Dead Last

by James W. Hall

  * * *

  The darkness permeates you and you permeate it.

  You are quiet, waiting. Everything is in order. Everything laid out. You have worked to put each beat in the correct position, so the music will rise and fall, will spin and leap, will shoot forward, then march in short steps, short hard claps of thunder. You have written the script, applying your intelligence and your heart, and your sense of the mythic needs of the story, and all your actors are behaving as you designed. Everything is happening as planned.

  You wait in the darkness. The darkness waits in you.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THORN STOOD OUT IN THE shadows listening to the distant highways hum. A screech owl trilled a block away. The clouds were dense, the air as thick and breathless as mud. A bat whisked overhead through the dark, its silent flicker invisible against the sky.

  He headed up the stone stairs to the garage apartment, to wash up, put on a fresh alligator shirt for the long night ahead.

  He unlocked the door and stepped into the darkness and patted the wall for the switch, flicked it, but nothing happened.

  Retreating a step onto the porch, Thorn waited, worked to hear any foreign sound, catch the trace of an intruder. He held still for a full minute, waiting, listening, and hearing nothing.

  Then remembered. The ceiling fan’s light fixture had a two-foot pull cord. This morning he’d tugged it on his way out.

  Thorn was losing it. Spooked by shadows.

  He stepped back into the apartment and raised his hand high and swished it back and forth, feeling for the cord. The single streetlamp that lit the driveway and the front of the house left the garage apartment in total dark. As his eyes attuned to the gloom, his fingers ticked the cord and sent it swaying.

  He waved his hand some more and brushed the cord again and thought he had it, when across the room, on the queen-size bed, a blue screen lit up.

  Cocked against a pillow, Buddha’s electronic tablet was playing a video, the music set low, an eerie string quartet.

  Thorn lowered his arm and took a half step forward. In the blue halo he saw the ball gloves, the two duck eggs, and a baseball spread out across the bedspread where he’d left them this morning.

  On the tablet’s screen was the TV scene Buddha showed him in Key Largo in their first few minutes together. A murder from Miami Ops. The Zentai Killer was moving up behind the black man who was working late in his office. The reflection of the killer appearing in the picture window for a split second before he slipped his wire over the businessman’s head and strangled.

  Thorn pivoted to his right and slung a fist into empty space.

  Ducking into a crouch, he took a step backward. The video ended and a second later the light winked out and the room was black again.

  In his own house, Thorn could sprint its length with eyes closed and never bump a wall or piece of furniture. He could locate any drawer and choose a spoon over a fork without fumbling. But this room, though cramped, was still foreign to him. The narrow hallway ended in a bathroom. The double closet doors where the baby raccoons had been trapped were two steps from the bed. A slim space ran between the other side of the bed and the wall. Behind him was the small dining table where he’d eaten his fish sandwiches beside a window that looked west.

  To start the electronic tablet, the intruder had to be standing beside the bed. But which side? Thorn chose the right, the side nearest the bifold doors, and stepped forward into the darkness, his hands open, held chest high, ready to defend, punch, or wrestle. To his right he thought he heard the dry brush of fabric against fabric and cut in that direction.

  But somehow the Zentai man slipped behind him and struck. At first it registered as no more than a hard tap on the meat of his right shoulder.

  Thorn swung halfway around to face his foe. Who wasn’t there.

  By then the puncture wound was starting to buzz in his flesh, a hot patch of inflammation spreading across his right shoulder blade, numb and fiery at once, as if he’d been set upon by a gang of hornets.

  He rotated the shoulder and felt the deadened joint, a sting flaring through his right arm, echoing in the elbow joint like a well-struck gong, vibrating in the wrist, dulling the sensation in his right hand.

  To his right he saw the shape. The Zentai man, blacker than the darkness around him. A missing cutout of the night, and the quick glitter of metal in his hand. An ice pick. The weapon April had ordered up had arrived a few days early.

