A Killer in the Wind

by Andrew Klavan

  I heard the breath come stuttering out of him like a death rattle. I saw the big eyes glow with frustration and fury. He kept coming toward me. I kept stepping back—and then my heels hit the door, the door of the last room, the room where the Fat Woman was tied to the chair.

  I stopped. Stark stopped. We stood facing each other. The corridor was silent. The Fat Woman wasn’t screaming anymore. I guess all that gunfire had shut her up.

  For one more second we faced off, Samantha between us. Then I saw the next idea—the next move—come into the skeleton’s glowing eyes. I guess we thought of it at the same time, and we knew at the same time that I was finished.

  He shifted the gun from Samantha’s head to her elbow. He tightened his grip around her throat.

  “I don’t have to kill her,” he rasped. “We can begin this now.”

  But even before he finished speaking, I threw down my gun. I spread my hands.

  “You win, Stark,” I said.

  Stark made a noise: a long, groaning breath of satisfaction. His grin and his pleasure-glazed stare made his face look like something that might pop out at you in a funhouse. He had to lick the salt of joy off his lips before he could speak.

  “Go through the door now,” he said. He pressed his gun harder against Samantha’s writhing body by way of emphasis.

  But I didn’t need to be told twice. I reached behind me for the knob. Opened the door. Stepped through.

  The light in the room made me squint after the shadows of the corridor. Before I got my bearings, Stark stormed in after me, shoving me aside. He took one look around: the Fat Woman struggling in the chair, the cluttered desk, the night-hung windows, the papers and files stacked up against the wall . . .

  “Good!” said the Fat Woman at once in her loud, blunt voice. “Get this cord off me—now!”

  Stark ignored her. With every breath, he was still making that sound, that gratified groan. He tossed Samantha away from him—as if she were a crumpled piece of paper; as if she were garbage. She hit the wall and stumbled, struggling to keep her feet. She stood there, breathing hard behind her gag, her hands bound behind her. She watched us with her wide, distant eyes.

  Stark, on the other hand—he was all focus, fully alert. He gestured at me with the gun.

  “Take off that jacket.”

  “Get this cord off me, damn it!” said the Fat Woman. “It’s cutting off my circulation. I’m going to get gangrene.”

  “Shut up,” Stark told her. And to me again: “The jacket—take it off.”

  I stripped off the windbreaker. He gestured with the gun again. I tossed the jacket to a spot near his feet. Stark kicked it aside.

  “Turn your pockets inside out,” he said to me.

  “Goddamn it, Stark!” shouted the Fat Woman.

  “You’ll get out,” he told her. “Just hold your water.”

  The Fat Woman made a guttural noise of rage. She struggled against the cord for a moment, then sagged, gasping with the effort.

  Another gesture my way from Stark’s pistol. I started to turn my pockets inside out.

  “You’re a hard case, Champion. I have to give you that,” Stark said as I went at it. He was beginning to come down from the high of winning our confrontation. The bitter rage was welling up in him again. “Those were good men I sent after you. And you took them out. I have to give you that. You’re a hard case. We’re going to see how hard.”

  I didn’t answer. I went on turning out my pockets.

  “Go ahead. Say something funny,” Stark told me. “I like it when you say something funny.”

  I was done. I lifted my hands.

  “Turn around,” said Stark.

  I turned. I looked down at the Fat Woman. I saw her glaring up at me from the chair, her mottled ruin of a face contorted with furious triumph. Her marble eyes glinted her hatred at me.

  “Good,” said Stark behind me. “You’re unarmed. Turn around again.”

  I faced him.

  “All right,” said the Fat Woman. “Now let me out of here.”

  Stark nodded—but for another moment, he made no move to go to her. He went on standing there, went on looking at me—looking at me almost dreamily, covering me with the gun. He was really enjoying this now.

