by John Inman
Finally, I turned his way. Even mad, he was cute. I could see him through the strobe of passing streetlights. “I’ll explain it to you later, Kenny. Maybe when we’re in bed. I always think I have a better chance of getting you to see things my way if I explain them to you in bed.”
“I know you do. And what makes me mad is that you’re right. You do. Did I ever tell you you’re an asshole?”
“Not lately,” I said.
“Well, your chain of good fortune is about to end because I’m going to say it now. You’re an asshole. There.”
I opened my mouth to deny it, but my argument crawled back down my throat like a frightened possum before I could get it out. Insincere arguments have a way of doing that.
The only smidgeon of hope I extracted from the entire exchange was the fact that Kenny’s hand never once left my leg. That was a good sign, right? In appreciation, I brought his hand to my lips again, and we drove the rest of the way to my house in not an entirely uncomfortable silence.
The car with the uneven headlights peeled away two blocks from my house. For a second I was relieved. Then on further consideration, I wasn’t. It meant Davis already knew where I lived.
With a heavy heart, I pulled into my garage and beeped the door closed behind me. I parked beside the pickup truck I had rented from Alamo. I hadn’t returned it yet.
In one last desperate attempt to make me see reason, Kenny groused as he climbed from the car. “I don’t have any clothes here.”
“Great! I like you better without them.”
He didn’t answer that, but I thought I saw him trying to hide a grin as I steered him into the house.
Chapter Fourteen
“I’M GOING to lock you in,” I explained. “The only door that can remain unlocked is the one leading out to the veranda from my bedroom. The bedroom is technically on the second floor, but the veranda overhangs the side of the canyon. It would be like a four-story climb for an intruder to shimmy up one of the support beams. Plus you have the dogs to warn you if anyone approaches the house.”
“Should I be expecting an intruder, then?”
I guffawed. Theatrically. Maybe too theatrically. “Golly, no. No, no, no, no. Of course not.”
Kenny didn’t look convinced. He was wearing an old pair of my pajama bottoms I had dug out of a dresser drawer. They were so big on him, he had to cinch up the waistband with a kitchen clip I used to seal potato chip bags shut. He had the clip clamped at the side, so he wouldn’t stab himself in the back with it if he sat down.
He tugged at the pants. “Please don’t let me die like this.”
I grinned. “I don’t plan on letting you die at all.”
“Oh goody. Should I have a gun?”
“I’m not giving a blind man a gun. You’d shoot the dogs.”
“You’re probably right. Or put a bullet through myself. We can’t have that.”
“No,” I agreed. “We can’t have that.”
“Do you have an alarm system for the house?”
“I have the dogs,” I said. I looked over to the corner where François and Chuck were sitting side by side. François was licking his balls and Chuck was yawning around a chew toy he seemed to have gotten stuck in the side of his mouth. Great.
After a pause, Kenny asked for the umpteenth time, “Is all this really necessary?”
“Probably not. But why take chances?”
“Is this how you live your life, Larry? Always thinking people are coming to kill you? Hiding out in your own home? Seeing evildoers popping up like gophers everywhere you look?”
I took a fistful of the pajama bottoms and pulled him to me. I cupped his face in my hands and held him in place, his mouth two inches from mine. “Sometimes, whether you want to admit it or not, there really are bad guys out there. I happen to be in a line of work that attracts them a bit more than other jobs.”
“Lucky you,” Kenny said prior to stretching up on tiptoe and planting a teeny kiss on my bottom lip.
“You’re going to pay for that later,” I said, trying to sound stern.
His eyes crinkled merrily at the corners. “I’m counting on it.”
I took his cane from the bed and pressed it into his hand. “Be careful on the stairs. Don’t break your neck. You’ve been here enough to know where the kitchen is and the fridge if you get hungry. I have a radio on the side of the bed here if you want music. I’ll draw all the blinds before I leave. I’d prefer you didn’t sit on the deck. While it might not be possible to climb up there, someone could still take a potshot at you from the trees.”
His eyes opened wide. “Jesus, Larry. Now you really are scaring me.”
“Just trying to think of every contingency,” I said. “I’m probably overreacting but….” My explanation fumbled.
He cocked his head to the side, waiting for me to finish what I had been about to say. When I didn’t, he asked, “But what? You’re probably overreacting but what?”
Again I dragged him into my arms and held his face to my chest. “The ‘but’ in that sentence is this,” I whispered into his hair. “I absolutely cannot let anything happen to you. Do you understand?”
He tilted his head back and blinked wide-eyed into a darkness only he could see. His hand came up to stroke my cheek. Almost as an afterthought, he reached higher and pinched a lock of my inch-long hair above my forehead. He playfully tugged at it, bringing my face closer to his. “Are you feeling what I’m feeling?” he asked, his voice little more than a murmur.
I closed my eyes and pressed a kiss to the side of his neck. “Are you talking hard-ons or something deeper?”
“Something deeper,” he said.
“I think I am,” I said softly. Then I gave my head a tiny shake. “No. I know I am.”
He didn’t answer, but he sort of melted into my arms, burrowing closer against me, clutching a little harder, our dicks two stones pressed together. I couldn’t see his face, but somehow I knew he was smiling. I couldn’t see my face either, but I knew I was too.
