The Inside Dark

by James Hankins

  Jason limited his search to Massachusetts and soon found the John Cobb he was looking for. First, he found an obituary, which noted that John Kenneth Cobb of Beverly, Massachusetts, had died three years earlier at the age of twenty-nine. A graduate of Beverly High School, a photography enthusiast, and an amateur astronomer, John was survived by his batshit-crazy brother Ian. Beside the obituary’s text was a photograph of John. Jason immediately understood why big brother Ian saw similarities between Jason and him. Looking at John’s picture wasn’t exactly like looking into a mirror, but the resemblance was considerable. Comparable facial structures and light complexion, same high cheekbones and square chin, similar eye shapes, and even though the picture was in black and white, Jason knew that John also had red hair. Yes, the resemblance was striking.

  Next, Jason learned that Beverly High School yearbooks were available online. He found the book for John’s graduation year and moments later found his photo, which, at a glance, Jason could have mistaken for his own yearbook picture. The photograph was where the similarities between the two ended, though. While Jason had played in rock bands in high school and hung out with the cool crowd, John had been a member of the astronomy and photography clubs.

  He searched the Internet for mention of the fatal car crash but came up empty.

  And that was all he found. A life that lasted twenty-nine years reduced to a few hundred words. A life remembered, it seemed, by no one but Ian Cobb.

  The day passed quietly. The older clerk with the shaky hands was replaced by a younger man, nondescript but for the sideburns that reached down to his jawline, and Jason gave him the story about writing a book there. When he went out for coffee, he brought some back for the guy. Now and then he did try again to get some writing done but was too distracted. Somewhere, if all went well, a man would die soon, if he hadn’t already, because Jason had paid for that to happen. It was a sobering thought. He didn’t want to think about what Sophie would say if she knew.

  Eventually, he turned on the cheap television sitting on the scarred surface of the cheap dresser and found a news station. He watched and waited. Sophie called to check in, and Jason told her that her plan to frame Cobb of something or other was progressing nicely. He didn’t want to share the details with her, but it shouldn’t be long, he said. He hadn’t decided what he would tell her when Cobb ended up dead. He’d have to take his clue from whatever method Wheeler chose to kill him. If it looked like a suicide, which Jason had requested, it wouldn’t be an issue. But if things got messy, Jason might have to spin a good yarn.

  At just before 2:00 a.m., Jason was still awake, his tired eyes staring at the ceiling, when a call came on his cell phone. For a brief moment, little more than an instant, he hoped that Wheeler was calling with news that he had completed the job, but then remembered that the hit man wasn’t going to call when the job was done. There was to be no more contact between them. Jason answered the call.

  “Hello?”

  “Hope I didn’t wake you.” It was Cobb, still very much alive. “I have someone here who wants to talk to you.”

  Cold iron pincers gripped his heart as he waited to hear Sophie’s voice on the line. Instead, he heard someone grunting desperately, someone with a male voice. Wheeler?

  “Wait a second,” Cobb said. “Let me remove the tape.”

  Jason heard a ripping sound followed by a man’s voice. “Please help me. Pleeeeease.” The voice was strained and distorted by panic, but Jason didn’t think he recognized it.

  Cobb was back on the line. “That was Lyman J. Gooding. We met just a little while ago. He has a lovely home. And a pretty wife named Lauren. And twin girls named Kayla and Suzie. And he’s really hoping his entire family doesn’t die tonight. But that’s up to you, Jason.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  “Are you there?” Cobb asked. “Did you hear what I said?”

  Jason was too surprised by Cobb’s call to think clearly. Who the hell was Lyman J. Gooding? Was it someone Jason should know?

  “Jason?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Oh, good. I thought I lost you.”

  “What are you doing, Cobb?”

  “Right now? Sitting with Lyman in his living room.”

  Oh, God.

  “Where are his wife and daughters you mentioned? Did you hurt them?”

