by Lou Berney
“I wanted her to run,” Wyatt said. “Candace. I hoped she’d hear it and take Lily and run.”
The detective wrote that down. “That little lady is something,” he said, admiringly.
“What about him?” Wyatt said. “The ex-husband?”
He didn’t want to hear the answer. He already knew the answer. Wyatt had killed a man, a human being. The worst kind of human being, and Wyatt hadn’t had much choice in the matter. But the truth was the truth. He would have to live with it for the rest of his life.
“Deceased,” the detective said.
“Am I going to be charged?”
The detective closed his notebook and stood up. “With what?” he said.
He gave Wyatt a nod—of respect? of pity?—and left.
Wyatt slept. He dreamed about the old house full of worthless junk. When he woke, it was dark outside. Candace sat in the chair next to his bed.
“About time,” she said.
“Better late than never.”
She yawned. “I guess.”
“Go home.”
“That goof in the kilt brought me a clay dildo he made.”
“He finds it deeply offensive when people call them that.”
“He said it was an apology. A peace offering.”
“Go home. What time is it? How’s Lily?”
“I told her you had a car accident. I didn’t tell her the rest.”
Wyatt nodded. “Sometimes partial honesty is the best policy.”
“She was worried you would die and turn into a ghost.”
“You’d never get rid of me.”
“Ha.”
Wyatt slept again. He woke, morning now, with a clearer head. The male nurse with the handlebar mustache unplugged him from the IV and heart monitor while Gavin sat in the chair.
“I’m gonna be paying for this until the end of time,” Gavin said, “aren’t I?”
“Now that you mention it,” Wyatt said.
A nurse’s aide gave him his phone, wallet, and watch. She offered him a plastic bag stuffed with the blood-soaked clothes and shoes he’d been wearing when they brought him in. He declined politely.
“We have to ask,” she said. “It’s a rule.”
Gavin had brought Wyatt a new set of clothes, a long-sleeved shirt with some kind of Navajo print and a pair of pleated Dockers, the Dillard’s tag still attached to both. White New Balance sneakers. Wyatt knew that beggars couldn’t be choosers.
He had to take his time getting dressed. A clearer head had its price, and he felt like a cork bobbing in a sea of pain. His chest, his head, his hand, his ribs. He felt slightly nauseated, too, as a bonus.
The pharmacy in the lobby of the hospital filled Wyatt’s prescriptions for various anti-inflammatories, antibiotics, and painkillers. Gavin was waiting for him out front. He helped Wyatt ease into the passenger seat of the Town Car he’d rented.
“I had a steak last night,” Gavin said as they merged onto the Lake Hefner Parkway.
“Tell me more,” Wyatt said. “I beg you.”
Gave shot him an irritated glance. “The joke,” he said. “Your dumb joke about the two guys eating steaks in Oklahoma.”
“New York. They were eating steaks in New York. That was the point of the joke.”
They pulled in to the Marriott parking lot. Home, sweet home.
“I got you a flight out tomorrow morning,” Gavin said. “I figured you could use a good night’s sleep.”
“Thanks.”
“Call me if you need anything.”
“A hug?”
“Smart-ass.”
Wyatt took the elevator up to his room. He ordered eggs from room service and ate a few bites so he’d feel less guilty about cracking open the first miniature bottle of Jack Daniel’s from the minibar. The first bottle made him less guilty about cracking open the second one.
He took off the clothes that didn’t fit and climbed into bed. Now that he wanted to sleep, though, he couldn’t. He could feel the blade of the hunting knife slide into him. And then slide in again. And then again. Each time the sensation was a surprise.
To distract himself Wyatt thought about the night of that long-ago tornado, August of ’86, the small forgotten memory he’d stumbled upon at the coffeehouse. He’d been saving the memory for a special occasion. This qualified, didn’t it? The details were so vivid, so fresh. It was his one memory of that summer that was not yet a memory. Wyatt was there, his finger hooked through the label of his blazer, the raindrops blowing against his face.
