Hollow Man

by Mark Pryor

  “Things happen in threes, Tristan. You're the third pedophile I've known, and you might want to bear in mind that the other two wound up dead.” I shrugged. “You might too, of course, but you're white and middle-class, so I doubt it. Especially in Austin.”

  “You turned me in because I'm…because of those pictures?” He was getting there and his eyes flicked from side to side as he put the pieces together. “Otto?”

  “Otto's still dead.”

  “Jesus. You killed him.” I didn't respond to that. “Are they really coming here?” he asked.

  “The police? Yes. They've been watching you since they connected your car to the crime scene. One car is out there now, plus the cop who brought me here from the police station. You can probably make it out the back way, through the laundry room.”

  “There's no back door in the laundry room.”

  “Come on, Tristan, you're a fucking idiot. The police are coming to arrest you for capital murder. Which you committed, by the way. The laundry room has a big fucking window, so you can pack your shit and squeeze your skinny body through that. Use your imagination.”

  For an empath, he wasn't as freaked out as I expected him to be, and it was pissing me off. Of course, maybe he was so freaked out he was paralyzed. Either way, his self-preservation instincts were crap.

  “If they catch me,” he said. “I'll just turn you in, you know that, right?”

  Ah, he still thinks we're in this together. “Dear chap, listen to me. The cops know I didn't have anything to do with it. They believe you've been trying to frame me. So if you start telling them I'm involved, that just strengthens their theory. The more you protest that I had something to do with it, the more in the clear I am.”

  “How? How did you—?”

  “Plus I have an alibi.”

  “An alibi?”

  “You don't recall all the wild, kinky sex I was having that night?”

  He nodded slowly as he remembered. “Yeah. But that was later, after we got back.”

  “Two things about that. First, neither the police nor our neighbor have a good timeline. Second, I have a witness who says she was with me all evening, as well as all night, doing rude things to each other. You remember our neighbor, how mad he was?”

  He stared at me. “Why are you doing this? This is evil.”

  “Right, and fucking kids is a harmless pastime.”

  “I didn't do anything to you. I gave you a room, a place to live.” Tears welled in his eyes. “I treated you like a friend, I never did anything to you. Now I'm going to die, in prison or in…in an execution chamber. A fucking needle in my arm. All because of you.”

  “Grow up, Tristan. You'd fuck a little baby if you had the chance. And you're the one who pushed yourself into this thing. You remember that?”

  “But I never wanted anyone to get hurt.” He rose. “You, you're the one who shot someone. I'll tell them that. I'll fucking tell them everything, and yeah, maybe I'll go to prison, but so will you. No way you're getting away with this, no fucking way.”

  “Relax, you're sounding like a Scooby Doo movie. I already got away with it.”

  His mouth opened and closed and I knew he was looking for something, some tiny foothold, not even so he could get himself out of trouble. So he could get one up on me.

  “The money,” he said. “All this, all this shit, this killing, this planning, you evil fucker, and someone else stole your money.” He smiled and his eyes gleamed like a crazy person's. “The fucking money. You think you're so smart, but some asshole took your money, and you've done all this for nothing. I may rot in prison, but you'll have that on your conscience and not a penny of that money.”

  I hesitated because I realized at that moment that he was right about something, that after all, the money was the fulcrum of this little jaunt. Not just the motivation, that's obvious. But even afterward, when two people had been killed, the money was what we focused on. We even made a risky trip to get it, placing ourselves in huge danger. The excitement, the terror, the death, the risks, all revolved around our desire for the money. And if he knew that I had it, he'd lose his mind.

  So I told him.

  “You ever see the movie The Sting?”

  His eyes narrowed for the tenth time that afternoon. “What?”

  “The movie with Robert Redford.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “It's a very old trick, Tristan. And I'm telling you because I don't want you to think all this was for nothing.”

  “Telling me what?”

  “You remember how I put the bags of money in the trunk? Then I went back and took them out, and buried them. Remember that?” He nodded so I went on. “You never looked in the trunk, did you?”

