Kill the Next One

by Axat, Federico

  “Wendell and I met in college,” Lynch said, “and we became best friends. Those were the years when the Organization was being formed, and Wendell soon became involved; he became the cornerstone of it. But Wendell wasn’t interested in dealing out justice, Ted. Wendell is a stone-cold fucking killer. He’s been offing people for years.”

  Ted wrinkled his forehead. Lynch kept talking.

  “I learned of Wendell’s unofficial activities fairly recently, almost by accident. In a way, I suppose I always suspected, but I didn’t want to see it.”

  “Why didn’t you turn him in?”

  “Did you see the way he lives? He has a lot of power, lots of connections, the best lawyers. He’s gotten into scrapes before and he always comes out on top. Not to mention I couldn’t pin anything specific on him.”

  “It wasn’t just his wife and daughters you forgot to mention. You also left out the security cameras.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re sorry,” Ted said morosely. “You realize you’re dealing with a man who’s got nothing to lose, don’t you?”

  “You’ll understand everything. You’ll see.”

  “And Blaine? The information you gave me about him was pure bullshit. Everybody knew the guy was guilty. If Wendell was your target, why send me to kill Blaine?”

  The sound in the file drawer again. Louder than before. Like a fist pounding on the metal box from the inside. Ted jumped.

  “What was that?”

  “What was what?”

  Ted’s heart was pounding.

  “Can I show you something?” Lynch asked. “I’ve got it right here, in the desk drawer.”

  Ted pulled out the Browning again and pointed it at Lynch.

  “Open it slowly.”

  “Of course.”

  Lynch opened the middle drawer.

  “It’s that folder,” he said.

  “Pull it out.”

  Lynch put it on the desk, within Ted’s reach.

  Ted sat back down. The folder looked like the ones Lynch had given him at his home. He was about to open it when Lynch asked him not to.

  “Before you open it, let me explain something to you. As I just told you, I only learned fairly recently about Wendell’s activities, the murders. He was my friend a long time ago, but the harm he was causing was too great.” He paused. “Open the folder.”

  Ted put away the Browning.

  “Tell me what’s in it.” He didn’t dare touch it.

  “Holly’s been deceiving you for a long time,” Lynch said without further ado. “That folder contains irrefutable evidence. Photographs, telephone records, hotel receipts.”

  Ted frowned contemptuously. It couldn’t be true. He reached out to open the folder, but at the last second he stopped. Something in his face changed.

  “Holly asked you for a divorce,” Lynch went on. “Things have been bad between you two for years.”

  “That’s goddamn bullshit.”

  “Think about it for a second…”

  Ted again pictured Holly at Wendell’s house, the girls running to the front door with their smiling faces and pink backpacks. A string of experiences he’d been through with her over the past several months flooded into his head. It was true that, in general, he was the one who had been acting evasive, distant, excusing himself with work, and so on. Ted didn’t want to open the folder.

  “I investigated Wendell,” Lynch said, “and accidentally found out about Holly’s cheating. It’s a long story.”

  The banging in the file drawer started up again.

  “Stop it!” Ted screamed at the metal drawer.

  Lynch stared at him with a look of horror on his face. Ted jumped up and ran to the file cabinet. He gave it a good kick.

  “Quiet!”

  He returned to the desk and, overcome by a sudden attack of rage, swept the folder away. It fell next to the filing cabinet; a few pages spilled out, including one of the photos. Ted screamed and dropped to his knees next to the partially covered photograph, looking at it dumbstruck. It had been taken from outside a restaurant. Through the window, he saw Holly in profile, bent slightly forward over the table, smiling with her mouth open, about to try a bite that someone on the other side of the table was offering her. Only part of the man’s arm was visible. Ted stood up. He stepped back, not taking his eyes off the photo, and slammed into the cabinet. A series of bangs rumbled inside.

  Ted bent down and opened the drawer. He stifled a scream, covering his mouth with both hands.

  “What is it?” Lynch asked.

  The possum peeked over the edge of the drawer; sniffed at the air in the office, just as it had done the day before on the tire swing at Robichaud’s house; and climbed up until its front paws were in the air. It pivoted and fell to the floor with a thud.

  Ted ran stumbling from the office, forgetting about the gun, which was trembling like an extension of his arm. He ran along the corridor, lunging at each door in turn, only to smash into it and back away. Where was the fucking elevator? Holding his head in his hands, he reached the end of the corridor and rushed down a narrow, nasty staircase, the steps growing narrower and narrower as he went down. Twice he nearly fell. The first floor was almost dark: no lights were on, and he saw trampled piles of mail in front of many of the office doors. He picked a door, forced it open, and was swallowed by an empty office that stank of disuse. A massive old filing cabinet, which even its owners had not bothered to move, one of its drawers missing, greeted him with a blank expression of surprise. Ted hugged it and slumped down softly by its side. He was staring at the open door, knowing that the possum would come in at any moment…

  Part II

  15

  Ted McKay was about to put a bullet through his brain when the doorbell rang. Insistently.

  He opened his eyes. The natural light flowing in through the window of his study blinded him. Soon enough he heard the knocking at the door, and with it the voice of the visitor who should have been a stranger to him.

