Serial (38 page)

Roy Brannigan was terrified. If he managed to work his way along the building and get to a section of fence where he thought he could wriggle beneath it, he might be okay.

He’d known who Quinn was the second he’d seen him, and he couldn’t let the big detective catch him. He’d hit Quinn hard and heard the breath rush out of him, but he didn’t know how long he’d be down.

It was amazing, Roy thought, how suddenly everything had turned to crap. Jock Sanderson had been blackmailing him about the ticket stubs, and Roy was increasingly reluctant to pay. Sanderson’s threat to expose Roy and then live large in some country where there was no extradition treaty was losing credibility. It was easier to
talk
about setting yourself up as a wanted blackmailer and accessory to murder, and taking refuge in a foreign land, than it was to actually take the step.

But it wouldn’t hurt for Roy to have alibis in case the police happened to connect the dots. The stubs would be plausible. Some men let ticket stubs and the like build up in their wallets or on their dresser tops. The stubs would make it difficult if not impossible for him to be convicted of any of the Skinner murders.

At least, Jock Sanderson had convinced him of that.

And after the death of Link Evans, Roy thought he was completely safe.

Roy had latched on to Link Evans’s extramarital adventures while spying on him because he’d taken Roy’s place as Beth’s husband. Never one to ignore opportunity, Roy coordinated his Skinner murders with Link’s clandestine visits to New York to see Julie. Roy knew that Link would draw suspicion away from him, and also deny being in New York at the times of the murders. If push came to shove, Julie would provide Link’s alibis, but Link would do almost anything to avoid that eventuality. Not to mention that women in love make lousy witnesses.

Roy’s boot toe caught on a crack in the asphalt and he stumbled and almost fell. Another reminder that things could go wrong. His heart felt like a bird beating its wings in his chest.

This isn’t supposed to be happening! This isn’t fair!

Roy had wanted only to rid the earth of destroyers of innocent men. Such women gave false witness and were possessed by the devil. Like his own wife Beth, who’d ruined the lives of two men and bore the son of the devil that possessed her. Roy hadn’t anticipated Satan working through a blackmailer to torment and defeat him. Or unleashing on him a cop stubborn enough to follow every lead and learn the answer to every question.

Roy felt a joyous pang of hope. He should never have doubted his special blessing and mission as God’s blade of vengeance. He was almost there. The parked trailers made good cover. He could see the misshapen corner of the fence and the scooped-out area of dirt where kids, or maybe a large dog, had squeezed beneath it. Roy was lean and strong. He knew with certainty that if he made it to the fence, he could escape from the lot, escape Quinn.

He was dashing the final fifty feet toward the break in the fence when the blast of a gunshot temporarily froze him. He spun and saw Quinn about a hundred feet away, trudging around the nose of a parked trailer. His movements were deliberate. His head was down, but his eyes were trained on Roy. He looked like doom itself.

Roy began dancing backward toward the fence corner, watching Quinn, watching the muzzle of the gun. It wasn’t aimed directly at him, but pointed to the right and down.

Quinn fired again. This time Roy didn’t flinch at the shot, but he heard the bullet zing off the chain-link fence. There were buildings outside the fence, on the opposite side of the street. He knew Quinn would have to be careful shooting at him, making sure where his warning shots would go.

His warning shots.

Quinn could safely fire a bullet into him and not worry about collateral damage, but only when he got close enough.

Keep moving! Keep moving!

Roy kept walking backward with the grace of a ballet dancer, almost skipping. He couldn’t look away from Quinn, who was coming at him slowly but relentlessly, angling like a boxer cutting off space in a ring, cornering his prey.

Roy knew now that he’d never have time to squeeze beneath the fence. When he got to within ten feet of the chain-link corner and its sturdy steel post, he wheeled and at the same time slipped his Amalgamated shirt over his head, whipping it inside out. He tossed the shirt up over the razor wire that topped the fence and launched himself after it.

For a few seconds it worked. Then the razor wire came through the thin material of the shirt and sliced into Roy’s arms. He glanced back and saw Quinn still coming, and he panicked, flailing his arms and desperately trying to gain enough grip despite the pain so he could pull himself up and over. It was pure primal reaction now.
He had to escape!
The razor wire was like fire. He was surprised to see one of his fingers sliced almost all the way through and dangling limply by a flap of skin.

He heard Quinn calmly say his name behind him.

All right! Enough…

Roy released his grip on the razor wire. Part of his shirt ripped away and fell with him like a bloody flag as he dropped from the fence and slumped exhausted with his back against the chain link. He cradled the section of ripped shirt wrapped around both bleeding hands.

Quinn holstered his revolver and knelt beside him, as if to administer an act of mercy.

But what Roy saw in Quinn’s eyes wasn’t mercy; it was curiosity.

“Where’d you get the ticket stub?” Quinn asked.

“Same place I got the others,” Roy said.

“You gonna tell me now, or later?”

Roy told him, and then told him everything else, not liking it at all, but not minding what was going to happen to Jock Sanderson, thinking ex-wives, what a pot full of trouble they are.

Quinn thought it was over. He shifted his weight so he was squatted near Roy, reaching out to adjust the bloody strips of shirt wound around his injured hand.