  “Why would I?”

  “Right, why would you? Great point. But if you had, you'd have seen four camo bags. The two I brought to the trailer park stuffed with paper, and the two with money. Now, guess which ones I took out to the woods?”

  “Oh, no. Oh my God.”

  “And guess which ones were in the trunk of the car when we came back here?”

  “The money,” he whispered.

  “So yeah, I have the money. All of it.”

  I could see the wheels turning in his head, the cogs clicking into place as he searched for a hole in my plan and didn't find one. His breathing quickened as the panic rose in him, but then he looked at me, a glimmer of hope, or at least doubt, in his eyes. “The camera from the woods. Was there ever really a camera?”

  “Yes, actually, I had to do the surveillance. That was my one risk, an unavoidable one. When I left the bags, I took it down and threw it into the trees, after wiping my prints off it, of course. Someone must have found it and sold it, like we saw.” I gave him a cold smile. “Of course, that whole business following the schmuck who was selling it, that was just for show. A fun expedition with no downside and a good way to keep you guys busy.”

  “That guy never had the money, any of it.”

  “Nope. I did. All of it.”

  Tristan looked at me and his spine seemed to stiffen. The air between us crackled for a second, and then he rushed me. He covered the five feet between us in a flash, and I barely had time to hit the right button on my phone. I'd planned on him losing it, so I had “911” typed in. When that anger flashed in his eyes and his skinny little body flexed taut and hurtled toward me, I pressed Send. He hit me head on and we both went to the ground. My phone skittered away but I didn't care. I was too busy trying to stop him hitting me. He was a man possessed, swinging his fists at my face and my body, spittle streaming from his mouth and spattering me as he cursed and yelled, a hatred so intense that I was caught off guard. My rages burn cold and lingering, my revenge is always deliberate and emotionless, whereas this was a passion I'd not seen in any human, ever. For a moment, the sparest of seconds, I felt envy that one man could feel so much, so deeply and, even though it was anger, I resented him for it because I knew I'd never feel it, that my body would never explode with the passion of rage, horror, agony. Or love. This scrawny little fucker about to spend the rest of his life getting raped and bullied by inmate thugs had something I'd never had, and never would have. And to punish myself for that, I let him hit me, my forearms acting like shields but letting in his fierce punches, softening but not ending the pain from his sharp little fists.

  And then Ledsome and two detectives were there, pulling him off me, screaming at him that he was under arrest, driving him to the floor with knees in his back and his wrists pinned between his shoulder blades. He was in pain now, wailing and crying, his feet kicking at the floor, but in despair, not in any real attempt to be free. He knew it was over, and I wiped the blood from my nose as I watched him, knowing why he'd chosen to attack me instead of escape, to hurt me rather than save himself. Because of the money.

  In seconds he was handcuffed and lying still on the floor, crying quietly and moaning the occasional phrase that neither the cops nor I listene
d to. Ledsome still had one knee in the small of his back.

  “Are you okay?” she asked me.

  “Yeah, fine. I'm fine.”

  “What the fuck happened?”

  “Nothing. I mean, everything was fine, I was getting my stuff, then he came out. I think, I don't know, but I think he knew you guys were coming. He must have.”

  “How could he know that?”

  “I have no idea. I mean, he works at the DA's office and is a computer geek; maybe he hacked into something. I don't know. Maybe he saw these guys out in the parking lot and guessed. Anyway, I was getting my stuff together, and I opened my bottom drawer to get some trousers. In the back corner was my gun.”

  “Your gun? So what?”

  I took a deep breath. “What I mean is, it used to be my gun. My Smith and Wesson. But a week or so before all this happened, I sold it to him.”

  “You sold him your gun?”

  “I should have mentioned it when we were at the station, but I didn't think of it.”

  Tristan kicked and wriggled. “No, no, he's lying!”

