“Maybe she shut herself in there for safety,” Moody said. “You better knock.”
Nightingale did so. Nothing. Nobody came.
“Funny,” he said.
“I’ve always liked kicking doors down ever since I saw my first Untouchables,” Moody said. “I always thought Robert Stack should have won an Emmy.”
Nightingale tried to peer inside again.
Damn darkness.
He tried the door again. He leaned against it.
It didn’t budge.
He turned to look at Moody. “It looks like you’re going to get your chance, Doug.”
And he touched his holster nervously.
11.
I shouldn’t do it, shouldn’t put my hand out and try to take the knife away from him. I shouldn’t fall for this kind of thing. The pain in his arm was intense, awful, blood seeping through his shirt, the material of his shirt sticking to his skin. I shouldn’t listen to his taunts, his dares. It’s a game for him, one big motherfucking game and nothing else.
Harrison turned to look at Madeleine.
It’s her I want to protect. Nothing else. Only Maddy.
He felt the sharp edge of the surgical scalpel dig into the palm of his own hand, where he was trying—like some artless conjurer—to conceal it. He backed against the desk and thought: This is the face you wanted to see, this is the person you wanted to meet, but it doesn’t match anything in your imagination. You thought maybe something sleazy and shadowy in a dreary phone booth; you didn’t see this good-looking red-haired boy. How could it be this one who’d made all the calls? Done all the killings? How could it be somebody who looked like this?
You’re going to have to kill him, Harry.
Him or you.
This time it isn’t Albert.
He’s crazy and real and he has a knife and he wants to kill Maddy—
He kept his eye on the knife. It swung again and he stepped back from it like a bullfighter avoiding the horns of an enraged animal. Wait, wait for your chance to move with the scalpel, wait for that opening, that moment. He hasn’t seen it.
“Cocksucker, come and take the fucking knife.…”
No, he thought.
Just keep coming forward to me. Keep coming. You think you’ve got it made here. You think it’s just a pushover, don’t you?
The eyes.
Dead eyes.
They would kill and never blink.
You killed Rube with that knife. That’s the blade that went through his flesh again and again—
Keep coming.
Don’t stop now.
The knife flashed, flickered. Harrison felt another pain in his body—something that carved through his chest, laying bare the material of his shirt just as so long ago he’d carved Albert in some insane kind of game he’d invented.
No game now
The real thing
Again, the knife came. It struck the back of his hand. Covered in blood. He slipped to the floor, blinded by pain, trying to see the figure looming over him, trying to guess where the knife might be coming from next. How could you ever tell?
Wait for your chance. You’re no goddamn hero.
He watched the kid’s legs move forward and he heard Maddy scream something and in shadow, falling like the silhouette of a maddened blacksmith’s tool, he saw the knife cleave the air and come winging down towards him—
Roll, you roll, you turn over and over on your side—
You hear the vicious sound of steel tear apart the fibers of wood, blade slashing desk—
Then you see it, a chance, a moment, something given to you like a gift of sheer survival, you raise your foot and hammer it into the shin and you watch as the kid steps back and you rise, driven by a weary strength, by the need to save Maddy, you get up and slash this fucker’s wrist with the scalpel and you see his knife, his beloved knife, go flying across the room—
Then you’re forcing your weight on his body, bringing him to the floor, dragging him down—
You want to kill him, Harry.
With the scalpel at his throat, you want to kill him.
You dig a little, skin breaks, flesh punctures, a slither of blood goes down from the larynx to the collar of the shirt—
Kill him.
He pressed hard, harder, wondering what was restraining him from pushing the scalpel deep into the neck, pushing it one final time—you’re looking right into his eyes now and suddenly they’re not empty, they’re not cold, chilly, distant, they’re just the eyes of a very scared kid—
Kill him, Harry.
You’ve got your chance now. Kill this monster.
Kill him.
He doesn’t deserve to live; he needs to die. He needs to be finished right here, under your scalpel—
God damn it, so easy—
Harry—
You can’t do it—
It’s not Albert. It’s not something you made for the purpose of violating; it’s a very scared kid lying here waiting to die—
You can’t kill this person, monster, whatever—
You don’t have the heart—
Kill him, Harry—
Is that your inner voice or is it Madeleine shouting at you?
I can’t kill I can’t go the last step I can’t kill anybody or anything.…
What did he hear in the distance?
What?
The breaking of glass, the sound of voices, movement.
A certain voice. “Okay, okay, let’s put this fucking show to rest. Let’s stop it once and for all. Put the weapon away.…”
I have to kill him, Harrison thought.
I have—
He looked up. He saw a fat man with a gun.
Then he was conscious of his blood dripping on the kid’s face, aware at the same time of a sense of slippage, giving way to the dark, an abrupt yielding—
He felt the scalpel slip from his fingers to the floor.