He tried to grope his way back in time, back inside the mall and the movie theater. Just a few minutes before he stepped outside into the wind and rain, just a few minutes before lightning lit up the sky and he watched the funnel of the tornado twisting like a snake on the road, Wyatt knew he would have told O’Malley good-bye. He would have told Melody good-bye. Theresa was already gone, but maybe a faint trace of her scent had lingered in the lobby. That was a moment Wyatt would love to live again.
This new memory, though, like all memories, was just a broken fragment of the whole—the edge crumbled when he stepped there, fell away beneath his feet. Wyatt stood outside the mall, the raindrops blowing against his face, but he couldn’t get back to the good stuff.
The tornado sirens died. The raindrops blew against his face. Already they were becoming photocopies of raindrops. So he tried walking forward, not back. And what do you know? That edge of memory supported his weight. Wyatt was still there as he headed home across the wet, black street, as he cut through the park behind the movie theater. He smelled fresh-mowed grass and heard the deafening chirr of cicadas in the trees. The clouds broke open, and the stars spilled across the sky like confetti. Wyatt recognized the car parked up the street, an old black VW Bug that belonged to Bingham’s nutty friend Donald.
If you had an existential bent, if you believed in a cold and indifferent universe, here was the proof. Instead of a rediscovered memory that gave him five more precious minutes with O’Malley or Theresa, with Melody or Grubb or Karlene—Wyatt had been given the gift of Pet Shop Boy instead.
“Hey,” Donald said as Wyatt approached.
“Hey,” Wyatt said.
He didn’t slow down. He was tired. He had blocks to go before he slept. He didn’t want to hear about yet another of Donald’s dumb, can’t-miss moneymaking ideas.
“Mr. Bingham’s going to be in there another hour at least,” Wyatt said.
“Okay,” Donald said. He stood up as Wyatt passed and walked alongside him. “Hey, do you want to hear about this idea I have? Get ready. Swedish porn films.”
Wyatt didn’t feel bad for Mr. Bingham that his only friend in the world was Pet Shop Boy. You got the friends you deserved.
“I have to go home,” Wyatt said.
“Okay.”
Donald stopped. Wyatt kept walking.
“Later, Donald,” he said, without looking back.
And then that was it. Wyatt, in his hotel bed, had reached the far boundary of the rediscovered memory. He didn’t remember walking the rest of the way home. Or, more accurately, he remembered walking home a hundred different times, no one particular time more distinct than any of the others.
The last place Wyatt was really there was in the playground, hurrying away from Pet Shop Boy. The chirr of the cicadas, the stars like confetti, the street wet and black from the rain. Wyatt hadn’t wondered what Donald was doing alone in the park across from the theater at eleven o’clock at night. He was waiting for Mr. Bingham to get off work. Why else would he be there?
Why else, on that night in August, a week before the murders, would Donald be alone in the park across from the movie theater?
Wyatt saw Donald sitting on the end of the teeter-totter—perched there, tall and skinny, like some a
wkward flightless bird—just outside the reach of the weak light cast by the streetlamp.
Hey.
Hey.
Mr. Bingham’s going to be in there another hour at least.
Okay.
Wyatt’s hotel room was too hot. Every breath he took was an effort. He kicked off the sheet and swung his legs off the bed. He stood up, too quickly. The room grew hotter. The drapes were pulled wide, and the sky outside his window was blue and bright and empty. He made it to the thermostat on the wall and punched it down to sixty degrees.
Donald, Wyatt realized, wasn’t waiting for Mr. Bingham to get off work—he’d been casing the theater. He’d been sitting on the teeter-totter and clocking the routines of the doormen, of the mall security guards.
And Donald had access to Mr. Bingham’s keys. He was Mr. Bingham’s one and only friend. He had better access to the keys than anyone else.
Mr. Bingham had sent Wyatt home early. It was the first time he’d ever sent the second doorman home early. Corporate had told him, only that morning, to cut back on weekday hours. So Donald hadn’t expected to see Wyatt come walking across the park toward him.
