The Killer in Me

by Margot Harrison

  When I close my eyes, when my head grows heavy and my mind drifts toward sleep, the smells come first.

  The musty, mineral odor of a dirt road after the rain. The clean bite of spruce trees.

  He always notices smells.

  Next, the sounds. A wall of spring peepers to my left sing in unearthly unison, making it harder for me to hear what I need to hear.

  I am on high alert. This is a crisis.

  My ears strain for scrambling feet, darting pebbles, tiny landslides of wet earth. The telltale sounds of a big, ungainly body making its way down the bank, toward the woods and the brook.

  This is the place. I can feel the presence of the shack or cabin, just up the road.

  Words, incredulous words, are reverberating in my mind. The bitch got away.

  The bitch is Mrs. Gustafsson. I am not me.

  These are not my thoughts. This is him. Him.

  I am not the Thief, I remind myself frantically. Still I see through his eyes and hear through his ears—there, at your ten o’clock, about four meters—as he detects the sounds of the fleeing woman and glides after her, silent on his rubber soles, the .38 pistol in his hand.

  Her gun.

  It was on the nightstand, her side. Right out in the open and loaded.

  She was still half-asleep when he picked it up; she never even reached for it. He held it to her husband’s temple and said, “I’m gonna ask you both to get up and put your hands behind your head, sir, ma’am. Nice and easy, now.” He made his voice authoritative and reassuring, like a fireman come to lead them safely from a burning house.

  Everything had gone as planned. At eleven on the dot, he broke in through the door from the garage, nabbed their car keys from the peg, and glided to their bedroom without rousing them. A lightning raid, just like he learned to do on his tour when they broke into the homes of suspected insurgents.

  The couple acted meek and confused, offered to give him cash and their wedding rings. He told them he was special forces and it was a matter of national security that required them to duct-tape each other’s mouths and get downstairs to their Hyundai.

  Did they believe him? Of course not. Still, they seemed impressed by his all-black attire and swift, powerful movements. To them, he’s no ordinary burglar, but someone who dropped into their lives from a Hollywood action flick. That’s probably why they were docile when he taped their hands and made them get in the trunk.

  They don’t mind being part of my story, he thought as he drove out of the city and up the winding dirt roads. It’s a good story. This is the most excitement they will ever see, even if it’s the last.

  Then the banging started inside the trunk. Maybe the sheep weren’t so docile, after all.

  Once they reached the place, the Thief secured the man first, hauling him out and trussing him to one of the pine support pillars that rose from the cabin’s floor. He didn’t think the woman could free her feet or get far on her own.

  He was wrong.

  Now he scrambles down the soggy bank toward the woods, cussing to himself as the damned peepers drown the noise of her flight. His eyelid twitches, his vision blurring for a fraction of a second.

  She won’t get far. He can track, and he happens to know the nearest inhabited house is over a mile in the opposite direction to where she’s heading. But still, points will be taken off for this. It’s sloppy. Humiliating.

  He pauses at the edge of the woods, letting his eyes adjust so he won’t need his flashlight. And there it goes—a splash.

  He pins the woman with the flashlight beam as she stands in the brook. She struggles up the opposite bank, but mud slows her down, and a couple of long strides bring him to her.

  With her mouth and hands still half duct-taped, her pale blue eyes wide, and her long gray hair coming loose, she no longer looks to him like a person. More like a cow going to the slaughter. But then, maybe he’d look the same in her situation.

  The Thief wonders if he’s defiling this woodland spot that presses on his senses with its fragrance of spruce needles. All around him, he can feel green leaves rising in tightly folded spears, about to pop.

  But a mission is a mission, even if he has no commanding officer but himself. And he doesn’t want to prolong her struggles, her suffering.

  He forces her to her knees, ignoring the words she’s moaning through the gag—prayers? bargaining? curses?

  He holds her and says, “Shh, shh.” She shakes her head violently when he puts the muzzle against her temple, and that stops him for a second.

  Why does she want to live so much, knowing she’s still going to die one day? He doesn’t understand it. Someone could come up and put a gun to his temple right this second, and he wouldn’t care.

