88 Killer th&dl-2

by Oliver Stark

  Out at ringside, the first bout was cleared. The ring was mopped of sweat and blood as more cops poured in from the street for the main event. They were there to see the ex-champ Harper take on the new boy Castiglione. Harper had retired as champ, had never been beaten and word was, he wanted his title back. People of all ages, from the old vets to the fresh-faced rookies, began opening beers and jostling for space on the battered wooden benches.

  In the locker room, Harper thought about the weeks of preparation and training. He’d pushed himself hard, working long shifts at North Manhattan Homicide and then carrying on with lengthy sessions at the gym.

  Cops weren’t supposed to be affected by what happened to them, they were supposed to move on to the next case, the next body. The reality was different. The cops Harper knew hid their weaknesses. The hardening of the heart was the price you paid for being in the game, but every cop knew that underneath, every damn thing stuck in deep and clawed away at you. Awake, you could control your fears, but asleep, there was nothing at all between you and the abyss.

  Harper stood up, his gloves on and laced. He was in good physical shape — six two with broad shoulders and toned muscles. His age showed only in the gray flecks in his hair.

  Pushing his mouth guard in, he gritted his teeth and let himself be led out of the room into the darkness beyond. They walked slowly up the narrow corridor as the noise of the crowd grew louder and louder, the heavy beat of stamping feet rising to meet them.

  The door to the gym opened up, the noise doubled in a moment and hit them like a wave. There was no fancy music, no fancy name. Just Tom Harper who had demons to face and had decided he’d try to face them in the place he knew he could fight best. The ring.

  He looked across at Marco Castiglione pacing his territory. He was a short, bullish patrol cop with a mean and hungry look in his eye, who was out to prove himself. Once upon a time, Harper had been that guy.

  As Harper walked towards the ring, the cops started shouting his name, rising from their seats and patting his back as he passed. He pushed the top rope high and stepped through on to the canvas, standing opposite the young Italian, who was shadow boxing in his corner.

  The referee walked up and stood between the two men. The fighters came together. Harper held up his gloves, but stared right through Marco Castiglione’s direct gaze. Denise Levene was still in his head, back in the dungeon, the face of the killer behind her. Fragments of his nightmares kept breaking in.

  From ringside, Harper’s partner Eddie Kasper slurped on a beer and leaned back, his arm curling around the shoulder of the cop next to him. ‘My man is going to slay this guy,’ Eddie boasted. ‘It’s going to be brutal. I’ve got a hundred dollars here that says so.’

  In the ring, Tom Harper felt a wall of fear rise up like never before. It was like a sudden freeze, turning his muscles to waste and leaving his mind in flashes of white-frosted panic.

  But time had run out. The bell rang three times and, from across the ring, Castiglione approached like a beast from the shadows.

  Chapter Two

  Upper East Side

  March 6, 11.28 p.m.

  He sat in his car opposite the building, waiting. He had been watching for three hours, his focus on the door of the club. His hands were cold now. He held them out in front of his face and looked at them closely. Thin and elegant, like a pianist’s, his nails were cut and filed. He liked all aspects of his life to be neat, ordered and clean.

  He was a hunter. He was supreme. He could wait and wait. Sometimes for days, until the opportunity was right. The point was to be on duty at all times. Always vigilant. The hunt he could control. Not like everything else in his life.

  Love hadn’t worked out for him at all. For six months she’d made him happy, then she had cut herself free. She had rejected him and what he believed in.

  He had never really understood her problem and he didn’t believe she did either. She was part of the world — the world that was corrupt and out of order. He had to put it all back into shape. Frighten when necessary, hurt when necessary, and kill when necessary. But it had to start changing.

  The man stared across at the black railings and stone steps that led down to a red basement door. He knew they were inside: him and her. He had planned this for a long time, had lived it in his mind and waited patiently for the right time. He had his kit on the seat beside him: the barbed wire, duct tape, knife, gloves, flashlight, pistol, needle and ink. There was going to be pain first, then resolution, and then freedom.

  Orders were orders, whatever you thought about them and however you played it. People had to understand — there was no morality, no absolute, in battle and war. God’s will was self-assertion and evolution — the drive to secure the future for your own kind. He’d read more than he could remember about it. The science was unmistakable. People were just a genetic code seeking its own silent future. They were just incubators for God’s code. Bodies were nothing. But people had forgotten what God’s chosen code was and what the inferior code was doing to the world.

  His purpose had been sharpened over the years. He understood who he was now; finally understood that it was possible to be alive in both the present and the past. When he had absorbed that simple truth, the whole of his life fell into place. Time was not linear, time was all-present. It didn’t matter if you weren’t part of the original purpose, you were part of the eternal struggle which happened outside time and space. And anyone you killed was killed throughout eternity.

  The man knew he wasn’t really an individual; he was part of a hive, a single cell in a larger mind. He didn’t need to understand the whole, only his work, his duty, his small piece of the city that needed cleansing.

  Tonight was special. The order was to kill again. He would follow them slowly. He would make them cry out for death. Then, he would help them.

