No one would answer his questions. Not even his lawyer. When she finally looked up, her eyes were sad—and mad, too—and she said only, “I’m so sorry, Jerry,” before the judge banged his gavel and called for order.
Jerry soon found out why she was sorry. It was because she had lied. Jerry did go to prison.
And he’s never going to get out. That’s one of the things Doobie says to him, late at night.
He scares Jerry. He scares everyone. His tattooed neck is almost as thick as his head, and he’s missing a couple of teeth so that the ones he has remind Jerry of fangs.
He’s in charge of the cell block. Well, the guards are really supposed to be in charge, but Doobie is the one who runs things around here. He decides what everyone else gets to say, and do, and watch on TV.
Tonight, though, the same thing is on every channel as Doobie flips from one to the next: a special news report about the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks.
After shouting a string of curses at the television, Doobie throws the remote control at the wall. When it hits the floor, the batteries fall out. One rolls all the way over to Jerry’s feet. He looks down.
“Touch that, and you’re a dead man,” Doobie warns.
Jerry doesn’t touch it.
He’s sure—pretty sure, anyway—that he doesn’t want to be a dead man, no matter what Doobie says.
Doobie is always telling him that he’d be better off dead than in here. He tells Jerry all the things he’d be able to do in heaven that he can’t do here, or even back at home in New York. He says there’s cake in heaven—as much cake as you want, every day and every night.
He knows Jerry’s favorite thing in the whole world is cake. He knows a lot of things about Jerry, because there’s not much else to do here besides talk, and there aren’t many people to talk to.
“Just think, Jerry,” Doobie says, late at night, when the lights are out. “If you were in heaven right now, you would be eating cake and sleeping on a big, soft bed with piles of quilts, and if you wanted to, you could get up and walk right outside and look at the stars.”
Stars—Jerry hasn’t seen them in years. He misses them, but not as much as he misses seeing the lights that look like stars. A million of them, twinkling all around him in the sky . . .
Home. New York City at night.
The thought of it makes him want to cry.
But the New York City they’re showing on television right now doesn’t bring back good memories at all.
He remembers that day, the terrible day when the bad guys drove the planes into the towers and knocked them down. He remembers the fire and the people falling and jumping from the top floors, and the big, dusty, burning pile after the buildings fell, one right after the other.
“Sheee-it,” Rollins, one of the inmates, says as he stares at the footage of people running for their lives up Broadway, chased by the fire-breathing cloud of dust.
“I was there.”
All of them, even Doobie, even Jerry, who had the exact same thought in his head, turn to look at B.S., who uttered it aloud.
B.S. is small and dark and antsy, with a twitch in his eye that makes him look like he’s winking—like he’s kidding around. But he’s not. He told Jerry that he always means what he says, even when everyone else claims he’s lying.
“I don’t care what they say, because I know I’m telling the truth,” he told Jerry one night after lights-out. “You do, too, don’t you?”
“I do what?”
“You know I’m telling the truth, right, Slow Boy?”
That’s what they call him. Slow Boy. It’s just a nickname, like B.S. and Doobie.
Doobie says nicknames are fun. Jerry doesn’t think they are, but of course, he doesn’t ever want to tell Doobie that.
As nicknames go, that’s not the worst Jerry has had. Back in New York, a lot of people called him Retard. And in the courtroom, during his trial, everyone called him The Defendant.
“That’s a big ol’ pile of bull,” Doobie tells B.S. now. “Just like your name.”
“No!” B.S. protests. “I was. I was there. I was a fireman.”
“You wasn’t no fireman in New York City,” Rollins tells him. “Sheee-it. You from Delaware. Everyone know dat.”
B.S. is shaking his head so rapidly Jerry thinks his brains must be rattling around in his head. “I climbed up miles of stairs dragging my fire hose, and—”
“Your fire hose was miles long?”
“Yeah, yeah, it was long, like miles long, and I got to the top floor right before the building collapsed—”
“If you were up there,” one of the other inmates cuts in, “then how the hell are you sitting here right now? How’d you get out alive, you lying mother—?”
“I jumped. That’s how. I jumped, yeah, and the other firemen, they caught me in one of those big nets.”
Jerry regards him with interest as the others shake their heads and roll their eyes because they’re thinking B.S. makes things up all the time.
Jerry usually doesn’t know if B.S. is telling the truth or not, and he doesn’t really care. He talks all the time, especially at night, and Jerry usually has no choice but to listen. Like Doobie, B.S. lives in the cell next to Jerry’s, but on the opposite side.
But this time, for a change, he’s interested in what B.S. is saying.
“I was there, too,” Jerry says, and they all turn to him. “When the terrorist attack happened.”
“Yeah? Did you jump out the window too, Slow Boy?” someone asks.
“I wasn’t in the building. But I was near it. I saw it burning. I saw . . .” Jerry’s voice breaks and he swallows hard.
He squeezes his eyes closed and there are the red-orange flames shooting out of white buildings, gray smoke reaching into a deep blue sky, black specks with flailing limbs, falling, falling, falling . . .
There are some terrible things that, despite his brain injury, he has no problem remembering.
September 11 is one of them.
That was the day before he killed Kristina Haines, the other lawyer, the one who didn’t like Jerry, said at the trial.
“On the morning of September eleventh, The Defendant was teetering on the edge . . .”
