“There’s a bag at your feet.”
“With the ibuprofen?”
Charlie jerked with a sudden laugh. “You won’t need it.” Then the humor was sucked away into the barrenness of the room. “What’s in there is better.”
Her legs were quivering from the cold. She bent down and reached into the bag. Her fingers closed over something that felt like a pill bottle. She shook it, but there was no rattle. She let it go, as though it could poison her through the plastic container. She fiddled around until she found another object, a cell phone.
“I took out the battery,” Charlie said. “I just left the phone for you as a memento.”
“A memento.”
“Get the gun.”
Another wash of crazy, wild, electric hope. Her gun? Her gun was in the bag? Dana groped around, trying to regulate her breathing, which wanted to come fast and hard as the adrenaline filled her. This had to be a trick. Yet she rose with the pistol in her hands. “Rounds in it?”
“Of course.”
“Magazine feels light.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
She could see Charlie in the low light. His face was a pale moon. She tried to recall the face of the bartender from O’Sullivan’s. This man resembled him, but in the way the corpse resembled the living person.
“I want to understand.”
“Of course you do.”
“You were going to show me something . . . What is this going to achieve?” She meant the gun.
“You can shoot me at any time. That’s what it’s going to achieve. Can put a man-stopper into me, can even put one execution-style into my head. I know you’re probably a good shot. Free will, lady. But, I don’t think you’re going to. I think you want to see. You want to see your own part in this.”
The gun was heavy in her grip; it seemed thicker and weightier than she remembered. Her muscles felt stiff, semi-responsive. Maybe she was a good shot with a clear mind and some sleep, but the head on her shoulders now was pounding. Not long ago she’d been seeing double. But, he was right there. Just a few feet away. She could end this right now. There was probably monkshood in the bag. He’d tied her up. He was the killer. This was over, case closed.
“Come on.”
Charlie was back by the window, and the path was clear to the door. One shot, he goes down, and she runs. But, what if there was something else? It made no sense to give her a gun. Even a psychopath had some perspective — they didn’t hand over a weapon unless they had an insurance policy of some kind. There could be another victim, Lori Stender, stashed somewhere, dying.
Dana took a step, then another. Her legs were unsteady. She pointed the barrel of the handgun at the ground. She kept her eyes on the killer and followed him out of the room.
* * *
The difference in temperature was amazing. The hallway was twenty degrees warmer. She went into the kitchen and took another breath and tried to clear her mind.
Charlie motioned at the door to the outside. “After you.”
“Out there?”
He nodded.
“I was just getting warmed up.”
He waited. She could smell something sour on the man, like sulfur.
“Why outside? Are we going to pace it out, turn and fire at high noon?” Her voice had a tremor in it which she tried to subdue.
“The first thing I want you to see is in your car,” Charlie said. She could see Charlie’s grayed-out eye, glinting with malice. “In the trunk.”
Dana let out her breath in a rush. She saw a face; the young student at the top of the stairs, looking down at her. But, in that split second she imagined other faces, too. Her daughters: Sarah, Kayla, Ria. She slammed out through the doors. She leapt from the trailer into the deep snow, forgetting her pain, forgetting her weariness. She cut a line through the snow to the car, moving as fast as she could.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO / Deciding to Die
The car had been moved. As Dana approached it, she realized she didn’t have any keys. She felt in the pocket of her pea coat, but they weren’t there. Her wallet was in her back pocket, her badge clipped to her belt. Charlie had given her the gun back, but she had no functioning cell phone, no keys. Charlie didn’t want her to leave here or call for help.
She wondered about the dog that had been barking when they’d visited Scott Dunham two weeks ago, the day that Sonia Taylor’s body had been found in the Clair. There was no dog barking now. Dover Court was eerily quiet, the trailers surrounding the roundabout dark and still behind a screen of falling snow.