  Or would he? Even an ant struggles when you try to kill it.

  He presses her face to the earth and pulls the trigger.

  The shot is a crack across the sky, assaulting his sensitive ears, because, dammit, he didn’t switch her pistol for his suppressed .22LR. He is a fool.

  It’s okay, though. The summer cottages in these woods are still empty—he checked—and the only other houses are the kind inhabited by ancient, hardscrabble folk. Maybe they think he just executed a varmint, if they weren’t too deaf to hear the shot at all.

  He forgot to bring supplies to burn the cabin down, just in case. But he can still dispose of the remains.

  Now it’s just the peepers and his own harsh breathing. Time to lug the woman up the bank.

  As he does his grunt work—most of missions is grunt work, when you come right down to it—the Thief imagines the look on the man’s face when he sees the corpse of his wife dumped beside him on the plastic sheet. The Thief isn’t looking forward to the other man’s despair, but he has to anticipate it so it won’t distract him from his work.

  Which will be arduous tonight.

  He’ll finish the man before he opens the case and gets out the tools. There’s no need for the target to know what’s going to happen to his remains, which is grim necessity.

  The Thief doesn’t want those remains found. Ever. For covering his tracks, for leaving everything as he found it—including the Hyundai, which he’ll park on the other side of town before hiking to his own vehicle—for all that, he will grant himself a clean sixteen points. Deducting two for his screwup with the lady.

  Her fraying gray braid hangs over his shoulder. Almost there. He wishes he could drag her, but he can’t leave marks.

  These two people whose first names he’s never bothered to learn will disappear. The night woods will close over them like the ocean after a shark attack, and the other small fish will be left to wonder what lurks beneath.

  At last—the cabin. His back is killing him; he needs a warm bath with Epsom salts. He needs the desert air and Eliana’s coconut cake, the one she always bakes to welcome him home. Her lips brushing his neck, her sexy voice asking him what took so long.

  He steps through the doorway, and the man’s muffled moan cuts through the air like a scythe.

  A man’s hands tangle in my hair, gripping my shoulders. With a muffled cry, I push him away and jab my elbow as hard as I can into his side.

  I’m no sheep. I won’t let you kill me.

  “Ow! Nina, wake up. It’s just a dream. You were freakin’ dreaming, okay? What’s wrong with you? Oh, shit, Nina. C’mon now.”

  Not the Thief’s voice.

  The car door opens, and the dome light blinds me. Warren stands beside my mom’s Legacy in his bulky army jacket, rubbing his ribs like they hurt.

  He catches his breath and starts talking again. “Nina, if you don’t calm down in the next five seconds, I’m gonna call nine-one-one. I don’t have a choice. You might be having a seizure.”

  A seizure? My throat feels rough, like I’ve been—screaming? Crying? The rest of me feels fine.

  “Is it the pills?” Warren asks. “You been taking some new pills, Nina?”

  “No.” I can’t seem to speak above a whisper.
“Warren, we have to find a…Toyota Sequoia. Black. It’s parked on a quiet street, where nobody would notice it. Walking distance from here. We have to find it now.”

  “No, we don’t.” His voice has gone gentler. “You were just dreaming, okay?”

  “But he’s coming back there.”

  My shorted-out brain scrambles to put the pieces of what I learned together. “He’s going to dump their car in town and walk to his. His car is probably eq-equidistant from where he’ll leave the Hyundai and this house. He plans logically like that.”

  “What are you talking about? Who are you talking about?”

  My cover story floods back to me. How on earth do I get from there to here?

  “Please just do this one thing for me,” I say. “Find the Sequoia. I-I can’t tell you why.”

  Warren fingers the car keys. He doesn’t quite keep the sarcasm out of his voice as he asks, “What about the lady we were waiting for? Your bio mom?”

  “She’s not coming back.” My eyes fill with tears; he can’t doubt the realness of those, at least. “I think he took her.”

  “The guy in the Sequoia?”

