Dead Last

by James W. Hall

  “Who are you?” she says.

  The two of you are doing a subtle dance. A step to the right, a half step left. She counters you, mirroring your moves as if she’s your partner, your other half.

  “You don’t know me,” you say.

  You speak without thinking. A violation of your rules. Engaging with them. You’ve never done it before. But then this is the start of a new direction. Crossing a great divide, the beginning of the next act when new laws apply.

  “I do know you,” she says.

  “No, you don’t. No one does.”

  “You can stop doing this. It’s not too late. You can stop.”

  You slash the bat at her, but she skips away.

  You don’t like being lectured to by this woman. It makes you feel childish, as though she’s torn your suit away, left you as naked as she is.

  You feint in and she tries a martial arts kick.

  But the bat is already in motion and it cracks against her shin.

  She buckles, stumbles backward, moans. She throws punches at the air. She’s a trained fighter, but her training is futile against your blitz. You swing the bat, wade into a flurry of grunts and shrieks, push ahead with chopping blows and more chopping blows. Driving her backward, and backward again.

  Your bat pings against bone and pings again. It’s a disgusting noise. You wish you’d found a wooden bat. But no, there simply wasn’t time to shop around.

  THIRTEEN

  THORN STARTED OFF AT A lope, trying to stay calm, telling himself this wasn’t super-serious, just worrisome, somewhat alarming. But after trotting along the riverfront for a block, a tingle swept along his shoulders, a creepy sense of foreboding that someone was following him, a black presence, the boogeyman.

  Too much beer, too little sleep.

  He looked over his shoulder, saw nothing. But he kicked it up a notch, running now, stretching it out. Not a full sprint, but close. The tingle turned into chills as he pictured Buddha alone in that isolated building, apart from the inn, set a long block away from a nearby apartment complex. Not that anybody would come to her aid if she called out. Not that the cops were cruising that bleak quadrant of town. Center of the city, but as devoid of human presence as the middle of the Mojave.

  Streetlights too dim. Shadows everywhere.

  He rounded a corner and saw someone on the sidewalk coming toward him. All black, head to toe. Jesus, right there in the open, right there in front of him like an everyday thing.

  Thorn got his legs driving, going to tackle the guy, lower his shoulder, level the asshole. Twenty yards, ten, the guy in black halted, seeing Thorn flying at him, stopped and waited like he wasn’t all that worried, like maybe this happened all the time, forced him to draw his gun and bring down some charging beast on the city street. Thorn hadn’t considered the guy being armed, but kept coming anyway, closing fast.

  Fucker set his feet, turned sideways like a marksman at the range, raising both hands. Then Thorn was there, ten feet off, and saw the guy’s face. A black man, African American, in dark trousers and a brown T-shirt. His fists up in a fighting stance.

  Thorn swerved at the last second, the guy taking a swing, but missing.

  “Sorry,” Thorn gasped at him. “Sorry.”

  And got back up to speed, a full-out sprint, seeing the bungalow, the red car out front, the lights on in Buddha’s side, door shut.

  Everything appeared normal, but his gut wasn’t buying it. He covered the last twenty yards in a flat-out dash.

  Breathing fast, not quite gasping but close. He halted at the oak tree.

  Light-headed, out of fucking shape, hands on his knees, bent over. He didn’t want Buddha to see him like this, didn’t want to rattle her with his own paranoia. He took a few seconds to get his breath then walked to the door and knocked.

  No response.

  He waited, knocked again, spoke her name. Said it a little louder. His chest was still thumping. Breath heaving too loud to hear clearly.

  He tried the knob and it turned, and he knew that was wrong. Way wrong. With the door still shut, he crouched and set his shoulder against the wood midway for maximum leverage, and rammed forward, ducking as he came into the room, set to roll across the hardwood floor, to dodge a bullet or a fist, but there was nothing.

  The room was empty.