  “They’re fine. They’re in a bedroom, tied up with hoods over their heads.”

  “Why are you calling me?”

  “To give you a chance to save an entire family, Jason. Well, most of it anyway.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that Lyman is going to die tonight. That’s a done deal. Nothing either of us can do about that now. But his family might die, too. You can prevent that from happening, though. All you gotta do is drive out to Lyman’s house here in Chelmsford and watch me kill him, and I’ll let the family go free.”

  Oh, God. “You won’t let them go. They’ve seen your face.”

  “Not true. They were all asleep in their beds when I knocked them out one by one with chloroform. Tied them up before they even woke up. I’m sure they’re scared, but I haven’t hurt them. Yet.”

  In the background, Jason heard Gooding grunting again. Cobb must have slapped the tape back across his mouth.

  “Now,” Cobb said, “how about we give this thing a try? You and me together. You can’t say you haven’t thought about it. Remember . . . I know what’s inside you.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “You can deny it to me, Jason, and to yourself, but you can’t deny the thing inside you forever. But listen, if it helps, don’t think about it as taking a life. Think about it as saving three. What do you say? Do you watch me kill Lyman, or do I murder poor Lauren, and little Kayla and Shelley?”

  Shelley?

  Jason frowned. Cobb had said Shelley, not Suzie, like he’d said earlier. Was it a slip of the tongue? He easily could have forgotten their names. No doubt he’d heard them for the first time only a short while ago. But then again . . .

  “What do you say, Jason?”

  He opened his laptop, which, thankfully, he had kept powered on, and searched the Internet for Lyman J. Gooding and Chelmsford. He got several hits, all apparently pertaining to the same man, including a year-old obituary for a Lauren Gooding.

  “Are you even listening?” Cobb asked.

  “I’m thinking. Give me a second. This is a lot to take in.”

  Jason skimmed the obit and learned that Lauren Gooding was survived by her husband, Lyman J. Gooding, and her sisters Rachel and Theresa. No mention of children.

  “Lyman here is running out of time, Jason. What’s it going to be? One death tonight or four?”

  “If I came there,” Jason said, stalling, “would I have to see the family? Because I don’t think I could take that . . . seeing them, knowing I stood by while their husband and father was killed.”

  “They’ll never even know you were here.”

  Jason clicked on another of the Google hits—the website of an architectural firm where Gooding worked. His picture popped up on the screen. He looked to be in his late fifties, a bit overweight with thinning hair, a professional smile on his lips, and a quirky little bow tie around his neck.

  “Ticktock, Jason. I need an answer. Will you save an innocent woman and two innocent girls? Or let them be slaughtered like animals?”

  Gooding was almost certainly going to die tonight. There was nothing Jason could do about that. But there were no children in peril. And his wife was already dead.

  “Give me the address. I’ll be there in an hour.”

  Jason was pacing in his motel room when his phone rang seventeen minutes later. It was Cobb’s number again, which wasn’t a good sign.

  “Didn’t I tell you what would happen if you called the cops on me, Jason?”

  “I didn’t tell anyone that you’re Crackerjack. All I did was report a break-in at Gooding’s address.”

  For five bu
cks, the clerk with the sideburns had let him use the phone at the reception desk. He hadn’t buried his tracks very deeply if the police ever got curious about the 911 call, but he hadn’t had a lot of time. At least he didn’t use his own phone.

  “Thankfully, Lyman and I were actually in my van down the block when we called you. The cops drove right past us.”

  “Is he . . .”

  “Not yet. But soon. How did you know?”

  “Googled it.”

  “What would you have done if he really did have a family?”

  Jason wasn’t sure. It was all he thought about as he’d walked laps around his motel room, until Cobb had called. He liked to think he would have done the right thing . . . whatever that was. But he had a family of his own to think about.