  The Zentai man moved right, cornered by the bed on his right, the closet doors on his left, and Thorn in front of him. In Thorn’s shoulder the ache was taking root, its deadening tentacles piercing the layers of flesh below.

  Despite the pain, wading forward into battle was his first impulse. All the pent-up rage, the hurt, the loss had him leaning forward, ready to leap into the phantom’s embrace. But for once, just this once, he caught himself.

  With only the vaguest plan, he took an oblique angle, two steps to his left, hopped up on the bed, snatched one of the ball gloves, and slipped it on his left hand.

  He bounced on the bed. His right arm flopping at his side as useless as a stocking filled with dust. He thought he saw the Zentai figure moving onto the open floor, and he bounced once more and launched himself at the black body.

  His dead arm clipped the Zentai man, and Thorn was butted sideways into the closet doors. He twisted hard, kept his feet, and saw the glint of the ice pick coming, and tried to smother it with the glove.

  It glanced off the heavy leather and nicked Thorn in the cheek. A second strike came quick, but Thorn blocked that too, then a third wild swing dug deep into the glove’s webbing. His attacker breathing hard.

  Thorn bulled the man backward toward the bed, got him off-balance, and kept churning his legs till he had the guy caught against his good shoulder, driving him back onto the mattress.

  They landed together in a sprawl, the Zentai man pinned on his back, Thorn’s chest pressed to his chest, his weight keeping the lighter man down. But with his right arm worthless he couldn’t bear-hug him, couldn’t pin him for long, and he felt the guy wriggling his ice pick arm, squirming it free. Felt it break loose and pull back.

  Before he could jerk away, Thorn heard the crunch of the blade entering his flesh, then felt the nasty shock somewhere near the base of his spine. He grunted, slid backward, got his feet planted on the floor, and pushed himself into a forward somersault, rolling up and over the Zentai man, toward the narrow aisle on the far side of the bed.

  He flattened against the wall, bobbed to his right, shed the glove, and found the bedside lamp and switched it on.

  “You’re doomed,” the guy said.

  Standing now, with the ice pick in his right hand, its prong bloody.

  “Flynn?”

  The Zentai man inched along the foot of the bed, trapping Thorn in the narrow aisle beside the bed.

  “What I want to know,” Thorn said, “is where’d you learn to hit a baseball, son?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Who taught you to hit like that?”

  “You’re crazy. A time like this, you want to talk sports.”

  “Is that you, Sawyer?”

  “If you must know, one of my daddies taught me to hit.”

  He kept coming. Thorn’s legs were pinned between the mattress and the wall. He tried to maneuver them in the tight space, to balance himself. Feeling the blood seeping down his legs, the throb in his shoulder, another in his lower back. More than a throb, but Thorn couldn’t find the word.

  “One of those men in the photographs taught you.”

  “Paulo,” he said. “His name was Paulo. Like you, he thought every red-blooded American boy should play baseball. So each time he came to screw my mother, we boys had batting practice afterward. The smell of my mother’s juices on his hands, on the balls. Wiffle balls. Softballs. Batting and batting and batting. That’s where I learned my skills. Paulo Montenegro. Wrists loose, knuckles in a straight line. Paulo hung ar
ound, then lost interest. Like the other ones. My mother is impossible to love.”

  “So this is her fault? This person you are, the shit you’ve been doing, you blame April?”

  “All she had to do was pick up the phone and call my father, let him know. We could have been a normal family.”

  He was six feet away. Thorn’s only opening was back across the bed, but by the time he unpinned his legs from the cramped space and mounted the mattress, the kid would be on him.

  “You’re Sawyer.”

  “That’s a name,” he said. “That’s just a name.”

  “You’re my son. My flesh and blood.”

  He laughed at that.

  “In case you haven’t noticed, you’re dying, old man. Your flesh and blood is leaking out inside you and it’s spilling on the floor. You’re seconds from passing out. And when your knees sag, that’s it, handsome stranger. You’re done. You’ve finished your last adventure.”

  “Why, Sawyer?”

  “Always why,” he said. “You’re so fucking worried about why.”

