Rubble and the Wreckage
Page 31
None of those emotions crowned quite as high as they did much later when Christian was lounging in a chair and drinking a glass of wine, trying to calm himself. He heard a knock at his front door, and his heart seized. The vital organ had paused beating long enough to feel as if it were swelling to five times its size, and suddenly he had forgotten how to breathe. Sitting there in the silence, he tried to gage the intensity of the knock, as if that could tell him just what to expect if he found the courage to open the door.
His hands were trembling as he put his glass on the table, feeling it was all about to be over. He knew it was Gabriel, so few visited his place, and his neighbor Ruth was conveniently out of town. The rap at the door told him that Gabriel hadn’t left Seattle, but it didn’t tell him just what the man knew or didn’t know. He was shaking when he rose to cross the floor, and as the lock slid back and the outside light forced its way in, he saw Gabriel standing there with an unaccustomed look in those beautiful eyes.
Neither man spoke a word, simply stared at each other as both were trying to distinguish whether it had been a mistake to be standing there face to face. The small fragment of time was destroyed when Gabriel shoved past him and headed inside.
“We need to talk, baby,” he said, with Christian still holding the door in blanked confusion. His tone seemed calm, but his final word was edged with uncertainty and hinted with unknown malice. In for a penny, in for a pound, thought Christian, as he closed the door on Gabriel’s shadow.
“I know . . . but you first.”
“I had a visitor yesterday. She was really informative . . .”
Gabriel’s timbre fortunately remained steady, but a guarded Christian took a step farther away as if prepping for what he figured was a stalwart attack by an angry man. It seemed eminent, and who could blame Gabriel when it finally came? This was his mistake, he had screwed up, and the images of Gabriel and Shea together in bed were forever shoved back into the nether regions. They no longer existed in the face of his criminal confession.
Nervously, he began what he hoped was a road to recovery. “I know what I’ve done, and I can’t begin to apologize. But it’s important that you understand what I was feeling when I found out about you and the girl—”
Cutting him in mid-explanation, Gabriel turned to face him, his expression one of cold polished marble. He didn’t seem capable of screaming or showing any anger in that second. This should have been a calming effect, but Christian knew the man well enough to understand that wasn’t always a good thing.
“I don’t want to talk about your conversation with Shea. I equally don’t want to discuss your reasoning behind being the little bitch you decided to be. I want to tell you about ramifications and the seeds we sow with our own frustrations.”
Christian heard the laced poison in his words, and he backed away unconsciously, just as Gabriel advanced on him, but not to grab him by the collar and throw him around as Christian expected. He was moving forward to make a solid point.
Standing a couple of feet apart allowed him to see Gabriel’s three-day growth of beard and the veins in his neck pulsating with every beat from that irregular heart of his. Suddenly he decided to take whatever punishment Gabriel wanted to give, and he planted his feet firm on his mahogany-stained hardwood floors and expanded his chest, as if he were poised bravely in front of a firing squad. But instead of his expected assault, Gabriel turned away and moved into the living room and the intensity fizzled into nothingness.
“You cost Shea her life, you know.”
Even though he’d heard the words, he hadn’t understood them. Christian felt that empty void swirling around as he was trying to grasp Gabriel’s meaning.
“Shea was never supposed to die. She wasn’t one of the ones sent to me for cleansing. You did that, not me.”
Christian listened as Gabriel’s words spilled out in an unsympathetic tone, and his knees began to buckle. He was forced to reach for a nearest empty chair for support. Had he just heard what he thought he had?
It was disbelief he was feeling, the same hope of lies that Shea had wanted, that maybe even Gabriel had hoped for since the two men had first met. That sense of when everything around you begins to wobble into abstract shapes and that wooziness that you are falling without anything to hold on to. He was cognizant enough to understand he was about to pass out, and he pulled at every graspable edge to stop the falling. He shook his head to clear the fog and somehow found the veracity to remain in the here and now. He stared at Church in amazement: the man who’d just admitted to killing an innocent person he’d thought worthy enough to fuck.
“I had to do it. You’d told her too much. I guess you know I have to get the hell as far away from the city as I can get. I just wanted you to know that it’s all because of you.”
Christian couldn’t believe his ears. Hearing Gabriel shift the blame from whatever he’d done to Shea onto him was another thing he wasn’t able to hold in his head.
“You’re saying I killed her?” Christian asked with a screech that sounded like fingers on a chalkboard.
It took a minute, but when Gabriel finally raised his head, he said, “No . . . I’m not saying that exactly. I’m saying it was because of you! I was never gonna make it out alive, and I knew that from the beginning . . . but I couldn’t take you down with me. I just couldn’t.”
He could see Christian’s vacant look and saw that he didn’t understand. “If she’d gone to the police, you’d be involved . . . but now I can just drop outta sight. She’ll be found soon enough . . . and no one ever saw us there, so no one needs to know you ever even knew me, or Shea.”