  I nod. Could I say we’re looking for my birth mother’s psychotic son, just released from jail? Her abusive husband? No, I’d just be insulting Warren’s intelligence.

  “This town probably has dozens of black Sequoias,” he mutters.

  “But not that many,” I say, “with a New Mexico license plate.”

  Warren starts playing talk radio again. This time I’m glad, because the endless stream of strangers’ chatter keeps him from asking me questions. At two A.M., he switches to NPR. Then to an oldies station.

  We scour the town—exploring leafy streets with big houses, then gliding past shuttered dry cleaners, check-cashing joints, doughnut shops. In the distance, a gigantic columned building looms on a hill—a courthouse, I think. The Beach Boys croon about sun and fun. “Try that strip mall we skipped before,” I say as my eyelids drift closed.

  I wake with a jolt to sunlight and a clamor of shrieking birds. The car is parked in a Denny’s lot. Warren lies slumped in his seat beside me.

  I grab his shoulder and shake him. “You let me fall asleep. Why didn’t you wake me?”

  Warren blinks like he’s still fighting his way through dreams, and they aren’t good ones. “We combed the whole grid four times, Nina. Sheesh.”

  “The light will make it easier to check all the alleys.”

  He pulls himself upright. “Nina, listen. We’re not going to find that Sequoia.”

  “You think it doesn’t exist.”

  “I think you’re confused. You were gonna meet your birth mom, and suddenly you have a crazy nightmare and we’re chasing a bad guy. I hate to ask, Nina, but…do you normally take meds stronger than Adderall?”

  “No.” I close my eyes, fatigue wrapping me like mummy bindings, the sunlight a distant, hostile glare. Warren is right: all night I’ve been telling lies on lies. If I were him, I would’ve ditched this town and headed home hours ago.

  But I’m not Warren. And the Thief may not have reached the Sequoia yet. What he planned to do with those bodies in the cabin must’ve taken a while. It involved a bow saw.

  He could be hiking across town right now, every part of him aching from the exertion. He could be one of the bleary-eyed young men strolling into Denny’s for coffee.

  But even if the Sequoia pulled in right now and I could point to him, so what? He’s eliminated the evidence, and he doesn’t take trophies. He’ll have ditched his tools like always—that’s why he has a Home Depot frequent-buyer card. I can describe the dirt road and cabin, but not find them on a map.

  Warren already thinks I’m crazy. So will everyone else.

  Sixteen points for the Thief. Zero points for me.

  “Okay, Warren.”

  “Okay what?”

  “You’re right. Let’s go.” Home. Back to fighting sleep and being paranoid about strangers who might be following me.

  I keep my eyes closed and lean back as we pull out of the lot, trying to forget that cabin, that burbling stream. I’ve blocked worse memories.

  I’m just starting to drift when Warren’s voice jerks me upright. “Holy shit, Nina. That’s it!”

  “Where?”

  My eyes snap open on a busy intersection. Tall office buildings—as tall as they get in Schenectady—block the sky. I catch a glimpse of a black SUV, two cars ahead, as Warren hits the gas and blows through a red light.

  We careen down the street, swerving around a bike. The rider glares at us.

  “New Mexico?” I ask breathlessly. “Did you see?”

  “Yeah, when he turned out of the side street. Red-and-yellow—hard to miss.”

  “Did you see the driver?”

  “Are you gonna tell me why I’m chasing him?”

  Why are we chasing him? What can we possibly do? Carjack him and make him take us to the remains?

  “Soon,” I say. “Try to get his plate.”

  If I can link a plate to the name I already know, I’ll have proof I’m not crazy, at least.

  Ahead of us, the light flicks to yellow. The SUV swishes through it, and so does the next car, but the third one stops.

  Warren tries to pull into a side street, but it turns out to be an alley, so he pulls back into the lane, swearing. The light is red now, as a gaggle of uniformed Cub Scouts and their leader navigate the crosswalk.

  Horns blare at us, and Warren mutters to himself, too low for me to hear. As the light finally turns green, he says, “This car chase thing is harder than it looks in the movies.”

  “Where’s the interstate?”