Pet Shop Boy. He was the inside man. He’d given copies of Mr. Bingham’s keys to the killers. He’d cased the theater for them.
Wyatt felt like he’d crashed through a glass door he hadn’t realized was there, the world around him shattering into fragments of bright, winking light.
What was Donald’s last name? Wyatt tried to remember. He knew he knew it. At one point in his life, he’d known it. What was it?
Wyatt rested his forehead against the wall next to the thermostat and let his mind float. He pictured the pet shop on the second floor of the mall. The lamps that kept the reptile tanks heated. Donald, when he was at work, wore a white smock that made him look like a pharmacist. The sleeves were too short for his long arms. Next door was a shop that sold pipes and fancy pipe tobaccos. Next to that were two vacant stores and then the bar directly above the movie theater.
Wyatt floated. A name bumped up against him. Furst. That was it. Donald Furst. Pet Shop Boy’s father was a Donald, too. Donald had liked to introduce himself as “Furst the second.”
O’Malley had thought Donald’s chances of finding a woman willing to procreate with him were slim. So sometimes O’Malley had called him “Furst the last.”
Wyatt moved to the desk and opened his laptop. A Donald David Furst Jr. lived on Penn, just past NW 122nd, barely five miles from the hotel room Wyatt was sitting in.
He got dressed again. His own clothes this time, a pale blue shirt and dark gray suit, leather oxfords. He wasn’t thinking about the pain anymore. The front-desk clerk sent the bellhop to whistle up one of the cabs lurking along the side of the hotel.
The apartment complex on Penn was a shabby, anonymous cluster of two-story boxes painted a chalky shade of green, with rusting gutters and dead leaves trapped in the ivy. Wyatt had lived in places like this before, his first month or two in a new city, before he found a house he wanted to buy. An apartment complex like this was just nice enough—an ornamental wrought-iron fence around the perimeter, a perfunctory stab at landscaping—that you could talk yourself into believing it was nice enough. Most of Wyatt’s neighbors had been single, middle-aged men who looked like they’d lost everything in the divorce. They came and went quietly, at odd hours of the day and night.
Wyatt told the cabdriver to wait for him, however long he took. There was a small swimming pool between two of the buildings, but this wasn’t one of the complexes Wyatt and the others had snuck into after work. This one was too far north, too depressing.
He found number 219, a second-floor unit, and rang the bell. He didn’t have a plan if Donald Furst Jr. no longer lived here or wasn’t home or wasn’t the one Wyatt was looking for. Wyatt was just concentrating on each breath he took, in and out, nice and easy.
Donald opened the door. Pet Shop Boy. Twenty-six years later, Wyatt recognized him immediately. The awkward tall kid’s stoop, the teeth too big for his mouth, the heavy freckles. Wyatt had forgotten about the freckles until he saw them now.
Donald had aged badly. He was even skinnier than he’d been before, cadaverous, with sunken cheekbones and, beneath all the freckles, skin the unhealthy color of dirty dishwater. An incisor was missing. He reminded Wyatt of one of the elongated, decomposing zombies in Lyle Finn’s Halloween army.
He was wearing slacks and a dress shirt, untucked. No shoes or socks.
“Can I help you?” he said.
“I’m Michael Oliver,” Wyatt said. “From the Pheasant Run.”
The sound of the TV from the apartment next door came through the thin walls. Judge Judy. She was haranguing some poor bastard. Donald nodded. He didn’t seem surprised to see him.
“Oh, sure,” he said. “I didn’t recognize you. Heinz.”
“Yes.”
“Come on in.”
He shuffled back inside. He had to duck his head beneath the hanging pendant light in the foyer, the frosted glass speckled with dead bugs. Wyatt followed him. In the living room of the apartment, there was what looked like a brand-new sofa and nothing else—no other furniture, no TV, nothing on the walls. Against the wall leaned a black-and-yellow foam-board sign that said OIL CHANGE $22.90!
Donald lowered himself to the couch. Wyatt kept standing.
“Did you just move in?” he said.
