He jerked the pull cord, and Thorn’s world grayed out and the pistol sagged and loosened in his grip.
Jeff walked him backward toward the house, away from the empty street and any chance of help. He kept the pressure on the loop, Thorn wavering on the uncertain edge of consciousness.
“Guys like you, all squeaky clean and upright, you don’t have the balls to mess with a mean motherfucker like me.”
But Jeff was wrong. One-slug-through-the-thigh wrong. And one more through the knee.
THIRTY-TWO
“MATHESON CONFESSED. NOT DIVULGING ANY details yet, but he’s come clean on the killings.” Frank Sheffield held his cell phone to his ear, getting the update from Vasquez, then giving it to Thorn in short bursts. “Blood on the running shoes matches Hilton’s type. They’re expediting the DNA, but it’ll be tonight before it comes back.”
It was nearly seven in the evening; the dusky sky showed ripples of red and silver in the west. A fading light that gleamed on the river and powdered the palms with make-believe frost. Thorn and Sheffield were standing at the back of a small gathering of mourners who’d come to April’s house to watch Danni Dollimore’s ashes tossed into the Miami River.
Gus and Flynn and Sawyer stood up front along with April and Garvey. Behind them in the second tier were a couple of dozen others he didn’t know, most of whom appeared to be either some of the homeless folks Danni had fed and bonded with or the workers at the shelters that served them. There might have been a couple of fans of her TV show in the group, but he couldn’t be sure.
He assumed the young couple in the back who kept taking snapshots might be followers of the show. Both of them had slightly dumbfounded looks, as if they weren’t sure whether they should pretend to be sad or just go ahead and gawk at these actual living, breathing TV stars.
“Says he drove to Atlanta to do the nurse. Took a flight to Oklahoma City under an assumed name to do Rusty’s aunt.”
Sheffield looked bedraggled and his breath was boozy. He’d told Thorn about holding off the bulldozers all morning until a few of his cop buddies answered his distress calls and came en masse to the Key with sirens and lights blazing to show solidarity with their old drinking buddy. The demolition guys turned tail, and the rest of the afternoon Frank kept the beer flowing, putting a little pizzazz back into the sweet old Silver Sands.
The party was still going on, so Frank was free for an hour or two.
“Matheson says he bumped into you and the sheriff at Poblanos and followed you back to your motel.”
“How’d he know to do that?”
“What?” Frank was listening to more of Vasquez’s report.
“How’d he know who we were or what we were doing there?”
“That’ll come out. This guy’s cooperating. Vasquez says he sounds cocky, all pumped up over his big day in the spotlight, spewing everything. I’m thinking when the sedation wears off, and he starts feeling those two rounds you put in him, he won’t be so cocky.”
While Vasquez talked some more in Frank’s ear, Thorn patted him on the shoulder and nodded toward the ceremony, and Frank nodded that he understood—Thorn had obligations.
Frank drew the phone away, covered the mouthpiece, and said, “I’m supposed to keep you company until Mankowski arrives. Monitor your whereabouts.”
“I already gave my statement to Miami PD.”
“This is Mankowski’s baby,” Frank said. “She’ll be here shortly and take you up to North Miami to get you on video. You okay with that? If it’s a problem, I could always let you slip through my fingers.”
Thorn looked off at the solemn ceremony, the shutterbugs moving in for a good profile shot of Flynn.
Frank said, “My advice, whatever it’s worth, get the statement over with. It’s a pain in the ass, it’ll burn a couple of hours, but better now than later. More time Mankowski has to think about this, more questions she’ll be throwing at you.
“And listen, Thorn. She’s been barking about you breaking into the subject’s house. So you might consider rearranging the order of events, like maybe you found the Zentai suit first, then you cracked the glass. That might go over better, sounds like you had some probable cause. Not that you need it, being a citizen, but still, breaking and entering like you did, from how Mankowski sees it, that sort of muddies the legal waters.”
