“I’m not acting like anything.”
“Yes, you are.”
“I’m not.”
“You suck so bad at lying.”
“OK. I’m freaked. Maybe depressed. Hurt. Pissed. OK. It messed me up. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be sorry.” He hugged her but for the first time since she’d met him two months ago, his hug did not melt away her worries. Eight weeks. That’s how long she’d known Felix. How well did she even know him? She’d never even met his parents, or his childhood friends. Stop thinking like that, she told herself.
“You don’t know what it’s like,” she said, “to have someone watching you, someone who’s done what he’s done. Who could do it to you. You’re a guy. If someone were watching you, you wouldn’t have to worry. You’re six foot three.”
“And all of a hundred and ninety pounds soaking wet.”
“That’s eighty pounds and a foot more than me. You don’t get it. Most any guy that tried to hurt you, you could defend yourself. If even a regular guy, five foot eight and a hundred and fifty pounds tries to hurt me, I’m going to be hurt.”
“Not if you stick by me. Like we planned. Stick close. For now. That was the agreement. Go to class. Meet after class, and hang out with your boyfriend even more than usual, so you’re not alone. That’s not so bad, spending more time with your boyfriend, is it?”
“We can’t be around each other twenty-four seven. You have your work-study and class schedule. I have mine. They don’t match.”
“Hang with your friends. And. Screw work-study. We’ll explain to them—”
“No. I don’t want people knowing. I don’t want a pity party, or OMG that’s like so creepy from girlfriends who can’t relate. No one can relate. And it’s no one else’s business.”
“So we lie,” Felix said. “Tell work-study there’s something else going on and we can’t work for a while. No biggie. They won’t care. When this is over, we’ll just work more hours.”
“And when will this be over, exactly?” Rachel said.
Felix shook his head. “I don’t know. But you can at least be where you say you’re going to be when you say you’re going to be there,” he said. “Every time you make me wait or don’t text back right away, my stomach drops. I think the worst.” He was right. It was reasonable to have her at least show up when she said she would.
The streams of students filing in and out of the building had dwindled to a few loners pushing through the rain to make it to their next class.
Rachel and Felix stood alone on the steps.
“I gotta get to class,” Rachel said. “So do you.”
“Meet me here after, OK? Before all this crap, we met after every class anyway. Now this happens and you seem to want to spend less time with me. I don’t get it.”
Rachel did not get it either. She wanted to spend time with Felix. Of course she did. So why wasn’t she? Why was she retreating? “Sure,” she said, “I’ll meet here after class.” She turned to go inside.
Felix reached for her to give her another hug, his fingers grabbing at her backpack. The ammunition rattled and the revolver shifted.
“What’s in your pack?” he said.
“Nothing. My tablet.”
He took hold of the straps and lifted the backpack. She pulled it back to her.
“It feels like a rock,” he said.
“It is, it’s a rock for my dad, a hunk of quartz I found a while back. You know he’s into geology. Finally going to give it to him. I gotta go.” She left Felix standing there and pushed through the doors of the building.
Inside, she climbed the stairs to a window that overlooked the steps and watched her boyfriend who stood with his back to her. He stared out at the rain and fog, his hands jammed in his coat pockets, then looked up toward the sky though there was no sky to see in the fog; Rachel could barely make him out in the mist.
He hunched his shoulders and stepped into the murk.
64
Rath drove south on New Hampshire Interstate 93, the fog hampering progress.
New Hampshire was a peculiar state, the joke being that Vermonters were forced to drive through it to get to Maine and back. The Granite State had a lot of, well, granite, so its trout streams, though cold, clear, and dazzling to the eye, also tended to be devoid of the insect life brook trout needed to thrive, the trout scrawny and stunted. Racers. The motto, Live Free or Die, was a bit hyperbolic, too; yet what did one expect from a state that for decades had strapped its identity to a rock outcrop, the Old Man of the Mountain, and slapped the Old Man’s image on any tchotchke that took ink. Five years ago, the Old Man had crumbled into the forest below, and the populace had mourned as if for a beloved grandfather. The state’s license plate still bore his image.
Rath took the next exit.
Timothy Glade lived with an elderly aunt. Hopefully she wanted him there; Glade wouldn’t be the first violent ex-con to persuade an elderly family member to offer room and board.
Rath turned left into the Old Man of the Mountain apartment complex.
Most of the vehicles in the lot were at least a decade old. A bulb in one of the parking lot lights was out, the glass fixture shattered.
No one was around, at least not that Rath could tell in the dark and fog.
From out on the highway, an eighteen-wheeler’s horn blared.
Rath walked to the door of 64A and knocked.
A dim light shone inside, visible through the shade. From the way it flickered, the light was from a TV screen.
The aunt was likely asleep. A risk of dropping in at random was you might not find your target as planned. Rath knocked louder.
A brighter light flicked on inside.
The door opened.
An elderly woman answered, as brittle and jaundiced looking as dried summer grass, fingers gnarled with arthritis, barely able to work the storm door latch.
“What’d he do?” she said.
She knew.
Yet she helped her nephew anyway. Or abided him. Perhaps abetted him. Old age did not equate to innocence.