  “To save the goddamn show? Is that all?”

  “You don’t get it.”

  “You’re not Flynn,” Thorn said. “You’re the smart guy who puts words in everybody’s mouths, moves them here and there. You sit all cozy with the script in your lap watching it unfold exactly like you made it up. God in his heaven.”

  “That’s better,” he said.

  “Take the hood off, Sawyer. Show me your face.”

  “You’re just passing through, Thorn. You don’t get to call the shots.”

  “Just passing through.”

  “Like the rest of them. Here to score what you can. Then you move on to something better. Come and go. Come and go.”

  Thorn felt the blood filling his shoes. He saw a yellow flicker in the light as if someone was tapping into the power line upstream.

  “Is that what happened to Paulo? He went away, or did you drive him away?”

  “Paulo was an asshole.”

  “And the others, the other daddies?”

  “They’re in the river,” he said. “Wired to concrete blocks.”

  Thorn couldn’t tell if he was serious or not. It didn’t have the weight of a confession. Just a bland statement of fact.

  “You’re lying.”

  “Every one of them.”

  “How many?”

  “I haven’t kept count.”

  “You got them before they could abandon you.”

  “Me and Flynn and Mother.”

  “I see.”

  “You don’t see shit.”

  “They were warm-up, your own batting practice. Those men in the photos in the hallway. That’s your trophy wall.”

  “Every kid needs a hobby, don’t you think, Dad? I was never good with traditional sports.”

  “So you invented your own.”

  “Next season,” he said. “That’s the big reveal. Turns out the evil twin got her start whacking her mother’s boyfriends. I think it’ll be a hit. A few wrinkles to work out, got to get the tone right, but I have the feeling it’s going to be a winner.”

  He tugged off his hood and Sawyer stood there smiling. A handsome boy, a young man with eyes so clear, jaw so rock solid, hair so thick and golden, he could have been a TV star himself. Though following someone else’s script was probably beyond his abilities.

  Thorn had been wrong about Sawyer Moss. It wasn’t a tranquil smile he’d seen, it was the smug and pitiless grin of one who mastered every challenge so easily they had only disdain for the struggles of others.

  “Buddha, the woman you beat to death, she had you right. A control freak.”

  “And that’s bad, because?”

  “You hid the suit in Matheson’s truck. You knew he was a suspect, somebody would find it sooner or later.”

  “And true to form, Jeffy confessed,” Sawyer said. “Thinking he was taking a bullet for Flynn. Or just trying to get Flynn’s attention. Who knows about that shithead.”

  He came a half-step closer, shifted the ice pick to an underhand grip.

  “You’re sure you’re not insane? A psychopath? It would be so disappointing if it turned out to be just that. Doing all this elaborate scheming and killing without any purpose. I’d like it better if it was about something shallow and silly like making the show a success.”

  “It will be a success. It’s going to be huge.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then I get back to work. Brass ring in hand, door wide open.”

  “And how long will that last before you lick your lips and start again? Once you’ve had a taste, it never goes away.”

  “Like you would know anything about it.”

  “I know more than I’d like to.”

  Sawyer’s smile had turned sour.

  “I don’t need your psychobabble, Dad.”

  “What do you need, Sawyer? Anything at all? Or are you totally self-sufficient?”

  “Goddamn right I am.”

  “Sitting alone in a room, making things up. Hour after hour, getting every word in place, the dialogue, the action, the story. Doesn’t leave you much left over for the real stuff, does it? Kind of drift away into your perfect world.”

  “I know what’s real, what’s TV bullshit. If that’s what you’re implying.”

  His son stood watching him, waiting for him to die.

  “What a loser you are,” Sawyer said. “What a putz.”

  “Poor kid, your only role model was the handsome stranger. An imaginary hero. Thin air. Words around a breakfast table.”

  “Fuck you, Dad.”

  “It’s not going to be so easy this time, kid. I’m not dying. You want me dead, you’re going to have to come over here and stick me a few more times.”

