by J L Aarne
So Rainer was less than pleased to see Thomas, even though he hadn’t seen him in a week. His mind was occupied more by the idea that out there somewhere at that very moment someone was pretending to be him. It just would not stand. While grateful for the stellar timing, he was not flattered by the imitation, he found it vexing.
“Are you okay?” Thomas asked him, falling into step at his side. He put a hand on Rainer’s back to subtly steer him toward where he had parked the car. “You look kind of…”
“I’m furious, Thomas,” Rainer said.
They reached the car and Thomas hit the power locks with his keychain. “Oh yeah? What happened? Did Agent Asshole use you just like I warned you he would?”
Rainer opened the passenger door then paused and looked at him. His eyes focused as he dragged himself out of his homicidal contemplation. “What? No, of course not, he was irritating, but what can you expect? He is supposed to believe I’m a psycho killer.”
They got in the car and Thomas cranked it. “It probably helps him that you are, in fact, a psycho killer,” he said.
“Whatever. That’s not the point,” Rainer said. “You’re missing the point, Thomas.”
“What is the point then, Rainer?”
“There was another murder. Another Lamplighter murder. Which is impossible and infuriating.”
Thomas backed the car out. “Rainer, you should probably know—”
“No, listen. You see that woman back there? The redhead?” Rainer said, twisting around to point back toward the police station. Diana was no longer on the steps, but Thomas had been standing right there when she walked by him. “That’s my lawyer. A cop told her. There was another one, but there can’t be another one, Thomas. You know why?”
“Because you’re The Lamplighter?” Thomas guessed. It wasn’t a great leap of deduction.
They came to a red light and he braked.
“And I was in jail!” Rainer spat. “Which means someone out there is killing my way and I won’t have it, Thomas. That’s mine. Those people, the women and men, I killed them. They belong to me. How dare some uncreative fucking upstart come along and—”
“It was me,” Thomas said.
“—it’s like stealing. My work, my reputation, my—What?” Rainer went very still and turned his head to look at Thomas.
The red light turned green and traffic began to move again.
“I said, it was me,” Thomas repeated. “And I’m sorry I copied you, but I wouldn’t have been doing it otherwise. They had to believe it was you. Or rather, that you are not The Lamplighter.”
Rainer said nothing and stared at him, his mind racing and quickly filling in what had happened and why. Thomas had learned about where he was and why and he had created a diversion. The perfect diversion. Thomas had killed for him.
“Your crazy friend Elijah showed up at my house—I don’t know why he knows where I live, by the way—and told me what was going on,” Thomas said. “He had to help me with the details—you never really talk about how you do it—but in the end I—”
Rainer unbuckled his seatbelt and leaned over the console to kiss him. Thomas tensed and turned his head away. “What the fuck are you doing? We’re going to wreck,” he said. He pushed Rainer back. “Sit down. And put your seatbelt back on. Jesus, Rainer.”
“That’s the sweetest thing you’ve ever done for me, Thomas,” Rainer said. He did not put his seatbelt back on but remained turned toward him and leaned back in to kiss his cheek. “And incredibly sexy. I wish I could have been there.”
Thomas shivered at the warmth of his breath on his neck and rolled his shoulder up against the sensation. “Seriously, you have got to quit it,” he said, watching him out the corner of his eye. “I’m driving.”
Rainer gave up because while he had no moral reason or sense of shame that would have prevented him from slipping his hand down Thomas’s pants while he was in the turning lane, he did not want to be in a car accident and Thomas was right. So he returned to his seat, put his seatbelt back on and tapped his fingers on the door while he looked out the window and Thomas drove.
Thomas took them back to Rainer’s place because it was closer. Once they were out of the car, Rainer backed him up against it and kissed him. There was nothing to stop him and Thomas didn’t even try.