  “You know what’s funny about this,” he rasped. He cocked his head as if the clever idea had just occurred to him. “Here you are again. You see what I mean? All this time, all this running, all this killing you’ve done . . . this whole journey of yours—where has it taken you? You’ve returned right back to where you started, haven’t you? You and your girl—prisoners of my fat friend here. Locked up—oh, yes, she told me all about it. Locked up in the high room, about to be sent into a world of my pleasure, and your pain.” His laughter made my skin crawl. “Isn’t it amazing, Champion? How it’s all come full circle? After all that trouble and time and death, here you are again, same place, same situation, you and your girl both, and what’s the difference?”

  I shook my head slowly, my hands still raised. “Only one,” I said, “only one difference.”

  Stark snorted through his weird, wide, sunken nose. “What’s that?”

  “This time, my girl has a knife.”

  I had kept watch on Samantha during this past minute or two. I could see her working at her canvas and metal belt, getting the knife out, sawing at her zip-tied cuffs. I could see she was ready—or as ready as she was going to be. I just wasn’t sure she had the will or the courage.

  But if she was capable of doing anything, she had to do it now.

  There was a second after I spoke—what seemed to me like an unnaturally long second—when I saw my words begin to make sense to Stark, saw his eyes begin to reflect his understanding. He had probably searched Samantha. Of course he had. But she was just a librarian. It hadn’t occurred to him that she had planned for this, that she had thought of a way to fight back, to turn herself into a weapon. My weapon. He hadn’t thought of that at all.

  Too bad, skeleton-man.

  As the understanding dawned on him, he turned—and still, the time seemed to stretch out, the movement seemed to me slow as slow could be—he turned, bringing his gun around toward Samantha.

  I threw myself at him. And at the same time, Samantha launched herself off the wall, her hand lashing out from behind her with the strength and flexibility of a bullwhip. The little blade jutting from her fingers caught the light and winked. The Fat Woman had time to let out a short bark of surprise behind me.

  Then Samantha slashed Stark’s face. A scarlet line of his blood arced through the air, following the arc of the blade. And at the same instant, I grabbed the killer’s wrist with one hand and drove the edge of my other hand into the crook of his elbow.

  The blow sent his gun hand flying up. The pistol discharged—a blast that filled the room, that overwhelmed the atmosphere with noise. The bullet went into the ceiling and fragments of wood and white plaster rained down on top of us.

  Chaos then. I twisted Stark’s wrist and he dropped the gun. He twisted around to strike at my throat but sent only a glancing blow to the side of my neck. Samantha, making a high, gravelly noise behind her gag of tape, tried to cut him again, leaping at him, jabbing the point of the knife into his shoulder. He drove his elbow back into her—a hard shot in the center of the forehead. Her blade went flying. Samantha went reeling backward. She smacked into the wall. Her legs went rubbery underneath her. She reached for purchase but found nothing and slid down to the floor, blinking, openmouthed, dazed.

  And Stark and I came crashing together, grappling with each other, our contorted faces inches apart.

  My hands were on his arms and his on mine and both of us were struggling to strike a blow. Locked in combat like that, we also smacked into the wall, trying to punch or tear or knee or kick one another but only turning violently around the doorjamb as one body, stumbling as one body through the opening, out into the hall.

  We moved from the light of the room to the shadows of th
e corridor, struggling, wrestling. Those sinewy arms of his were strong; I could feel it. I couldn’t get a hand free and had to use all my own strength to hold on to him. We turned again and my back hit another wall in the corridor. The impact jarred me and Stark used the moment to spin me off the wall and lift his leg between us. In a single, swift motion, he jammed his foot into my belly and hurled himself backward to the floor, dragging me down with him.

  I let out a grunt as he lifted my body on his foot and somersaulted backward, hurling me through the air.

  I took a long, helpless, turning fall through the darkness. My back hit the floor hard, the jolt punching the breath out of me. Still, I managed to roll forward, managed to scramble to my feet, managed to swivel round and set myself, ready for Stark’s next onslaught. But while Stark was on his feet too, he wasn’t coming after me. He was turned away from me, bending forward . . .

