Nothing Good Happens After Midnight: A Suspense Magazine Anthology

by Jeffery Deaver

  George lunges for Kyle, but Kyle, true to his word, turns swift and snakes away, down the seam of the mountain, towards Karen, weaving between trees. George is having difficulty keeping up with the snake despite his gripping cleats, but as Kyle is leaving the web of light between trees, a galloping beast leaps in the air and onto Kyle. Kyle is stomped by the animal into the deep snow.

  George sees his knife at the base of a Douglas fir, a tree owning layers of umbrella limbs that shield the earth beneath from too much snow. He grabs the knife and, looking at the animal that leapt, sees a familiar figure. It’s Cope all right. Several coyotes stand around in a circle, yipping at Kyle, and yipping at George’s pocket with the breakfast sandwich.

  “Cope, off him now, Old Girl. Good Girl. Off.”

  Cope, barking mad, backs off Kyle, who struggles to get out of the snow and off his back. George quick steps to Kyle, throwing Cope the breakfast sandwich, bends, and grabs Kyle around his scrawny neck with one bear claw of a hand. With his other, he holds the now unsheathed knife to Kyle’s temple. “You’re coming with me to the river,” he says.

  George knows the cold side of the mountain like the back of his own ass. He’s the only one who can work it. He’s got Kyle tied with safety rope, hands and feet, sitting in his passenger seat, right where Reeker was only twenty minutes ago. George is not calling Karen on the walkie now. George has definitely forgotten he wanted to tell Karen he loves her tonight. He has a killer to kill. He has a wrong to right. He has his love’s murder to vindicate.

  Has George ever been this homicidal?

  No, not ever. But love will do that to you sometimes. Ten years of grief and guilt, guilt for not saving her, that will do that to you sometimes. Being stalked for ten years by a psychopath who wears a homemade robot head, that will fucking do that to you sometimes. Knowing your haste and inadvertent rudeness, a simple second of stepping on a stranger’s foot, led to death. Such snap insanity, such freak and fatal instances, will do that to you sometimes.

  At the bottom of the cold side of the mountain, after barreling through the steeps, blind through the dark, which George did not fear, for he’s numb now, they reach the raging river, cold as arctic ice. This violent river never freezes given the constant current.

  It’s loud here from the roiling water and the howling wind, which funnels through the basin’s valley. It sounds like a freight train colliding with a rocket during blast off. Around where George has dragged Kyle, light from the snowcat illuminates a bubble of river bank. George’s legs are a foot deep in snow as he removes, with one meatpaw of a hand, the ropes from Kyle’s hands and feet. The ropes go in the river. The entire while, George holds Kyle around his neck. He could crush his windpipe with a mere fraction more of pressure.

  It must be 2:00 a.m. now, and, having left his gloves in the cab, George’s thick fingers are beginning to prickle in tightened circulation.

  Ignoring Kyle’s throttled cries, which are drowned by the sounds of a train and a rocket, George lifts Kyle as if he’s a single log and thrusts him in the freezing cold water. The wild current sucks Kyle in and away, bangs his head against boulders, drowns him, crushes him, kills him of hypothermia in ten seconds flat.

  George watches all ten seconds, and when he looks away for a break, there along the bank, in the far-reach edge of his snowcat’s light, stands Reeker, naked, his hat off, bald. He wears only snowshoes, which, George guesses, the fucker must have stowed in the woods or stolen from a staff cabin. He’s here premeditated. All his round parts, all there, now. Reeker holds a bar of soap in his hands. It dawns on George that this is the Spine Ripper’s modus operandi: Reeker cleans himself in freezing river water before a kill. At least George hopes it’s before, and that nobody from the mountain is already dead. He thinks this because he doesn’t see a body dragged here, waiting to be fileted and deboned, as other bodies were left at other watering holes.

  “Reeker,” George says.

  Reeker stares back, that same black-eyed, emotionless expression. Despite this blizzard, despite this cold air, despite it all, George notices the man is aroused. Reeker enjoys the fright he’s causing George, the power is a sexual charge. This threat is real. Sure enough, Reeker makes known his weapons by drawing George’s eyes to a tree stump, upon which sits a long serrated knife and a small carving knife.