It took Rainer all of Sunday to put his apartment back in order after the police search. They hadn’t broken anything and Pogo hadn’t gotten loose and run away, but they had made a hell of a mess and they hadn’t put anything back where they had found it. Thomas had cleaned the kitchen that morning before he made breakfast and straightened a few things here and there as he moved around the apartment, but he hadn’t cleaned it for him as was his obsessive way because he had to get home and get ready for work.
Rainer didn’t mind the mess like Thomas did, he didn’t even mind cleaning it up. He put Ben E. King on the record player and it was even kind of nice, though he was outraged that strangers had entered his home, his territory, and tossed everything around like it was nothing but garbage in their way that they did not owe any respect to before leaving. It was the trespass that made him mad, more so because there wasn’t anything he could do about it.
It was as he was finishing with the bedroom, hanging the clothes the cops had tossed on the bed and the floor back up in the closet, that there was a knock on his door. A loud, banging, demanding cop-knock that instantly set his teeth on edge. It came again as he was walking down the hallway toward the door and it was hard enough to rattle the door in the frame.
Rainer picked up his cell phone off the top of the piano as he went to the door, ready to call Diana Barker if it was the police returned to accuse him of something else and maybe this time arrest him for it. When he looked through the peephole on the door, he saw nothing but blackness. Whoever it was had covered it.
“Who is it?” he called.
There was no answer and Rainer’s fingers hesitated on his phone. He didn’t want to call his lawyer if he didn’t actually need her.
“Who the hell is it?” he demanded.
From the other side of the door, Ezekiel said, “Open the door, Rainer.”
Rainer opened the door and found Ezekiel standing there, one arm braced on the top of the doorframe. He was wearing sunglasses and he looked at Rainer over the top of them and smiled. A bolt of pure desire shot right through his belly and just that quickly, Rainer wanted him. His own desire was reflected back at him in Ezekiel’s eyes. He dropped his arm from the doorframe and stepped into the apartment toward Rainer.
“Hello, sweetheart,” he said.
Rainer backed up so that he could move forward and close the door. As soon as it was closed, Ezekiel reached for him. Rainer was already there and they hit the door, pulling at each other’s clothes. Ezekiel’s sunglasses fell off when their mouths met in a rough kiss and were crunched under their feet as Ezekiel backed Rainer toward the hallway. They made it to the bedroom, but not to the bed. They ended up on the floor with the coat hangers and wrinkled shirts.
When they were done, they lay there catching their breath and Ezekiel laughed. Rainer had been on top and he lay slumped over him, his head resting on Ezekiel’s chest as he panted. The air conditioner hummed and turned their sweat between them icy. It took him a minute for Ezekiel’s soft laughter to register.
“What’s funny?” he asked.
“Everything,” Ezekiel said. “This. Us. All of it.”
“Mhmm. Well… perhaps we have a talent for self-destruction,” Rainer said, lifting his head to look down at him. He smiled though because he didn’t really believe it. “Or just destruction.”
“Yeah, well, if certain people were to find out…”
Ezekiel didn’t finish that sentence, but he didn’t have to. Rainer grinned and leaned down to kiss him. “I won’t tell if you won’t,” he said.
Ezekiel hadn’t been able to get away sooner because of work and because he was expected at home, though he had wanted to
. He had been crazy and itching to lay hands on Rainer once he got out of the police station, but Rainer had gone home with Thomas and Ezekiel knew he had to go home to Jacob. It wasn’t fair to Jacob—none of this was fair to Jacob—but it was getting easier to lie to him, too.
He’d woken Jacob up when he got home and they’d had sex. It had been good, but it hadn’t been what he really wanted, so it had left him feeling guilty and a little irritated about it. But the guilt was getting easier to deal with as well. It wasn’t quite the burden that it had been at the start and he could see the day when it wouldn’t be anything more than a shadow.
For Rainer, it was different. Thomas didn’t like Ezekiel, he didn’t trust him, but Ezekiel hadn’t turned Rainer in. He had, in fact, protected him. That bought him a little bit of credit. Not much, but enough that he let it all slide and wasn’t angry with Rainer anymore. He preferred it when Rainer didn’t fuck a lot of strangers and if that meant tolerating Ezekiel, he would learn to do it.