  And I realized: the gun. My Glock. I’d thrown it to the floor right there, right at the doorway. I started racing toward him, but too late. He already had the weapon in his hand. He was already straightening, already turning.

  Then I reached him. Caught his arm in both my hands as it came around toward me. I tried with all my strength to wrestle the gun away from him as he tried with all his strength to strike me down and pull it free—and battling like that, we spun and banged and jostled down the corridor into the dark, the rectangle of light from the open doorway getting smaller and dimmer as we moved.

  He wouldn’t let go of the gun. I couldn’t get it away from him. I had to hold on to his arm—which left him free to try to strike at me with his fist. He looked for a way to get at my throat or my eyes. Finally, he hit. Hard. A blow to the temple that made the shadows spark around me. I lost my grip on him. I fell back. Stark staggered, his hand thrown high—but he still had the gun. He lowered it at me.

  I had one half-second before he fired—one half-second to see and understand that we had come all the way down the hall to the stairway, that Stark was standing right at the head of the stairs, right at the edge of the stairs, with me against the wall in front of him.

  I ducked and charged him and he fired.

  The gun must have been right by my ear because the explosion seemed to go off inside my head and for the next few moments, I could hear nothing. I didn’t know if I’d been shot. I didn’t know if I was wounded or bleeding out, seconds from death. All I knew was that I had barreled full force into Stark’s midsection, driving him over the edge of the top step. Now he and I were falling—falling and turning and tumbling together down the stairway into the lightless living room below.

  It was a weird, dreamy fall, a weird, dreamy spiral of pain and fear—fear because I couldn’t stop it, couldn’t control anything: all the jolts and jars and somersaulting confusion—a helpless tumble through dreamy silence that wasn’t silence but the endless deafening explosion of the gun obliterating every other sound.

  Then we hit the floor. We spilled into the living room, losing our grips on each other, so that for a long, long, terrible second, I had no idea where Stark was or where the gun was or what was about to happen.

  Searching in the dark, I made him out, the awful figure of him, a skeleton scrabbling like a lizard across the floor, his white head lifted, luminous in the shadows, his white hands clawing their way over the edge of the rug—and toward the gun. The gun had fallen and spun a few yards away from him. He had almost reached it.

  I somehow got my feet under me and sprang at the crawling killer. Landed on top of him. Wrapped my arm around his throat.

  I got a good grip, a good choke hold, the crook of my elbow wedged in his gullet, preventing him from tucking his chin in, from getting a breath. He knew it too—and he knew he had only seconds before he lost consciousness. So he didn’t try to fight me. He just kept going. He just kept crawling, scrabbling, driving across the floor, dragging me—amazingly—along with him as he tried to reach that gun.

  I tightened my stranglehold. I could hear again now—and I could hear him gagging. But he kept crawling and now his fingers were on the gun’s grip. I choked him. Choked him. He had to stop. Had to go under. But he didn’t. Wouldn’t. He willed himself on. He wrapped his fingers around the gun. He raised it with an unsteady arm.

  I tried to hold him down. Tried to stop him. Tried to cut the blood flow to his brain, closing my grip around his throat with all the force I could muster.

  And still—God help me, still—he kept lifting the weapon in his hand, lifting it over his shoulder, pointing it back at me so that I had to choose whether to get out of the way or to keep my hold on him.

  I kept my hold on him. I would not let him go, not again, not ever again. Even if he did it. Even if he shot me. Even if he killed me. Even if he sent me straight to hell, I would keep this grip around his throat and drag him into the fire with me.

  I squeezed his throat tighter . . . tighter. He lifted the gun over his shoulder. The barrel touched my head. He pressed the muzzle against my eyebrow.

  I felt the cold metal on my flesh. I felt the black bore burrowing into me. I waited for Stark to pull the trigger and went on choking him, defying him, defying the bullet that was going to go through me. Waiting for the explosion I would never hear.

  But he collapsed then, before he could pull the trigger. His hand—his gun—dropped heavily to the floor. His body went slack beneath me, twitching weakly, trembling weakly, finally falling still.