  They must have been in his coat pocket.

  He looks to Reeker’s snowshoes.

  Shit.

  George is sinking deeper in the heavy snow where he stands, and now it’s too late. He might as well be in cement. He’s stuck. He can’t turn and run. He can’t reach any better packed glade, covered in powder, but at least not as keeping as this quicksand. And even if he could run, this larger man, this brutal murderer, would catch him in those snowshoes of his, thrust a knife in George’s back to slow him. Then gut him. Filet him.

  George is out of moves, and he knows Reeker knows it.

  “Saw you kill that man, George,” Reeker says, smiling by pushing both lips together in the middle and up. No blinking. His slow tone and cool demeanor changes when he lunges sideways for the tree stump and grabs the long serrated knife. He holds the handle with one hand and keeps the point poking into the palm of the other. He does that weird mouth middle push up thing again, watching George, who’s struggling and failing to lift his legs and step away. George keeps sinking.

  “You threw him right in the river, George,” Reeker says. He slow blinks. Takes a step to George, and George counts the time it takes for Reeker to reach him: three snowshoe steps in three seconds. And in those three seconds, George’s body takes over, acting on pure instinct. He falls to his ass, which hard tree fall frees his feet, like a heavy redwood falling and dislodging its root ball: physics. As Reeker lunges down to follow George, leading with his long knife, George sets his spiked cleat feet to Reeker’s hip joints and pushes. George pushes the entire weight of his grief, of his guilt, in the thrust, sending Reeker to shimmy backwards—just far enough. Puncture holes from the cleats spray blood on the snow, quickly covered by more falling snow.

  In this very second, a roar interrupts, something louder than the water and the wind. A dim light grows brighter through the trees, but blurred, as all is blurred in this blizzard. Out of the trees, a snowmobile bombs out of what was a blackened trail and straight into Reeker, punting him to the river’s edge. The snowmobile stops. Backs up. Revs and shoots forward, plowing Reeker into the river.

  The river sucks Reeker’s circle-stacked body in, greedily dunks him, drowns him, bobbing, screaming and swallowing water, crashing his round skull into boulders, and freezing his balls off in fatal hypothermia in ten seconds flat.

  George is on his ass stunned.

  The snowmobile driver stands with her legs straddling the snowmobile seat. She takes off her helmet, releasing her sun-drenched California hair.

  She looks over to George. “Oh, thank God, George. Thank God. The news kept escalating warnings. They pieced together his name, this guy, he didn’t even try to hide his identity. Reeker’s the Spine Ripper! I tracked you both by your walkies. They got the upgraded GPS, thank God. Thank Goodness I got here in time, George. I love you!”

  “I love you, Karen! I love you!” George yells. He yells it over and over, a gorgeous unending song of I love you’s as he cries in the snow, on his lumberjack ass, in a blizzard, professing his love for a woman who saved him. He cries, too, with relief that she didn’t see him kill the first killer, for that is a tall tale George will never tell, not to Karen, not to those muggers at Malforson’s. Nobody’s ever going to find either body; this roaring river swallows bodies into deep glacial canyons, pinning them under any of thousands of sunk logging trees, dozens of feet deep. That’s why the forest rangers won’t let anyone kayak it, no matter their skill. Everyone will hear about Reeker, for Karen and he will tandem tell that tale, but Reeker’s gone and no witness no longer to George’s crime. As for Kyle, everyone will think he slunk off in the night, disappeared h
imself into a new identity.

  Ayup.

  This Kyle tale stays with George, and probably with his ghost overseer, Martha, who protects him from their heavenly displacement, above these gorge streams, and in her afterlife dog, walks on mountain trails. She’s with Cope all right. She is Cope.

  Yes, for sure, George doesn’t want any mugger to know about Kyle. So he better go find that damn robot head and get rid of it for good. And to punctuate that thought, to underscore that objective, a howl overtakes all noise. George turns to see Cope howling at the blurry moon, right there, within the trail Karen bombed down. When done, Cope bends her head and picks up a leather book in her teeth. She runs off to join her coyote pack.

