There was the same light hanging from the ceiling. It swung from an extension cord, gently, throwing shadows. Electric humming. Racks of cleaning supplies along the walls. A mop bucket. Gallons of Formula 409. Stacked cardboard boxes. A dizzying smell of bleach. All of these elements within her reach. The only thing missing was the digital veneer, the pixelated crust of the videos themselves.
Every muscle in her body tightened into stone as she swung her gun around each corner, her focus narrowed as she swept the space for any sign of the man in the mask. Even though the room was small, it was cluttered. Plenty of places to hide. She kicked at empty boxes, peered behind a broken filing cabinet slanting across the floor. She swung to her right and immediately before her a video camera perched atop a cardboard box, the lens shining like a single eye beneath the light. Next to the camera, a semitranslucent mask staring back at her. She stepped back, her finger reflexively pressuring the trigger. But it was only the mask, no face for it to hide. It made her sick, the inanimate smile, as though it had been propped up to greet her. But it also gave her some relief. He wasn’t here yet. When he came, she would be ready for him.
She turned back to the hostages.
The center of the room was cleared out save for three office chairs, and in each, a hostage. One was Paulina. A large, glistening pool of blood gathered around the wheels of her chair. Her head was rolled back. Motionless. Tillman reached forward to take her pulse. She was still alive. Next to Paulina was the other woman from the video—Miss May. A shock of red hair, brighter than it had appeared in the grainy video. Her eyes were wide, conscious, and she was moving her head, gesturing at the hostage next to her—a burlap mask over his head, black slacks, tennis shoes. Pale hands clutching the arms of the chair as he tried to shake his way out of the ropes. She felt a euphoric wave of relief to hear his muffled screams, to see that he was still alive, squirming against the ropes.
She stepped to this third hostage and removed the burlap sack. She saw his face—twisted, misshapen by agony, colored white and blue. She knew this must be Peter. He bit down a thick cord of rope tied around his head. His waxy blond hair stuck to his sweaty forehead. She removed the rope from his mouth.
“Oh my God,” he gasped, spit dripping from his lips. “Oh my God. I thought you were him. Are the police coming?”
His voice was soft, a boyish slur joining each uneven sentence.
“Are you Peter?” she asked.
He nodded.
Miss May screamed into the rope.
“Where is he?” Tillman asked Peter. “The gunman. Where is he?”
“Oh my God.” He closed his eyes and threw his head back. “I don’t know. He left a few minutes ago, but he’s coming back. You have to get us out of here.”
“Do you know where he went?”
Peter’s nostrils flared and he was thrown into a coughing fit, straining against his ropes. Long spools of spit crawled from his mouth onto the bloodstained floor below him. “Help May and the girl. Untie them.”
Tillman moved to Miss May. Although a rope also cut through her mouth, her teeth bared against the cord, her eyes were alert and shifting. They landed on Tillman with a sort of physical force she felt in her chest. She was trying to communicate something. Tillman tried to pull the rope from her mouth, but it was tighter than Peter’s had been. Tillman set to untying the knot with shaking fingers, and finally loosened it enough to pull it down her chin.
As soon as she could open her mouth, May shouted, “It’s him.”
Immediately, Tillman reached for her gun in her waistband, but not before she turned to see an empty chair where Peter had been just a second ago.
She felt the cold, hard nose of a pistol press into her spine.
“Drop the gun,” Peter said.
He spoke in the same soft voice he had before, but it was now unhurried, self-possessed. As though he were asking her to do something she’d known she’d have to do. A stage direction she’d forgotten.
“You piece of shit,” May said, spitting at Peter.
And still Tillman turned his words over in her head, unable to make sense of them. The moment was ruptured. She felt like she had just awoken in this cold, dark room. A light hanging and swinging.
Dust hung in the air, frozen.
“Drop the gun,” Peter repeated, pressing his own gun harder against Tillman’s spine.