What he didn’t know was that all he had to do was ask Rainer not to have sex with other people, even Ezekiel, and Rainer wouldn’t. In a twisted way Rainer never completely understood, Thomas mattered in ways that other people did not matter. He had decided a long time ago that this was love; an emotion he had been told many times was beyond his capabilities.
He didn’t want to give up Ezekiel though, so he didn’t tell Thomas that. Thomas might ask him then and Rainer preferred things the way they were; Thomas believed completely that Rainer would not do such a thing for him. Rainer let him think so.
“You know, it is funny,” Rainer said.
Ezekiel looked at him and raised his eyebrows in question.
“You’re having a clandestine affair,” Rainer said, drawing his index finger down Ezekiel’s chest. “I’m not, but you are. It’s interesting. People would say, it takes two. I know, I’ve heard them say it, it’s silly. But I don’t think it does in our case. I am a little jealous.”
“Why?”
“Because you’ve got a secret.”
“I bet you still have secrets.”
Rainer smiled and shrugged. “Maybe,” he said.
He got off Ezekiel and went into the bathroom. The water in the shower turned on and Ezekiel started to get up, intending to join him, and noticed the cat sitting in the open bedroom doorway watching him.
“You like the show?” Ezekiel asked.
Pogo lifted a paw and began washing himself.
Ezekiel got up and stepped over the cat on his way to the bathroom to do the same.
Chapter 45
The Lamplighter had killed a girl named Vivian Prescott who nobody much cared about while Rainer was being questioned and after that there were no more. It was enough to turn suspicion off of Rainer. Detectives were still investigating the murders, but the LAPD didn’t have the time or resources to spend on following Rainer around when they had no physical evidence linking him to the crimes. They had no choice but to drop it and with no more bodies popping up cut open and burning the case started to go cold again in a couple of months.
There was every chance that The Lamplighter would resurface eventually—he had done it before—but until he did, the old murders were overshadowed by new murders. L.A. had many of them every week and after The Lamplighter hadn’t killed anyone for a while, police had to move on and the media moved on right along with them.
Rainer didn’t kill anyone, which helped throw them off, too. He wasn’t giving it up. He hadn’t quit. The urge to kill had curled up and bedded down to hibernate for the time being though. When it woke up again, who knew what form it would take? Not Rainer, though he expected when the time came it would have shed the skin of The Lamplighter and transformed into something new.
The week before Easter, Rainer had Ezekiel meet him at the kitschy little coffee shop he liked to show him the decorations and watch him eat a cupcake with a marshmallow Peep on top of it squatting in a nest of shredded green coconut. He had an espresso himself and a handful of jellybeans and they didn’t call it a date, but it was the sort of thing people did when they were dating.
That Friday, Rainer went to the restaurant to have dinner with Thomas, but Thomas wasn’t there. He had left work early, Mr. Gold said, and he hadn’t left a message for Rainer. It was not the first time Thomas had done such a thing, but it was becoming a habit Rainer did not approve of. They had dinner together on Fridays. Always, unless they were fighting, which they rarely did. They were not fighting that particular Friday. Thomas hadn’t left him a note or called to cancel and he clearly wasn’t too busy at work.
It occurred to Rainer that Thomas might be seeing somebody. He hadn’t had a girlfriend or boyfriend since Rainer ran off Jasmine, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t met someone else. Except if he had, Thomas would have mentioned it to him. And Rainer would have gotten rid of him or her. He had decided after Jasmine that these occasional relationships of Thomas’s with other people were an intolerable irritation. Jasmine had been too much.
Rainer called him and it went to voicemail.
Rainer almost hung up without leaving one. Then he said, “Thomas, I’m coming over. You better have a damn good reason for this. And if that reason is someone else, they better not be there when I get there.”
Rainer drove to Thomas’s house in Hancock Park, but he could see even before he pulled into the driveway that all the lights were out. Thomas hadn’t called him back and Thomas’s car was there but he didn’t appear to be home.
