The Killer in Me

by Margot Harrison

  Becca just grips the wheel. Then, as we hit our exit ramp, she starts talking again. Like I’ve turned a faucet in a long-abandoned house, and all this gunk comes pouring out.

  She describes the drive from Phoenix to the detention center in San Bernardino to visit my dad. Hours of crossing the desert, first when she was very pregnant, and later with me wailing in the car seat and Dylan doing puzzle books beside me. He was so good. He tried to distract me with songs and games. Becca didn’t dare leave us at her parents’ house, and her friends had gone weird and distant after the sentencing.

  The visits were hard, too, because Steve was “unquiet in his mind,” Becca says. He wouldn’t stop talking about his sister and her husband. “That man was poisoning my sister’s mind, and she was poisoning me,” he’d say. “He would have killed her in the end, and that would kill me, too. The nothingness, Becca. Every night, the nothingness.”

  Becca started spacing out her visits. She always came back from the penitentiary wanting a stiff drink or several.

  When she heard Steve was dead, she blamed herself. She’d never wanted to visit him again, and he’d made her wish come true. For us.

  I shake my head, It wasn’t your fault, as Becca turns onto the long dirt driveway leading to her house.

  After Steve hanged himself in jail, Becca passed out drunk two nights in a row, leaving Dylan to put me to bed, which he did with no mishaps whatsoever.

  Then she got dressed and brought me to Child Services.

  She did it for Dylan. She believed he’d return to normal, and she was right (she thinks). She did it for me.

  And yes—because Becca is finally answering my question, as we sit stiffly in the parked truck, not looking at each other—yes, for a few years after that, Dylan talked about seeing me in his dreams. Becca let him, because it made her feel better to pretend she believed what he was saying. Sometimes she caught herself believing it for real. “False balm for the heart of the wicked,” she says and laughs.

  Dylan described me sleeping. Full, warm, contented under soft blankets. He described the mobile hanging over my bed. The sun shone through its cutouts of tigers and starfish, and they chimed sweetly.

  As she says this, I hear the chiming. I see the starfish, marigold yellow with pink stripes. We took the mobile down when I was eight, but it was exactly as Dylan described it to Becca.

  And one day when he was nine, Becca says, Dylan stopped talking about me. He never mentioned his dreams again.

  Like me, I see now, he kept silent out of love. I wanted my mom not to think she was second best, so I stopped talking about the boy in my dreams. Dylan wanted his mom to know she hadn’t made the wrong choice in protecting him.

  Two people can be a family, as strong as any. And that’s why I can never let Becca know what she was really protecting when she kept her son by her side.

  When we finally leave the truck, there’s only one thing in the world I want to do, but I still take time to hug Becca.

  I hug her on the porch while the wind chimes sing and ping around us. She flinches at first, but then she lets her head droop on my shoulder, her broad arms tight around my waist.

  All the time my mind churns, like Dylan’s mind when he kisses Eliana. I have to convince her everything is okay with us. So she’ll never suspect that Dylan and I didn’t turn out okay after all. She’s punished herself enough for giving me up; she doesn’t need to know the rest.

  Dylan must have started deceiving his mom early. He told her about his dreams as long as she needed reassurance, and then he stopped. He learned to hide, to have a secret life.

  In that secret life inside his head, our family was still intact, just a little discombobulated. Brother and sister saw each other every night. Our dad lived in Dylan’s dreams, too, under the apple tree. He would never die because Dylan controlled death. He decided when it would happen.

  My eyes are still wet with tears I don’t remember crying as I lock the upstairs bathroom and sink down on the fluffy white bath mat to call Warren.

  Still no new texts. No calls. I leave a message, keeping my voice level: “Warren, it’s six thirty. I need you to stay in the motel room—no, wait. Go somewhere public, like the pie place, and text me. I’ll meet you tonight. I found out something new, and he could”—I swallow hard, can’t expel the dry knot from my throat—“be dangerous after all. He’s probably seen your van. Wait for me. Just trust me. Call me, and I’ll try to explain.”

  Steve explained his dreams to Becca. That helped a lot.