  I would not let him go—I couldn’t; I couldn’t relax my arm—until long after he was dead, until long after I felt the life go out of him.

  Then, at last, my own strength broke. I lost my hold. I rolled off Stark’s body onto the floor. I lay on my back beside the corpse, gasping for breath.

  And suddenly: a gunshot. From upstairs.

  Samantha . . .

  I choked on my terror. The Fat Woman . . . had she gotten free?

  I had to get up there.

  I turned quickly to Stark. Saw him lying dead, his face twisted to the side, his skeletal features still, his tongue lolling out between his bared teeth, those eyes, those bulging, glassy eyes, staring, empty. Quickly, I reached for his hand. Got the gun, the Glock, peeled it from his limp fingers. I climbed painfully to my feet. Staggered forward.

  Samantha . . .

  Weak, I moved unsteadily to the base of the stairs. A sour acid of fear was running through me. I took hold of the banister. My legs were so rubbery, I had to use the strength of my arm to haul myself up. I climbed slowly, gripping the banister, gripping the gun. Only my will kept me moving. Because I had to get to her.

  I reached the landing.

  The door at the end of the hall was half-open. I could see nothing but a narrowed wedge of yellow light at the end of the long corridor of shadows. I willed myself step by step through the darkness to that light. Step by slow step with no strength, the light growing larger in front of me.

  Two steps before I reached the door, I smelled the gun smoke. Then I came into the doorway. Pushed the door back. Moved over the threshold.

  I saw Samantha first. She was standing in front of the desk, her arms down by her side, her face in quarter profile to me. She was looking at something but her eyes were empty. Her mouth was slack. She seemed in a state of waking unconsciousness. She had Stark’s pistol gripped loosely in her fingers.

  I followed her gaze to the Fat Woman. The creature was still tied to the chair. Her head was thrown back. What was left of her face was tilted up toward the ceiling. In the midst of that nearly featureless swirl of burned brown and white flesh, the bullet hole seemed merely another blemish, this one right between her marbly, soulless eyes. Funny: Those eyes looked no more dead now than they had when she was living. Her body, though—the huge mass of it seemed to have sagged into itself, like a hollow thing that had been stepped on, crushed; that’s where you could see that she was gone. And by the blood, of course, dripping heavily from the back of her head. In the quiet of the room, I could hear it pattering on the flo
or behind her.

  We held our places there a moment, we three—Samantha, the Fat Woman, and I. Still and speechless. I felt dazed—dazed to find that it was all over. Or at least I thought it was all over . . .

  But it wasn’t. Not quite.

  Because then, in one smooth, deliberate motion, Samantha lifted her hand, lifted the gun, and put the barrel into her mouth.

  I had time to shout—one word: “No!”

  I had time to rush to her, to drop my Glock, to grab her hand. But there was no time to stop her. If she had not hesitated, she could have pulled the trigger, could have blown the back of her head all over the walls.

  But she paused. Just a second. Just long enough to shift her gaze—just long enough to look at me.

  I don’t know what she saw, but it seemed to wake her up somehow. That look that had been in her eyes, that look I’d seen in the eyes of so many abused children—that look of retreat into distance or fantasy or empty despair—seemed all at once to be overcome, the emptiness all at once flooded with life from within, her eyes like the eyes of someone coming out of a trance.

  The gun barrel was still at her lips. My hand was still on her hand. My eyes were on her eyes and now her eyes were awake to me.

  “No,” I said again, more gently.

  She let me pull her hand away. Turn the pistol away. Gently draw it out of her fingers. Toss it aside.

  I wrapped my arms around her, pulled her to me. She pressed her face into my shoulder. She let out one loud, awful sob—one spasm that racked her entire body—but she didn’t cry.

  “I killed her,” she said.

  I kissed her hair. “She deserved to die.”

  “She was tied to the chair and I . . .”

  “It’s all right.”

  She shuddered against me. Placed her palm against my chest and pushed away until she could look up at me. Now that she was awake to herself, she had no defense. Her eyes were wide. She saw everything.