  Outside the club, his watch chimed at fifteen-minute intervals. He checked the time visually before going through his other checks. The first was his weapons check. He pulled out the small pistol, examined the magazine, removed it, took the bullet out of the breech, clicked the trigger twice, replaced the magazine, levered the bullet back into the breech. Then he took out his army combat knife, a small four-inch holed blade. He unsheathed it, felt the blade, sheathed it and put it away. Next he took out his flashlight. It was combat standard, strong and simple to use. He flicked on the beam and picked out the shadows opposite, then quickly switched it off and replaced it in his pocket. He took out the gloves. They were industrial gloves, so that he could handle the barbed wire. He was ready. He opened the window a couple of inches and pulled out a cigarette. A match flamed in the darkness; he dragged deeply and felt the rush of nicotine in his blood.

  Soon, it would be time. He held the anger in and felt it spread throughout him, the rage forming in each muscle in turn, mingling with the nicotine. He didn’t just hate. Hate was for part-timers. He was hate. It was his DNA, his purpose, his sole trajectory.

  Hate was a bloodline. It had grown in his cells like anything else: blue eyes, brown hair, muscularity — and hate. Hate was his inheritance, his birthright — and his duty.

  He stared across, blew smoke out of the window and repeated the eighty-eight words softly to himself.

  Chapter Three

  Salsa Club, Upper East Side

  March 6, 11.50 p.m.

  Inside the basement salsa club, the dance floor was heaving with bodies, the walls running with condensation under dark red lights. The series of small rooms reverberated with the high-pitched hoot of the trumpets and the rhythm of the bongos. A barely audible singer led the song in Spanish.

  David Capske was twenty-seven, engaged to be married and very pleased with how life had changed for him. He put his arm around Lucy, pulled her in tight, sipped his fifth Corona and stared at her. She was so perfect. Lucy’s eyes followed the dancers; David, too, turned to watch.

  The couple on the dance floor were breathtaking. The woman twirled in a tiny silver d
ress, flicking her long legs around on high heels, her elegant arms draped across the shoulders of her chisel-jawed partner. He was tall and taut in every movement — like a fixed bar against her fluidity.

  The dancers moved quickly, their legs and hips lifting and falling to the rapid thump of the beat. David stared transfixed. Then he felt something on his thigh. He looked down and saw Lucy’s hand slowly moving across it.

  ‘You want to dance?’ he shouted over the noise.

  ‘I see you like to watch her dance,’ she teased. ‘You getting excited?’

  David grinned. ‘I was admiring her technique. She’s got great upper-body isolation.’

  ‘That’s why you were staring so hard at her upper body region?’

  ‘What’s to look at? She’s not half as beautiful as you and she’s not even got the moves you’ve got.’ He reached out and tried to kiss her. ‘Now your upper-body isolation is second to none.’

  She pulled away and smiled. ‘I need proof.’

  David leaned closer. ‘That’s not a problem.’

  ‘How are you going to prove it to me?’

  ‘By taking the most beautiful woman in this place home and showing you,’ he said.

  ‘Flatterer! Anyway, that might be second-hand excitement. You might be thinking of anyone. I want better proof than that.’

  They stared at each other. This was happiness, David Capske thought. Whatever more was to come, couldn’t compete with the feeling he had when they were together.

  ‘My family have disowned me, is that not proof enough?’

  Lucy laughed and stood up. ‘They just want you to meet a nice Jewish girl and not some—’

  ‘Talented and brilliant young writer.’ He gazed into her blue eyes. He meant it. She was the one. True, Lucy Steller was not what his family had in mind for their firstborn. They were part of the wealthy establishment and she was still working in a supermarket.

  ‘Let’s go home then.’ She took his hands and dragged him to his feet. David kissed her.

  They stood outside in the cold night air. They were both sweaty from the heat of the club, and the cold air stung. Lucy had goose bumps. David put his arm around her and rubbed her bare arm briskly to try to warm her up. The road was quiet — just a line of dark shop windows and a row of parked cars under gloomy street lights.

  ‘I love being with you,’ he said.

  In one of the parked cars across the way, a light suddenly flared in the driver’s seat: a face illuminated for a second seemed to be staring directly across at him.

  Lucy felt David’s body tense. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. The light went out in the car and smoke drifted from the half-open window. ‘Someone just lit a cigarette.’

  ‘We should get going,’ she said, and took his arm.

  ‘He was staring right at me,’ said David. ‘Not a nice look, either.’

  ‘Don’t start with the paranoia,’ she said, and drew him close. As they began to walk up the street, David turned and looked again over his shoulder at the parked car, but all he could see was a trail of smoke from the window.

  Chapter Four

  Apartment, Lower Manhattan

  March 7, 7.04 a.m.

  Denise Levene lay alone in her bed, staring up at the ceiling. Everything about her had changed. She used to leave her clothes all over the room, for one, but now her whole apartment was obsessively neat; even her shoes stood in an orderly line in the closet and there wasn’t so much as a sock on the floor.

  It suggested an ordered mind. And that’s how she wanted it to look.