The clarity of his words was coming into focus. Church had done this horrible act, but he’d done it out of some twisted notion of love. In his own way he was trying to save Christian from any more damage from his individual destruction or the demons that ruled him.
“You can’t say it was for my own good that you murdered Shea!” Christian said loudly as he bravely rose to come within inches of Gabe’s body. He wanted to jab his finger into the man’s chest to emphasize his anger, but he stopped himself. “There were other choices you know. The girl was innocent, and she simply didn’t know anything . . . not really. We both could’ve just left the city, together.”
“STOP THINKING this romance would’ve ever have had a happy ending,” Gabe said, trying to rise to a detachment that he didn’t really believe.
In his mind, as in Chris’s, there had always been that slight hope. A rather insane image of them running away together . . . with the killings simply falling away into bad memory. They would live out whatever days they had left, and do it together. Maybe there had been more of a hopeful aspiration in Chris’s heart, but he would have been lying if he’d said he hadn’t thought about it, even dreamed about it on those nights together, just as much as those nights apart. But he was a man who had killed numerous people. At one time he thought there had been a reason, but standing facing Chris, he was beginning to wonder if he hadn’t been wrong all along.
Gabriel Lee Church had been a man who thought he understood his destiny, formed by years beyond what most could comprehend. But he’d never allowed himself to believe his life could be any different, as he hoped now. If Chris had come sooner, or if he’d just kept driving and that killing in Texas had never occurred . . .? Those were questions he didn’t want the answers to, because they would have shown him how mistaken he’d been from the start.
He stared out Chris’s large-paned window, a beam of light stretched across the floor and drew his eye, and he remembered how late in the day it was becoming. Of all the murders he’d committed and felt no remorse, he was still devastated by Shea’s. It meant he had to go, and go quickly.
AS IF the pained expression revealed everything in an instant, Christian stepped up, dropping all his guard. He grabbed Gabriel and spun him into an embrace, not thinking about Shea or any of the other’s who’d been left in his serial killer’s wake. He started to cry quietly
into Gabriel’s shoulder, the last few weeks boiling into something he could no longer control.
“I’m going with you . . . but only if you swear it’s over.” His words were barely audible, and the wet stain at Gabriel’s chest couldn’t break apart the pictures he was clinging to in his head.
“NOT TODAY, boy . . . this cowboy rides alone,” Gabe said quietly, his arms circling his lover for what he knew would be the last time.
Epilogue
THE SEATTLE STREETS seemed lonelier to him since Gabriel had disappeared. He refused to sit idle in his apartment any longer and found himself prone to walking around by himself and remembering the time when he wasn’t. He found himself walking a lot to the Elliott Bay Seawall in the weeks since Gabriel had left. It was like waking up from a fog and finding yourself standing by the edge, unsure of how you even got there. The spray of saltwater from the bay rousing him into reality. Christian tried to go to clubs then, risking finding someone and replacing the hole that Gabriel had created, but it never seemed to fit him.
He considered going back to work, but he wasn’t sure what he’d tell his superiors, since his time off had borne no fruit of his literary success. He considering writing about Church anyway . . . turning it into fiction and changing enough names and circumstance to protect him from prosecution. But every time he tried, the laptop just stared back at him, seeming to whisper: you don’t have the words inside you anymore! He felt more alone than he ever had, because the story couldn’t be told. His friends and family could never know; no words were ever going to find the paper; it would never sit bound in leather on crowded shelves with other books. He spent too many days remembering the man and the events that had shaped him. He missed Gabriel greatly but never doubted him leaving had been the right call.
Shea was discovered in Church’s apartment, conveniently days after he’d already left town. Christian was sure there were warrants out for his arrest, but he knew Gabriel had rented the place with an alias, and the killer had always remained more than a single step ahead of the authorities. He never worried much about a knock on his own door or a circle of cop cars as he walked the busy sidewalks and streets of the city. He didn’t care about any of that, because he felt empty and drained and knew there wasn’t much they could do to him now anyway—he was already doing that himself.
Christian guessed it would take years before the pictures would fade into nothing, but that never stopped him from wondering what became of him, and wondering if Church thought about him as much as he did Church. Well, he thought, you wanna make God start laughing—just mention to him that you had other plans for how it all should end up.
About the Author
Rodd currently resides in Dallas, Texas. He shares his life with numerous cats, dogs, and his partner of many years. He has many projects under his belt and is working on many others. Some of his works are There Is Always Another Boogey Man, Jesse, Justice Denied, Short Ride to Hell, A Cache of Killers, and the recently completed final book in the Brantley Colton Mystery series, No Place for the Wicked.
Always penning his next work, Rodd likes to keep busy with writing and reading and of course his menagerie of critters.
Find Rodd at his website:
www.roddclark.com
Also from Rodd Clark
The Brantley Colton Mysteries
Short Ride to Hell
A Cache of Killers
No Place for the Wicked
Jesse
There is Always Another Bogey Man
Justice Denied
www.drivenpress.net
info@drivenpress.net
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