Or was he?
The gray-black sky began spitting snow, and Reginald hurried up the walkway to the leaning row house. The shaded windows of the ground floor were dark, which meant Wally was still sleeping off his third dose of chloral hydrate. Reginald had awakened him that afternoon and, disguised as Wally’s mother, made him drink a liter of water before injecting him again. A very groggy Wally obliged and promptly conked out.
Back in his room, Reginald snapped on some lights and shucked his coat. He sighed as he looked around, tired suddenly. Didn’t think I’d be coming back here. His handwritten composition from the night before sat on the kitchen table. A sickly surrealism gripped Reginald as he flipped through the point-by-point justification for murdering the president. Before leaving that afternoon, he’d penned an addendum on the final page: “The man in the bed is your Pumpkin Carver.”
Reginald carried the declaration to the gas stove and held the corner of the pages over the blue ring that hissed up. He dropped the flaming sheets of paper into the sink. Now what to do with Wally? As recently as a week or two ago, he would have beaten the kid black and blue, maybe made a few face carvings of his own. Punishment for preying on the defenseless.
But now…
Reginald turned on the faucet and washed the black ashes down the drain.
In the back room, a sour, humid smell emanated from beneath the mound of covers. Reginald slipped past the foot of the bed and pulled a tan hard-shell suitcase from the top shelf of his closet. His gut was talking to him again, telling him he had stayed here long enough. An anonymous call to the D.C. police would take care of Wally.
Reginald stopped, his gaze locked on the window shade beside the bed.
He had drawn it below the sill before he left. He was sure of that. Now one tucked-under corner of shade sat on the sill itself.
Reginald set the suitcase on the floor. He peeked behind the shade. The window was sealed and locked. In the alley beyond, snow fell through the amber globe of an unseen streetlight and blew around the broken pavement.
Sniffing the air, Reginald picked up the scent of copper. Copper or…
He jerked the covers down. The twin entrance wounds above Wally’s right ear were small, precision-clean, but the down pillow beneath his head was a blood-drenched mess.
Reginald listened. Except for the creaks and coughs of the moribund house, all was quiet.
He leaned toward Wally’s head. The wounds looked at least two hours old. Reginald separated the covers and held them up. The bullets had blown through a cotton sheet and both wool blankets. The killer hadn’t seen his victim’s face. Which meant there was a better than even chance someone believed Reginald Perry was dead, the final Champion snuffed out.
Reginald just had to figure out how to use that to his advantage.
* * *
Grumbling curses accompanied the clicks and clunks of locks being worked from the door’s inside. The door cracked open a few inches to reveal a dark fist grinding against an eye socket. “Damn house better be in flames, rousing me at this time of night. I swear to—” The landlord dropped his fist. Yellow eyes squinted out into the light of the third floor landing. “You,” he said.
Reginald-as-the-old-man pushed past him.
“Hey, now!” A mold-colored robe flapped around the landlord’s swollen, shuffling feet. “I ain’t been down in that room of yours.”
“I’m not here because of that.” Reginald took a wingback chair by the backrest, dumped the pile of adult magazines from the seat to the floor, then set the chair in the middle of the grimy room. “Have a seat.”
“What the hell’s this about?” the landlord asked, but he did as Reginald said.
Reginald paced a circle around him, not bothering to affect a limp. “I’ve seen your big face up in that window. Watch this place pretty good, don’t you? Who’s coming, who’s going.”
“I told you, I wasn’t down in your—”
“And I told you I’m not here because of that.”
Reginald removed his billfold from his pocket and snapped out a ten. The landlord followed the bill with his eyes but kept his hands in his lap, probably so his wrist couldn’t be bent back again.
“Anyone been around here tonight you don’t know?” Reginald asked.
“Do I get to keep that either way?”
Reginald balled the bill up inside his fist. “I need you to think, damn it. Seen anyone around my room, around the windows?”
“’Sides you?” The landlord shook his squat head.
“You sure about that?”
The landlord nodded.