  He stood up and immediately felt something weighing down his left pants pocket. He fingered the lump in the pocket: no mistaking this semicircular form. It was the horseshoe. Ted tried to take it all in. Unbelievable. The study, which in his memory had been ransacked and turned upside down, was now back to normal. The desk was neat and orderly, the books sitting on their proper shelves, the computer on the side table. As Lynch shouted for him to open the door (Ted knew it to be Lynch), the most Ted could do was lift a finger and touch the computer’s on button, as if doing so would provide definitive proof that all this was really happening. The machine whirred to life with the usual hums and flickering LEDs. Ted, half terrified and half annoyed, quickly turned it back off by pressing the button and holding it down. He could hear Nadine warning him: That’s not how you turn it off, Daddy. You should go to shut down from the start button. Mommy taught me. Ted shivered. The letter to Holly lay on the desk.

  “Open up, please!”

  Ted fumbled for the keys in the small jar while the shouting continued. He was waiting for the demand that he knew was about to come.

  “Open up now, Ted!”

  Why am I not surprised that you know me by name, Lynch?

  He opened the study door. He read his note to Holly: “Honey, I left a copy of the key to the study on top of the fridge. Don’t let the kids in. I love you.” It was as if somebody else had written it. Ted couldn’t get the photograph from the restaurant out of his head: Holly, leaning across the table to taste the bite of food her lover was offering her. How could he possibly remember something that hadn’t happened yet?

  “Coming!” Ted shouted.

  Reaching the living room, he recognized the silhouette in the window. This time, too, he gazed at everything with unusual interest—not because he had said farewell to all these objects expecting never to see them again, but because his last memory was of seeing them smashed and broken.

  When he opened the door, there was Lynch—the friendly vers
ion of Lynch—with his fabulous smile, the polo shirt with the brightly colored horizontal stripes, and the briefcase that seemed out of place.

  “Whatever you’re selling, I’m not interested,” Ted said, paraphrasing his other self.

  “Oh, I’m afraid I’m not here to sell you anything.”

  As the dialogue continued, Ted noticed that Lynch showed no sign of having had this conversation before; he was acting too natural. Again Ted closed the door in Lynch’s face, but this time he didn’t stand around to hear Lynch telling him he knew what he was about to do with the gun he’d left on the desk. He ran to the kitchen, to the fridge, and there was the photo of Holly at the beach, running in that particular frozen posture, surrounded by the frame that Cindy and Nadine had decorated with glitter. He stood there for a moment, relieved. He ran a finger over his wife’s printed body, as if he needed to feel the slick surface of the photographic paper and assure himself that it was really there.

  He stuck his hand in his pocket. The horseshoe was real, too. He clutched it without taking it out. But then his fingertips felt a piece of paper. In disbelief, he pulled out the tattered note, written in his own handwriting: Open the door. It’s your only way out.

  He went back to the living room and let his persistent visitor come in. Lynch was still standing there, smiling under the midday sun.

  16

  Ted was in a crouch. He held his head in both hands, rocking slowly back and forth, staring at the photo of Holly on the beach, which he had set on the floor inches from his feet. He needed to understand.

  It’s the tumor…

  Dr. Carmichael had told him that his headaches might return, that he might even get dizzy spells or hallucinations. Hadn’t he said that?

  Yes, Dr. Carmichael had told him he might experience hallucinations. But hallucinating a gnome running through the backyard, or a rainbow in the bathroom, or some such psychological shit—that was one thing. Going through all this stuff now, though: that was a completely different matter.

  He forced himself to stand. When he got to his feet, the weight of the horseshoe reminded him that at least one thing had changed. He pulled it from his pocket and took a good long look at it. The memory of picking it up on Wendell’s private drive was vivid; he could see every detail of the house. He also had the note, wrinkled up enough to show that he’d been carrying it in his pocket for a while.

  He stooped down for an instant and placed the horseshoe next to the photo; later he would decide whether to leave it there or carry it with him. The priority now was to talk to Holly. He had agreed with her that they wouldn’t speak again until Friday, when she would be back to sign the divorce papers. How had he forgotten that little detail? He had told her he would need a few days for the lawyers to make all the arrangements, and she had told him she’d go visit her parents with the girls, just as Ted had anticipated. They’d had one last, amicable conversation in the living room, and had said an amicable good-bye, as if for one fleeting moment the old Holly and Ted had been reborn from the ashes.

  But that illusion had lasted only as long as a quick hug and a lukewarm smile. The events of the last few months had demolished everything; there was nothing to rebuild. Ted accepted some of the blame. Almost all of it, actually. He’d let himself get wrapped up in his work without realizing how distant he’d become, as he would later tell Laura Hill. He’d again become the Ted of his teenage years, the rebel, the misunderstood kid, the person he’d finally overcome thanks to his feelings for his family. The headaches had begun, the constant bad moods. Even the girls had started looking at him warily. “It’s the fear, Laura. There’s nothing worse than realizing your own kid is afraid of you. It’s as if someone else has taken over.” That was when he had turned to Carmichael. His headaches had gone from once-daily torments to three or four times a day, and they were growing more intense. Ted feared the worst: a malignant tumor. On the other hand, it was a relief to be able to attribute his shitty behavior to a clump of malevolent cells.

