Killer (10 page)

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I sit panting in my erstwhile grave, half-covered in damp dirt, grateful and terrified, my heart banging my ribs like a caged madman. I look around quickly, fearful, and see nothing but trees towering over me in stillness. My hungry breathing is the only sound. I crawl out of the pit and scramble to my feet, my voice making sounds I’ve never heard before.

I turn, looking around for whoever has done this to me and see no one. I look back down at the hole I climbed out of, my lungs still sucking the precious cold. It is Sharon Belton’s grave.

I run off, back through these horrible woods, staggering through slashing brush and branch and out into the open moonlight, where I stumble over a headstone and fall and then get up and run to my car, heaving and mewling like a beaten animal.

I find my keys in my filth-covered jeans and unlock the door and get inside and start the car and tear off, spraying gravel and thanking God that Sharon Belton’s grave hadn’t become my own.

I roar back the way I came, down Rt. 90, gripping the steering wheel hard to keep my hands from shaking. Dirt and grit filter down from my hair and into my eyes.

“Hunhh! Hunhh!”

I shake the dirt out wildly, shuddering and sneezing and coughing up clots of soil and snot and nearly driving off the road. I right the car and wipe my sleeve across my face and think only primitive thoughts of getting away, getting out, getting back to bright lights and cities and airports and daytime and comforting furniture and pretty lawyers in clean suits with charming smiles and fresh fruit and coffee waiting to nourish and soothe and save me.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Fuck.

I am back at McDougal’s bar in Pasadena. In my dark booth in the corner, farthest from the door, and I am drunk.

Fuck fuck FUCK. Jesus God, what have I done? Five years of riding the wagon and now I’ve fallen off and fallen hard and I have really fucked up. Fucked up, drunk off my ass like the fucking drunken loser that I am. I look around. How the hell did I wind up here of all places? How long have I been here? How did I get here? I try to remember but my head is pounding and my mind is full of wet fog.

He comes to me with a fifth of Jack and two fresh glasses. He places the bottle and the glasses in front of me, then turns to the jukebox. He puts money in it and selects a song. The low, slow pulse of the bass guitar and the smoky, bluesy chords play from the jukebox:

Jesus just left Chicago and he’s bound for New Orleans,

Well now, Jesus just left Chicago and he’s bound for New Orleans,

Workin’ from one end to the other and all points in between…

He slides into the booth across from me in the dark. Who the hell is this? I try to think clearly but I can’t. I can barely hold my head up. I can’t see his eyes, only my own face distorted twice—reversed—once in each lens of his rectangular wire-framed glasses. The bar is quiet, and his deep, soft voice is pitched so low that I feel it resonate in my chest.

I listen.

“Used to play this song all the time when I was hauling machine parts out of Chicago,” he says.

I nod sloppily to the music, the slow Texas shuffle…

“So you’re a writer?” he asks. His face is solemn, but his voice has a hint of a smile behind it.

“Nn,” I nod, a bobble-head drunk.

He opens the bottle and pours my glass full and the aroma fills my senses.

“Well I’ve got a story for you, Doc,” he says.

CHAPTER TWENTY

“Sir?”

A woman’s voice.

“Sir.”

I force my dry eyes open, the light sending a shot of pain through my head. A flight attendant, blonde with dark roots, glaring at me impatiently.

“Are you alright?”

I nod slightly, my head pounding.

“We’re in Boston and you’ll have to deplane.”

I look around, remembering where I am. The plane is empty and quiet. I rise unsteadily, gritting my teeth against the pain in my skull.

“Are you sure you’re alright?”

“Yeah.”

I’m not hung over. I didn’t get drunk. It was only a guilt-dream. I was attacked…buried…

Right?

I slide out from between the seats and reach for my small bag in the open overhead compartment above my seat.

“Did you want those?” She points to the seat-back pocket in front of my seat.