  Her small suitcase was on the folding stand. The lid open, everything packed neatly, clothes in folded squares, a plastic bag full of her toiletries. Her phone on the made bed, her electronic tablet lined up beside it. Her black ballistic nylon holster was wedged into a corner of the bag. The butt of the pistol visible. Otherwise the room was exactly as it had been when she’d first walked in and done a tour and pronounced herself pleased. A woman on the road for the first time in her life, staying in a room she considered swanky.

  The bathroom door was shut and a slit of light showed at the bottom. He thought he heard water running but wasn’t sure. Still breathing too hard to be certain.

  She was drawing a bath, or brushing her teeth.

  “Buddha?”

  When she didn’t answer, he stepped closer to the door, suppressing his breath, listening. It was water, then the water shut off.

  “Your door was open. Buddha, it’s me.”

  No answer. Something wrong.

  He noted the hinges. The door opened outward, into the room.

  He tried to flex his puffy right hand. He couldn’t trust it to turn the knob and yank open the door. Which meant he’d have to stand to the left against the wall and backhand it with his working hand. Awkward as hell.

  He called her name again and stepped closer. On the bed her cell phone began to play a tune. Paul McCartney on the piano, McCartney singing, “Hey Jude, don’t make it bad. Take a sad song and make it better.”

  He reached out and knuckle-tapped lightly. Nothing.

  McCartney continued to sing, continued to tickle the ivories.

  Thorn was stepping to a safe position, to plant his back against the left side wall, when the door blew open and slammed his forehead, staggered him, froze him in place. Dazed, he watched the door close slightly, knowing he should be taking defensive action but unable to marshal his thoughts, watching the door slam open a second time even harder, cracking him in the forehead again, exploding a shower of fiery yellow pinpoints on the inside of his skull. He’d seen those starbursts before, knew what followed, the long slow drooping into darkness.

  The two blows sent him tottering backward into the room and hunched him over, gasping, tasting the burn of acid in his throat, the fried cheese, the gristly chicken nuggets, all of it moving upward.

  He coughed, cleared his throat, swallowed back the first hot squirt of vomit, then lifted his hands to shield himself from whatever attack was coming. Vision blurry, room tilting hard to the right like a ship riding slow-motion down the backside of a thirty-foot wave.

  Backlit by the bathroom fluorescents, a black figure in a bodysuit held a purple baseball bat. Slender, long arms. He cocked the bat to his shoulder and took a step toward Thorn.

  Still bent at the waist, Thorn got a sidelong look as the black figure took another step and set his feet. Going to send half-conscious Thorn sailing over the center field wall. Knock him the fuck right out of the park.

  In the bathroom Buddha groaned, and the Zentai figure halted, held his bat steady, and turned his head. Thorn looked through a blue diamond light, felt the ship beneath his feet begin to sink.

  Zentai man turned away and walked back to the bathroom, and Thorn watched through the open door as he raised the bat above his head like a woodsman about to split a piece of kindling.

  Growling, Thorn lurched across the unsteady floor into the bright tiled room spattered with red, grabbed the Zentai creature’s shoulder. But his crabbed right hand and bloated fingers slipped off the arm, as the bat swung down against the naked woman huddled in the white porcelain tub. Thorn rammed him backward against the sink, and the Zentai man clubbed Thorn in the shoulder,
a half blow in that cramped space, but enough to stun his right arm, send splinters of pain into his neck and spine. Then Zentai used the butt end to spear Thorn in the gut and drive him backpedaling to the bathroom doorway.

  “Hey!” a voice called from the other room.

  The bat, aluminum and purple, swung twice more at the helpless shape in the tub. Finished with the woman, Zentai man took aim again on Thorn. Hitching up the bat on his shoulder, setting his hands on the narrow shaft, knuckles lined up nicely, bottom hand grazing the knob, a good, relaxed grip. Ready to send another bomb over the left field wall.

  Arms cocked, black figure inching forward.

  “Hey, what’s going on in there?” Somewhere in the scramble of Thorn’s memory he recalled the leering innkeeper, his creaky voice.

  Thorn thrust his shoulder at the Zentai man but caught the flash of purple and tried to duck. Knowing he was late, his skull could never withstand the blow, this was it, the end of a long, torturous road, the same road everyone walked that ended at the same place. A flood of calm filled him. Some automatic chemical mechanism to ease the pain before a final flicker of sight. All that in the split second as the purple aluminum bat carved its arc through the air.