“One hundred percent certain?”
“A hundred fifty. How ’bout that?”
Reginald exhaled. It’d been a long shot. If the killer had slipped unseen from the safe house in Montgomery County, there was little chance this tub of tits had spotted something a team of trained security professionals hadn’t, but still … Reginald had been hoping for something.
He turned to leave.
“Hey, wh-what about my money?”
Reginald tossed the balled-up bill over his shoulder and listened to the landlord fall to his hands and knees and scramble after it. “Need any more of that information,” the landlord panted, “you know where to come, hear?”
Reginald didn’t respond. He was concentrating on his surface cells. By the time he closed the door behind him, he’d become the landlord. He waddled down the stairs and seized the suitcase he’d set beside the front door. Through the thickening snowfall, he made for the corner of Fourteenth and U, thankful to see the yellow cab still idling in its own exhaust.
It was time to talk with Halstead again. This time regarding his number two, Assistant Director Kilmer.
24
Gainesville, Florida
Friday, August 16, 1985
6:12 p.m.
“Oh c’mon,” Tyler muttered. “You said you weren’t gonna keep doing this.”
He took another step toward their kitchen table. Half a glass of brown booze stood beyond his mother’s outstretched arm, as though she’d face-planted in the act of reaching for it. Her other hand lay in the middle of a spill of pills, her twitching fingers like the dying legs of a spider. Across from her sat a cutting board and a dull chef’s knife. A yellow salad bowl held some chopped cabbage.
She had intended to prepare dinner, anyway.
“C’mon, Ma. Wake up.” He might as well have been talking to himself.
Sighing, he pushed the pills into a pile and the pile into the mouth of an orange medication bottle. He considered carrying them to the bathroom and flushing them, but they were prescription antidepressants. His mother was supposed to be taking them — just not with a tumbler of forty-proof.
“Hey, Creed,” Tyler called toward the stairs. “Mind giving me a hand with Ma.”
There was a gust of air, and Creed appeared beside him. “Sorry, embryo, but big brother’s late for a date.”
Tyler did a double take. He and Creed had arrived back home together, but in the minute it had taken Tyler to arrive in the kitchen and put their mother’s pills back in their bottle, Creed had already showered and dressed. Whatever Gus was doing with him in training was working.
“How do I look?” Creed’s eyebrows arced above his John Lennon shades as he adjusted his bowler hat from the sides, his long hair still dark with water. He was wearing tight black jeans, a Judas Priest concert T-shirt, and a black leather vest, an anarchy symbol burned into the pocket.
“Like you always do. Did you say a date?”
His brother had never been out on one, not as far as Tyler knew. Or if he had, he never talked about it. Creed had always acted liked he wanted nothing to do with girls — probably because they wanted even less to do with him.
Irritation flashed across Creed’s face. “Did I stutter? Met this chick at the Hardback last week. A little intense with all her talk of nuclear freeze, but man can she head bang.” The corners of his lips slanted up as he talked.
“Cool name, too. Star.”
Tyler nodded. If it was the same Star from school, his brother was going to have his hands full. He turned back to their mother, who, save for the sputtering breaths that shook her straw-like pile of hair, hadn’t moved.
“Just give me a hand getting her upstairs,” Tyler said. “It’ll only take a sec.”
“Naw, no time.” Creed disappeared and reappeared at the front door. “Hey, man, you should ask that Janis Graystone out sometime.”
“Janis?”
Creed tipped his shades down. “You don’t think I see the way you eye her?”
Tyler’s frustration with his brother vanished beneath a rush of hot blood and mental stammering. Before he could utter a word, his brother flashed a grin, saluted him, and blew out the front door. By the time the front door slammed closed, the engine to the truck was cranking up. The truck heaved out of the driveway and rumbled down the street.
“I don’t eye her,” Tyler mumbled to no one, his ears still stinging.
