer opened the door a fireball rolled from the hood across the front yard. It lit up the trees and sky. The explosion rocked the walls. The heat of it washed over my face and arms. A deep, slow silence followed the blast and then the screaming, crying and sirens started. When those sounds passed too the whole world rang in my inner ears and kept ringing.

  A week of wetland searches turned up bloody rags but no Charles. The police issued a national and then an international alert and newspapers and magazines featured Charles’ tear-scarred face. How do you hide a face like that? The best lead had him holed up in the Hillside neighborhood of Laredo, Texas, but when the police raided the house they found a one-eyed Mexican immigrant with an old knife wound on his cheek in bed with his fifteen-year-old wife. The police arrested him out of pure spite on charges of statutory rape.

  Charles was gone, as he’d said he would be, but without a body buried or incinerated I felt his presence always behind me and expected to hear his voice each time the phone rang. I put his broken front tooth in a dish on my desk at my Best Gas station in case he came looking for it. After the bandages came off, my right hand had three puncture scars and my left had two. Everyone in town knew how I got them. But when children or visitors asked, I said I burned myself with battery acid.