Time Release

by Martin J. Smith

  “Damn you,” Sonny whispered. Even as he said it his voice dissolved into a sad whimper. He didn’t care anymore. He’d seen everything, knew everything; the secrets of his past were laid bare. Now he felt empty. Even the white-hot burning in his right hand began to fade. He thought of the poisoned orange, wishing he had eaten it. Better, he wished he had died years before, thrashing against cold water and cold metal and merciless hands in a rusting basement tub.

  “I remember,” he said, every scar alive now. But he also remembered how he’d survived. How he’d retreat down his throat, to the warm and safe place inside. The storms outside could rage and batter him, but it didn’t matter. Sonny drew his knees tighter, protecting himself. Ride it out, he thought. Obey. Submit.

  The door popped open, an inch at first, then two more. The bedroom was darker than the hall, and from it came the rasp of a pack-a-day smoker: “Hello, Sonny.”

  His whimpers became sobs. He closed his eyes again. “Bitch,” he rallied.

  “Let it out, Sonny boy,” it croaked. “Everybody’s got a breaking point.”

  He pressed himself against the wall. It was hard, unmoving, offering no escape. Then, in an instant, Sonny was swimming, surfacing from a dive into the icy Ohio, still safe inside the hard shell of his bloodless skin: He focused on his stroke, on the seamless arm-over-arm rhythm that carried him away. He felt better, strong, but not strong enough. Whatever was behind him, the presence he’d felt in a hundred water dreams, had finally closed the gap. It was too powerful, too fast, close enough to touch and speak to him in its sandpapery voice.

  “There, there,” it soothed. “We’re almost done.”

  “Yes.” The word came in a sob, his voice distant.

  “Yes, Sonny boy,” it said. “We’ll go where they can’t find us, just like we planned. David’s there. He stopped us last time, delayed our destiny. No one can stop us now.”

  His brother. Sonny saw David standing at the base of the cellar stairs, his father’s pistol in one wavering hand, ordering her to let him go. He gasped, the taste of death suddenly at the back of his throat. “He came back from the pharmacy too soon,” Sonny said, choking. “We were almost there. Almost to God.”

  A husky sigh from behind the door. “That policeman, that therapist, they never understood. I worked so hard to keep your daddy alive, dangling him between life and death. Purgatory on earth! Alive, Sonny, but tortured. Despised! I created that for him, sentenced him to it. Those who interfere must be winnowed from the floor.”

  “Winnowed,” Sonny repeated.

  “You tried to help them, didn’t you, Sonny boy? They asked you to help, and you did. You’ll have to be purified before we go. It has to be done. You remember our prayer, don’t you? Sonny boy?”

  “John the Baptist,” he said. “‘There is one to come who is mightier than I. His winmowing-fan is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and gather the wheat into his bam; but the chaff he will burn in unquenchable fire.’”

  “Good. Very good. I’ve winnowed the chaff, Sonny. Your friends won’t bother us again. We can go now. We can. It’s right. It’s beautiful. Your daddy will burn in the lake of fire for the rest of his days, and we’ll go, the rest of us, where no one will follow. My will be done.”

  “Your will be done,” Sonny said.

  The door creaked. Sonny opened his eyes. Looming above him, naked except for a white bedsheet around her shoulders, was a woman who seemed much taller than his mother. She stood like royalty, not stooped or manic or desperately sad, but still and regal, the sheet clasped to her breast like a risen saint. Her feet, too, were bare, and Sonny slowly lifted his head to meet her eyes. They were alive, penetrating. He felt them boring into his soul.

  “Rachel.” He curled even deeper into himself, fetal now, moving inside a body that no longer seemed to matter.

  “It’s time,” she rasped. “Come with me to the font.”

  The cab’s headlights swept across the peeling plywood sign for Lakeview Pointe Estates. The driver stopped and studied the steep driveway. A single set of tracks, straight and steady, scarred the foot-deep blanket of snow leading to the apartment building at the top of the rise.

  “No fucking way, chief,” the driver said. “Somebody made it, but you can bet your hairy left nut they had four-wheel drive. Youn’s’re on your own from here.”