  The news, far from upsetting him, helped Ted see his fate clearly. Laura helped him, he had to admit. She helped him shake off some certainties he had lived with for too long. His relationship with his daughters improved, and with Holly, too. And that was when she asked him for the divorce. “I’ve wanted to have a civilized discussion with you about it for a long time.” Their conversation was polite. She told him she preferred it this way, that they deserved to end up on good terms, the same way they started. Ted agreed.

  Now he understood his wife’s motives much better.

  “Hello, Ted,” Holly’s voice said on the other end of the line.

  “Hello…”

  Honey.

  He felt a pang in his chest. At his feet was the photo of Holly, smiling at the beach, in the red bikini. Ted’s favorite.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Yes. Sorry I called you on your cell.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Is there a problem with the papers?”

  “No. The papers are almost ready.”

  Silence.

  “Holly, are you at your parents’ house?”

  Or at your lover’s?

  “I don’t owe you any explanations.”

  “You have my daughters, so I think you do.”

  As soon as the words were out of his mouth he wanted to take them back.

  “Sorry.”

  “What do you want, Ted? I’m busy.”

  Ted felt very confused. If Holly really had been cheating on him, then she might be in genuine danger. Wendell could be a dangerous man.

  You don’t know Wendell.

  “Take care of yourself, Holly.”

  “I always do. What are you talking about? Is there something I ought to know?”

  Ted knew he had to make up something to excuse his phone call.

  “I’ve been getting some strange calls at home, and they have me worried.”

  “Strange calls? What sort of calls? Have you reported them to the police?”

  “I don’t think that’s necessary. They mentioned your name—that’s why I’m worried.”

  “My name?” Now Holly did seem to be paying attention.

  “I don’t want to worry you, but you can see why I needed to call you, right?”

  “Yes. Yes, I do.”

  “Just…take care.”

  “I will. Thanks.”

  Ted couldn’t help smiling at this minimal display of gratitude.

  “Bye, Holly.”

  “See you on Friday, Ted.”

  17

  “I almost killed myself today,” Ted said in a neutral tone.

  He was sitting on the usual couch in Laura Hill’s office, staring at the plastic water cup in the middle of the coffee table. He looked up.

  “You don’t seem very concerned,” he told his therapist with a thin smile.

  “You’re still here,” she replied, returning his smile.

  “It’s been a crazy morning. I don’t know where to start.”

  “We have time.”

  Ted had been talking to Laura for several minutes, but he’d been so agitated that he hadn’t noticed how she looked.

  “You’ve let your hair down,” he observed.

  Laura blushed and tossed her head, making her hair swish against her cheeks. It was a shade lighter than before.

  “I got it done yesterday. I decided to change styles.”

  In his recent hallucinations, Laura hadn’t gone to the hair salon. Apparently tumors didn’t bother with cosmetic details.

  It wasn’t a hallucination! Lynch came to see you this morning.

  Ted’s smile disappeared. If he needed any more proof that these last few days really happened, he had it in his pocket. He’d found the horseshoe near Wendell’s house, a place he remembered perfectly well even though he’d never been there in his life.

  “What happened this morning, Ted?”

  “I was in my study at home, holding my Browning to my head, when suddenly someone st
arted knocking frantically at the front door. That was when I came to and saw where I was, what I was about to do.”

  Laura’s expression was indecipherable.

  “You didn’t remember picking up the gun?”

  “Worse. I didn’t remember any of the past few days. And I still don’t. Just bits and pieces, all jumbled together, partly because I have…well, it’s a little hard to explain. I have other memories. It’s as if the tumor has scrambled everything.”

  “Go on about what happened this morning. You’re in your study. You hear those noises at the front door. What happens next?”

  “There’s a letter to Holly lying on the desk, written in my handwriting. I had also left her a note on the door to my study telling her to keep the girls away. Apparently I had it all planned out. It’s like, as I discover these details, bits of information from the past are unveiled in my brain.”

  “Do you really think you were going to press the trigger?”

  Ted put his head down and rubbed his temples. Laura reached over and squeezed his shoulder.

  “Ted, stay with me. Look at me. That’s right. Who was knocking on your door?”

  “A man named Lynch,” Ted said. “I thought he was trying to sell something and I tried to get rid of him, but he said he knew what I was about to do in my study; he said something about my gun, I don’t remember what, but it was pretty specific. The craziest thing was, I remember going through the whole situation once before. I knew everything Lynch was about to tell me, what he was going to propose. It was like watching a movie you already know by heart.”

  “And do you believe you actually have lived through the same experience before?”

  “No,” Ted said. “It’s the tumor, Laura. Dr. Carmichael said that a tumor like mine can cause hallucinations. It can put pressure on parts of your brain, and that can cause—”

  “Hold on, Ted. We can consult with Dr. Carmichael later if we have to. What I want to know is whether there is any chance that you met Lynch some other time. In the past, perhaps, when he was younger.”