“What do you mean?”
“It’s a Greek myth—”
“I know Greek mythology. Epimetheus made the animals and finished before Prometheus, who made mankind. That’s why he had to steal fire from the gods, because his brother had given all the best gifts to the animals. But he didn’t destroy his creations, far from it. He loved them. He risked everything for them.”
“As far as we know,” Billy Windsor said. “But what if part of the reason that Prometheus took so long is because he started over again? And over. And over. I’ve come to believe he made several attempts, destroying his earlier work, until he got it right. That’s why Epimetheus was done first. Because Prometheus had the integrity to strive for perfection.”
“You think you made us? That you’re our creator?”
“Not exactly. But you would be less without me. Can you deny that?”
“I’ll concede you set some events in motion,” Tess said.
“I set everything in motion. I am motion. We’re soulmates, Tess. You can live with me or die with me. If you want to die, I’ll kill you now—and join you in death. One quick shot to the heart, and it will all be over. But if you choose life—if you choose me—it will be a love like no one’s ever known. I’ll hold you forever, the way the jimmy holds the sook, floating on the tide. We’ll be beautiful swimmers. Together.”
He was leaning in so close she wanted to shut her eyes. His breath was surprisingly sweet, minty, as if he had rinsed with mouthwash before she arrived. The Dominican man must have called Billy Windsor on his cell phone after she knocked on his door. Billy Windsor had told him to come here, knowing she and Carl would follow, improvising this plan. He could not plan everything in advance.
“You have to admit, I took advantage of those events you set in motion. I built up my own business. I got better at what I did. You don’t get the credit for all that.”
“True. But without me, you never would have crossed the starting line. What would have happened if I hadn’t killed that man?”
“His name,” Tess said, struggling for control of her voice, the one thing left for her to control, “was Jonathan Ross.”
“I know. But he didn’t matter to me. Neither did you, at first. But when I realized how you were blossoming, how you began to thrive—then I knew you were ready. And I knew what I had to do.”
He leaned toward her, his mouth open, as if he meant to kiss her. Tess swallowed hard, then parted her lips. She had no choice. She had to do what he wanted, had to stay alive every second she could. She opened her mouth, opened herself, allowed his lips to fasten on hers. His kiss was shockingly familiar, not unlike Crow’s—probing but polite, not gnawing greedily as some men did. He was waiting for permission. She opened her mouth wider still, drew his tongue inside— and then she bit him.
She drove her teeth into his lips with all the force she could muster, biting through the lower lip until his blood spurted into both their mouths. She bit down and she held on the best she could, until she tore a strangled scream from his throat, shocking him in her betrayal as he had shocked woman after woman in his. She used her teeth like knives, but the human face was surprisingly resilient. She was not strong enough to rip another person’s flesh, although she was bearing down so hard she felt a sharp, metallic pain in her molar, the one that was tender because she ground her teeth at night.
But she was strong enough not to let go, to fasten on his mouth like some vicious parasite, sending wave after wave of pain into his face, his head, his body. He slapped her, boxing her ears until they rang. Still, she didn’t let go, just kept holding on to his lip with her teeth even as she raised her right leg, the one that wasn’t hurt, and landed her knee exactly where her eighth-grade gym teacher had told her to kick a man if she was ever in real trouble.
It worked, it actually worked. He fell back, writhing. Tess calculated she had bought herself ten, maybe twenty seconds at the most. She rocked on the legs of her wooden chair, tucking her chin to her chest, hoping she didn’t lose consciousness. The chair fell backward with a thud that knocked the breath out of her—and, as she had hoped, cracked its wooden frame, so the rope was now slack and the chair in pieces. She struggled free and looked around the room. He had a gun, he had said he had a gun. Where was it?
But she was out of time. He was on his knees, those strange guttural sounds still coming from his throat, his eyes slitted in pain and revenge. She saw the glint of the scissors on the floor and dove for them. He grabbed her left leg—high, on purpose, on the very bandage he had made for her—and the pain was searing. Now he was on top of her, he had her left arm, but not her right, which she held away from him, like a kid in a game of keep-away. Her right hand had the scissors.