That was when Roy pulled the carpet tucking knife out from the bloody rags with his good hand. The wickedly hooked blade flashed through the narrow space between the two men. Quinn got his arm up right away, or the blade would have severed a carotid artery, and Roy would have had the pleasure of seeing him bleed to death. The gash in Quinn’s arm gushed red as he backed away, drawing his revolver from its holster. He slashed sideways with the gun and knocked the knife out of Roy’s hand and away, on Roy’s second attempt to kill him.

Quinn got up on one knee, laid his gun on the pavement, then removed his shirt and tied it around the gash in his arm.

He used his belt to make a tourniquet, which he yanked tight high on his bicep.

Roy had his injured hands together again inside the blood-coagulated mass of material that was his shirt. On his knees and elbows, he was crawling toward the knife lying on the blacktop. Quinn knew what Roy wanted. It was what almost all the sick animals who became serial killers wanted—to exit in a blaze of glory. Fame and finale at last! Quinn would have to kill him, if Quinn himself hoped to survive.

Sirens were sounding blocks away. The NYPD wolves closing in. Roy didn’t have much time. But it was enough to get his wish.

They were across the street from a boarded-up building. Parked trailers blocked vision from the warehouse.

When Roy had almost reached the knife, both his hands still wrapped tightly in the packed layers of his shirt material, Quinn picked up his revolver and aimed carefully. Three bullets ripped through the bloody mass of material, and through Roy’s hands.

Roy stopped crawling, then rolled over on the hot blacktop and stretched his jaws wide in a silent scream of terror and frustration. He drew up his knees and hugged his ruined hands tightly to his body.

“Self defense,” Quinn said. “You came at me again with the knife.”

“Not fair!” Roy yowled. “Not goddamn fair! Shoot me! Shoot me in the heart!”

“You’ve got no heart,” Quinn said. “And you won’t harm another woman with what’s left of those hands, in or out of prison.”

“You’re goin’ to hell!”

“Maybe we’ll do this again there,” Quinn said.

“Roy Brannigan all the time,” Renz said from behind his vast, uncluttered desk. “He did his Skinner murders between out-of-state truck runs delivering carpet, and he used Link Evans for a patsy, while Evans was using those same weekends in New York putting it over on his wife with Julie Flack.”

“Jock Sanderson had it worked out almost from the beginning,” Quinn said. “He used Roy to kill Judith Blaney, the woman who’d wrongly sent Sanderson to prison. Sanderson even provided Roy with an alibi. But all the time, he was planning on taking it further with blackmail. The little bastard decided he’d rather be a rich fugitive in South America or someplace else with a favorable exchange rate, living high where there was no extradition treaty and he couldn’t be touched by the law, than be an impoverished janitor in this country.”

“He didn’t get to the airport quite fast enough,” Renz said. He opened a desk drawer and withdrew an aluminum tube. He unscrewed the tube and produced a cigar, which he fired up with a lighter from the same drawer, puffing so that his jowls expanded and made him look like a bullfrog working up to a good croak. Instead of croaking, he said, “There’s a certain judge wants to take a bite out of your ass, Quinn. His wife is pretty much out of legal trouble, but she’s embarrassed as hell.”

“I did what I could.”

“He puts people like that away all the time.”

“The incredibly popular police commissioner will protect me,” Quinn said.

Renz smiled around the cigar. “Thash true.” He removed the cigar from his mouth and held it up. “You want one of these? Against the rules, but so what? We’re celebrating the arrest of the real Skinner.”

“No, thanks.”

“You’re gonna go home and smoke one of your Cubans. That’s okay. I’m gonna hold a press conference this afternoon, talk about how our policy under my administration is never to give up on a case until all avenues are explored and all questions answered. We owe it to the public.”

“I’ll be watching on TV,” Quinn lied. He’d already seen Renz blow enough smoke for one day.

“You did a good job, Quinn. If you were still in the department, I’d present you with a commendation. But you can understand why I won’t mention your name or Julie Flack’s in the press conference.”

“Sure. It’s your press conference. Your political ass.”

Renz smiled and blew more smoke.

Quinn and Pearl stood and watched the workmen put the finishing touches on laying the brownstone’s upstairs carpet. The gray-haired man doing the artful and delicate trimming around the baseboard finished with his tucking knife and then stood up and grinned, admiring his work. He glanced over at Quinn and Pearl.

“Beautiful,” Quinn said. The spread of beige carpet lay wide and pristine, a geometrically perfect blank space awaiting an identity. Outside the tall windows, their panes distorted by the years of three centuries, the city hummed and bustled, but the old building’s thick walls reduced the sounds to subtle punctuation.

“It makes a hell of an improvement,” the carpet layer said.

Quinn agreed.

Pearl gave Quinn’s arm a squeeze. “It looks like home.”

A multiple Edgar and Shamus Award winner, John Lutz is the author of over forty books. His novel
SWF Seeks Same
was made into the hit film
Single White Female
. He lives in St Louis, Missouri.

*Mister X

*Urge to Kill

*Night Kills

*In for the Kill

Chill of Night

Fear the Night

*Darker Than Night

Night Victims

The Night Watcher

The Night Caller

Final Seconds (
with David August
)

The Ex

SWF Seeks Same

*featuring Frank Quinn