I look at where she’s pointing and see two little bottles of Jack Daniel’s tucked into the seat-back pocket, their tiny necks sticking above the elastic seam on the pocket, both bottles topped with brown whiskey and their seals intact. She leans over and pulls the bottles from the pocket and holds them out to me.

“No,” I say.

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“Hang on.” She puts the bottles in her pocket, then reaches into another pocket for a wad of small bills and starts to count out money for me.

“Did I—order any other drinks?” I ask.

“Nope. Just these, but then you fell asleep.”

She holds out ten dollars.

“Keep it.”

“Oh, no, here—” She holds the money out.

“Please.” I hold my palm up. “Thank you,” I say to her, and then turn and get off the plane.

Thank God. Thank you, God,
I think as I get off the plane and head into Logan airport. I have had guilty drunk-dreams before but this was the most vivid. I pause to let the pounding subside in my head. I reach up and touch the bandage over my brow. It is damp and hot to the touch. I see blood on my fingers.

I go to the restroom and my reflection forces me back a step, from shock. My face is milk white and my eyes are red slits sunk in sallow hollows beneath filthy, coagulated hair. The Band-Aid I bought at the Kansas City airport is soaked through with blood. I didn’t even realize I was cut until I had driven halfway back to Kansas City and a trickle of blood dripped into my eye. I don’t remember being hit—I only remember the blinding light.

I had washed up at the airport in Kansas City the best I could, then wrapped some ice in a napkin and held it there until the bleeding stopped, but I guess it started again. I peel the blood-soaked Band-Aid off, wincing when I see the deep, open split in my brow. I may need stitches but not here, not now. My flight to Burlington connects in an hour and I will stop at the ER at the university hospital on the way home.

I wash up and dab the cut clean and put a towel against the wound until the bleeding stops and then I take the small packet of Band-Aids from my pocket and apply two fresh ones and go find my gate and sit there and think.

What in the name of God is happening?

I take out my phone and dial my voicemail. Four messages:
“Jack? It’s Nicki. Call me right away, please.”
The next one, again from Nicki:
“Jack, where are you? It’s very important that you call me immediately. I’m at the office but here’s my cell…”
A similar message from Joel, and one from Arnie.

Now what?

I sit there, wondering what to do. Everything in me resists the idea of calling them. I am certain it is bad news.

They call boarding time for my flight and I get up and I am the first in line to get on the flight to Burlington and get the hell out of here.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

I drive away from Burlington International Airport in my truck and head for the University of Vermont hospital. I reach it in a few minutes and pull into the parking lot beside the ER.

I go inside and give my information to the registry nurse and she gives me a chemical ice pack for my head and I sit in the waiting room. I take out my phone and look at Nicki’s number. I don’t want to hear what she has to tell me, but how long can I put it off? I snap the phone shut and put it in my pocket and distract myself with the television hanging from the ceiling in a corner of the waiting area. The TV is tuned to a daytime talk show featuring the show’s hosts, all women, interviewing transsexuals about their difficulties maintaining meaningful long-term relationships. I take out my phone again and look at Nicki’s number. I try to gather my scattered thoughts and, in my dizzy, light-headed state, I find those thoughts focusing on Nicki. But not as my attorney. As a woman. I don’t want to call her because I’m afraid of what she has to tell me. But I
want
to call her just to talk to her, to hear her voice. I wonder if I could have a meaningful long-term relationship with her. I listen to the advice from the women on the talk show, but none of it seems to apply. “Love is love, no matter who you are,” one of the hosts tells one of the transsexuals, who is crying.
Love is a sickness full of woes, all remedies refusing.
The TV cuts to a commercial for floor wax. I close my eyes.
Love beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things…

I feel my pulse rising inexorably. I can’t stop it. Panic needles again, up and down my arms and legs, more than before, more than I can remember…

The door opens to the waiting area and a short, round nurse calls my name and I get up and follow her back to an exam room, where I sit on the paper-covered examination table. Flecks of grave soil drop off my clothes and onto the white paper and I brush them off. I look up and see myself in a small mirror on the wall and once again I am taken aback by my wretched appearance. My face is colorless and my breathing is shallow and realize I am probably in shock. Maybe I have a concussion. I look dead. Hell, for all I know I
am
dead. That would answer a lot of questions—if I were lost in purgatory like some doomed character in a bad horror movie.