Rainer sat in his car for a few minutes and looked at the house sitting there in the bright full moonlight, trying to think of where else Thomas might be. Thomas probably had friends that Rainer did not know. Or at least people who thought they were his friends, which was more or less the same thing. He played baseball with some people occasionally, Rainer knew that, but he didn’t know who those people were and it was much too late for playing baseball.
Thomas had been a little different the past two or three years, but not so different that it was a marked personality change that would lead to him making friends and hitting all the clubs with his buddies. Thomas was a control freak, workaholic, germophobic misanthrope who never got ill, had left work early for reasons unknown and had nowhere else to go.
He got out of the car and went up the steps to the door. He knocked, but predictably there was no answer, so he used his key and went inside.
“Thomas?”
No answer.
The house was silent. One of Thomas’s dogs, Marley came out of the hallway where Thomas’s bedroom was and approached Rainer, tail wagging. Rainer petted his head absently and went by him down the hall. Each room he checked on his way to the bedroom was empty. He called Thomas, but Thomas didn’t answer because Thomas wasn’t there. He found clothes in the hallway outside of the bathroom; pants, a shirt, shoes, underwear and socks. Like Thomas had undressed in a hurry and thrown them down there.
Thomas would not do that. Thomas even put his clothes neatly aside most of the time before sex, unless Rainer didn’t give him a chance to, but even then, he would pick them up as soon as they were finished.
“Thomas?!” Rainer shouted into the house.
Marley had followed him down the hall and when he shouted the dog whined.
Rainer’s heart was racing. He could feel it in his throat and on the back of his tongue like a moth in a jar bashing itself against the glass. His fingers trembled as he reached out and pushed the bedroom door open. The moonlight fell through the window onto the bed and the empty room.
Marley went into the bedroom ahead of him and walked around the bed, sniffing, a soft whine escaping him like he was trying to talk to Rainer. Rainer started to back out of the room, but Marley barked and that drew him up short.
There was something on the other side of the bed. He turned on the light and revealed it to be the tail of another dog. A very large dog if the tail was anything to go by.
“Thomas?!” he called again.
He walked i
nto the room to go around the bed and get a look at the dog. Some new mutt the size of a horse Thomas had picked up and brought home because Thomas was a pushover when it came to animals.
But as Rainer drew near the bed, he realized that it wasn’t a dog. He didn’t at first know what it was, but it was shaped all wrong to be a dog. Then it picked up its head and looked at him and Rainer caught his breath like he’d been punched in the chest.
It wasn’t a dog, it was a monster.
It was beautiful and terrible and he knew the beast. It had taunted him from the darkness the night he killed Eden Raines. It had killed Pied and thrown the coyote’s head at him. It had followed him from the desert back to Thomas. It was impossible, but it was the same monster, the same long wolf’s nose, the same glowing eyes, the same pointed ears. And if the monster was in Thomas’s house, Thomas wasn’t there because Thomas was dead.
Thomas was gone. Gone forever. No more Thomas. Rainer would never see him again. He had been wiped out of the world by the impossible creature standing before him.
Rainer gasped and could not catch his breath. He stared at the thing and it didn’t move toward him, just watched him back and it was impossible, a thing snatched out of the pages of a dark fairy tale. Rainer felt the very real, very clean sensation of his mind snapping like the stem of a wineglass. It wasn’t the mythical beast there beside Thomas’s bed where it had no business being that shattered his mind, it was Thomas gone forever. The knowledge of his nonexistence from that moment stretching out to encompass the rest of Rainer’s life was hopelessly devastating.
His insides felt like they were somersaulting, his pulse beat so heavily that it hurt, he couldn’t catch his breath. Then he did and he screamed.
The wolf creature winced and backed away from him at the sound, but Rainer hardly noticed. He was blind, his vision swimming as his eyes filled with tears. He went down on one knee gasping and choking around his sobs as he tried to breathe.