  “I'm not fucking lying, you gave me a check for it.” I turned to Ledsome. “I didn't get it back from the bank yet, but when I do you can see. The memo line says ‘Smith & W’; it's for two hundred dollars.”

  Tristan howled again, but Ledsome ground her knee into him to shut him up. “You done?” she snapped and, when he went limp, she stood. The two detectives moved forward, bent over Tristan, and pulled him to his feet. “Take him to the car and read him his rights,” Ledsome said. “Make sure he understands them, and that the in-car video records you.”

  “Yes, ma'am,” they said in unison.

  She pulled the radio from her belt and connected with dispatch. “I'm going to need EMS to my location. No emergency but get them started this way, please.” She helped me to my feet. “Quite a terrier, that guy. He got you good.”

  “Yes,” I said, pinching my bloody nose. “He sure did.”

  I kept out of the way as they searched the apartment. They found my Smith & Wesson in the dresser's bottom drawer, just as I'd said. I knew they'd test it for prints and find his, and not mine, because the night of the murder I'd worn gloves and he hadn't. After the shooting, I'd handed him my gun to hold for a moment. When he gave it back, I handled it carefully, not wiping it clean. I hadn't cleaned it since, nor touched it with my bare hands.

  They found the crumpled-up map, too, right there in the trashcan by his bedroom door. They wouldn't get any prints off that, but they wouldn't need to. A thorough hand-writing comparison would show he'd drawn the map and written on it. No prints needed to show it was his.

  I hated to part with any of the money—that was the hardest thing for me. But for authenticity, I just had to. My special girl, as I'd started calling her, had helped with that. In fact, now that I think about it, that was the hardest part: her using his bathroom, having his spidery little hands on her naked skin. That was sickening. But it'd bought her time to put some of the money in the space above his ceiling tiles in the bathroom, a place I couldn't get to. If he talked to the police, he'd have to admit that I couldn't get into his room because he always kept his goddam door locked. I consoled myself over the loss of a few hundred dollars by reminding myself that the money the cops found had blood on it, yet more evidence of his guilt. And I congratulated myself for that touch, the kneeling beside a dying man to feel his pulse, to touch him as life left, and to dip my fingers in his blood and smear it on the bills that I knew I'd be leaving for the police to find.

  Of course, the child porn in the little drawer helped. Not to connect Tristan to the crime but to paint him as a horrible human being. If there's one thing cops, prosecutors, and juries hate, it's a pedophile. And the media made sure everyone knew. He'd put that particular nail in his own coffin, of course; that wasn't my doing at all. But even sociopaths deserve a little luck now and again.

  I saw Gus's wife, Michelle, a few times after Tristan's arrest, but I decided not to pursue her, an assertion of self-control that I was quite proud of. As for Gus, he's gone. He won't be found, by her or the police. Ever. He'd hate that, too, the permanent, unexplained disappearance, because he'd be much happier as a victim—all that drama and pathos, the adulation and adoration that comes when your faults are no longer around to annoy people.

  As for why he's gone, well, it was his name I saw on Marley's computer. It was Gus who'd complained about me stealing one of his songs, and that's the real reason Marley didn't want him playing that night. Not a show of solidarity at all, so he'd lied to me about that. I should have figured it out. As for the song, sure, I'd heard him play it, early versions, stop-start versions in his den and my apartment. My version, the one I played and that he called “stolen” just wasn't. A few chords are similar, and I concede a similarity in rhythm and pacing, but that's all. Stolen? Hardly. If I write the words, “I'm not sure I want to be a killer,” am I stealing from Shakespeare because I used the words “to be”?

  Like writers, musicians feed off each other's work and gain inspiration. If he really thought I'd stolen it, he should have said so to my face. Going to Marley behind my back, sneaking around like that, well, it's the kind of stunt I'd pull. He really shouldn't have done that. I was supposed to be his friend, and he was supposed to be mine.

  And speaking of that, it's not like I formed some devious plan to do away with him. Friends argue and fight. Well, anyway. You don't need to know that part of the story. It's not like you'd have good cause to believe me.