  Halfway through the swing the bat struck the medicine cabinet, tearing it off the wall, and the aluminum club broke loose from the Zentai’s grip, hit the tile floor, chiming and chiming as it bounced. Just luck. Just a small miscalculation saved him. Nothing he’d done.

  The man shoved Thorn to the ground, stomped the side of his head against the tile, then vaulted over him and bolted from the room. Thorn managed another wild grab, snagged a patch of his stretchy legging, tearing a hole in the ankle. But the Zentai man pulled from Thorn’s grasp and was gone.

  He came to his knees, his palms against the sticky tile, the blood of Buddha. On all fours, he pulled himself to the tub, reached out and touched her arm, shook her, tried to rouse her from her agonizing slumber.

  But she was dented, broken and gone. No pulse, no movement, no breath. She was back on the wheel of rebirth, if there was such a wheel, turning and turning again, taking her spirit into the next realm, the coming incarnation, the young sheriff from Oklahoma gone off to reap the karmic rewards of a life of endurance and decency in the face of unspeakable suffering.

  Thorn picked up the baseball bat.

  The room was tilting and a soft pounding grew in his ears like the synchronized footsteps of a vast army on the march, the rhythmic thump of thousands of feet thudding against the earth, accompanied by the low hum of chanting voices as waves of warriors approached the battlefield.

  He seemed to be looking through a pinhole at the room before him, as he carried the baseball bat to the door and found himself suddenly outside, then found himself again a half block down the darkened street, sprinting with the bat after the phantom in black, toward another pinhole of light he could barely make out miles in the distance.

  Next he found himself standing before a galvanized pole, heaving for breath, and he was cocking the bat onto his shoulder, taking aim at the pole, then he was hammering the bat against the steel, feeling the shock in his joints, the ache in his hands, but drawing the bat back to his shoulder again and ripping it forward and clanging metal against metal. Doing it again and again and again.

  He was still at it, breathless, sweating, heart floundering, when the sirens shut down and the flashing lights surrounded him. Still drawing back the aluminum bat and slamming it into the immovable light pole, continuing to do it as the guns approached, as the voices commanded him to halt, to drop his weapon, Thorn taking another full swing, another bone-rattling crash, until this time the purple bat, spattered with Buddha’s blood and dented and bent, finally cracked in half, the slender shaft staying in his hands while the barrel spun away and clattered across the street.

  Then there were rough hands on his shoulders and he was jammed to his knees. His arms jerked behind him, wrists cuffed. Thrust forward, Thorn’s face against the coarse city asphalt. On his lips the taste of blood and salt from his watering eyes, and in his throat the sour burn of rage.

  FOURTEEN

  FRANK SHEFFIELD AND THORN SAT side by side in wicker chairs on the bungalow’s patio. Thirty feet before them the river sparkled with the reflection of shipboard lights. A breeze sifted in from the east, pushing away the stench of diesel oil and rotten vegetation. Inside the bungalow the crime scene technicians were at work. Photographs, scrapings, dusting the walls. Men and women in sterile suits taking rational measurements, methodical recordings. With their science and their finely calibrated instruments they would eventually explain the order of events, the size and shape of the instrument of death, a precise and orderly description of what took place. But none of it would approach the root cause, the breakdown of the civilized contract that allowed for such a thing. Nothing yet invented could quantify that.

  Thorn’s head had been wrapped in a small turban of gauze by Miami-Dade Fire Rescue paramedics. A lump had risen in the center of his forehead like an emerging third eye. His face was bruised, ribs tender. The paramedics had pronounced him fit for service. He might be groggy for a week or two. Recovery time depended on his general health and the thickness of his skull.

  “Then he should do just fine,” Sheffield had said.

  Frank reached over and patted Thorn on the knee.

  “Let me know when you’re ready to begin.”

  Thorn shook his head, which he instantly realized was a mistake. His gray matter felt as loose inside his skull as Jell-O wobbling in a dish.