She got to the car and started brushing it off. The gun was in the way. She jammed it in her holster and used both her bare hands. She cleared the snow from the trunk. The trunk needed a key to open it. She glanced at Charlie, who was walking slowly towards her, in the tracks she’d just made. Forget waiting for him. She went to the driver’s side, snatched open the door, leaned in and pressed the lever to pop the trunk.
She got her fingers under the lip of metal. Her hands were numb after removing all that snow. The snow that just kept coming. Thick as a plague of locusts, filling the dark sky. She threw the trunk open and peered in.
For a moment, just a second, she didn’t know how to react. Her mind was befuddled. For all she knew, she had a bad concussion. It took some time for her to realize what she was looking at.
In the trunk was a tire iron, a couple of empty plastic bags, and a roadside flare kit. There was nothing else. No Lori Stender, curled up in a fetal position, drugged or dead. None of her daughters either, thank God. Not even Robert Hamill — another possibility which had crossed her mind — that somehow this whole thing had to do with Charlie the bartender taking revenge on cops. No one was in the trunk. It was open, waiting. When she realized this, and when she spun around, she was too late.
She was able to get her gun out before Charlie fired. The force of the shot threw her against the car, her legs slamming against the bumper. The momentum tipped her backwards, right into the trunk. She snapped off one shot as she fell. But she didn’t know if she hit anything.
The two shots were deafening. Her hearing sang with a high-pitched whine, scattering her thoughts.
She felt like an overturned beetle, kicking and flailing, unable to gain footing. She had to let go of her firearm. She grabbed the edges of the trunk and hauled herself into a sitting position, her legs dangling out.
Charlie was not there. For one wild, panicked moment, she had no idea where he was, and her mind leapt into gear, cycling through the worst possible scenarios with frightening speed: Charlie had gotten around the other side of the car and was crouched and waiting, or, he had run off into the dark and snow and was taking aim from somewhere with cover.
But then Dana looked down and saw that the killer had not fled or regrouped, he was lying in the snow, blood spreading all around him. He was holding his stomach. Dana had got him in the gut.
She retrieved her weapon and stepped away from the vehicle. She’d been shot, too; his round had penetrated her left shoulder. She stood looking down at Charlie Plume, with her gun in her hand. She caught sight of a flashlight beam shining through the falling snow.
“Call 911!” Dana shouted towards the light. Someone had come out of one of the neighboring single-wides and was pointing the light her way. “Get back inside and call 911, now!” Her ears were still ringing.
The light disappeared and the door slammed shut. Dana had no idea who it was. For all she knew, it was Teresa, holed up in a neighbor’s house. There was a phone in Teresa’s trailer. A landline. Dana needed to get back there and call emergency services. Call Yarrow. Call everyone.
Charlie’s gun had disappeared into the snow. The killer was lying on his back, his eyes staring up. But he was breathing.
“You stupid shit,” Dana said. She needed to find Charlie’s weapon. “Is this what you wanted?”
Charlie made a gurgling noise, and Dana realized he was laughing. Her hearing was back.
When Charl
ie spoke, his voice was like gravel. “I wasn’t going to kill you,” he rasped. “I don’t kill anybody.”
Dana dug through the snow with one hand. Her fingers had gone numb. She was in shock, her body revolting against the intrusion of the bullet, shutting systems down. She had to use her left hand while she held her firearm with her right, and her left shoulder was throbbing with pain that made her recent head trauma seem like a caffeine headache. She knew that the toxins from the bullet were entering her blood stream.
Her hand bumped up against something hard. She tried to feel her way around it, but there was no sensation left. She was numb from the cold and the gunshot wound. She hooked her hand into a kind of shovel and scooped out what was there. She knocked into the object, got her clawed hand underneath, and brought it out of the snow, already knowing it wasn’t what she’d hoped.
Dana threw the rock aside with a yell. At the same time, she heard another door open from a different trailer. A second light stabbed through the storm. Or maybe it was the same one. She was becoming disoriented. Dana shouted the same commands, and heard the voice float back, “Phone’s not working!”
She felt a sinking fear.