Donald gave him a blank look. “No.”
Wyatt walked over to the wall and pounded on it. “Turn the fucking TV down!” he yelled.
Judge Judy continued to harangue away.
“He’s not home,” Donald said. “He’s never home.”
Wyatt had brought his new painkillers with him, in the pocket of his suit, as well as three miniature bottles of booze from his hotel room. Gin. He swallowed a couple of painkillers and washed them down.
“Why do you have an oil-change sign?”
“I work there. Sort of. It’s where I work.”
“Do you know why I’m here?”
“No.”
“You look like shit, Donald. Are you sick?”
Donald laughed, a sound like bare winter tree branches scraping against a roof. Wyatt offered him the second bottle of gin. Donald shook his head. His laughing had turned into crying. The sound was basically the same, just different branches on a different roof.
“Tell me what happened,” Wyatt said.
“Nobody was supposed to get hurt.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“It was just supposed to be me and the one guy. Dale. He seemed like an okay guy. But the night everything went down, he showed up out of nowhere with his two friends. He said his friends wanted in on the score. It was just supposed to be me and Dale that night. That was the plan. We were just going to scare Tim and make some serious money. It was supposed to be quick and easy. Nobody was supposed to get hurt.”
Who was Tim? Wyatt realized that was Mr. Bingham’s first name. And Dale. Dale Earl Barrett was the killer who’d worn the pantyhose over his head.
Wyatt didn’t feel anything yet. It was like he was standing in the desert, dispassionately watching the flash of a distant explosion, waiting for the shock wave to trundle across the flats and reach him, to sweep him off his feet and carry him away.
He walked into the dining room. There was no furniture there either. In the kitchen he found a single metal folding chair. He carried it back into the living room and sat down across from Donald.
“Start from the beginning,” Wyatt said. “How did you know Dale?”
“At the bar. He used to come in and drink there. That little bar upstairs at the mall?”
Wyatt nodded. The bar directly above the movie theater, where ten movie passes were worth a bottle of bottom-shelf booze, if a bartender was inclined to c
ut a deal with O’Malley.
“Dale was a tough guy,” Donald said. “You could tell. But he seemed like an okay guy.”
“Was it your idea to rob the theater?” Wyatt said.
“Was it my idea?” Donald said. “No. No! It was a lot of money, though. It was a lot of money because it was the end of the weekend. The money from both nights, Friday and Saturday? It was supposed to be quick and easy.”
“You said that.”
“But right beforehand, when we met to drive over, Dale shows up with his two friends. They were psycho. They were high on some crazy shit. Angel dust or something. I had a really bad feeling about it. So I bailed. I just . . . I bailed.”
Wyatt, from habit, had taken out his reporter’s notebook. He flipped it closed and put his pen away. “That’s why there were only two rubber masks,” he said. “That’s why the third guy had to use pantyhose to cover his face.”
Donald nodded. “I only had two masks. One for me and one for Dale. But then his psycho friends showed up, and I bailed. I wanted to bail even earlier than that. I’d been having a bad feeling about Dale, too. Everything was getting out of hand.”
“What do you mean?”
“First we weren’t going to have a gun, and then yes we were. Then we were going to have two guns. And then Dale showed up with his psycho friends, and I bailed. Dale said it didn’t matter. He said I was part of it now. He said I was in the mix now, whether I liked it or not.”
Donald was crying again.
“The next day I saw what happened on the news,” he said. “What happened. You don’t know how crappy my life has been since then. Every single day I wake up.”
Wyatt waited for the rest of the sentence, but there was no “and” or “but.” That was it: Every single day I wake up.
Wyatt still didn’t feel anything. He didn’t hate Donald. He didn’t pity him. Wyatt just wanted to know, now, after all these years, why he alone had been left alive in the projection booth that night.
“Donald,” he said. “Why did they kill everyone but me?”
Donald just keep crying. Wyatt scooted the folding chair a couple of inches closer. The shock wave from the explosion still hadn’t reached him yet. He didn’t know what would happen—or what he might do when it did.
