The Killing Room

by Richard Montanari

  “So, tell me. Which dream do you choose?” Luther asks. “To live many more years as a blind man, or to die in this terrible place?”

  Luther smells the sharp tang of urine as the man fouls himself. In the chill of this unheated room, steam begins to rise from the thief’s lap.

  “If … if I do this, you won’t kill me?” the thief asks.

  “I will not,” Luther says. “You have my word.” He glances at his watch. “But you must do this in the next thirty seconds. Beyond that, I cannot make any promises.”

  The thief takes a deep breath, releases it in four or five small gusts. He slowly turns the knife toward himself.

  “I can’t do it!”

  “Twenty-five seconds.”

  The thief begins to sob. The knife shakes in his hand as he brings it closer to his face. He raises his other hand to steady himself, and stares at the blade as a man might consider a burning rosary, the abacus of his sins.

  “Twenty seconds.”

  The thief begins to pray.

  “Dios te salve, Maria.”

  “Fifteen seconds.”

  “Llena eres de gracia.”

  “Ten seconds.”

  “El Señor es contigo.”

  “Five seconds.”

  At the moment the tip of the blade descends, the 11:05 train on the Frankford line carrying eighty-one passengers roars to a stop overhead. The thief’s screams are swallowed by the whet of steel on steel, plumed inside the release of hydraulic steam.

  Twenty seconds later, when the knife falls from the thief’s hand, there is only silence.

  The thief — whose name was Ezequiel “Cheque” Rivera Marquez — had always thought that when death came it would be accompanied by a bright white light, or the sound of angels singing. When his mother died at the age of thirty-one in an osteopathic hospital in Camden, New Jersey, it was what he wanted to believe. It was possible that all eight-year-olds wanted to believe this.

  For Cheque Marquez it wasn’t anything like that. Death wasn’t an angel in a long flowing gown.

  Death was a man in a tattered brown suit.

  One hour later, Luther stands across the street from the old woman’s row house. He watches the woman sweep the leaves off her small porch, marveling at how small she is, how big she had at one time seemed to him.

  He knows that the next time he sees her it will be in her bedroom, her ruched and cloying boudoir with its peeling wallpaper and brown mice and generic powders, a visit during which he will replace her credit card in her wallet.

  Nothing can be out of place over the course of the coming days. Everything must be as it has always been.

  He’d already visited her home, three times sitting at the foot of her bed as she fitfully slept, chased by what demons he could only imagine. Perhaps he was one of those demons. Perhaps the woman knows that when her time comes, it will be him.

  In the end, someone always comes.

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Also by Richard Montanari

  One The Children of Disobedience

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Two In Nomine Patris

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Three The Last Saint

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Forty-Nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-One

  Fifty-Two

  Fifty-Three

  Fifty-Four

  Fifty-Five

  Fifty-Six

  Fifty-Seven

  Fifty-Eight

  Fifty-Nine

  Sixty

  Sixty-One

  Sixty-Two

  Revelation

  I

  II

  Acknowledgements