  I split some of the money with my girl in green. After all, she'd put those bloody bills over Tristan's tub and made those anonymous calls to the police for me. Somehow her brother had found out about it all, though we weren't sure what or how much. Seemed like putting some money his way was a good move. I'd also come to trust her. Maybe it was because she'd sealed herself into this crime with me. If that seal broke, we'd both be done for and we knew it. But it was more than that. I told her stuff about me that I'd never talked about with anyone. Once she realized that I was empathy-challenged, there didn't seem much point hiding anything. It was, and always had been, the biggest and meanest skeleton in my closet, and she'd opened the door, seen my bare bones, and not run away screaming. I suppose I was too much like her brother to scare her and, of course, she wanted my help in helping him. To understand him, she needed to understand me because I represented one possible future for him. She didn't judge me; she just asked questions with her head cocked in that adorable way, her soft, wet eyes drinking me in as she listened. And I do love a captive audience.

  She continued to try to understand me, and asked repeatedly about the reason I was in America in the first place. She didn't swallow the story everyone else seemed to take so easily. She knew there was more to it, and so I told her.

  I told her about Mr. Flowers, the first pedophile I'd encountered, about his picking on my friend and then on me. I left out the details, but she got the picture of his sickness. I left out the details of his death too, the monkshood that I picked on my birthday walk, the poisonous leaves I covered the plate with, and the fact that he died the same way Agrippina killed Emperor Claudius. I so wanted to tell her about that, the wonderful irony of a perverted Latin teacher dying in agony like a Roman king. But I didn't think she'd appreciate it; she wasn't ready for that.

  I did tell her about the second pedophile I knew, Gary Glasscock. His name would be funny if he'd been anything but a child molester. He was the gamekeeper on our estate. A short, red-faced man who waddled from side to side when he walked. I always wondered, with all that walking he did for his job, how he stayed fat. To everyone else, he was a jolly fellow, and his penchant for littering the woods with empty bottles of Navy rum was overlooked because he managed such fine pheasant shoots.

  When I was fourteen, he took an interest in me. He showed me the tracks that the game followed and showed me how to build a quick but good hide for shooting pigeons. He taught me that the best time for pigeon
shooting was the evening, during a snow storm. I went out three times in those conditions, and he was right, the birds would swoop into the trees and flee when I fired, but turn back immediately because of the wind and snow. I could just shoot and reload, shoot and reload, until the barrels got too hot to touch.

  It was in one of those hides that he made his move. One minute I was looking out over the decoys we'd set up, the next he was behind me, panting. I looked back and saw his trousers around his knees, his face redder than usual and his tiny dick standing to attention. I was fourteen and had only a dim awareness of what he might be doing, but my secondhand experience with Mr. Flowers was still fresh. For some unknown reason, gamekeeper Gary had been unable to contain himself any longer and threw his body on top of mine. He weighed a hundred pounds more than I did, and I crumpled under him, face down. His fetid breath pumped into my ear, my cheek, as his hips ground against me, and the more I fought to get away, the louder he grunted, as if my squirming was for his benefit. I would never forget the sweet stench of rum on his breath and his bulging eyes that shone with desperation and lust. It took me a full minute to elbow and kick him off, and I wanted to shoot him right there and then. I probably should have, but I didn't know what the ramifications would be. More than that, I'd been lying a lot to my parents—and been found out a lot—and I simply didn't think they'd believe me. And if they didn't believe me, the police wouldn't. The oldest son of landed gentry could get away with a lot, but not cold-blooded murder.

  No, his murder needed to be accidental.

  Glasscock's role in the pheasant shoots was as the backstop, the flag man. He'd stand on the edge of the wood and try to change the mind of any pheasant that didn't want to fly forward, flapping and shouting to turn it around. Which put him about twenty yards from whichever gun was stationed on the flank. His last outing was when I was sixteen. I'd wanted it to be the year before, but the situation had never been quite right, the timing and positioning not close enough for an accident.