  “You took a shot,” Frank said. “Lucky it’s only a concussion.”

  “Yeah, I’m some lucky guy.”

  “Your friend, the sheriff. Anybody to contact?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I suppose Starkville has a mayor.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Frank said.

  “A baseball bat. A fucking bat.”

  “Bad as I’ve seen in a while,” Frank said. “You start to think murder is murder, then something like this happens.”

  “Buddha was coming into her own. A smart, exceptional woman.”

  Thorn watched a man in a dinghy heading upstream in the dark. A German shepherd puppy sat in the bow, nose lifted into the air. To that dog, undiscriminating, at peace, all smells were good smells. Maybe Buddha had made her transmigration already, maybe that was her new state of being. A dog drinking in the night air. By Thorn’s reckoning that would be progress from her human phase.

  “You might be wondering why it’s me, not the new girl, Mankowski. Well, she wasn’t that interested. Something going on with Cuba has her all atwitter.

  “And Miami PD, they’ll be assisting. There’s turmoil in the department, mayor trying to unseat the chief. Typical banana republic bullshit. So I’m taking the lead. Miami PD’s okay with that. Nobody’s fussing.”

  “Is this a serial?”

  “At this point, my friend, I don’t know what the hell it is. Maybe we’ll wake up tomorrow, find out it’s some kind of publicity gag for that TV show. It’s all been a put-on.”

  Thorn stared at Sheffield. The man was lean and tanned, had shaggy brown hair with streaks of gray, and pouches beneath his eyes. Handsome still, but with major wear and tear. In his wrinkled khakis and blue Hawaiian shirt, he looked more like an aging surfer than an SAC.

  Like most in his profession, he’d developed a Kevlar sensibility. You couldn’t hold his bad jokes against him. Gallows humor was his bulletproof shield. Thorn shared the tendency, though he doubted he’d be making jokes of any kind for a good long while.

  Without warning, Thorn’s eyes burned and clouded. A bad time to succumb to a long-delayed wail of woe over Rusty. That loss now compounded by Michaela Stabler, and Buddha Hilton. Three more women with the misfortune to cross Thorn’s path. Three who’d been living worthy, colorful, rich, strange, complicated, idealistic lives, struck down for no reason.

  He held on, riding out the surge of anger and gr
ief.

  Frank patted him on the knee a second time.

  “It’s okay, man. You’re still here, you’re in one piece more or less, and I promise you, I’m going to get this fucktard. I’m going to be the ton of bricks that flattens his bones and grinds his guts to sausage.”

  Thorn shifted in the chair, let out the breath he’d been holding, guarding against a breakdown in front of Frank.

  “And where am I while you’re making sausage?”

  “Where all law-abiding citizens are. Standing on the sidelines.”

  “Unacceptable.”

  “You think I’m going to let you tag along? Why would I do that?”

  “Because you need me.”

  “When I’m ready for things to spin out of control, I’ll give you a call. How’s that?”

  “He won’t kill again till next Saturday,” Thorn said. “But Monday he gets his marching orders.”

  “Do that again.”

  “Are we collaborating?”

  “Riddle me this, Thorn. You want to sit in a room for a few days, stare at some blank walls? Because we got a nice holding cell up in North Miami where we put material witnesses that refuse to cooperate.”

  “You need me,” Thorn said, “a lot more than I need you.”

  “Granted, you got a head start on this. But do I need you? Not really.”

  “I know how he selects his victims. How he locates them. How he chooses his weapon. This week he made an adjustment, picked a victim without the obituary’s guidance. But the baseball bat, that was in the newspaper. Buddha and I knew a bat would be his murder weapon four or five hours ago.”

  Frank raked his fingers through his hair.

  “Earlier today,” Frank said, “you told me you had personal reasons for pursuing this asshole. I want to know what those are before we go any farther down this path.”

  “All right,” Thorn said. “Rusty’s obit in the Herald steered the killer to the Oklahoma victim. That victim was Rusty’s aunt, someone she was very close to, and someone Buddha was close to as well. Personal, personal, personal.”