  “You’re sure this is the place?” Christensen said.

  “You wanna debate it? I’ll set the meter.”

  Christensen stepped out and slammed the door. His loafers weren’t suited to a climb like this, but what choice did he have? He started up, sidestepping, digging the edges of his soles into a hard-packed tread track he recognized from a familiar set of Firestones.

  The Explorer was sitting sideways in the middle of the parking lot, like it had been left where it skidded to a sudden stop. The driver’s door was open, the interior light on. He scanned the apartment building, looking for the second-floor door that said 2B. When he saw it, nearly dark and lifeless, he started toward the concrete stairs. Then he stopped, went back to the Explorer, and reached under the driver’s seat. Brenna’s gun was icy cold. He held it up to the ashen light, wondering if it had a safety. He found a tiny, gnarled button and slid it to the left, breathing easier when the gun didn’t go off. His hand was shaking. Could he pull the trigger if he had to?

  Across the dark plain toward Ridgeville, he’d seen no sign of approaching headlights. The roads were as uninhabited as they were unplowed. Even I-79, which he could see in the distance, was a vast desolate ribbon lit orange by PennDOT’s towering lights. Not a single driver dared brave it. Do cop cars carry chains, he wondered, and would Downing have the sense to use them? Even if he did, how long might a crosstown trip take on a night like this?

  At the top of the stairs, Christensen heard a voice, low and coarse, the words indistinguishable and monotonous. A woman’s voice, but one engaged in memorized lines, like the rote prayers of a congregant at High Mass. The gun in his right hand weighed a thousand pounds.

  The door to 2B was wide open, its frame splintered. Through the opening, the voice droned on. Christensen leaned close, snatching a word here and there from the toneless steam. “…baptize … right hand … forever and ever.”

  Christensen leaned close to the door again, listening. The voice had stopped. He started to knock, but held back. Instead, he pushed the door open wide enough to see into the apartment. It opened without a sound into what seemed like a sparsely furnished living room, stuffy and dry, lit only by the soundless glow of a small television set atop an upturned milk crate. At least two people were in the apartment, he figured, but where? In a place this small, the silence was even more unsettling than the low murmur of an unfamiliar voice.

  A passage to his left was brightly lit, and it led into a small breakfast area. Christensen moved to it, and as he did he heard the sound of trickling water. The room around the corner had to be the kitchen. Slowly, watching his feet, he moved tighter against the wall and listened. The sound was oddly comforting, reminding him of the times he and Molly bathed one or another of the girls in the kitchen sink, sponging warm water onto a squirming, kicking baby.

  He edged closer to the corner, committed now, compelled to see what was happening but scared half blind. Slowly, he leaned his head around. The room swept into view, until finally he saw the scene. Sonny was on his back, stretched across the kitchen counter with his head tilted back into the sink. He seemed relaxed. A woman draped in a white bedsheet—who else could it be?—was supporting the back of his head with her left hand and running tap water in a gentle stream over his forehead. With her right, she stroked Sonny’s temples and smoothed the long dark hair that floated like kelp in the pooled water just below his head. The sink was nearly full.

  “There, there,” came the throaty voice Christensen had heard from outside. “Almost
home now.”

  Now what? Christensen felt awkward, standing uninvited in a stranger’s apartment with someone else’s gun, a gun he wasn’t even sure was loaded, watching a scene that to an outsider might speak of nothing so much as the gentle trust between a parent and child. Suddenly, the woman yanked down on Sonny’s hair. Sonny’s head snapped back, and he reacted with a kick that rocked the cupboard above him, opening one of its doors. The second kick jarred a stack of plates into motion. Several spilled through the open cup­board door and into the void, splintering against the edge of the counter as they fell. Shards scattered across the floor, a few traveling as far as Christensen’s feet. He realized only then that he’d stepped fully into the room.