  “At first,” Cobb said, “I wondered why you would risk calling the cops, but then I realized that this wouldn’t have been like calling them out of the blue and telling them that I’m Crackerjack. If you did that, you’d have to convince them to investigate me. And an investigation would take time. And during that time, you know I’d kill your family. But if they actually caught me in the act tonight, they wouldn’t need convincing of anything. In fact, Crackerjack wouldn’t even have to come up, right? They’d have me for Gooding’s murder.”

  “It would only have been attempted murder if they got there in time.”

  “They wouldn’t have. If there was even a small chance they might’ve caught me, I’d have killed Gooding first. And I bet you knew that, Jason. And you called the police anyway. Wow, it seems that in order to send me to prison, you were willing to sacrifice an innocent person.”

  Jason said nothing.

  “See? You’re not so different from me. Which means there’s still hope for you.”

  Jason closed his eyes. Cobb was wrong about him.

  “I’m not going to help you kill anyone, Cobb. And I’m not going to watch. So there’s no point in trying anything like this again.”

  He waited for a reply but heard only silence for several moments. Then, Cobb started whistling. It was “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” Jason shivered.

  “Listen, Ian, maybe you could just let Gooding go. If he promises—”

  Cobb stopped whistling and said, “Don’t be stupid. I can’t do that. And Jason?”

  He waited.

  “That was strike one.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  For the rest of that first night at the motel, Jason barely slept. When he finally dozed off briefly, his sleep was fitful and haunted by dreams of Lyman Gooding’s face as it looked on his company’s website, only there was a huge gash in his neck between his bow tie and his chin. He never lost his professional smile, though, as blood ran down his shirt and his life seeped out with it.

  The following morning was quiet. Jason tried to write now and then and watched a lot of the news, hoping he wouldn’t see a story about the murder of a local architect named Lyman J. Gooding, and praying he would see a story about the death of local hero Ian Cobb. He did see a story about two Wenham men who were missing, last seen three nights earlier at a bar in Hamilton, and he wondered whether they were the men Cobb said he’d murdered.

  Things turned a bit more interesting for Jason, unfortunately, when Detective Briggs called his cell in the midafternoon. His first thought, naturally, was that the call had to do with Gooding. He hoped it didn’t.

  “I swung by your place looking for you,” Briggs said, “but you weren’t there, so I decided to call. Got a few minutes to talk?”

  “I’m writing at the moment, Detective, in a really good flow. Can it wait?”

  “I don’t want to inconvenience you. Tell me where you’re working and I’ll come to you.”

  Nice try. “I have some research to do at the Salem library anyway. Why don’t we meet there? Say, half an hour?”

  “Sure.”

  Their meeting didn’t take long. Jason figured its purpose had been to make him sweat a bit. And it did. In an effort to dot his damn i’s and cross his piece-of-shit t’s, Briggs asked whether Jason could remember his whereabouts in the early morning hours on numerous specific dates, which he’d helpfully written down for him. Briggs didn’t explain the significance of the dates. He didn’t have to. They were the nights that Crackerjack’s various victims had been abducted.

  “I’ll have to check my calendar and get back to you,” he said, knowing that alibis were highly unlikely.

  “That would be great. Hey, I don’t suppose you know anything about a couple of missing guys from Wenham.”

  “Why would I?”

  Briggs shrugged. “Just thought I’d ask. The North Shore used to be such a quiet corner of Massachusetts, didn’t it? Since Crackerjack started up, though, it hasn’t been nearly as quiet. The thing is, when you and Cobb killed that psycho, I figured we wouldn’t have any more guys disappearing. But suddenly . . . two more this week, and that doesn’t even count the guy who showed up dead in Tewksbury the other day, hanging from some monkey bars with his skull crushed. And we know Wallace Barton wasn’t responsible for any of it, right?”

  So Briggs didn’t know anything about Lyman Gooding yet. Or if he did, he hadn’t connected him to this case.

  “Maybe the two missing guys hopped a flight to Atlantic City,” Jason said. “Or they’re off camping and forgot to call in sick.”