  “Couple miles from here. You think he’s heading there? North or south?”

  “South. You saw him?”

  I can barely get out the words. Saw him. His face.

  “A guy, yeah. Didn’t catch specs.”

  Warren bolts to the next light, both of us keeping our eyes peeled for the red-and-yellow plate. “Was he old or young?” I ask.

  “Young, I guess. White. Slender. Don’t distract me, okay?”

  Warren swings into the right lane, the interstate one—we both know the city grid too well by now. My eyes flick from car to car, but there’s no Sequoia.

  A broad stream of weekend traffic tugs us toward the entrance ramp. I strain my eyes to see the cars ahead of us, squinting as sunlight glares off bumpers.

  “I think he lost us,” Warren says in a low voice.

  We shoot into the concrete slot and onto the interstate, headed south toward Albany. Toward Albuquerque. But it doesn’t matter now, does it?

  “You mean we lost him.” My heart sinks like a stone. “Or do you think he saw us and bolted?”

  “Nah, he didn’t see us. He got lucky with that light.”

  “Just a little faster, okay?”

  He steps on the gas. “I’m practically going ninety.”

  We pass car after car without a glimpse of the Sequoia. Warren’s lips move like he’s reciting a prayer or a curse. When we reach the suburbs of Albany, without a word to me, he slides into the exit lane and around the clover leaf, heading us back up the Northway. He takes the tight curve heart-stoppingly fast, driving one-handed, and all I say is “Thanks for trying. You were all Fast and Furious back there.”

  Warren snorts, while reality settles in my stomach like a meal turning to heartburn. The Gustafssons are dead, and there’s no one I can tell, no report I can file, no investigative journalist or crusading blogger I can call.

  Concrete ramps crisscross a sky as flat and gray as my future feels. My mind is with the Thief, imagining him racing southwest, flipping on his radio, looking forward to crashing at a motel and taking his hot bath.

  On Tuesday, his girlfriend will greet him with kisses and cake.

  Somebody’s talking to me, soft but insistent. Asking questions.

  Warren. He’s still here.

  I turn to find him staring at me, his narrow, dark eyes
cop-suspicious. “Please look at the road, okay?”

  Warren rolls his eyes way up, then back to the asphalt. “What I was trying to say,” he says, “is, that was pretty fun and all, and I like having an excuse to drive recklessly as much as the next guy. But now it’s time to tell me what the hell we were doing.”

  Four hours of driving around a dark Nowheresville, U.S.A., passing the same neon signs and statues and parks and bus shelters and mini-marts till they gave me a headache. All that time, I didn’t ask what we were really looking for.

  If my brothers knew about tonight, they’d laugh their asses off. They’d say I’m whipped. They wouldn’t understand that this isn’t about sex and that I wouldn’t have driven to Schenectady for any cute girl who gave me a smile. This is about Nina—her and me.

  Other girls have asked me for favors; that’s kind of what happens when you deal drugs, even study drugs. Some have cried, and a couple have not-so-subtly offered something in return. It may sound hot, but their desperation was palpable, and I got very good at talking them into treatment, until eventually I realized the extra income wasn’t worth the guilt.

  I wouldn’t have explored Schenectady for any of those girls. But Nina helped me survive middle school, the most hellish era of my life, and I’m not about to forget that.

  It started in spring of seventh grade with the book report for Ms. Mullins. I’d stayed up all night reading The Man Who Japed, by Philip K. Dick, an old book I’d found at a library sale, and now I couldn’t seem to explain its convoluted plot. It didn’t help that every time I said “Dick,” the whole class snickered, and Ray Welles, the class comedian, sang out, “Who you callin’ a dick, Witter?”

  By the time I finished, Mullins’s voice was hoarse from shushing the class. “What does ‘japed’ mean, Warren?”

  I’d read the whole book, yet my mind went blank, and sweat beaded under my collar.

  Mullins made me fetch her enormous dictionary and read out the definition. When I was finally allowed to sit down again—amid mutters of “What a dick” and “Dick move, Witter”—a tiny, rolled-up note waited on my desk.