The door to the exam room opens and a young doctor breezes in. Thirty at most, with thick, jet-black hair and the brusque manner of every ER physician except George Clooney.

“Hello,” he says, without looking up from the information I filled out for the registry nurse.

“Hello,” I say. He kicks his rolling metal stool over between his legs and sits squarely in front of me and looks at my brow.

“Let’s have a look.” He snaps on a pair of latex gloves and swabs something across my Band-Aids and peels them off.

“Nasty cut,” he says, and looks closer. “Got some infection. How’d you get this?”

Oh, I was just nosing around a murder victim’s shallow grave at two a.m. and this blinding light struck me down like Saul on the road to Damascus and next thing I knew I was buried alive. At least I think I’m alive…you might want to check my vitals just to make sure, Doc…

Doc.

Killer liked to call people that. And in the dream…what was that the guy had said…?
“I’ve got a story for you, Doc.”

I have had dreams about Killer before—obscure, haunting dreams—but this dream was different. I actually believed this was really happening…it had the
feel
of something that really happened…

The doctor presses a wad of gauze against my eyes and I can feel him squirt Betadine over the wound. It stings like hell. He sops up the drips of Betadine then pulls the gauze away and I see the needle.

“Little stick now,” he says, as he raises a syringe toward my face, its long needle moving up to my eye and over it, to my brow, and my shoulders tense as he sticks the needle right into the wound. I grit my teeth as the needle penetrates.

I’ll give you a ‘little stick,’ you little prick. Why don’t you just tell the truth? “I’m gonna stick a needle right into your deep, bleeding wound and it’s gonna hurt like a motherfucker.”

I can see his gloved hand pushing the plunger down slowly, filling my wound with lidocaine, and I wait for the numbness and it comes and I realize how much it had been hurting me and now I feel warm fuzzy feelings for my friend the doctor whom I now like
ever
so much.

“I walked into a door,” I answer his question belatedly.

I feel him look at me as he cleans the wound deeper. He doesn’t say anything, just proceeds to treat me.

I flash on a long-buried memory of being treated in an ER while I was drinking. I had found myself in a downtown L.A. emergency room in the middle of the night, coming off a howling bender with a bad cut on the back of my head. I had no idea how or where I got the injury but I told the doctor I fell, and the doctor’s silence was the same silence I feel now from the doctor who is quickly applying a series of butterfly bandages to my brow. I know I present like a drunk or an addict—having fallen down and hurt myself, looking like I slept in an alley. Or in a grave…

“Okay,” he says, finishing already. “Here,” he hands me a few aluminum sample packets of Polysporin and then snaps his gloves off. “Put some of this on there tonight and every day until you run out and if you see any redness or swelling you need to get it taken care of. The bandages will come off on their own in about a week,” he says this slowly and clearly, as though he were talking to a five year-old. To him I am a stumbling drunk, or some kind of problematic person that he doesn’t want coming back here.

“Thanks,” I say, and get off the table as he writes something on my chart.

“Take care,” he says, without looking at me, and then walks out.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

I steer my truck homeward, running my mind over everything. I am confused and in trouble but somehow I feel okay. Maybe it’s the lidocaine, but I feel calmer as I near my cabin. I feel my strength and confidence returning as I crest the last hill before my driveway and I am thinking of calling Nicki the moment I get home and then I see Claire Boyle’s Sheriff’s Dept. SUV parked near the front of my driveway, pulled off onto the shoulder of the rutted drive. As I come closer I see no one in the vehicle so I drive on by without slowing down.

Time to call Nicki.

I pick up the phone and dial, watching my driving carefully.

“Jack Rhodes returning Nicki’s call,” I say to Nicki’s assistant.

I wait for what seems forever and then Nicki’s voice in my ear.