“Nothing,” Rath said.
“You’re not here for nothing,” she said.
Yes. She knew. Rath wondered how many generations of this woman’s male kin had been in and out of scrapes their entire lives.
“Is he in?” Rath said.
“You could find him sleeping on the couch at noon, if you tried then.”
“Expect him back anytime soon?”
“I don’t expect anything from Timmy. He left four hours ago to run to the drugstore ten minutes away for me.”
“To pick up a prescription, or—”
“I know better. Lady nighttime diapers.”
The throaty growl of a rotted muffler rose behind Rath.
“Speak of the devil,” the aunt said.
A car with a headlight out sped into the lot, rocked over the speed bumps, its underbody grinding and shooting sparks despite the damp asphalt.
It whipped in next to the Scout. A Ford Escort. Late ’80s.
Its exhaust backfired, a flame blasting out the tailpipe.
Timothy Glade got out twirling keys around his finger, took the steps two at a time, his head down.
He stopped fast, as if he’d scented Rath.
His head jerked up. At the instant his eyes caught Rath’s eyes, he turned and bolted.
Rath chased as Glade fled across the lot toward the woods on the far end. Woods that stretched for miles. If he made it, he’d be gone. Maybe for good.
Rath dug in, gaining fast; too fast.
Glade had stopped and now wheeled around and swung his arm, catching Rath square in the windpipe.
Rath hit the pavement hard, his knees and palms scraping on the asphalt just as his face struck the pavement.
A boot kicked him in the lower back.
Rath reached for his sidearm. He should have drawn it at the start. Been ready.
The boot kicked him again. Rath rolled away, grabbing for Glad
e’s ankle. Rath’s throat felt collapsed, as if he were breathing through a reed.
Glade’s eyes went wide as he saw a pile of bricks a few feet away. He lunged and grabbed a brick, stood over Rath with it and reared back.
Rath crabbed backward, trying to scurry under a car, but the car was too low for Rath to use to protect himself.
Glade swung the brick down hard. Rath kicked Glade’s knee. The knee buckled and the brick struck the car’s bumper and glanced off Rath’s head.
Rath was pinned against the front of the car.
He reached for his sidearm again.
Glade straddled him, the brick raised, ready to bludgeon.
“Timmy! He’s police! Timmy, please!”
Glade glanced behind him.
Rath pulled back his leg, his knee to his chest, then drove the heel of his boot into Glade’s ankle.
A bone cracked. Glade howled. Rath drove his boot into Glade’s shin and ankle again.
Glade collapsed.
“Timmy,” the old woman cried.
Rath found his feet and pounced on Glade, flipped him over onto his stomach and drove a knee into his back, cuffed him. Yanked him up.
Glade wailed as he limped in place. “You broke it. You broke it.”
I’ll break the other one, too, Rath thought as he shoved Glade up to the top apartment step and pushed Glade down to sit.
“I didn’t know you were a cop,” Glade whined. “My fucking ankle.”
The aunt stood near, gaping.
“Go inside,” Rath said. “It’s cold out here.”
“I’m fine.”
“Go inside. Now.”
The aunt disappeared into the apartment.
Rath looked down at Glade. “Who’d you think I was?”
“People.”
“I’m not people. I’m one guy.”
“I didn’t know if there were others.”
“Who?”
“People that want to hurt me.”
“That you owe money or—?”
Glade shook his head and stuck his leg with the wounded ankle out straight, winced and moaned. “I wish. No, I don’t owe nobody nothing. I don’t even know who it is. But they know what I done and where I live. They call the house, they leave notes, they break headlights on my aunt’s car and the streetlights, one took a shit on our porch and left a copy of my mug shot splattered with blood. What looked like real blood, with my face all hacked up.”
“Because of what you did?” Rath said.
“I got no control over it,” Glade said. “No. That ain’t true. Most times I do. Like ninety percent. But I’m like a alcoholic. Gotta keep temptation away. I don’t own a cell phone or a computer or nothing, because then it’s all right at my fingertips, man. I gotta keep busy, keep my mind busy, keep my body busy, off tempting thoughts of that shit.”
“Of boys.”
“And girls. I need to do the meetings. That’s where I was. Way over in Nashua. They don’t have enough meetings ’round here. I need to go like once a day. I need support. I don’t want to hurt no one else. But they come and trash my aunt’s car. Break her windows. Vandalize her place she worked hard to retire here. I brought this shit. Disgraced her.”
Rath crouched beside Glade. “I don’t give a shit about your sob story about broken windows after what you broke. I don’t give a fuck if you need to go to meetings. All I need from you is to know the relationship you had with Ned Preacher while you were inside.”
“What? Are you crazy? Preacher? I didn’t know the guy. Didn’t want to know him.”
Rath took Glade’s ankle in his hand and cranked it sideways so it made a popping sound.
Glade went rigid with pain. “Jesus. What the fuck?”
“What the fuck?” Rath said. “Two minutes ago you want to cave my skull with a brick. Murder me in your aunt’s parking lot, in front of her, a police officer, and now you ask me what the fuck? You knew Preacher. You shared his cell block for three years.”