Her pistol clattered to the floor like a plastic toy-thing. With his gun still pressed against her, he bent over and picked up her weapon. His fingers fumbled with the pistol.
Instincts.
Tillman shifted her weight to her front foot and, with the other, she kicked Peter in the groin. He screamed in agony, dropping his gun, falling to his knees. She grabbed him by his hair as he reached his hands across her waist, attempting to pull her to the ground. But she remained planted. She jerked his head up by his hair and struck him in the jaw. He sprawled across the ground, reaching frantically for his gun at his side. She reached for her own, but it was not there. It must have gotten kicked away, she realized. She saw from the corner of her eye Peter pointing his weapon directly at her chest, his back to the ground.
“Sit down,” he said. Blood formed in the corners of his mouth, staining his teeth. “I’ll kill you right now. It doesn’t matter to me either way. Sit the fuck down.”
She lowered herself into the chair she had found him in. The ropes that had bound him lay on the ground. They were untied. He must have been holding them behind his back. She hadn’t thought to check. The leather cushion of the chair was slick with his sweat, and for the first time she noticed the absence of any sort of ventilation into the room. It was stiflingly hot, each breath a material and burning presence passing down her throat.
With his gun trained to her chest, Peter rose slowly. He was smiling. Of course he’s smiling, Tillman thought. He had won.
“Who are you?” he asked Tillman, as though he were meeting her at a bar with the chatter of a hundred conversations drifting between them, a man looking to make conversation out of boredom. “How did you find me?”
“You miserable little shit,” Miss May spat.
Tillman spotted her gun lying three feet away, in front of Paulina’s chair. Peter saw her looking at it. “I wouldn’t if I were you,” he said, stepping forward to pick up the pistol. “Seeing as how I don’t even know who you are, you aren’t worth a whole hell of a lot to me alive.”
He backed toward the camera and Tillman saw that he had hidden a limp in his left leg. He set her revolver next to the mask and turned on the camera. It emitted a small electronic whine and he seemed amused by it. He turned back to Tillman and cocked his pistol. A small nine-millimeter. She saw in the way he placed his hand clumsily over the slide that he wasn’t used to the weapon. The first time he had fired it might have been directly into Walter Williams’s head just two days prior, Tillman thought, though it already felt to her like several eternities ago. “Should I expect any other visitors?”
She gestured at the door.
He smiled wider. “You’re lying. I heard you coming. Only you. I saw you coming. Through the door. You came alone.”
“They sent me first,” she said. “They’re coming in after me. Police. SWAT. They’re coming.”
He remained in front of her and removed one hand from the gun to brush his hair from his sweaty forehead. His teeth were yellowed, nicotine-stained. “Yes, because that’s the way that SWAT teams operate,” he intoned. “They send some woman ahead of them.”
“She beat the shit out of you,” Miss May said, laughing.
“Is that right?” Peter turned to Tillman. He held his gun out at arm’s length. “Did you beat the shit out of me? Because the way I see it, you’re the one with a gun to your head.”
She wanted nothing more than to wrap her hands around his neck, feel the life force dwindle with each beat of his heart pulsing in her fingertips. It might even be worth taking a bullet for. But she shook it off. What she needed now was to bu
y time. If it wasn’t midnight already, it would soon be. “They sent me to talk to you. To negotiate.”
“Who?” he asked, a disbelieving grin.
“The police.”
He broke into wheezing laughter, bloody spit forming at the edges of his lips, which he licked away. “You’re so full of shit.”
“If I’m lying, then how do you think I found you? They sent me here to talk to you. To hear what you have to say. To see if we can work something out. I’m here to help you, Peter.”
He looked back at her, stone-faced. He seemed to her like a boy trapped inside a man, a strained sort of innocence trying to break from his gaze. But he was not innocent, she reminded herself. He would kill her if she let him, or even if she didn’t let him. He was the one with a gun. He was more than willing to use it, too. He brought one hand to his head and raked his fingers through his hair while he bit his bottom lip so hard she thought he might swallow it.