She called out. “Cell phone?”
“Yeah, cell phone.” It was a woman’s voice.
Relief. There was still a chance Teresa’s landline would work.
The killer was trying to sit up. “Stay down, Charlie.” She pointed the gun at him. “Don’t move.”
“You’re going to see now, lady,” Charlie said. “You’re going to see.”
Dana ran to the trailer.
It was dark and cold. One candle remained in the kitchen, the flame whipping with the wind as she came in the front door. She headed to the phone and slipped on the linoleum. Her shoes were covered in snow, and the linoleum was slick. She went down hard, crashing onto her side, banging her head.
When she came to, she didn’t know how much time had passed. She felt frozen, stiff. She tried to move and the pain blared through her from multiple sources. Her head, her neck, her shoulder. Like nothing she had ever known. It was holding her down.
Give up.
Just let go.
She had failed. She had failed as a detective. A serial killer had cut through a college campus. A bartender who had been right under their nose. Someone who had gotten to know the group from Wayland Kimball’s study. Selected them, studied them, then went about killing them one by one, leaving a glaring suspect – Perry Brady – for the cops to fumble over. She’d failed.
She’d failed as a mother. Right now her beautiful girls were at home with their father, sleeping, unaware that their mother was bleeding to death in a trailer park two miles away. Because she had walked right into a trap. Her girls, and her husband would never see her again. They’d probably be better off without her, anyway. She was barely in their lives as it was.
It was the end. The end of a cycle in time.
She stared up at the water-stained ceiling in the gloom of Teresa Dunham’s trailer. Enough. She closed her eyes.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE / Free Will
For some reason, Dana was still alive, still there, and she felt the grip of death recede.
She got slowly to her feet, pulling herself up by the kitchen counter. Her gun was back in her holster and her right arm was free to hoist herself upright. She felt faint. She squeezed her eyes shut and waited. She saw a rapid-fire montage of images against the backs of her eyelids. Sonia Taylor in the river. Her brother, David, in Topper Pond, being hauled out by the divers. The lithe body with the horned bull head. Crying. She opened her eyes and saw the phone on the wall in front of her. She pulled the handset from the cradle and stuck it to her ear. The silence was unsurprising. Whether there was a telephone pole down somewhere or Charlie had cut the line, the phone wasn’t working.
State detectives had the option to carry a two-way radio. But since cell phones had become standard, few detectives carried them anymore. Some states still required them, but not New York. Dana vowed, if she got through this, that she was going to make sure they became mandatory.
With no landline, no radio, no cell phone, she might as well have been in Siberia. If Yarrow had worked out that Dana had come here, then the police would’ve arrived long ago. She hadn’t told anyone where she was going. She hadn’t been thinking; she’d been running on emotion. The only one to blame for the mess she was in was herself. She needed to fix it, once and for all.
The trailer, rapidly losing heat, was still just warm enough to thaw her addled, frozen mind and get her thinking a little more clearly. She had been shot in the shoulder. She needed to put her arm in a sling, keep its movement to a minimum to prevent lasting tissue and nerve damage, slow the blood flow.
Charlie was probably still outside. His gun was buried somewhere near him. For all she knew, he’d fallen on top of it. There wasn’t much time to dress her bullet wound. She took a couple of dishtowels hanging from the stove and did her best to make a sling, breathing heavily with the effort. Satisfied it was at least something, she pulled her weapon and started back out of the door.
She poked her head out cautiously, listening. She could see the Corsica through the snow, just barely, and thought she could make out the lump that was the killer’s body. Keeping a watchful eye, she stepped down into the snow and followed the path back to the vehicle. As she drew closer, she felt more at ease; Charlie had not moved. She might’ve only been unconscious on the floor for a few seconds. Dana saw that he hadn’t found his weapon.
“Get up.”
Charlie’s eyes fluttered open. “Huh?”
“Get up.”
“Man, I had one fucked-up dream.”
Dana crouched next to the killer and pointed the gun directly in his face. “On your feet.”