She didn’t want to do it. She knew the nightmares over this act would eclipse everything she had ever known before, would make her yearn for her old night terrors, where she was only a witness, not a player. But this was a nightmare too, and there was only one way to wake from it.
She drove the scissors into his left eye, plunging the blade as far as it could go. New blood—richer blood, thicker blood—flowed over her and into her eyes. He was still making those horrible noises. Which meant she had not driven the scissors deep enough. He was breathing; he was alive. But she was free, she was crawling away from him, her hands sliding along the blood-slick floor.
She stood, her legs shaking. She couldn’t run, she could barely walk, and he showed no signs of dying. He was tougher than she was, a cockroach, a scavenger. He had come back from the dead twice so far, and he would come back again if she let him. She staggered to the card table, to the gym bag from which he had pulled the scissors and razor. A 9-millimeter was on top, loaded.
Billy Windsor was sitting up, blood spurting from his face, the scissors jutting out, his voice full of pain and outrage as he screamed incomprehensible threats at her. She watched in a kind of sickened admiration as he took a deep breath, grabbed the scissors by the handle, and pulled them from his eye, releasing yet more blood. She couldn’t believe he had any blood left in him at this point. He didn’t look real to her. He didn’t look human. Good. She couldn’t afford to think of him as human.
Tess picked up the gun, held it in two hands, aimed carefully at Billy Windsor’s midsection, and fired. The 9-millimeter had more kick than her .38 and it jerked up, so her first shot tore through his throat. She held tighter with her trembling hands and the shots that followed hit him at chest level, again and again and again. She shot him first for Becca—whose only crime was to think well of herself, to believe she had a say in her own future. For Tiffani, and for Lucy. She shot him for Hazel and Michael Shaw and Eric Shivers. For Julie, the stupid little drug addict who had almost escaped him. And for Jonathan, who had been nothing to him but a shape in the morning fog, a means to an end, another person to be sacrificed for Billy Windsor’s survival. The gun had ten shells; she had two left. She shot him one more time. For Carl.
Done, she stuck the gun in her own empty holster and limped out to the parking lot. She found Billy Windsor’s cell phone in his van. She dialed 911 as she made her way to Carl’s body. He was lying faceup under the stars, his eyes still open. She tucked the phone under her chin as she waited for the dispatcher to answer, placing her hand on Carl Dewitt’s neck. For a moment, she thought she felt a pulse, but it was her own thumb, sending the news of her beating heart back to her. She was the only one who was still alive.
EPILOGUE
“Congratulations,” Dr. Armistead said. “I see the stitches have come out.”
He gestured toward her leg, which was still a little stiff but otherwise back in working condition. Tess had even rowed that morning, for the first time in almost two months. But she had been wearing shorts all that time, sitting in a lounge chair by the Roland Park Pool, so there was a white stripe where the bandage had been. The cut had required thirteen lucky stitches, two inside and eleven outside, and the scar on her left kneecap was still red and angry-looking.
It was as if a begrudging teacher had scrawled a checkmark on her knee: good work.
Now Dr. Armistead was saying the same thing, in effect. Congratulations. Good job. But was it?
“Are you congratulating me for being no-billed by the grand jury? I told you they always do, when self-defense is alleged.”
“Alleged?” His bushy eyebrows shot up. “But it was self-defense.”
“Officially. The newspapers didn’t report the detail that I used nine shots out of a clip that held ten.”
“I don’t understand the significance.”
“The homicide detectives did. And the state police.” She had left one bullet in the gun to show them she was in her right mind, she hadn’t lost control. She wanted them to know the deliberation she brought to her task. She had chosen to take a man’s life. But she had told Dr. Armistead that much.
“How do you—”
“Please don’t finish that question. I feel fine. I did what I had to do.”