He left Frank getting more of the lowdown from Vasquez, and walked up to stand beside April for the last few testimonials about Danni Diamond Dollimore, the girl with the secret life.
He listened to a woman with sparse gray hair and eyes the color of weak tea recalling an afternoon not long ago when Danni was cleaning the hard-used toilets at the shelter.
“I came in because, you know, I had to take a leak, and Danni looks up with a scrub brush in her hand, and she’s just beaming. I never saw anyone happier than that girl at that moment, down on her knees in front of a toilet.
“I asked her what it was that was making her smile, and she said, ‘This is the first damn thing I’ve ever done in my life that makes any sense at all.’”
When the last speaker had their say, the benediction was given by a man in khaki slacks and a blue shirt, with the wrinkled face of a seventy-year-old and the lucid blue eyes of a child. He explained that he was a recovering alcoholic, sober since the day he was defrocked, but although he wasn’t an official priest any longer, he’d been told that his religious incantations still worked pretty well.
Afterward April left Thorn to attend to the serving table where platters of food, a big glass bowl of pink punch, and an array of flickering candles were set up alongside the river.
Thorn was working his way through the crowd toward Sheffield when Flynn stepped in his path. He was wearing a tight black T-shirt that showed off his narrow waist and well-honed pecs. His jeans were faded and his loafers scuffed. There was a gold chain around his neck and two small diamond studs in each earlobe. He didn’t wear a wristwatch or rings. His haircut was the kind that was always nicely styled even when the wind was tossing it around. The worldly squint and hard set of his jaw that Thorn had noticed in his publicity shot were less pronounced in person, as if perhaps for the purposes of that photograph he’d been coached by some PR guru to assume a hardass persona.
“So, Tarzan, you going to swing back up into your tree house now?”
“Is that what you want me to do?”
“Doesn’t matter what I want. That’s never had any effect before, why should it start now?”
“If you give me a chance, I can give you the same.”
Flynn looked off at the river.
“I don’t think we’ve got anything to say to each other.”
“I don’t know. We’ve kept each other nicely entertained so far.”
“Something I learned a long time ago,” Flynn said, eyes drifting around the group, “minute you lower your guard, the assholes are there waiting to stomp your face.”
“Can’t argue with that,” said Thorn. “A lot of assholes in this world.”
Flynn waved his hand in front of his face. Stop right there.
“No way, dude. No fucking way. You’re not smooth-talking me into anything. Maybe there was a time I would’ve fallen for that let-me-be-your-daddy bullshit, but that time’s long past.”
“It’s happened to me,” Thorn said. “Somebody gave me a gift, birthday, Christmas, whatever. It’s some weird gadget, I can’t see the point. So I wind up tossing it. Next thing I know, a situation pops up, I realize that weird doohickey would’ve been very handy. And I’m standing there wondering which trash can I threw it in.”
Flynn canted his head to one side, then the other, studying Thorn’s face.
“You’re not very bright, are you?”
“Now see, there’s something we can agree on.”
April was coming over, taking her time as if she didn’t want to interrupt, but wanted to be nearby in case she needed to quell an argument.
“You ever play baseball, Flynn?
”
Flynn squinted at him.
“You can’t be serious.”
“Not ever? Not even PE in high school?”
“Hey, man, it was nice talking to you. Have a good life.”
“Is that a no?”
“That’s a triple no, Daddy-o, with a latte on the side. No baseball. Zero. Is that some huge disappointment to you, your son didn’t play America’s pastime?”
“Yeah, it’s a fairly big deal,” Thorn said. “I’m actually happy to hear it.”
Back toward the house he saw Mankowski stalking across the yard, Rivlin at her shoulder, the two women coming straight for Thorn. April arrived beside him and asked who it was and Thorn told her it was Sheffield’s replacement. April watched the heavyset woman plow through the departing mourners.
“Do you need a lawyer?”
“A lawyer, no,” Thorn said. “But if I’m not back in a few hours, you might want to start working on my obituary.”