  * * *

  ATM

  JON LAND

  “Don’t I know you?” the guy seated across from Venn on the A Train headed uptown toward 207th Street wondered.

  Venn tried not to regard him, avoided meeting his eyes. Could be the guy had been a trick in weeks or months past. Somebody he’d picked up in a bar like Tubby’s Tavern where he was headed right now, after midnight like always. Venn didn’t remember faces like that and didn’t want to remember this one either.

  “I don’t think so, man,” he said, not quite regarding the guy and not smiling.

  Barely regarding him, in other words, which was normally all it took guys who’d paid him for sex at one time or another to move on in their minds. Sometimes they wouldn’t let it go, maybe even wanting more of the same which Venn sometimes provided. He figured he should have been grateful that he remained attractive at the ripe old age of twenty-two.

  A glimpse caught in the subway car window across from his seat revealed the tousled hair that swam to his shoulders, mostly brown with some natural blondish streaks. His eyes were the same middle shade, more of a hazel, and a flash of his perfect smile could make any potential trick melt, even the straight ones or ones who at least thought they were straight. Of course, he was also blessed with a great ass which the reflection didn’t show, but that Venn regaled in catching guys, and girls, grab stealthy glimpses of that always lingered a bit too long.

  Tubby’s Tavern wasn’t a college bar per se, but its location in a trendy uptown neighborhood was populated by a mix of young professionals, many associated in some respect with nearby Columbia University. A convenient place to gather or stop by alone for a drink.

  “Are you sure?” the guy across from him started up again. “Because…”

  “You teach at Columbia?” Venn asked, still not fully meeting his gaze. “Maybe you’ve seen me on campus, something like that.”

  “Oh, you’re a student.”

  Venn nodded, calculating how many more minutes were left before the train’s final stop at 207th and Broadway came up. “Junior.”

  “You look older.”

  Ouch, Venn thought. Of course, he couldn’t say exactly what he’d looked like when he was younger, since foster homes, group homes, and shelters were not known for keeping photo albums. Venn had grown up in an assortment of those. His was a classic American tragedy, like homeless veterans and that sort of shit. He chose not to dwell on his past—or his future, for that matter. “Live in the moment” was Venn’s mantra, out of necessity as much as choice.

  There wasn’t much glamorous about being a hustler, but Venn had been the subject of a profile in New York Magazine and was included, anonymously as well, in the New York Times Magazine too. One trick he’d done claimed to be a film producer who wanted to base a movie around him. Venn had pretended to be excited and given the guy a disconnected number, because Venn thought he was full of shit. Months later, the same New York Magazine issue containing the article on him included the guy’s picture in a story on Hollywood up-and-comers, meaning he’d been legit.

  If that didn’t beat all.

  The train slid into the station and ground to a squealing stop, Venn and the guy across from him rising at the same time.

  “You have yourself a nice night,” the guy said, a forced smile accompanying his words.

  “You, too. Be safe.”

  The man’s face played with a smile, like he knew something he didn’t want to share. “I was just going to say the same thing to you.”

  Now Venn was regarding him closer, the man’s features appearing formless, not quite the same as they’d appeared before, but not really different either.

  “I hope you find what you’re looking for,” the guy said, flashing a smile that lingered briefly. “I think this might be the night.”

  “For what?”

  Before he could answer, the doors whooshed open and a swarm of riders swallowed the man up. Venn stepped onto the platform after him, looked one way and then the other, but the man was gone.

  * * *

  Venn needed cash. Money made for the best disguise. Guys in a bar seeing you paying for your own drinks took the hustler thing off the table until he put it back on. Same thing for clothes and in Venn’s case, that meant dressing like a college student. Khakis or jeans to go with the right button-down and jacket courtesy of North Face or something like that.

  The problem tonight was that his bank account was closing in on zero, all of fifty bucks left to his name which in his case was “Venn” and nothing more. Using his last name meant acknowledging his past, something Venn avoided at all costs given there was nothing there worth remembering. So why not avoid his surname as much as possible? He never used it when introducing himself, and the people he normally introduced himself to didn’t much care.