We stood like that for the longest time, wrapped in each other’s arms. We stood motionless so long that François and Chuck came over to see what the hell was going on. Chuck even nipped playfully at my pant leg, trying to pull us apart. Jealous, maybe.
“It’s okay, boys,” I said softly, and satisfied, they wandered off, back out onto the deck to check for lizards or take another snooze or lick their balls some more.
I watched them go before Kenny turned his empty gaze up to me.
“I’ll be safe here,” he said. “But will you be safe out there?”
“I’ll be safe,” I promised. “This is what I do.”
“Is it always dangerous like this?”
“No. Not always.”
“Did you lie to me that day you told me you never hurt anyone?”
The question caught me off guard. I stood motionless in his arms, my own arms wrapped around him. The smoothness of his back was satin under my hands. I could feel the thrumming of life beneath his skin, the gentle rush of air through his lungs, the soft patter of his heartbeat. I knew if we had any hope of a lasting relationship, it would have to begin with truth. He had shared his truths with me. How he lost his sight. How it changed his life. The insecurities his blindness left him with, the problems it presented. The least I could do was offer honesty in return.
Please, God, don’t let me scare him away.
“Yes,” I said, pulling him close, burying my lips in his hair. “I lied. I’ve hurt people. If things go right, I’ll hurt someone tonight. It’s what I do. It’s what needs to be done.”
“Why?” He had dropped his head and was speaking into my chest again. Once more he was holding me a little tighter. “Why does it need to be done? And why by you? Why are you the one who has to do it?”
“I correct wrongs, Kenny. When the law fails, I take over.”
“Don’t those same laws apply to you?”
“They do,” I said. “And I know what I do is
illegal. The only excuse I can offer you is that for some people out there, what I do is necessary. And it’s right, Kenny. What I do is right. These people I harm deserve the fate I dole out to them. They’ve earned it by the harm they’ve doled out to others. They can’t be let to walk away from the damage they’ve inflicted on innocent people’s lives. They have to be called to account. Do you understand?”
He ignored my question but asked one of his own. “Does it bother you when you hurt people?”
“Yes,” I said. “Every time.”
His voice grew softer. He was trembling now in my arms. “Do you actually… kill them?” he asked, his words teetering on the brink of fear. Fear, I suspected, that I might answer in a way he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear.
I dragged my front teeth over my lower lip, thinking. Thinking. “I do to them what they did to the people they wronged.”
“Like an eye for an eye,” Kenny quietly said.
“Yes,” I said, nodding slightly, still hedging. “Like that.”
I didn’t like myself very much at that moment because I knew I was still weaseling away from telling him the whole truth.
It didn’t take me long to realize that Kenny knew it too. He lifted his head and gazed upward in the direction of my eyes. “So you do kill people.”
The words sounded so cold coming from him, the truth of it so bare and heartless. I started yet again to edge around the truth. Maybe even to lie outright. But then I didn’t. Somehow I couldn’t. Although I knew that if I did tell him the truth, my life and my freedom would be left in his hands from that moment on. He could turn me in if he wanted. Or he could simply walk away. Away from me, away from what we were beginning to share, beginning to feel about each other. And that, I knew, would be infinitely worse than anything else that might happen.
“Yes,” I said, the word coming easier than I thought. “I kill people. When the law fails to redress their crimes, the families of victims pay me to correct the wrong.”
“So you’re a hitman.”
“Please don’t call me that.”
I had a sinking feeling I was losing this battle as I imagined the wheels turning inside his head.
“Do you vet these people?” he asked. “Do you investigate them? Do you know they are really guilty?”
“Yes. I know they are guilty.”
“Do you do it on your own, or do the victim’s families always come to you first?”
“I’ve never hurt anyone on my own. The families make it happen. The families seek me out.”
Kenny’s eyes were closed now. He was thinking. “And are they right to do that?” he asked. “Is it up to them to make that decision?”
“Baby, if you knew what these people have been through, you wouldn’t have to ask that question.”
“The person you are hunting tonight. What did he do?”
“He killed a nine-year-old boy. He drove drunk. Hit the boy with his car. Left him to die in the gutter like a dog, then did everything in his power to hide what he did from the law. He took no responsibility for his actions. He has never for a moment shown remorse for what he did. Now he’s driving drunk again, and it’s only a matter of time before he kills someone else.”
“And you know all this for a fact?”
“Yes.”
“And the boy’s family contacted you.”
I heaved a sigh. “Yes.”
“And this family will pay you when you finish?”
“Yes. The family will pay me. All my clients pay me.”
Kenny blinked, blocking the deep green of his eyes for a flash of time. Then he closed them again and left them closed as he stretched upward and pressed a kiss to each of my eyelids.
“Promise you’ll come home to me in one piece tonight,” he whispered.
“There’s nothing I want more.”
He stepped back, easing himself from my arms, but his soft hand remained on my cheek.
“Then go,” he said.
“I love you,” I said.
And at that, he finally smiled. “You said the words.”
“Yes. I said the words. I’ve wanted to for a while.”