THIRTY-THREE
YOU DRIVE ALONG NORTH RIVER Drive, scouting the area. Your kayak is strapped to the roof of your car. It makes you conspicuous, but this is unavoidable. No one else is on the road, no one walking on the sidewalks.
Darkness smothers the river. A faint gleam coats its surface; above is the cloudy sky, no moonlight. Ideal conditions. If you believed anything was real beyond your own imagining of it, then you would give credit for this perfect darkness to good fortune.
The darkness springs from your mind, the kayak is your invention, the river and its oily gleam is nothing but a projection of what you require right now, what you have spun out of nothing and placed before yourself.
It is only ten P.M. but on this Monday night, in this part of town, Spring Garden, people are locked away inside their houses watching TV, wasting their time in pointless sloth. This would be sad if you let yourself consider it, the shallow lives people lead, the dry tedium, the lack of purpose. But you don’t.
This is one of your skills. To move ahead with single-minded focus. It is embedded in your DNA. You are able to disconnect from the things that trouble others. You can make yourself smile and laugh and construct every lie of normalcy, but you are not one of them. You never have been.
A fresh Zentai suit is on the seat beside you. Tonight you will wear it one last time. It is familiar and comfortable and you enjoy the impact it creates, the shock. The wild eyes, the shivering, the coldness in their bones.
As you drive through the neighborhood, you rewind the tape. Start with the ancient Cuban man in a bleak apartment in Hialeah, asleep in front of his loud TV, your hands at his throat, your fingers cutting his air, his pleading look, the rictus of suffocation, his bleating, his eyes drifting upward.
The Atlanta condo. A slim young man who opened his door with curiosity, a half smile as if he thought you were one of his friends playing a trick. That look vanished when you wiped the blade across his throat, once, twice, then a third time as he stumbled back into his orderly, cheaply furnished apartment.
And the teenage kid with earplugs listening to a rap beat that you could make out from ten feet away, the kid sitting at his laptop, absorbed in some game in which he was disintegrating gremlins. Believing he was in control, believing he was the master of his artificial world.
You tapped him on the shoulder because you wanted him to see you, see what was happening, have a chance—even a slender one—to defend himself, and you wanted the slugs to enter through the front, not for any particular reason, just because it seemed orderly and fair. But mostly you wanted him to know how wrong he’d been about everything.
And the woman in her bed in Oklahoma, how she’d tried to lawyer her way out of the inevitable. You can still feel the heft of the spear in your hand, the resistance of her flesh and muscle fibers. It required more exertion than you had anticipated.
And the young sheriff with the tattooed face and ragged hair, who fought you hand to hand but was unprepared and ill-equipped to fend off your onslaught. And her defender, the blond man who tried to wreck your moment. You regret not staying longer and dispatching him.
The one tonight will be your last, so you will be deliberate and observant, you will absorb every detail, no matter how chaotic the scene becomes, for you want to record this one. This is special. This is the capper. This must last for the rest of your days.
As you have done before, you follow the obituary, complying with its commands. This time you will bend the rules to fit your own needs. By doing so you will bring your journey to a satisfying conclusion, circling back in a graceful, symmetrical way to where it all began. You will restore harmony and order and equilibrium.
At a vacant lot, you park your car along the crumbling sidewalk, strip off your clothes, climb into the suit, and slip on your new footwear. You get out of the car and unstrap your black kayak from the roof rack and carry it above your head to the stone steps that lead down to the waterline. You slip your black kayak into the river. You climb into the narrow craft, organize yourself and your gear.
When you are done and ready to go, you draw the ice pick from its leather sheath and hold it up so it may shine in the darkness. Its weight is ideal. Its hardened steel point is needle sharp. Its metal spike is five inches long and its wooden handle conforms exactly to the shape of your hand.
An excellent tool. It will easily penetrate the flesh and muscle and bone, slip deep into the organs and puncture them. Vital fluids will leak, and though you are not an expert in human biology, you expect the death to be slow. You will accompany the dying through the final stages, staying until the very end when it is complete. You will watch and listen and remember.