He helped his mother to her feet — at least she could stand this time — and guided her through the living room. On their feet-dragging journey up the stairs, he thought of that New Year’s Eve night three and a half years before when he’d had to carry her over one shoulder, the handrail rattling in his grasp. If only the damned rail had held. If only he’d gotten them upstairs.
(I can’t stop, Dad. I promise!)
Tyler half-walked, half-carried his mother along the hallway, past old family photos he wished would fade into oblivion. His bowl cut, Creed’s defiant but frightened face, his mother’s strained smile, his father’s stare, made more menacing by his encroaching mustache and sideburns.
Even now, his father’s black eyes seemed to follow him.
Tyler urged his mother to walk faster. In her bedroom, Tyler placed her on the bed on her side, in case she got sick. As he pulled a sheet to her shoulder, he muttered, “You were gonna clean up your act.”
Her breaths only deepened.
She had managed to remain sober during their first week of training, but that was it. Tyler guessed she would never recover from the idea that her husband had run out on her, never mind the drunken beatings.
Following a quick shower, Tyler turned the dinner his mother had begun into a plate of slaw-topped hotdogs. He wasn’t that hungry, but the thought of what Janis had said in the mess hall the other day compelled him: You’re scrawnier than Mick Jagger.
He chuckled at her dig as he bit into his first dog.
All right, so maybe he did eye her some. Thing was, he’d been eyeing her for a while, ever since that day he’d come upon her and Scott in the woods building a fort. They let him help out, Tyler remembered, and he thought maybe he’d found some new friends. But then Jesse and his brother showed up. And, of course, his brother had to be a dickhead. But when Creed went after Scott, Janis fought back, yanking him off. Creed punched her in the stomach — a blow that landed in Tyler’s gut as well — but she had stuck up for her friend.
Wiping a trickle of slaw juice from his chin, Tyler’s face burned at the idea that he had gone along with destroying their fort while Janis was on her hands and knees, struggling for air. Years later, when Jesse and Creed marked Scott for punishment, Tyler had remembered Janis’s act — and his own cowardice — and vowed to defend Scott, to keep anything from happening to him.
So yeah, he thought about her. Yeah, he eyed her. But that’s as far as it would ever go. She outclassed him, one. And, anyway, she and Scott were solid. He wasn’t the type to—
A knock sounded on the front door.
Wiping his hands and mouth with a paper towel, Tyler crossed the living room. Probably Jesse, wanting to go shoot pool. But when he opened the door, he found Janis standing on their ratty brown welcome mat. She had twisted her torso around to take in the yard, and now she straightened, her eyes a little uncertain. She tucked a fiery strand of hair behind one ear.
“Hey,” he said.
“Can I come in?” she asked.
Tyler peeked over his shoulder. In the two months since his mother had last straightened the living room, it had crept back to its prior state of perma-clutter. His gaze took in scattered dishes, newspapers, tossed-off articles of clothing. He couldn’t let Janis wade into that mess.
“Can you give me, like, two minutes? I just want to throw a shirt on.”
She nodded. “Sure.”
As he clicked the door closed, he thought, All right, now I just need Creed’s speed. He made do with his own, gathering up the clutter and throwing it into the hall closet. He straightened the afghan over the back of the couch and the crooked lampshade beside it. There wasn’t time to vacuum, and besides, she’d hear. Instead, he used a broom to sweep the floor litter off into the adjoining rooms. A couple of sprays of Lysol and a fresh T-shirt later, he reopened the door.
“Come on in,” he said as casually as he could.
As Janis stepped past him, he hoped she wasn’t too disgusted with what she saw. Though cleaner, the room was still rundown, marks on the walls, stains in the carpet. He gestured toward the couch and they took a seat on each end. Janis pulled a leg up beneath her, which helped Tyler to relax. He’d expected her to sit stiffly, afraid to let any more of herself touch the old brown-plaid sofa than had to. That was how the visiting social workers used to sit.
“I would’ve called first,” Janis said, “but I couldn’t find your name in the student directory.”
“Yeah, I never bothered filling out the form.”