“You know why he wants to kill us?” Miss May directed her question to Tillman, but kept her stare fixed on Peter Richards. “Because he’s a small, nothing man who has to tie someone up to kill them. He’s a fucking limp-dick psychotic piece of shit who can’t take the truth.” But before she could finish the thought, if there was anything left to finish, Peter stepped forward and lifted his pistol high and brought the grip down on her head. The gunmetal connected to her skull with a dull, percussive thud. Her head lolled forward, slumped to her chest.
“Jesus Christ,” Tillman whispered, seeing blood pour from the deep wound, spreading down May’s face like a rouge mask, just one gradient darker than her hair.
“I told her to stop,” he said, almost apologetically. He shifted off his bad leg, turned back to look at the camera. She was maybe four steps away from him. Too far to make a move for the gun. Peter took another step back, wincing as he put weight on his leg. He leaned against the boxes, taking focused breaths.
“You know Marcus Waters?” Tillman asked, hoping to distract him. She feared he would try to pistol-whip her as well, but unlike the woman, Tillman wasn’t bound by ropes. If he tried it, she would be able to subdue him. But if he simply shot her, that would be a different story. “The journalist, you know him?”
He ignored the question as he adjusted the camera. “So then it was Marcus that gave you my name? I’m surprised. Didn’t plan on that. He’s blind to just about everything. It’s willful ignorance. Ignores things right in front of him. Sees the world the way he wants to. I’m actually glad he figured it out eventually, though. Good for him.”
“So that woman”—Tillman nodded at May—“she knew the Kingfisher, then? That’s what you made it sound like in your video.”
“I’m done talking with you. I know what you’re doing.”
“I’m interested in the Kingfisher, too,” Tillman said. “I think he’s still alive like you do. I always have.”
“No, you don’t.” He laughed. “No one does.”
“Did she know him? The Kingfisher?”
He stood up straight and gently stretched his back, face wrought in a pained satisfaction. He adjusted the camera, turned the viewer around, and framed the shot so that both Tillman and the woman were in the screen. He reached for the Robespierre mask and slipped it over his face, adjusting the elastic band over his ears. Once it was on, his entire presence seemed to change. He stood taller and stepped forward to the camera, his bad leg no longer dragging.
Whatever window she had to act was quickly closing, so she took a leap of faith across whatever chasm she had found herself facing on this stolid night.
“He did that to you.”
He looked over his shoulder, eyes hidden behind the plastic sheen. His finger hovered over the record button on the video camera.
She nodded at his bad leg. “The Kingfisher did that to you, didn’t he?”
Peter didn’t move, didn’t speak.
“I don’t recall your name from the newspapers,” she said.
He patted his gun against his hip, shaking his head. The mask only smiled. That was all it knew. “That’s because it wasn’t written about in the newspapers,” he said, his voice dulled beneath the plastic contours of the mask. “I hadn’t done anything wrong. I hadn’t broken any laws.”
He seemed unsure of how, or whether, to proceed, and he busied himself for a few moments by picking up the rope from the floor and setting it next to the revolver, the video camera. Little tasks, mindless rearrangements. He rubbed his leg with his free hand and she wondered if he knew he was doing this.
“It’s past midnight.” He sighed and pointed at the camera behind him. “And these things, no one ever cared about them before, they don’t care now. They don’t matter anymore.”
“You don’t believe that. You’re not doing all of this just to cause chaos. You’re not killing people just because the Kingfisher may still be alive. You want to tell your story to the world. Maybe you don’t know how. So tell me, and then you can tell them.” She nodded at the camera. “You can tell them exactly what it was he did to you, and they will listen.”
“You’re wasting time.”
“What did he do to you, Peter?”
He shook his head slowly. “What happened was he severed four of my vertebrae.” He turned in profile and pointed at his lower back. “I found him, but I wasn’t supposed to find him. He was supposed to be dead. But he wasn’t dead. He wasn’t dead at all.”
“How did you find him?”