You slide the ice pick back into its sheath, tuck it in the band of your suit, and pick up your paddle and slip it into the sleek water. You push it behind you, and your craft glides forward. You are under way. You are a black mirror held up to the black night, skimming across the dark perfect surface of the world. This world that without your efforts would not exist.
* * *
It was not quite midnight when Thorn made it back to Spring Garden and rolled through the open gates. He got out of Buddha’s rental and waited, but Boxley didn’t trot out of the shadows to greet him. The main house was dark, April’s car parked where it usually was.
He took out Buddha’s phone and tapped it until he came to April’s cell number. One more tap and he could be sure that all was well. He looked up at the dark house but hesitated. Didn’t want to wake her. Didn’t want to arouse alarm. He held the phone at his side and looked around at the dark drive and yard and the river behind the house.
For Mankowski the grilling had not gone well. She must have honed her interrogation approach on people who had terrible secrets to hide or something big to lose. But Thorn had neither. The woman had tried and tried to chip away at his story, chip and circle and fake and bully and backtrack, trying everything in her arsenal, but none of it had had any effect on Thorn.
He answered every question he knew the answer to, doing it succinctly and without hesitation. Anything he didn’t know, he admitted and refused to speculate. He didn’t give her any smart-ass answers, didn’t try to sugarcoat anything. He confessed to breaking into Matheson’s house because he had reason to believe the young man had been Buddha Hilton’s attacker. What was that reason? The way the killer held the baseball bat. The knuckles, the loose wrists, the cock of his arms.
Knuckles?
Mankowski shook her head. It seemed to be the one bit of body language she allowed herself. She did it a lot. Thorn seemed to bring that out in certain people, that same head shake of disgust or disappointment or amazement. People were always shaking their heads at Thorn.
When she took a break to consult her notes, or sip coffee, he repeated to her the question he’d asked Frank. Why did Matheson bother to follow Thorn and Buddha to the Waterway Lodge after seeing them in Poblanos? It was a simple question, but a pivotal one. If they couldn’t explain why he’d followed, then they couldn’t fully believe Ma
theson was the Zentai Killer.
Despite the bodysuit found in his truck and the bloody shoes. Despite the altar he’d built to worship Flynn. And the latex replica of Flynn’s face. Despite his presence on the high school baseball team. And the general creepiness of the guy. Despite his confession.
Thorn wanted to be sure, but he wasn’t. Not yet.
He tapped April’s cell number. After three rings she answered, groggy.
“I woke you.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“Where are you?”
“In your driveway,” he said. “I wanted to make sure you were okay.”
She was quiet for a moment, then said, “Was it really Jeff?”
“That’s how it seems.”
“You’re not sure.”
“Let’s sleep on it. Maybe it’ll be more believable in the morning.”
“You sound worried, Thorn.”
“I’m glad you’re okay.”
“I’m fine.”
“Is Boxley in there?”
“At the foot of my bed.”
“Maybe I should sleep in the parlor tonight. Between Boxley and me, we should be able to handle whatever comes up.”
“Then you don’t think it was Jeff.”
Thorn looked up at the window of her bedroom. Still dark.
“It probably was,” Thorn said.
“I thought he confessed?”
“I’ll feel better when he gives them something specific that only the killer could know.”
The curtain moved aside in her bedroom. She looked out at him with the phone at her ear.
“You have your key, right?”
“Yeah, I’ll let myself in. Go back to sleep. That couch in the parlor looks long enough for me.”
She was silent.
“It’s going to be all right,” Thorn said. “I’ll stay here as long as it makes sense. Nothing’s going to happen tonight. Go back to bed. Get some rest.”
She pressed her hand against the window glass like an inmate at the end of visiting hours saying farewell to a loved one. Thorn kept looking up at her until she lowered her hand and let the curtains fall back in place.
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