Or had she? The cops considered her a hero, but she didn’t feel like one. Carl was the hero, and he had been given a proper hero’s funeral, although she was too numb at the time to appreciate it. Later, his name was read at the annual memorial service of law officers killed in the line of duty. Tess wasn’t sure she believed in an afterlife, but she hoped Carl had made it to one, if only because he would have been so pleased by his posthumous glory. She liked to think he and Lucy Fancher had met at last, and Lucy finally had her body back. Maybe her hair, too. If hair and fingernails can grow after death, they should grow in heaven as well.
Tess’s own hair was now just long enough to be impossible. She had forgotten how much curl it had when it was short. Her mother said, almost hopefully, that it would never grow back, that Tess should settle for a grown-up cut. But Tess was determined to reclaim her braid if it took five years, ten, twenty. Unlike Billy’s other women, she didn’t have the delicate features to carry such short hair. Whitney, being Whitney, had told her she looked like shit. Crow, being Crow, had said she was beautiful.
Neither one was right. But neither one was wrong.
“What are you thinking?” Dr. Armistead asked.
She sighed but told the truth. “About my hair.”
“Ah, yes. Your hair. I suppose you’ve thought about the inherent irony—how you were sent here because you decided to denude a man, like a modern-day Delilah, only to have another man do the same thing to you.”
“Well, duh.” She still couldn’t help tweaking the doctor at times. “Although your analogy falters. I didn’t lose my strength when my hair was gone. I was stronger than ever.”
“Yes. But have you stopped to consider the true source of your strength? Do you credit anyone, or any process in particular, with the fact that you were strong and resilient in the face of danger? That you used your anger properly?”
“Me.” He actually looked hurt. “Well, you might have helped.”
She wasn’t sure if she believed that or not. She knew having Dr. Armistead as a sounding board had been instrumental over the last several weeks. But she never forgot that her visits here were probationary, the result of another man thinking he knew what she needed. Three months to go, three months to go, three months to go. She was halfway to the end.
“Have you stopped to think that, if Billy Windsor hadn’t fixated on you, he might have continued killing these small-town girls who had the bad luck to look like his first love?”
“You’re trying to make me feel better that Carl’s dead and I’m alive. But I can’t rationalize things that way. I don’t think that’s what Carl wanted.”
“Do you think Billy Windsor was evil?”
They had been here before. “No. He was sick. He even tried to get help, but I don’t think he really wanted to be helped. He wanted to matter. From the day he killed Becca and faked his own death, he sentenced himself to a shadow existence. Killing was the one way he asserted his reality, strange as it sounds. Restored to his true identity, placed in a hospital for the criminally insane, he might have gotten better.”
“Yet you didn’t give him that chance.”
“No. I killed him.”
“One might even say you executed him.”
The more he pushed her, the more she felt compelled to defend herself. Perhaps there was a method to Dr. Armistead’s madness.
“When I’m feeling charitable about myself, I think that I put Billy Windsor out of his misery. He wanted to stop what he was doing, but he couldn’t. He was going to keep killing because no woman was ever going to satisfy him.” Tess tried for a light tone. “Not even me.”
She felt the dreaded thickness in her throat. She always blinked back her tears when they started in this office because she hated the automatic question, “What are those tears about?” Besides, she didn’t want to cry anymore. She didn’t want to be anyone’s hero, she didn’t want to talk to true-crime writers, from the sleazy to the sober, who kept leaving messages at the office she hadn’t visited for the past seven weeks. She didn’t want to spend all her time assuring solicitous friends and family members that she was fine, really fine, just fine, damn it. But mostly she didn’t want to cry, and she found she was crying quite a bit—in her car, at the grocery store, and every time she watched The Wild Bunch. The mere sight of William Holden and that damn scorpion was enough to make her break down.
This was the one place she had managed not to lose it. Until now.
She began to cry so hard that she had to grope for the box of Kleenex like a blind woman.