  The call ended, I sit for a minute taking in the bathroom’s soothing orderliness: the pink, blue, and mint-green toothbrush holders perfectly match the towels folded on a shelf. My brain roils in sickly circles, still stuck on This is not happening.

  Becca tried. With her color-coordinated bathroom, her photo album, the birdcages Dylan built for her.

  I dig my nails deep into my palm and hit Dylan’s number.

  What will he say? What will I say? How can I tell whether he plans to hurt the boy I think I might love? How can I persuade him not to?

  It doesn’t matter, because he doesn’t answer.

  It’s nearly seven when I reach the access road, well before sunset.

  My phone keeps searching for a signal, draining the battery, so I turn it off after I’ve parked a half mile past the turn-off, in a packed-dirt pullout screened by piñon pines. Then I hoist my pack on my shoulders and get going.

  The shortest way to the ridge is straight across the desert, through the purple clots of shadow cast by sagebrush and creosote bushes. Where the ground softens, I pause to scuff out my prints. Blue drains from the pale-rimmed bowl of sky. Lizards dart out of my way, but otherwise I could be the only thing alive for miles.

  Here’s the cabin Nina described—and here’s where the tire tracks end. No one’s parked there, but I get low and skulk from bush to bush.

  From the parking area, the natural path up the ridge is east. West for me, then, where the ridge deteriorates into head-high boulders and ledges sloping toward the desert floor. There’s no trail through this mini badlands, and that suits me fine.

  I climb to the top and then explore the ridge face, looking for the mine entrance. Today I researched abandoned New Mexico mines—coal, gold, uranium. Some are flooded; some are radioactive; some could collapse at the slightest provocation.

  I find bare reddish rock face and a few ledges where a person could almost sit concealed from the valley. But no gaping chasms in the hillside, no railroad tracks or rotting timbers, nothing to suggest the ridge is hollow.

  Damn it. But Nina said the cave was tricky to find. And if she didn’t imagine it, I will find it tonight.

  Back on the ridge’s western approach, I hunker down between two red boulders, one a seven-foot standing monolith and the other half sunken in sand. Here I command a view of the cliff and cabin but can still duck out of sight.

  The rifle’s been weighing on my back. I take it out, load it, chamber a round, and strap it across my chest. Easy gestures, long practice.

  If anyone asks, I’m hunting. What do people hunt out here?

  The night vision goggles go around my neck. Water bottles and protein bars by my side.

  I was always a whiner during deer season. Marines, my dad would tell me, carried five times the gear I did over ten times the distance without bitching or moaning.

  Was Shadwell a marine? Am I well and truly screwed?

  The night vision will give me an edge, and the moon won’t rise till after midnight. But I’ll need to be still. The ridgetop is less than fifty feet away, and the desert amplifies the sound of every falling pebble.

  I eat a protein bar, rehydrate, and watch the sun slip down the sky. The bookmark from Rivendell Books flutters from my torn Dashiell Hammett paperback and skids to the sand.

  My hometown feels even more than two thousand miles away.

  Clouds sheen the horizon, then the whole desert catches fire. New crannies and protuberances appear
in the boulders like they’re aging before my eyes.

  The sun slides under the earth, and in a blink, all the colors change again. The fire melts, leaving healing-bruise purples in its wake. The sand goes beige; the sagebrush and pines turn to inky pools.

  Birds cry, scurrying rodents rustle. Shrieks that I recognize as hunting owls set my teeth vibrating.

  It takes more than an hour for darkness to fall.

  I prop my feet up and watch the nightly show. Mice venture from their burrows, owls scream, light hangs lurid in the sky. No one to witness it till now—except Shadwell, I suppose. I’ve stumbled into a fairground that’s been officially shut for years, yet every night the midway still lights up; the roller coaster and Tilt-A-Whirl still run, their hurdy-gurdy music hectic on the breeze.

  I see why he comes here.

  Best-case scenario: I stay out of sight and obtain crucial intel to supplement the contents of that blue bucket. Worst-case scenario: he comes with someone. A captive. A girl.

  The .30-06’s got a decent scope. I might only have one chance to take him at a distance, but my hands would be steady.