Her gaze roamed the room before returning to him. “Why did you become a Champion?”
Her forwardness caught Tyler off guard. “I thought I told you. To help my family.”
“Were you coerced?”
“Huh?”
“You know, made to commit.”
I know it’s been hard, your father not being around. But maybe his leaving was for the best. You’re your own man now. Just as long as you make the right decisions. Understand what I’m telling you?
“Like I said,” Tyler replied, “sometimes you do what you have to.”
Janis sighed and looked out the front window. Tyler followed her gaze beyond the unkempt yard to where the light was fading over the gray-asphalt street. An orange cat sat on the far curb, licking its paw.
“I have a week left to figure out this program,” Janis said. “Scott, too. Kilmer keeps saying ‘it’s your choice,’ but it doesn’t feel that way to me. If anything, it feels like the Program’s using carrots and sticks to remove choice from the equation. Like they’re corralling us toward what they already had in mind for us.”
“Yeah,” Tyler muttered.
“So you’ve been thinking about it too.”
“A little, I guess.”
Janis shifted on the couch. Tyler wondered why she was discussing this with him and not Scott. When he lifted his face, he was startled to discover her on the middle cushion. She eyed him intently.
“One of my abilities is to sense people’s emotional states,” she said. “It’s not always intentional, what I pick up. Sometimes the images just come. When we were in the cafeteria last month, I picked up something on you.”
Tyler’s throat began to tighten. “Oh, yeah?”
“It was just a snapshot. You were younger, eleven or twelve, and I could see bruises on your body.” She spoke in a hushed voice as she scooted even nearer. “You looked shocked, and there was this burning smell. I didn’t dig any deeper, Tyler. Whatever happened is your business. I just want to know whether the Program is using something against you, whether you committed against your will.”
He had never confessed What Happened — not to Creed, not to anyone. But the way Janis was looking at him, so close now, eyes bold but questioning, lips slightly parted, fingers at her necklace…
Tyler surprised himself by nodding.
Janis’s eyes narrowed above her compressing lips. “I knew it. The bastards.”
“You’re not gonna tell anyone
, are you?”
“No, no, of course not. And, look, I don’t know what happened, but if you ever want to talk to someone…” She placed a warm hand on his upper arm. “You have friends here, you know.”
Tyler nodded, suddenly aware that they were sitting over the spot where his father had collapsed in flames. He looked at where his fingers were picking at the edge of the sofa cushion.
“My dad was an alcoholic.” The words came out in a sigh, as though he was tweaking open the valve on a container of compressed air. “When Dad drank, he got violent. He’d go after my mom unless me or my brother were there to stop him — or at least divert him. That’s why we missed so much school growing up.”
He peeked up at Janis. Her eyes were large, but her mouth small and stunned. She nodded for him to continue.
“One New Year’s Eve, he came home, and I just assumed he’d been drinking. I wouldn’t let him go upstairs, wouldn’t let him get to Ma. He grabbed me and that thing I do with electricity … it just happened, it got out of my control. I didn’t mean to use it on him. Next thing I know, he’s on fire. He started screaming, but I couldn’t help him. Couldn’t even stand up.”
Tyler looked up at the wall where his father had flailed, flames bursting from his flannel shirt, climbing his sideburns. But even in spite of the horrid image, Tyler wanted to keep talking. Had to keep talking.
“And then after a few minutes, he stumbled over here and fell and he … he never got up.”
“That’s so horrible,” Janis whispered.
“I was scared out of my mind. I didn’t know what to do. Something told me to bury him, so that’s what I did.”
“And they saw you,” Janis said. “On the cameras.”
“Yeah.”
Janis reached for him, tentatively at first, then pulled her toward him and held the back of his head. “Your powers did that, not you.”
Tyler, who had never been pitied, felt himself tensing, threatening to close up again. He nearly drew away. But when she sniffled near his ear, he let himself relax into her embrace a little.
XGeneration, Books 1-3: You Don't Know Me, The Watchers, and Silent Generation Page 77