  “You’re probably right. When you check your calendar for those dates, let me know.”

  For half an hour after the detective left, Jason hung around the library pretending to do research and trying to convince himself that Briggs would soon realize there was nothing to his suspicions and would finally leave Jason alone. On the drive back to the motel, he tried to determine whether he was being followed. He didn’t think so.

  Back at the Sleep Easy, he called Ben to check in.

  “Jason? Is everything . . . is that book you were working on finished yet?”

  Very subtle. “Not yet.” He told Ben about his meeting with Briggs.

  “That guy’s been busy. He called me again at work this morning to ask another bunch of questions about you. I was going to call you later to tell you about it.”

  “What did he ask?”

  “Everything about you. And I mean everything.”

  “Did he ask if I’m a serial killer?”

  “Practically. Listen, a senior partner’s calling on another line. I only have a minute before I’ll have to call him back.”

  He told Jason he’d caught a huge project at work a few days ago—one of his firm’s biggest clients was acquiring its top competitor’s company, and the contract issues were numerous and thorny—so he was hunkered down at the office with a gaggle of other lawyers, all of them crashing on their office couches the past few nights, sleeping, eating, and breathing their client’s impending deal.

  “I’m looking forward to sleeping in my own bed tonight,” he said. “Listen, I’ve gotta go, but I’ve been thinking about that book you’re working on. You know the one I mean?”

  “I know it.”

  “Are you sure there’s nothing I can do to help you? It feels weird to me, going through my normal stuff while you’re going through this.”

  “You can’t stop your life while I try to get mine sorted out.”

  “Yeah, but you’re not just sorting things out. You’re dealing with—”

  “Thanks, Ben. Seriously. But there’s nothing you can do to help.” Besides being true, he thought that it would be best, from a covering-his-ass standpoint, if as many things in his life as possible remained as normal as they could. That would leave fewer anomalies to explain to the police, should it ever come to that.

  That night, he dreamed he was driving through a rainy night on a dark stretch of road, Sophie asleep in the seat beside him. A man suddenly loomed in his headlights and Jason calmly aimed the car straight for him. The man turned and Jason looked into the face of Lyman J. Gooding, who stood and smiled professionally until the car slammed into him,
sending him flying through the dark. In the dream, Sophie woke up screaming and Jason said, “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of him.” When he reached Gooding, lying twenty feet in front of the car, the man was a broken mess, jagged bones protruding from all over his body. Still, he never lost his smile. Jason knelt beside him and a hammer with a smooth wooden handle appeared like magic in his hand. “Finish him,” someone said, and Jason looked up to see Ian Cobb standing a few feet away. Beside him stood Wallace Barton. And Cobb’s brother Johnny was there, too. “You know you want to, Jason,” Johnny said. “Right, Sophie?” And then Sophie was there. She was crying. And then two guys from Jason’s high-school band who didn’t seem to belong at all were there. Along with most of his former coworkers at Barker. And Jason’s first-grade teacher—and first real crush—Ms. Willard, beside Jason’s parents, who had just shown up. His mother said, “Why are you fighting it, Jason? Time to finally let your Inside Dark out.” He shook his head. She was wrong about him. They all were. “I’m already dead,” a voice said, and Jason looked down at Gooding. “You let me die once. You might as well kill me again.” Jason didn’t think they were right about him, but he was so very tired of fighting about it. He raised the hammer and brought it down hard. The wet crack almost drowned out Sophie’s screams.

  He woke up with her screams in his ears. It was hours before he fell asleep again.

  The next day, his third at the Sleep Easy Motel, was uneventful. Still nothing on the news about Gooding, which meant either that his body hadn’t yet been discovered or that his death wasn’t newsworthy. And Jason didn’t hear from Cobb or Briggs, which was a good thing. Less good was the fact that there had been no indication that Wheeler had been successful in his efforts.