Killing Spree (4 page)

It got so every time Barry bought her an expensive present, Gillian nagged him about spending beyond their budget. Then afterward, she’d feel horribly guilty and ungrateful.

One Saturday morning, Barry went off to work for “a couple of hours,” and by 11:15 that night, he still hadn’t returned home. Gillian hadn’t been able to get ahold of him. She was going out of her mind, and kept busy doing laundry all evening. On a trip up from the building’s basement with a load from the dryer, she saw him sneaking into the apartment. His back was to her, and his suit looked dirty and disheveled. He had his key in the door.

“Where in the world have you been?” she whispered.

Barry swiveled around. Gillian gasped and dropped the laundry basket. His beautiful face had been savagely beaten. His right eye was swollen shut, and dried blood was caked around his nose and mouth. “I got mugged,” he replied, talking out of one side of his mouth. His lip was split. “These two guys jumped me.”

In the bathroom, she helped him clean up his face. They spoke in whispers, so as not to wake Ethan. Barry didn’t want their son seeing him like this. “It’ll give him nightmares.”

The more Gillian asked exactly how it had happened, the less Barry wanted to talk about it. Finally, he admitted he hadn’t gone to the police yet. “Two teenage boys made me fork over all the money out of my wallet—along with my watch and my wedding ring,” he said. “Then they kicked the shit out of me. Please don’t humiliate me any further by making me tell this all to the cops.”

Gillian called the police anyway.

“I really wish you wouldn’t have done that,” Barry grumbled, changing his clothes to go to the station.

They had a neighbor sit with Ethan, and drove to the station house together. Barry was friendly, but not terribly helpful to the detective questioning him. He had a tough time recalling what his assailants had looked like, and was vague about the exact time and location of the incident. The police didn’t think he’d get back the wedding ring or the watch.

Two days later, Barry told Gillian of a fantastic job offer with a new ad agency in Seattle. Apparently, a former superior from Leo Burnett had recently defected there, and he’d asked for Barry. The job meant more money. The only catch was they needed him right away. So Gillian packed up and they moved—all very hastily, almost stealthily. She should have known something was wrong. But the mugging had soured them both on their neighborhood. And she imagined a fresh start with a chance for a real home.

Gillian found the duplex within days. Eight-year-old Ethan finally had a genuine bedroom—with a window, and a view of the ravine.

They hadn’t even finished unpacking when Barry gave her the bad news. The ad agency had gone belly-up. He scurried around looking for a job, any job. That was how the former ad executive ended up driving a delivery truck. As for Gillian, even with her file full of prize-winning syndicated stories, all she found was part-time grunt work at a Seattle weekly newspaper.

Barry had to be up at 3:30 in the morning to make his route, so he was usually in bed and asleep by 8:30—unless one of his union meetings went late into the night. They often interfered with weekends too. Gillian filled the nights alone by writing her first thriller—in notebooks and on an old laptop at the kitchen table. Later, Barry converted the pantry into her writing alcove. He was always doing things like that.

In three years, Gillian had written two thrillers,
Killing Legend
and
Highway Hypnosis
, and she’d started
The Mark of Death
. The two completed manuscripts collected a total of seventy-two rejections from literary agencies and publishers. Barry was always sneaking into the local union headquarters after hours and using their Xerox to make extra copies for her. With her husband’s encouragement, Gillian took all the literary rejection in her stride. She kept revising, rewriting, and resubmitting her manuscripts.

Then something happened that gave them hope. A coworker told her about a literary agent in San Francisco. Her name was Marcia Tokata, and she was accepting new clients. Gillian e-mailed her with a brief synopsis of
Killing Legend
. The next day, Marcia telephoned Gillian and told her that the plot of
Killing Legend
had best-seller potential. She was eager to read the manuscript. And yes, she wanted to read Gillian’s other book too. Could she send them both overnight mail? In the meantime, she wanted Gillian to make a list of hot leading men they could approach to play her sexy-star-turned-psycho-slayer in the movie version. She had a partner at one of the big entertainment agencies in Los Angeles. What did Gillian think about Colin Farrell?

In all the months and months she’d been trying to land an agent, this was the first time Gillian felt a connection with someone. Never had she met an agent this enthusiastic about her work—and Marcia hadn’t even read her manuscripts yet.

Three months later, Marcia still hadn’t read her manuscripts—and she wasn’t answering Gillian’s calls or e-mails. Gillian had long since abandoned the notion of Clive Owen starring in the film version of
Killing Legend
. She wrote Marcia a polite note, hinting that after three months of nothing, she wanted to pursue another agent to represent her.

The manuscripts came back the next week—along with a letter:

“She’s a moron,” Barry concluded. “And look at this sentence, ‘I
seriously think
you should
give serious thought
to
giving
up writing.’ Huh, got the word repetition or what?”

Ethan had the brilliant suggestion that his mother name a nasty character in one of her books
Marcia Tokata
, then kill her off—painfully.

Gillian didn’t give up writing. Barry wouldn’t let her. She sent
Killing Legend
to five more agents. One of them was Eve Kohner in New York. Eve thought she should revise her first chapter, and Gillian obliged her. Two months later, Eve sold the manuscript to Shalimar Books.