Charlie just stared back for a moment. Then he seemed to focus. He looked down the barrel of the gun at Dana. He grimaced as he sat up, grunting in pain. He got shakily to his feet.
“Get in the back.”
“Ah,” Charlie said. “You’re getting it.”
“Shut up. Get in the car.”
Charlie did as he was told, slowly, groaning in pain. Once he had crammed himself into the back seat, he promptly lay down. Charlie wasn’t moving. He laced his fingers across his stomach. He looked up at the roof the way he’d been gazing up into the sky. The snow melted on his skin. His face was hard and fixed, like that of a convicted felon.
Dana got in the driver’s side and pointed the gun at Charlie through the grate.
“Give me the keys.”
“My pocket.”
“Pull them out.”
She watched Charlie fumble in his pocket with his bloody hand. She tensed. He might have stashed the gun in there. This was insane. She was going to drive with this maniac in the back seat? He’s been shot in the stomach, for God’s sake. Charlie held up the keys.
“Drop them over onto the front.”
Charlie pushed them through. Then he interlaced his fingers again. Dana kept one knee on the seat, one foot out the door, the gun on the killer. The pain in her shoulder was incandescent. The seconds ticked by and the snow fell.
“You want me to kill you.”
Dana watched Charlie’s mouth twist into a rictus grin. “Come on, lady. Enough. Wake up, once and for all.” He started coughing, turning his head to the side. His eyes found her, two different shades, one white and dead. His face looked ghastly pale under the interior car light.
“Lori was going to be your next victim,” she said. “But the Feds have her. Sorry, game over. We stopped you. Now you want to make me pay, playing out some little fantasy here. I gotta tell you, I don’t have time for it. I’m taking you in.”
“You’re all turned around, lady. But, you’ll get it.”
“I’ll get it,” she repeated, her breath snaking out. She was getting hazy again, light-headed.
Charlie nodded where he lay across the bench seat.
Dana drew a shallow breath. “
I’ll tell you what I get,” she said. “Maggie Lange, your third victim, she won’t have water in her blood. The jesaconitine — the monkshood — will be confirmed.” She took a breath. “The shit you’ve got in that bag right now sitting in the trailer. We’ve got you,” Dana said, and closed her eyes. She slumped against the seat, keeping herself from falling over. “We’ve got you.”
The tires spun but eventually they found some purchase. She got the Corsica rolling forward, the front bumper parting the snowdrift like the prow of a ship cutting through waves. She slowly circled the roundabout. The vehicle was front-wheel drive, and the nose kept wanting to pull the car off to the side of the road. The fresh snow was powder on ice. She had to steer hard to keep the car going the way she wanted. She would have to keep it slow and steady. She would have to stay conscious, and her mind was slipping, slipping into the void.
She drove out of Dover Court, leaving the trailer park behind. She turned onto Cross Street, moving at only ten miles an hour. The wipers smacked back and forth. Charlie moaned and coughed in the backseat. At this speed, the killer would die back there. She had to bring him in.
“I tried to help you,” Charlie gurgled, and then broke into another coughing fit. “I tried to give you clues.”
Dana blinked away the melting snow in her eyes. The car was finally starting to warm up. Her hand was shaking, her other arm in the sling; it was nerve-wracking to drive like this. She should’ve just stayed put. Turn around, go back to the trailer park, hell, start a fire under some cover. But she was still driving. There was no one out. The windows of the homes on the street were black.
She focused on the pain as she struggled with the steering wheel. The Corsica wanted to just keep going with the forward momentum, not make the turn, and slam into the telephone pole there on the corner. She peppered the brakes and tapped the gas. Finally the tires caught and they jerked in the right direction, but now she had to one-handedly spin the steering wheel back to center. As she cranked, she heard Charlie talking. Good. He was still alive.
“Ah, lady. It’s over. I can’t do it anymore.”
DARK KILLS a gripping detective thriller full of suspense Page 22