“Harry.”
It was Madeleine’s voice. He heard it only distantly.
The fat man was leaning over him, smiling. “Take it easy, fellah. Just take it easy.”
“Apology.”
Apology, he thought. It was a tidal sound from an old season. He turned painfully on his side, looking up into Maddy’s face. She was lightly stroking his hair. For a long time she said nothing and he realized there wasn’t anything to say anyway. All the possible conversations, all the likely exchanges of language, had slipped into the resounding silence associated with the dead. He thought: You could tell me everything is going to be okay, Maddy, everything is going to be fine from now on. You could tell me everything’s over and the menace is gone, wiped as cleanly away as some chalked obscenity on a blackboard obliterated by a sponge. You could tell me consoling things and uplifting sentiments and try to make me believe that our life together can be retraced, that we can backtrack our emotions to that point where nothing had ever arisen to threaten them—where nothing had ever surged through our blood with the reckless speed of a pollutant.
You can stroke my hair and look at me with love in your eyes and be glad I am still alive.
But we have a distance to travel now.
He smiled at her weakly. “We made it,” he said.
Madeleine didn’t answer.
EPILOGUE
There was the sound of the sea, the last late moment of the season changing into winter from the vague twilight time it had been before. There was the sun turning to white ice and the ocean flecking the beaches with frosted tides. Boardwalk, surf, kids with cotton candy, machines that might conceivably guess your weight and issue your fortune on tiny cards with ambiguous messages. On the boardwalk was a telephone booth, a glass-plated obelisk around which Harrison kept walking, as if within the booth there might exist a secret too profound to fathom. Also, he kept wondering if the rattling rumbling of the Atlantic would obscure the sound of any phone call.
One day Madeleine said, “Do it, Harry. Get it out of your system.”
Do it, he thought, and put his arm around her shoulder and pulled her towards him as if he might save her from the wicked skin-chapping bluster of the ocean.
“Go ahead,” she said, nudging him. “One last call. That’s why you left it, isn’t it?”
Why? he wondered. What good would it do to make one last call? Just the same, he went inside the phone booth and picked up the receiver and thrust a bunch of coins into the slot. When he heard the voice answering him, his own taped message, his own alien sound, he remembered how they’d taken the rest of the tapes here, to Ocean City, and burned them on the beach and watched flimsy cinders get tugged away by Atlantic winds, like ashes of the dead scattered across beaches and set to drift on white tides.
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry about everything.
Plain sorry, like a heart breaking against his rib bones. He watched Maddy through the glass panes of the phone booth and he thought how beautiful she looked and marveled at the way the wind-tossed spray pushed through her hair. I love her, he thought.
I’m sorry the project died. I’m sorry about whoever I might have wronged and hurt and I’m sorry about Levy and sorry about Jamey Hausermann and sorry for
everything
anything
just sorry
He hung the receiver up and went outside and put his arm around Maddy’s shoulder.
She kissed the side of his face. A wigwam, an igloo, a small private sanctuary: that’s where they belonged together. A safe place that could never be touched. They went out along the boardwalk where acrobatic gulls squawked and ploughed the air in a defiance of gravity. The wind was springing higher, rattling wood planks, shaking the lines of the fishermen who sat with stoic patience at the end of the pier.
Harrison smiled. It was perfect here in its own tidal way.
It was both random and exact.
He looked out towards the ocean. Something came floating through the air towards him, a scrap of paper which sunk and curled itself around his ankle. He reached down to untangle it when he realized what it was that had blown out of nowhere and become attached to his leg.
He realized only too well what it was. Out here, he thought. Carried out here by somebody the way birds carry seeds and drop them. He handed it to Madeleine, who regarded it briefly.
It was an Apology handbill.
He watched her fold it over, tear it through; saw her reach over the railing and let it go flying out towards the sea. The scraps reminded Harrison of fledgling gulls committed to a path of certain doom.
“We didn’t need it, did we, Harry?” Madeleine asked.
He smiled, shook his head, and gazed out over the grey sullen ocean.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
I owe a deep debt of gratitude to my editor, Peter Gethers, who underwent this book with me.
About the Author
Campbell Armstrong (1944–2013) was an international bestselling author best known for his thriller series featuring British counterterrorism agent Frank Pagan, and his quartet of Glasgow Novels, featuring detective Lou Perlman. Two of these, White Rage and Butcher, were nominated for France’s Prix du Polar. Armstrong’s novels Assassins & Victims and The Punctual Rape won Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Awards.
Born in Glasgow and educated at the University of Sussex, Armstrong worked as a book editor in London and taught creative writing at universities in the United States.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1984 by Ink Creations, Inc.
Cover design by Angela Goddard
ISBN: 978-1-5040-0421-3
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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Mr. Apology Page 37