  “Almost home!” she thundered. Using Sonny’s hair as a handle, she held his head under the water and anchored her right across his throat by grabbing the base of the spigot. Sonny’s head was gone, fully submerged. He couldn’t possibly lift it, and his body was thrashing helplessly in the constricted space between the counter and the overhanging cupboards. Sonny remained powerless even as his thrashing grew more violent.

  Christensen lifted the gun on instinct and leveled it at the woman’s back. “Leave him alone!” he bellowed.

  She turned slowly, seemingly unconcerned by the ferocity of his demand. The sheet fell from her shoulders and gathered in a heap at her ankles, leaving her naked. A strained and ghastly smile split her face as she fought Sonny, giving no quarter to the intruder with the gun. She turned away, recommitting herself to her grim work.

  “Rachel!” Christensen roared. “I said leave him alone!” He gripped the gun’s handle tighter.

  Her sinewy back muscles moved like serpents beneath her pale skin as she leveraged herself against her son. She had position. Strength didn’t matter. “You … don’t … know … me,” she said without turning around.

  Christensen bolted across the room and shoved her with his free hand, hoping to break her grip. “Let him up, I said. Now!”

  He backed off four steps, his panic rising. It was as if she’d simply ignored him. Sonny’s body suddenly went limp. His legs twitched, but they had no power. All that seemed left were reflexes.

  “Move away from him, goddamnit,” Christensen said. “Get away now! Don’t make me kill you.”

  The woman eased her grip on Sonny’s hair and let go of the spigot. Sonny’s head remained, sickeningly, beneath the water.

  “I said move away.”

  She turned fully toward him, unashamed, panting from the struggle, and took one small step toward the refrigerator to her right, then another. Even as her chest rose and fell, she leaned almost casually against the counter. Her right hand disappeared behind her back.

  “Kill me,” she said.

  “Across the room,” Christensen ordered. He wanted her away from the sink when he tried to revive Sonny. “Move across the fucking room, I said.”

  He heard the scream, an almost feral sound, before he realized she was charging. She was ten feet away when he recognized a pair of silvery sewing scissors in the hand high above her head. In that instant, Christensen felt the gun become weightless, independent, an extension of a hand driven by adrenaline and fear and a powerful will to live.

  It popped once and jumped, and the woman spun, a single off-balance pirouette. She faced him again, still clutching the scissors, and touched the dark nickel-sized star below her left shoulder. Christensen steadied the gun with both hands, keeping her in sight. He wanted to vomit as a tiny red stream curled from the wound and traced the outer curve of her breast.

  “Holy Jesus,” he said.

  She smiled. A sad, unknowable smile. Her legs wobbled beneath her. She opened her mouth, and for a moment Christensen thought she might speak, might forgive his intrusion, might simply declare the moment impossible and ask Sonny to rise and start the scene again. What came out, though, was a thick red bubble. It burst, and was followed by a low rumble from somewhere deep within. The sound built slowly, like the basso profundo of an approaching locomotive. When it reached a guttural howl, she raised the scissors again.

  This time, Christensen aimed. Her head snapped back as the bullet crashed into her forehead, then immediately jerked forward again, propelled by the red-gray jet from the exit wound. She crumpled at his feet, and he spun away, letting the gun fall. The scream continued, but it was his own.

  Christensen grabbed the collar of Sonny’s shirt and in a single motion heaved him off the counter and onto the floor. Sonny’s face was as gray as fog, his eyes closed. No pulse. Christensen laid his ear against his chest. The heart was faint, but beating. He rolled Sonny onto his stomach. Christensen hadn’t had a lifesaving class since the Boy Scouts, had never actually used what he learned, but he knew the drill.

  He kneaded his hands into that muscular back, pumping the water from Sonny’s lungs. After thirty seconds, Sonny coughed and vomited. Water poured from his mouth onto the kitchen floor, diluting the deep red pool beside him to a garish pink. Sonny struggled onto his elbows, choking, gasping, drawing quick, shallow breaths. He vomited again.

  “That’s it, Sonny,” he said. “Get it all out.”