“I’m glad. I love you too, you know.”
My heart did some sort of somersault inside my chest. “I was hoping you did.”
And he grinned.
I relived that last conversation over and over again as I drove through town in my rattletrap rented pickup. A heavy wrench, which made a pretty good weapon, and a three-foot length of clothesline, which also made a pretty good weapon, lay on the truck seat beside me. If things went as planned, I wouldn’t need to use either of them. I’d use my bare hands instead.
I drove past John Allan Davis’s apartment building and circled the block. His apartment lights were out. I glanced at the radium dial on my wristwatch. It was almost midnight. As an afterthought, I slipped the wristwatch off. If I found myself in the darkness with my quarry, I didn’t want the light of the watch to give me away.
As I approached the building for the second time, I pulled into a parking space I found half a block away that still offered a view of the steps leading up to Davis’s shithole apartment. I sat there silent and anxious, watching the building for more than an hour. Only when the urge to pee began to make itself known did I act.
I reached up behind me, and snapped off the plastic cover of the truck’s interior light, removed the bulb, and laid it on the seat beside me. I stared at the wrench and the clothesline for a second and decided on the spur of the moment not to take them with me. I had the shoulder-length rectal gloves and the ski mask stuffed in my pockets. That would be enough. Besides, I had other weapons in my arsenal. Built-in weapons. I slipped from the cab and eased the door closed behind me.
Retracing the path I had taken with the truck, I strolled to the corner and followed the sidewalk around to the middle of the block where the alley passed the back of Davis’s building and the garage next door. I stood behind bushes, watching the property for a long minute. Of the six units in the building, not one was showing lights. Everyone was in bed. But Davis too? I didn’t believe it for a minute. Or did I? Not more than thirty minutes ago, he was following me home. Where he had gone from there, I didn’t know. If he had been watching my place, he would know I had left. Hopefully he wasn’t trying to break into my house right now. Hopefully he wasn’t trying to get back at me by going after the person I cared about most.
Just the thought of it clenched my heart into a ball of tightly bound fear. I moved to pull my cell phone from my pocket and dial home, just to hear Kenny’s voice, but I didn’t want the phone light to give away my position.
No. I’ve started. I might as well finish what I set out to do.
But was Davis even home?
The streetlight at the front of the building left a large swatch of deep shadow angling across the backyard of the complex. Inside that swath were the stairs leading up to Davis’s back porch. But I didn’t go that way. I slipped away to the left instead and ducked into the even deeper shadow at the back of the garage.
Recalling my previous foray onto the property, I remembered a window that was not only locked, but also painted shut. I’d make a lot of racket getting through it. Instead, I sidled around the corner of the building, carefully staying in the shadow of the eaves. The ancient clapboard walls scraped like sandpaper along my back, probably depositing flakes of sunbaked paint chips across my shoulders. If so, thanks to the miracle of forensic work, which unfortunately was one of the few things the police actually did well, I’d have to permanently dispose of the shirt. Small price to pay not to end up in the condemned unit at San Quentin.
Using my favorite lock pick again, it was a matter of ten seconds tops until I was able to squeak the garage side door open and sneak inside. I squinted against the darkness but couldn’t see a thing. Pitch black. This time when I went for my cell phone, I carried through. I flicked it to life, and the screen shot of François and Chuck as puppies, wrestling on my bed, provide
d enough light for me to see. Except for a lot of junk stacked around the walls, the garage was empty. Davis’s car was gone.
At that moment, I knew it was pointless to scope out the apartment. He wouldn’t be there. Suddenly I had an overwhelming desire to hightail it back out the door and head directly home, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. Kenny was there, and I had to know he was safe.
I would take care of Davis another day.
I slipped back into the night air, relocked the garage door, scooted to the back of the property, and headed down the alley. Somewhere off to my left, a dog was barking, but I ignored it. Out on the street, I turned right, followed the corner to my right again, and went straight for the rental truck. Ten seconds later I was on the way home.
I had been gone little more than an hour, but it was late, and there were no sounds in my house when I arrived. I climbed the stairs to my bedroom, shedding clothes as I went. On the second floor, I found Kenny asleep on the bed. My pajama bottoms were neatly folded on a chair, and Kenny lay spread-eagled on his back, naked in the moonlight, one hand tucked behind his head, the other dangling off the side of the mattress. He was snoring softly. The dogs were at his feet. They had been asleep, too, until I stepped through the bedroom door. I thought they looked a bit sheepish to have been snuck up on like that, and I certainly couldn’t blame them if they were. Watchdogs indeed.
I pressed a finger against my lips to plea for silence—like François and Chuck would really pick up a nonverbal cue like that—and carefully ushered them out onto the deck, where I quietly closed the screen door behind them, locking them out.
Since I had removed everything else, the only thing keeping me from being totally unclothed was the T-shirt I wore. I made short work of pulling it over my head and flinging it into a corner. Now I was stark raving naked, just the way I wanted to be. And wasn’t it fortuitous that Kenny was in the same state?
I eased open a dresser drawer and pulled out a bandanna I tied around my neck sometimes when I jogged. Tonight I had a different use for it.