At first, Jerry thought the lawyer was confused. He tried to speak up and tell everyone that he wasn’t in the towers on that morning. A lot of people were teetering on the edge up there, but he wasn’t one of them.
But he found out that you aren’t allowed to just talk in the middle of a trial, even if you’re The Defendant and what they’re saying about you is wrong.
Anyway, Jerry soon discovered that the lawyer wasn’t talking about teetering on the edge of a building.
Sanity: that’s the word he kept saying. Teetering on the edge of sanity.
“When those towers fell,” he told the courtroom, “a lot of people lost their already tenuous grip on sanity. Jerry Thompson was one of them.”
He told everyone that Jerry stabbed Kristina Haines to death in her own bed because he was angry with her for turning him down when he asked her out.
The lawyer was right about that.
Jerry did ask Kristina to go eat cake with him.
He was angry with her when she said no, especially because she gave him the finger as she walked away, and—
“Tell us more, Slow Boy.”
Doobie’s voice shoves the memory of Kristina from Jerry’s mind. “What?”
“Tell us what happened in New York that day.”
He doesn’t want to look at Doobie, or at anyone else, either. He can feel their eyes on him, burning into him, and he turns away, toward the television. He stares at the pictures of the mess the bad guys made when they flew the planes into the buildings. He takes a deep breath and his nose is full of the smell of burning rubber and smoke and death.
Jerry shakes his head. “I don’t know why they did that.”
“Why who did what?”
“Why the bad guys made t
hat mess. Why they killed all those people. They even killed themselves. Why would they do that?”
“Because they knew the secret, Slow Boy,” Doobie says, leaning closer so that the only way Jerry won’t be able to look at him is to close his eyes. He doesn’t do that, though, because he thinks it might make Doobie mad.
“What secret?”
“The one I told you. Remember?”
“No.” Jerry doesn’t remember Doobie telling him any secrets.
Doobie’s face is close to Jerry’s, and his black eyes are blacker than black. “The bad guys knew that heaven is the best place to be. They wanted to go there. They chose to go there. It’s better than anywhere on earth. A hell of a lot better than here. Hell . . . Heaven . . . get it?”
He grins, and Jerry can see that his teeth are black in the back.
“So . . .” Doobie shrugs and pulls back. “You should go. That’s all I’m saying.”
“Go where?”
“Heaven.”
“Heaven?” Rollins echoes. “Ain’t none of us goin’ to heaven, brother. We all goin’ straight to—”
“Not Slow Boy,” Doobie cuts in, turning to look at Rollins.
Jerry can’t see his face, but it must be a dirty look because Rollins quickly shuts his mouth and turns away.
“You . . . you’re going straight to Heaven,” Doobie whispers, turning back to Jerry. “You can go now, if you want to.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“I told you. It’s better than being stuck here for another fifty years, or longer. You can have cake there.”
Jerry’s mouth waters at the thought of it.
He hasn’t had cake in years. Ten years.
“But I . . . I can’t fly a plane into a—”
“You don’t have to.” Doobie’s voice is low. So low only Jerry can hear it. “There are other ways to get there, you know? There are easy ways to get yourself out of here, Jerry.”
Jerry.
Not Slow Boy.
“I could help you,” Doobie says. “I’m your friend. You know that, don’t you?”
Jerry swallows hard, suddenly feeling like he wants to cry. A friend—he hasn’t had a friend in a long time.
He thinks of Jamie . . .
No. Jamie wasn’t your friend. Jamie was your sister, and she died when you were kids. She didn’t come back to you all those years later, like you thought. That wasn’t real.
“Jerry,” Doobie is saying, and Jerry blinks and looks up at him.
“What?”
“We’ll talk about this later, okay? After the lights go out. I’ll help you. Okay?”
Jerry doesn’t even remember what they were talking about, but he doesn’t want to tell Doobie that, so he says, “Okay.”
About the Author
USA Today and New York Times bestseller WENDY CORSI STAUB is the award-winning author of more than seventy novels. She lives in the New York City suburbs with her husband of twenty years and their two children. Learn more about Wendy at www.wendycorsistaub.com.
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Praise for the work of
WENDY CORSI STAUB
Finalist for the Mary Higgins Clark Award
“Solid gold suspense!”
Lee Child
“Wendy Corsi Staub is a master storyteller!”
New York Times bestselling author Brenda Novak
“Each twist and turn is methodical, meant to build anxiety as she cleverly yanks the rug out from underneath.”
Suspense Magazine
“Once Staub’s brilliant characterizations and top-notch narrative skills grab hold, they don’t let go.”
Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
“I couldn’t put it down!”
Lisa Jackson (on Live to Tell)
“Wendy Corsi Staub is an author not to be missed.”
Bookreporter.com
“If you’ve never read this fantastic author, you’re truly missing out on some of the greatest domestic suspense stories around.”
New Mystery Reader
By Wendy Corsi Staub
Shadowkiller
Sleepwalker
Nightwatcher
Hell to Pay
Scared to Death
Live to Tell
Coming Soon
The Good Sister
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Excerpts from The Good Sister, Nightwatcher, and Sleepwalker copyright © 2013, 2012 by Wendy Corsi Staub.
SHADOWKILLER. Copyright © 2013 by Wendy Corsi Staub. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition FEBRUARY 2013 ISBN: 9780062070333
Print Edition ISBN: 9780062070326
FIRST EDITION
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