  Behind Sawyer there was a light tap on the door and April leaned her head into the room. In shorty pajamas and flip-flops, her hair loose. The door shielding Sawyer from her view.

  “You weren’t in the parlor,” she said. “I got worried.”

  “Leave,” Thorn said. “Go now.”

  Sawyer stepped around the door and took her by the wrist and hauled her to the opposite side of the bed. April, staring at the ice pick, released a moan of anguish. Thorn took the moment to edge forward a step and another until Sawyer swung back his way.

  “What is this?” April said. “What’re you doing, Sawyer?”

  “This is fucked,” he said. “You shouldn’t be here. You’re not part of this.”

  “Not part of it? I’m your mother, Sawyer. Anything you’ve done, I’m part of it. Now put that down. Put it on the table and we can talk.”

  “Bullshit.” Sawyer took a swipe at the air in Thorn’s direction.

  “We can fix this, Sawyer. Whatever you’ve done, we can manage it. There are ways.”

  Thorn’s eyesight was smeared and spinning. He’d lost touch with his right arm and his legs felt unsteady; the light had begun to flutter like heat waves off a summer highway. But he was hatching something.

  When he was sixteen, Thorn had broken his right arm in a fall on the dock. For weeks, burdened by a cast, he’d distracted himself by working on his left-handed delivery. By the time he shucked the cast, he could toss a baseball thirty feet and hit the trunk of a tree with some regularity. Not great, not ambidextrous by any means, but he believed those hours of practice were still lurking in the muscle tissues somewhere, down there with all the other fluid moves—the graceful, effortless jumps and dives and sprints and the lazy, innocent grapplings of naked flesh in dusky bedrooms on a hundred tropical nights, and one memorable spring morning with the woman who stood across the room just now, talking to her son, their son, trying to reason him back from the nightmare he’d dreamed up and dragged everyone into.

  Thorn scooped up the baseball with his left hand and rocked back and flung it at the boy, his boy. It dinged him in the temple, a glancing blow, but enough to rattle loose the ice pick from his hand.

  Coming
around the foot of the bed, Thorn scooped up one of Matheson’s eggs and flung that too, and flung the second. One of them hit the wall, the other struck the boy’s face and smeared him with yolk. April screamed for them to stop, as Thorn kept coming, a race against his boy, a race to the ice pick that lay on the wooden floor halfway between them.

  The boy going for the ice pick and Thorn going for the boy, his egg-smeared son. Thorn looped his one good arm around the young man’s throat and pulled him upright. But not in time.

  Sawyer had the ice pick in his hand with Thorn behind him tightening the grip on his throat. His left forearm pressed so hard against the boy’s airway, he could hear the cartilage pop.

  Sawyer stabbed the pick into the meat of Thorn’s forearm. Someone screamed. Maybe Thorn. He used whatever leverage he had left to crank his arm tighter against his son’s neck. To stop him but not kill him. Strangle him till he passed out. Just enough. Just exactly enough.

  Sawyer straightened his arm and held the ice pick out, taking aim at Thorn’s arm. Screaming for him to stop, April came rushing to block the blow, but arrived a half second late and her hand only bumped his, enough to alter its trajectory by a fraction, just enough to plant the ice pick up to the hilt in Sawyer’s throat.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  ON THE FOLLOWING THURSDAY, THORN was out in his yard carrying boulders back to the seawall when he heard Paul McCartney playing the opening bars of “Hey Jude” somewhere inside the house. He’d forgotten he’d brought Buddha’s phone back to Key Largo with him, and it took a few minutes to locate it under a pile of laundry.

  “Can I come down?” April said.

  “Of course.”

  “I need to ask you some questions about … I need to know what Sawyer said to you before I came into the room.”

  “I can tell you now if you want.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m not ready yet. And I need to hear it face to face.”

  On the following Sunday afternoon April’s Mini Cooper rolled down the crushed seashell drive and stopped at the edge of the lawn. She and Garvey got out and walked arm in arm to the seawall, where Thorn was again setting the boulders back in place against the next high tide.