  She felt just like a dam wall trying to stop the waters from breaking through. She knew she could neither fight nor outrun the panic attacks. The best she could do was to try to distract herself. But she could feel fears looming — the black thoughts that had started to seep through from her dreams into the new day.

  She held the memories at bay for several minutes. Then a half-thought appeared. His face in the shadows. And suddenly she was in the dungeon again and the whole fragile world seemed in danger of splitting open.

  Denise threw back the duvet and stood up. Movement helped. She rushed through to the utility room, took her sweat-pants from the basket and pulled them on, then an old tank top. She put on a hoodie and her old sneakers and ran out of the apartment, slamming the door, heading fast down the eight flights of stairs.

  Then she was out in the street gulping air. The sense of terror was intense; she felt a momentary release, but she had only avoided it for a moment — the panic was still chasing her down. She felt the thoughts hiding somewhere in her mind, just behind her eyes, waiting.

  Denise sprinted up the street, avoiding the look of anonymous faces, hearing only the rumble of the city and feeling only the morning chill. Her feet pounded with long strides and her heart raced. She turned south and headed across the Brooklyn Bridge, out to the projects — the destitute parts of Brooklyn where she had grown up.

  On the street her head continued to swarm with dark thoughts. The fears returned, but so did the image of Tom Harper, the man she’d once admired. She could no longer deal with him in the aftermath — and as much as he tried to contact her and talk, she just flat out refused. Tom Harper had been cut off. Daniel, her boyfriend, was another casualty. He’d stayed around long enough to know she had changed, then he took the dog and moved someplace else. Denise didn’t feel much about it.

  She hit the ground hard, pushing her muscles as far as she could, and kept it going, thirty seconds, forty seconds, a minute… her heart rate soaring, her mind blank. It was working. She kept it up for another minute and then slowed her pace and settled into a rhythm, feeling the sweat start to form around her hairline and down her back.

  Her therapist called it ‘acting out’. To escape the panic, she had to put herself in danger out there on the streets. Because the danger made sense, and the fear of the outside world didn’t seem as bad as the terror inside. The pain of burning muscles was nothing to the memories that left her choking on her own silence.

  She knew the theory. As a psychologist herself, she had trained and taught at Columbia, then re-trained as a police therapist for the NYPD. She knew far too much about radical trauma and its manifestations. In medical terms, she knew what she was. In layman’s terms, she was a basket case, running away from fear, losing touch with everything and everyone.

  She ran for an hour then arrived back exhausted but calmed. She stopped across the street and stared at a car outside her building. It wasn’t one she’d noticed before. She saw the window ajar and smoke twirling from inside and felt a stab of panic.

  ‘You’re being a freak, Denise. Stop it. It’s just a car.’ She tried to move but her limbs refused to obey. She looked around, feeling self-conscious as she stood paralyzed on the sidewalk, the sweat beginning to roll off her.

  Two long minutes passed. Denise could make out two forms in the car. Two men, possibly. She twisted her fingers together as she looked at the door to her building. The car was parked illegally. She could see the two men looking around. They were waiting for somebody. She had to do something about this debilitating fear. After the abduction, Harper had given her the name of a specialist — a guy called Mac who he said could help her. She’d dismissed it at the time, but she’d always kept his number. Denise pulled out her cell phone and dialed. There was just an answerphone message giving the times of the classes and the address.

  Denise had wanted to speak to a person. She needed help. She’d done so much herself and come a long way, but she needed to walk around without fear. She finally talked herself into crossing the street. She planned to keep her head straight, keep tight to the building and make her way inside immediately.

  As soon as she started to walk past the car, the two doors opened. They must have been checking their mirrors. Denise jerked to a halt. She wanted to react well, to appear normal, but it sent a shiver right through her and her eyes shifted about for an escape route.

  The
two people were out of the car quickly, both medium height, purposeful, tidily dressed. Their quick eyes and languid movements told her that these were cops or gangsters, but most likely cops.

  ‘Miss Levene,’ said one of them.

  Denise didn’t speak, she just nodded slightly.

  The first cop held out his shield. He had obviously sensed her apprehension.

  ‘Sorry to jump out like that. Detective Munroe, Missing Persons.’

  Denise looked at the second officer. She’d been wrong. It wasn’t a man, but a tall athletic woman with broad shoulders.

  ‘Detective Gauge,’ she said, smiling.

  Denise was standing and sweating, aware that she looked like a car-crash victim.

  ‘What do you want?’ she said firmly.

  ‘You’re hard to get hold of, Miss Levene.’

  ‘Am I?’

  Detective Sarah Gauge had warm brown eyes and a way of holding people’s attention. She stepped forward, her gestures open and non-aggressive. ‘I failed, if the truth be told, Miss Levene. I tried calling you, but you never pick up. I came round here three times, you never answer your buzzer.’

  Denise Levene stared at them both. Still distrustful. ‘I wondered who was calling,’ she said. ‘Most people stopped trying a month back. I don’t socialize much.’

  ‘We need to talk to you,’ said Detective Munroe. ‘If that’s possible.’

  ‘About what? I’m not a missing person, I’m just not very good company.’