“That doesn’t mean I knew him. I didn’t even talk to him. We weren’t girlfriends, that’s for sure. I broke the asshole’s nose because he wouldn’t stop his bullshit praying after lights out. You want to talk to someone who knows the guy, talk to Shelly.”
“Who’s she?”
“Not she. Man. Shelly. Sheldon. Clay Sheldon. Those two were tight as a ball of snakes. They had some shit going on I’ll tell you what. You want to talk to someone who was close with Preacher, really fucking close, Shelly’s your guy.”
“Get up,” Rath said. “I’m going to uncuff you. Try anything, I’ll break your other ankle.”
“I need medical attention. I need to get to the hospital.”
“Then go.”
“My ankle’s busted.”
“Call an ambulance.” Rath leaned close. Glade was rank with stale sweat. He could have stood to have some namesake air freshener sprayed on him. “I suggest you tell doctors you slipped on the wet walkway. Unless you want to be charged with assaulting a police officer and head back into the joint. If I had time to waste on you, that’s what you’d do, but I don’t have time to waste.”
In his Scout, Rath dialed Test. “We need to get to the North Star.”
Part V
She is exceptional. An exception. Close to the bone. Too close? Perhaps. A grave, grave risk. There is no doubt. But a titillating risk. That is how he likes it. How he wants it. Needs it. More and more, the greater the risk, the greater the satisfaction. What is life without risk? Death. A long slow, pale death. The kind he’d been forced to live for too long, imprisoned: a life of death. No more.
To be unable to be who he truly is, to live his life as intended, to have to suppress his true self, smother it, strangle it, choke it down for so many years, it nearly killed him, even while another part of himself, the Good Boy, the Good Man, had begun to think, had begun to believe, that his dormancy, the forced hibernation of his urges, might be for the better, for all concerned. He’d almost convinced himself of it. Convinced himself he could live that way. Kill his true self. But that was to live a lie.
And how times changed. Look around. Look around. Everyone was entitled to be true to themselves now. True to their identities, true to how they identified. The voices who spoke up and said no. You can’t be like that, you can’t LIVE like that, you can’t be YOU, those voices were trounced now, stifled, belittled. Silenced.
Could he get away with it? That was where the thrill came, the risk of getting caught. Would he be caught and judged by those who did not understand? Those who were less . . . sophisticated. Would he be punished for being who he was? For how he came into this world?
Care would be needed. Care would be taken.
The Right Girl, the Right Girls, needed to be selected. He needed mature, grounded, reasonable girls.
Girls like Jamie. He could not trouble his mind now with what had happened with her.
There were other girls to appreciate what he offered. What he did. Girls who did not get greedy. Did not get cute. Did not get stupid. Like that other one. That could not be tolerated. Was not tolerated. An example had to be made. He’d been clear, painfully clear, on that point.
He watched the new one now, the smart one, the clever one, as she came out of the fog.
Yes. Care was needed for this one.
Care and luck.
She was a smart one.
He watched her now on the steps.
The old ecstasy awoke, the sensation that he was about to step barefoot out on a razor wire stretched high above a pit of crude spikes. One misstep and he would plummet and be gored, impaled, bleed out.
On the other side of the pit stood his reward, his treasure. Her.
He shuddered at his end of the wire. The ecstasy did not come from the fear of walking across the wire, high above the pit, trying to reach the other side to claim her without falling and being skewered.
No. It came from crossing halfway across the wire and stopping, poised above the fearsome spikes an
d seducing her into wanting to step across the wire to meet him halfway.
The seduction. That was the reward: to see her come to him of her own free will.
Oh.
He watched her go inside the building.
In the sixteen years of dormancy he’d thought about what to do when, if, his freedom came again. He had decided it would be much sweeter if they came to him, met him halfway to do to them what he did best. He knew these girls existed. Had learned that years ago, but then found himself caged. The girls, they have their own fixations, obsessions, kinks. Needs.
His last girl, the one he’d thought would be his last, forever, who had opened his eyes so many years ago, made him understand that some girls liked what he liked, needed what he needed. Loved what he loved. She was a miracle, until he found himself in prison.
No more.
Unchained now, he knew his power. He knew there were girls hungry to step across the wire to him when they caught whiff of his supremacy on the breeze.
What was this?
He straightened up, watching the new one. The smart one.
She came back out of the building. Oh, the sneaky whore. What was she hiding from her boy, that insect boy, the praying mantis, what duplicity was at work? His mouth watered at the proof of what he already knew: no one was without secrets, without alternate lives they kept in the shadows until someone came to shine the bright light of truth upon them, set their world on fire and scorch it to ash.
He was that bright, hot light.
And he knew the shadows. Thrived in them. He knew about alternate identities. The car he sat in now not registered in his real name. A terrific, thrilling risk that made him hard.
He got out and watched as she descended the stairs and walked directly toward him, their encounter preordained.
She was not paying any attention to where she was going; she was going to run directly into him, her first step out on the razor wire.
Yes, this one was special because of who she was.
Special because she was the daughter of that fuck who dared challenge him and press him, tried to trick and expose him. He started all of this. Frank Rath.
He deserved it.
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