  Worse worst-case scenario: he comes with a body.

  That won’t happen. But I think of the Gustafssons buried in a cold hole. Missing until the news reporters got tired of a story that never changed.

  Back in Vermont, Nina was scared shitless of Shadwell. Back then, she didn’t care that we didn’t have a shred of evidence. Now she’s doubting herself. Letting him win her over.

  She may be confused, but she’s not on his side. The way she kissed me, touched me—it was real. Awkward. Messy. More importantly (though my body tells me nothing’s more important than that night), Nina made me promise not to confront her brother. She tried to keep me safe, just like I’ve tried to keep her safe by not telling her about the cache.

  I hate keeping secrets from her, but that won’t last much longer.

  The eastern sky turns slate blue; the stars evolve from etchings into tiny headlights. The western sky bleeds light. The fairground is shutting down, the ghostly carnies flitting back to their graves in the sand.

  I watch long-legged birds fight over a patch of dust.

  A hundred years ago, maybe more, someone dug a mine in this ridge. Grizzled men dueled with six-shooters, squabbling over gold. Maybe bones were left to rot. Maybe ghosts return by night to lament fortunes never made, coasts never reached, friendships betrayed, treasury notes buried in the desert and never found.

  As the cabin in the valley disappears, I close my eyes and try to imagine home.

  Mom’s washing the dishes, Aretha Franklin bawling in the background. Outside lurks Vermont’s June gloom, gray clouds racing above pale green maples. Upstairs, my dad hunches over the computer, a finger flicking across his lips.

  My mom dreamed of college, never made it. She says I should be a professor, probably imagining me with a flock of adoring students and a leather couch in my study. In New England, of course. If I stray too far, it’ll be a desertion, a betrayal.

  Yet here I am.

  The ridgeline blackens against the sky. The Big Dipper blazes. The rest of the desert might as well be the bottom of the ocean.

  I put on the goggles, adjust the strap, and practice walking, getting the hang of navigating without depth perception. The range is only fifty feet in “stealth mode,” but it should be enough.

  The sky stops changing. Still I wait—for moonrise. For him.

  Wouldn’t it be fucking hilarious if he didn’t show?

  Five or six cars have passed on the county road since I hunkered down. Each time, I crouched and got a good grip on the rifle, but they all sped on.

  Now a motor does slow. Idles. Turns.

  The tires kick up an invisible veil of dust as the car rambles up the side road toward the cabin.

  For a second, I can’t get the night vision goggles back over my head. My heart pounds against my chest like a clapper in a bell.

  The engine sputters, goes silent. The desert’s tiny sounds become deafening.

  I creep to the edge of my retreat, brace myself on one knee, and get a look at the Sequoia.

  In the eerie, green-limned world of night vision, the SUV’s driver is a moving blot. He’s unloading another blot, nothing too heavy, because his gait is normal. He shuts the car and disappears behind the cabin.

  Where behind the cabin?

  Screw the fifty-foot range and the flattened green outlines. I wrench the NVG onto my forehead and stare into pitch black, my heart still hammering.

  Too dark. I could be in a cave.

  I force my throat muscles to relax so I can breathe, Warren, breathe. If you don’t breathe, you can’t aim.

  With painful slowness, my eyes habituate again. The ridgeline emerges against the starry sky.

  Light darts in the cabin. A flashlight.

  He’s there. I breathe evenly like you do when a buck enters shooting range.

  The flashlight disappears, and I will my ears into superhuman sensitivity. The door. Is he opening it?

  Wind. Insect drone. Two witless shrieks from the clumped sagebrush. Thanks a shitload, Mr. Owl.

  Or is the owl warning me? Did Shadwell startle it?

  Without the flashlight inside, the cabin is barely visible against the sky. I steel myself and clamp on the goggles again.

  It’s like snorkeling, your breath tinny in your ears. Gazing into the underwater world, I see no one by the cabin or the car. No one coming up the rise toward me, or on the ridge. No one behind me in the rubble.

  Where the hell is Shadwell? Why’s he sitting in the cabin in the dark?