  As Sonny struggled, Christensen tried to stand. He fell back against the low cupboards and sat down on the floor, covering his eyes with the heels of his hands, pressing hard, blotting out a scene he could never have imagined. How had he been drawn into someone else’s nightmare? When he opened his eyes, Sonny was sitting back on his heels, staring without apparent emotion at the vacant face of his mother. She’d died on her back, eyes wide, mouth open as if stopped in mid-sentence.

  “Sonny?”

  Sonny tried to talk, but coughed up another mouthful of water. Without taking his eyes off his mother, he steadied himself and tried again, this time choking out the words.

  “Are they dead?”

  Chapter 40

  Sonny struggled to his feet, bracing himself on the refrigerator handle. Elbows on the counter, he sobbed and laid his head in his right hand, recoiling from obvious pain.

  Christensen got up, unable to take his eyes off the horror on the floor. Sandra Corbett lay face up in a widening crimson pool. The back of her head where the bullet emerged was a soggy clump of hair, clearly the source of the blood. Her pale breasts slumped toward her armpits, and one leg, the right, was bent beneath her. She’d probably died before hitting the ground. The scissors were still in her hand.

  He put a hand on Sonny’s shoulder, only to have it batted away. The second time he tried, Sonny didn’t resist.

  “We’ll get through this,” Christensen said. “Really, we will.” He wanted to believe it. Had to.

  Sonny ignored him. Or his mind may simply have shut down, unable to process what he’d just seen. The accumulated brutalities of his life could not have been more traumatic than what he’d been through today, Christensen thought. He knew Sonny might never recover from it, might not even survive it.

  The sink was still full. Sonny dipped his hands in and splashed his still-wet face. Then he yanked the silvery bead chain attached to the rubber plug with his good hand. He seemed transfixed as the water swirled away.

  The bag of oranges and two grapefruit on the windowsill reminded Christensen of what had set this disaster in motion. This must have been where she’d prepared the orange they found in Sonny’s backpack. A man’s toilet kit, black leather, sat on the sill beside the fruit. He unzipped it and looked inside at a dozen or more safety syringes, each individually wrapped.

  “She was diabetic,” Sonny said. The last of the water gurgled away.

  He imagined her at this spot surrounded by her tools. A syringe. A yogurt container. An orange. Somewhere in the apartment, he was sure, was a brown bottle of cyanide similar to the one they’d found in the Jancey Street basement. Had she worked here, too, with the Squeezie Pops and breakfast cereal and the shampo
o that burned Melissa? They’d probably bury the answers with her.

  She moaned. Christensen spun around, his heart pounding. Sonny’s mother was still twisted in the same pallid heap. She couldn’t be alive.

  “Air from her lungs,” he said, but Sonny didn’t seem concerned.

  Christensen inspected the neat pile to his left on the counter, wondered about the roll of red cellophane, the pale straw, the ribbon. She’d been gift-wrapping something, which explained why the scissors were within easy reach.

  Outside, a car door thumped shut. Sonny laid his head on the counter, his right hand hanging limply at his side.

  “Wait here,” Christensen said. He eased past the body and bumped his way into the living room, still lit blue by the soundless TV. He fumbled with a lamp, looking for a switch, but only managed to knock it to the floor with a ceramic crash. When he opened the apartment’s front door, he found Downing crouched in the snow against the balcony railing, his gun steady and extended with both hands, aiming at his chest.

  “Jesusfucking Christ,” Downing said. He lowered the gun and shook his head. “That could have been bad.”

  “It’s already bad,” Christensen said.

  Downing pushed past him into the apartment. Christensen found him in the kitchen stooped over Sonny’s mother, searching with two fingers for a pulse in her neck. “Who did this?” he said.

  “She was trying to kill Sonny. She came after me when I tried to stop her, Grady. I had Brenna’s gun.”

  Christensen started into the kitchen again. “Stay back,” Downing said. “Don’t track the place up any more than it is.”

  Sonny hadn’t moved, his head still buried beneath his arms on the kitchen counter. He looked as if he was folding into himself, awkwardly, like some damaged origami. Downing laid a hand on his back. “Just leave me alone,” Sonny said, his voice muffled.