“Tess, I know you still don’t like coming here. And maybe you never belonged here, maybe the judge was wrong. But you’ve been through a lot. It’s a propitious time for you to be in therapy.”
“But doesn’t this whole thing prove how angry I am, if not downright psychotic? Aren’t you and Judge Halsey going to use this as an excuse to extend my term here? I fired nine shots at a man I could have allowed to live. Isn’t that wrong?”
“You were fighting for your life. In hindsight, you see that you had choices. But you were weak, you couldn’t outrun him. You had to use the gun.”
“So why nine shots. Why not just one or two?”
“You tell me, Tess. You say you left one bullet in the gun to show you were in control. But what’s the significance of nine?”
Eric, Becca, Tiffani, Lucy, Hazel, Michael, Julie, Carl—and Jonathan. But only the first eight names had been reported in the media. Tess had never spoken of Billy Windsor’s twisted motive, never explained how they had met. She had found, much to her amazement, a tiny flicker of sympathy for Luisa O’Neal, faint but true. Let her die with her family’s reputation intact, if it meant so much to her. Luisa didn’t have much left, lying in a hospital bed beneath a sign advising that she wore cloth diapers. The only thing she had to look forward to was her own glowing obituary. So be it.
Besides, if Tess could forgive Luisa, she might also begin to forgive herself.
She chewed her lower lip. “One day I might tell you. Not yet. But one day.”
“If it’s any comfort, I think you’re doing extraordinarily well. You’ve begun to sleep through the night without medication. You tell me your appetite is back, and it does look as if you’ve gained some of the weight you lost. I don’t expect we’ll go beyond the court-mandated term— which ends in October.”
“October twenty-eighth, to be exact. Not that I’m keep track or anything.” But she smiled, and he smiled back.
Finally, all the instruments agreed that the hour was over, and Tess was free, at least for another week. She walked out into an already-searing morning, the seventh in an oppressive heat wave. Now that it was August, every day was a Code Red day. Crow and Whitney waited in the Adirondack chairs, flanked by a panting Esskay and Miata. They followed her almost everywhere she went these days, in some combination. Whitney and Crow, Esskay and Miata. Sometimes Tess wanted to remind them of what could happen to those who got too close to her. But they would not be deterred, and i
n the end she did not want them to be.
She realized Crow was sitting where Carl had sat just seven weeks earlier, on another Code Red day, a day when sheer momentum had carried them too far and fast. They should have stopped in those increasingly manic twelve hours, should have paused for breath, taken a moment to think things through—but they hadn’t. They simply hadn’t. In hindsight, she could pick apart what she did, what they did, the mistakes they made.
But at the time, everything had made sense. Sort of.
“We thought,” Crow said, “you might like to get out of town for a long weekend, since we didn’t do anything for the Fourth this year. Get out of town, get out of this horrible air.”
“Where?”
“Ocean City?” Whitney put in. “Or my parents’ place at the shore. Or maybe even down to Saint Mary’s, to a bed-and-breakfast—”
“No, no, let’s head west for a change, toward the mountains. Out of Maryland, even. We could go to Berkeley Springs or somewhere else in West Virginia.”
Whitney wasn’t fooled. “Don’t let Billy Windsor keep you from the places you love, Tess. Don’t give him that power.”
“I’m not. I just want… a change of scenery.”
She could not tell them about the new nightmare, the waking one, where Billy Windsor waited for her everywhere: in every small town, along every hidden inlet of the Patapsco, in every industrial park glimpsed from the highway, behind the wheel of every van that tail-gated her on the Jones Falls Expressway, beneath the bill of every baseball cap on a brown-haired man of six feet or so. Billy Windsor had finally forged the lasting bond he wanted with a woman. Just her luck, it was her. They would be together for quite some time. Not forever, but longer than it took a knee to heal, and she needed to confront that unhappy fact.
But not today. Not now.
“Let’s go,” she said. “West. Away from the water.”
The Last Place Page 37