In celebration, Gillian, Barry, and Ethan went out for an expensive dinner, and she didn’t nag Barry about overspending when he ordered champagne. The five-thousand-dollar advance for the book went to buy a new sofa and pay off their Visa bill. The release of
Killing Legend
didn’t exactly make Gillian a household name. It didn’t make them rich either. But Gillian was thrilled. She was a
published author
. Readers actually wrote fan letters to her publisher—okay, only a handful of people wrote to her, but it was still a very heady experience. The local supermarket didn’t carry her book. But Barry always told her—and anyone who would listen—whenever he noticed
his wife’s book
in one of the stores on his delivery route.

Gillian received another twelve grand to fulfill a two-book contract with the already completed
Highway Hypnosis
and
The Mark of Death
. Eve explained that the pressure was on for her to deliver two thrillers a year. Gillian was up for it. And the money came in the nick of time, because she’d been laid off at the weekly. Just as well. The jerks there didn’t even review or promote her book. The contract money went to pay bills too. Gillian had been hoping they could buy a house, but realized that wouldn’t happen any time soon. What did happen was their landlord came to the door one morning after Barry had gone to work and announced that they had thirty days to evacuate the premises or he’d call the police on them. Their last two rent checks had bounced.

Barry, the former business major, always paid the bills and balanced their checkbook. Gillian had written enough checks to keep track of how they were doing, and it didn’t make sense that they’d been bouncing checks. In a panic, she called the bank, and they confirmed that the savings and checking accounts were overdrawn. Their credit cards had been maxed out as well. Barry’s tabulations in the checkbook didn’t reflect any of this.

Gillian put in a distress call to her mother in Florida. Mrs. McBride cashed in some bonds and wired them five thousand dollars. Gillian paid their landlord everything they owed—plus two more months in advance. “I really didn’t want to evict you folks,” the landlord explained, almost apologetic. “Until the checks bounced, you’ve been swell tenants, Mrs. Tanner. And your husband is such a nice guy.”

Barry was so ashamed. He was like a little kid, caught in a lie. He confessed he’d made a bad investment a few months before—a real estate venture in Nevada that was supposed to be a
sure thing
. He didn’t want to tell her about the ensuing catastrophe until things looked less bleak. He hadn’t been very honest with her about a series of recent “union meetings” either. He’d been taking on extra shifts in an effort to recoup their losses.

Gillian kept thinking she should have known. If something like this had happened to the heroine in one of her books, the woman would have realized early on her husband was lying to her. How could her heroines be so smart when she was so stupid?

They got some unexpected help from Sweden and the Czech Republic, when the foreign rights for
Killing Legend
were sold to publishers in both countries for a combined eight thousand dollars. It didn’t completely abolish their debt. But it undid some of the financial and psychological damage from Barry’s bad investment. Gillian was in a better position to forgive him, and forgive him she did. “Just don’t ever lie to me again, okay?” she asked.

From then on, Gillian paid the bills and balanced the checkbook. She’d sent a resume to the Seattle City Experimental College, along with a proposal to teach a creative writing class on Thursday nights. They hired her. The job was good for grocery money—at least. Gillian figured if she watched their budget, they could be out of debt by the end of the year.

That was why it seemed so odd—months after their
almost
eviction—Barry was crying in the middle of the night, calling himself a “fuckup,” and saying Gillian would have been better off if she’d never met him.

“Barry, stop pacing around and tell me what happened,” she said, raising her voice a bit. “I’m going to find out eventually. So you might as well tell me now. Did you—make another bad investment? Is that it?”

With a sigh, he plopped down at the foot of the bed. He sat there for a moment, shoulders hunched forward. Gillian ran her hand up and down his back. “What is it?” she whispered. “Tell me.”

He shook his head. “It’s nothing. I just started thinking about what a bum deal you got when you married me. You thought you were getting an advertising executive, and maybe some nice house in Winnetka or Lake Forest. Instead, you ended up with a truck driver in a dump of a duplex in Seattle. If it weren’t for your mother and your books bailing us out, I would have sunk this family. Me and my stupid schemes…”

“Oh, Barry, that’s old business,” she said, hugging him. “It’s forgotten. We’re doing okay now. You have a wife and son who both worship you.”

They tumbled back on the bed and held onto each other. Barry kissed her deeply. Gillian sensed he still harbored some awful secret. But she didn’t dare ask. She had a feeling the twelve years they’d spent building a life together and raising a son would all go down the drain if he told her what was really troubling him. So she didn’t ask. She just clung to him.

There was suddenly something inside her too—a feeling of dread in the pit of her stomach. That awful foreboding sensation didn’t go away, not even after they’d made love that night. Gillian remembered it was only two weeks before Barry disappeared. All that time, the knots in her stomach hadn’t gone away. It was as if her body had known what was going to happen.

Barry took two suitcases with him. But he’d left so much behind. Most of his clothes still hung in their closet. His favorite coffee mug was still on the kitchen shelf. She and Ethan still waited for him to come back.

Gillian hugged his pillow, and wondered about that mysterious e-mail: “Gillian, I found your husband.” Did it mean she was closer to seeing Barry again? Or was it an indication that she and Ethan had lost him forever?

She heard rain pattering against the bedroom window. Gillian opened her eyes to see the dawn’s gray light seeping through the thin drapes. Then a shadow passed across the very edge of the window. It made her sit up.