  Could he be on the phone? Is his signal stronger than mine?

  I resist the urge to remove the NVG and check for telltale blue LCD glow. The cabin window’s too small, anyway.

  He can’t have slipped up the ridge. There’s no route that doesn’t take him into my sightlines. Besides, assuming he doesn’t have his own NVG, he’d need the flashlight. No matter how well he knows the path, it’s treacherous.

  No smoke from the cabin. He’s not using the woodstove for light.

  My breathing shallows as I open my ears to the minutest sounds. All I hear is blood pounding in my temples and my inner voice screaming at Shadwell: Asshole, will you just leave your little hidey-hole and hike up the ridge already?

  It’s okay, Warren. Calm down. Breathe from the diaphragm.

  A man doesn’t bitch and moan, my dad would say. A man waits patiently for his game, hours if need be. A man doesn’t complain that his legs are cramped or the desert night is surprisingly cold or his rifle is heavy.

  If Shadwell popped out of that cabin and made a beeline for me, what would I do? Aim for the center of mass and then tell Nina, I shot your brother ’cause, well, he was there?

  Even with night vision, he couldn’t see me in my hiding place. Yet a shiver slithers down my back as I imagine his eyes (bronze like Nina’s) narrowing as they zero in on me.

  This isn’t Shadwell’s property. He’s no cop. I’ve got as much right to be here as he does.

  Am I really prepared to shoot him? What if he’s exactly what he appears to be—good with his hands, nice to kids, served our country, likes to grill corn on the cob?

  Anger at Nina whips through me like a gust of desert wind. Before she changed, she convinced me Shadwell was America’s greatest unsung serial killer. She dreamed he was digging a grave, for God’s sake. If I’m here for nothing—

  As blood starts its drumbeat in my ears again, I hear something else.

  Rock hitting rock, a percussive snap.

  Too loud for the wind or a critter. Out there on the sloping plain between me and the cabin.

  The empty plain.

  My eyes scan the flat green field of my night vision, back and forth, back and forth, willing the device to improve its range. Could he be in front of the cabin? Behind the Sequoia?

  Again: crack.

  An impact, pebbles sliding in its wake. A foots
tep?

  It’s no more than ten feet from my hiding place. I lower the rifle at sagebrush, finger on the trigger, breathe, breathe, only there’s nothing to aim at; the bush is too small to hide anyone—

  “Hands in the air.”

  A crisp voice, barely raised. Behind me.

  Suddenly, the desert is full of light, the shrubs casting shadows.

  I’m so confused I almost fire into the sagebrush where he should have been, where he isn’t.

  “Hands in the air.”

  Exact same intonation. No wasted breath, like a cop or a soldier following protocol. No emotion.

  I wheel to see him standing five feet up the rise.

  A faceless figure and a blazing headlamp illuminating the fat barrel of a .40-cal carbine. Steady as they come.

  It’s as clear to me as the desert swimming in his beam that he doesn’t think he’s confronting a prowler. He tossed stones over my head to confuse me. This is an ambush.

  I raise my .30-06 to aim, willing my hands still because this is my last chance.

  “I got no problem killing you,” the dead voice says.

  The drive back to Albuquerque takes four hours, and every ten minutes I hit REDIAL.

  Every time it’s the same horrible, generic message, not even Warren’s voice. The customer you’ve called is currently unavailable….And I cuss and fiddle with the car’s AC. Outside, the sunset makes the west glow nuclear before it all fades to black.

  When I came out of the bathroom, back in Arizona, Becca was warming up canned soup. I couldn’t remember anymore whether she thought my “friend” back in Albuquerque was a boy or a girl, so I just said, “My friend called. There was…a mugging. I have to get back right away.”

  “I’m so sorry, honey. Your friend’s okay now?”

  “Yes.” I hope. “Just scared.”

  Then Becca’s eyes filled with tears. “I was afraid you might leave after I told you everything.”

  “Oh, God, Becca, it’s not that, I swear. I don’t want to leave you.” This time I wasn’t lying, and I threw my arms around her, muttering, “I swear I’ll come back” into her shoulder, a ragged pulse throbbing in my temple.