“Her.” He pointed at May. “I knew he hadn’t died. I knew it was all bullshit. And I knew he would come back. For her. I knew where she was living. I sat in my car and watched her apartment. Didn’t have to wait for long. The night after the city’s funeral, I saw him. He was standing in the alley outside her apartment. Just standing there like he was thinking he might go inside through the window. I got out of my car and approached him. I was excited. I must have been smiling. I’m sure of it.” She realized Peter was laughing. But even so, his voice carried with it a dreamlike formlessness, the words blurred and hazy and automatic. “And then all of a sudden, before I could even say a single word, he was dragging me down the alley by my neck. And the whole time, he was saying how he knew I’d been watching her apartment. He said he knew that I wanted to hurt her, but he wouldn’t let me. I tried to tell him he was wrong, but then he threw me up against the wall.” He mimicked a push, laughter still dripping from his mouth. “I told him I was sorry. I told him I wouldn’t hurt her. I told him I only wanted to say something to him. But he wasn’t listening. He was out of his mind, kept saying over and over again how he had hurt her. He was screaming it. Said he only ever wanted to protect her, but he only hurt her. Said he wouldn’t let me hurt her, too.” By now, Peter was nearly doubled over in laughter. “And you know something? I didn’t even see him throughout the whole thing. Not once. He was there in front of me. But I didn’t see him. I just kept thinking to myself, ‘This can’t be him.’ It’s what I told myself. I said, ‘It can’t be him, it can’t be him, it can’t be him.’”
“What was it that you wanted to tell him?”
Peter straightened up, the laughter suddenly gone from his lungs. “I wanted to tell him that he was my hero. And I did. I told him he was my hero. I said it like I thought he would understand. I said it like I thought it might save me.”
“And that’s when he did that to you?” she asked, though it was not a question. “You told him he was your hero.”
“It’s terrifying, isn’t it?” He clicked the magazine out of the gun, inspected the ammunition, and clicked it back into place. “Realizing that your hero is a monster only when he starts beating you within an inch of your life.”
Tillman had only half listened, her mind freewheeling plans of action, none of which seemed more likely than any other, but she knew she needed him to keep talking. She thought of Jeremiah, hoped like hell he had put in the call to the station, and if he had, how long would it be until the SWAT team broke in? She thought of her father, sl
eeping in his armchair. She wondered if it was possible—but of course it wasn’t—that the Kingfisher would appear at any passing second.
“So you told the police?” she asked, measuring the distance between where she sat and where he stood. “After it happened. After he did that to you. You told them?”
Six feet of empty space separated them. If she could charge him, she’d be on him in a second. But a lot could happen in a second.
“Of course I told them, but they didn’t want to hear it. They never returned my calls. When I started dropping by the station after I was released from the hospital, they wouldn’t even file a report. Wouldn’t even listen to my story. I’m sure Gregory Stetson had something to do with that. It was his fault. All of it. The Kingfisher may have been a monster, but he was a monster that Stetson kept fed.”
The light in the room seemed to dim briefly, an electric yawn. There was some distant sound, a percussive thud. Maybe just a car door slamming shut. But they both listened for a moment to the ensuing silence, and she saw his fingers tighten around the pistol’s grip. She hoped with her entire being that the sound signified something, but she ignored it.
“Why didn’t anyone file a report?” she asked.
His face fell flat and he strained to listen to the phantom sounds. He poked his head out the door, stared into the darkness for a few moments until he was satisfied. He shut it quietly behind him and began inspecting his pistol under the swinging light.
“Because he was supposed to be dead, and he wasn’t dead.” Laughter—loud, gut-deep—erupted from behind the mask so suddenly it made Tillman wince. “I shouldn’t laugh. But it is funny, isn’t it? It’s all funny. It’s all very funny when you stop and think.”
“I’m sorry that happened to you,” Tillman said, willing sincerity into her voice. “That must have been terrible.”
The Reign of the Kingfisher Page 36