  Still, fifty bucks was fifty bucks and Venn set out in search of an ATM machine to take forty of it out, leaving him ten unless tonight proved to be a profitable one assuming he could find the right trick. Venn could have ventured a bit further uptown to where deeper congestions of bars were clustered. He could have hit the bars frequented more by Columbia students. But he only did that when he needed a place to crash for the night, maybe poach some food for breakfast the next morning, seeing those students as different kinds of marks since any college student worth seducing wouldn’t need to pay for what Venn was offering.

  ATMs were normally everywhere these days but not so, apparently, here in the area of Broadway and 207th Street. He found two banks but slipping his card into the exterior slot failed in both cases to make the glass door snap open. Since Venn carried the card loose in his pocket, maybe the magnetic strip was fucked up or something.

  He walked about in search of an ATM held inside a bodega or all-night coffee shop or convenience store, starting to get anxious when he spotted one on a darkened stretch of Sherman Avenue just off 207th Street squeezed between a shoe repair shop and a cut-rate men’s clothing store, both with steel grates bolted down over their facades. The ATM was unique because it was squeezed inside an old-fashioned phone booth of all things which had faded from use around the time Venn was born. The glass was cracked in spider web fashion by what looked like well-placed rocks, reducing previously scrawled graffiti to fractured letters.

  Venn unfolded the door after encountering some initial resistance; a single overhead lightbulb flickered to life after he’d folded it back closed. The ATM, too, looked old and beaten down, if such a thing could be said about a machine. In the outdated listing of the various cards it accepted was a selection he’d never seen before: CURRENCY OF with the final word scratched over except for part of the first letter, probably an O or maybe a G. The slot to the right swallowed Venn’s card and the ATM’s ancient looking screen flashed to life, asking for his password, fresh letters scrolling across the screen after he entered it.

  HELLO, VENN.

  When did these machines get to be on a first-name basis? Something all wrong about that in Venn’s mind, but he was too relieved his card had actually worked to ponder that further.

  DO YOU NEED CASH THIS EVENING?

  There was a Y and N trailing the question, so Venn clicked on the Y.

  I’M OUT OF SERVICE RIGHT NOW.

  Well, give me back my card, motherfu
cker, Venn thought.

  SORRY, VENN, I CAN’T DO THAT RIGHT NOW.

  Had he spoken the words out loud instead of merely formed them?

  Venn found the CANCEL button and pressed it a whole bunch of times to no effect.

  I NEED YOU TO DO SOMETHING FOR ME. THEN I’LL GIVE YOU YOUR CARD BACK.

  What the fuck was this shit?

  A TRANSACTION, VENN, THAT’S WHAT THIS IS. DIFFERENT FROM THE ONES YOU’RE USED TO, BUT A TRANSACTION ALL THE SAME.

  The light-colored letters scrolled across the screen and froze there, leaving Venn wondering who was messing with him and why. Maybe this was like one of those hidden camera things for some kind of prank show, so he figured he should just go along with it. What choice did he have anyway, since the machine had already swallowed his ATM card?

  I’M GOING TO GIVE YOU AN ADDRESS, the scroll resumed. YOU NEED TO GO THERE.

  THEN WHAT? Venn used the keyboard to type, the two words appearing beneath the machine’s last scroll on the screen.

  YOU’LL KNOW WHEN YOU GET THERE. WHEN YOU’RE FINISHED, COME BACK AND I’LL RETURN YOUR CARD.

  PROMISE? Venn typed, minus the question mark yet it appeared anyway.

  PINKY SWEAR.

  That gave Venn a chill because it was his classic follow-up to any lie he formed at the shelters and group homes that would have him. He’d probably said it a thousand times over the years but had never heard another human being utter it even once. Then again, this was a machine.

  Venn didn’t do drugs, other than weed, because they messed with his head. Had he taken something earlier in the night and forgotten about it? Could he have ingested something without knowing it, maybe been dosed unwittingly? Seemed like that would be something he should remember.