To Kill Upon A Kiss

by Blake Banner

  “What truth?”

  “That he had killed the girls.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense, John!”

  “No, it doesn’t…”

  “John, are you sure of all this…?”

  Was I sure? I stared out of the windshield at the black mass of the trees and struggled to put the pieces together. But something was wrong. Something didn’t fit. In the distance I could hear more sirens wailing across the Bronx. I heard the crackle of a radio. Then there was a uniform running toward me. The inspector’s voice in my ear: “John! John, are you there?”

  “Sir?” The patrolman’s face was at the door of my car, peering at me. “Sir, the lights are on at your house, but nobody is answering.”

  Wild panic was pounding in my chest. I shouted, “Blow out the lock! Smash the window! Get in there! Get in there now!”

  I slammed the door. Fired up the engine, spun the wheel and went screaming north up Zerega. A voice in my head kept screaming at me that somehow he had got to Dehan. Somehow he had got to her. But how? That was the truth he had wanted to tell me. The one shred of hope I clung to was that her body had not been there. All his other victims had on that spot, by the river. That was where he killed.

  All but one.

  Then everything went into slow motion. Up ahead on the left I saw Teddy’s Late Night Bar. It was closed. I heard a horrible noise in my head and realized it was me, bellowing. I slammed on the brakes and careened across the road, my tires screaming on the blacktop. I hit the curb, mounted the sidewalk and, as the rage inside me took hold, I released the brake and stood on the gas pedal.

  There was a shattering explosion. I was thrown forward in my seat and smashed my chest and forehead against the wooden wheel. All around me there were showers of jagged, sparkling, spinning shards of glass, shattering and bouncing off the hood. They were like the shafts of pain stabbing through my head and my chest. But somehow it all seemed to be happening to somebody else, somewhere else.

  I shoved open the door and climbed out. There was an alarm bell jangling, lonely and ineffectual in the night. The Jag was half inside the bar. All around the hood was the shattered debris of glass, broken tables and chairs. I looked back down Zerega. I was six or seven hundred yards from the crime scene. And there was a bend in the road at the intersection with Randall. They would not have seen or heard anything.

  The bar was still and silent after the explosion of glass. It was a one story building that sprawled back and to the right from the bar. There would be an office. There would be a kitchen. There might be living accommodation. I pulled the Smith & Wesson from under my arm, cocked the hammer and moved across the floor to the bar. There was a door behind it. I remembered Teddy had come out through there the afternoon we had come to talk to him. I lifted the flap, moved behind the bar and stepped up to it. It was locked.

  I selected the screwdriver from my Swiss Army knife, rammed it in the lock and turned. By the dim light that filtered in through the plate glass windows, I saw a short passage. At the end of the passage I could make out a single door. There was no handle and no lock, but there was a spring-loaded arm at the top. My gut told me this was the kitchen. I inched forward and pulled the door open, holding it with my foot. Nothing happened. I crouched down and peered in. It was dark but for the odd reflection of cold blue light off steel pots and pans. I listened for movement or breathing. There was nothing.

  I stood and flipped on the light. The kitchen was empty, but across the other side there was another door. In my mind’s eye I could see the layout of the building. I was at the right hand extreme of the one story section of the block. After this, it was two stories, and I was pretty sure that when I opened the door I would be in a stairwell. A stairwell is a death trap. But on the other side of that death trap was Dehan. There was no doubt in my mind about that.

  I opened the door and peered in. The light was on. It was a narrow, straight flight of stairs. On the right it was wall all the way up. On the left it opened out into what seemed to be a room or a large landing. I flattened myself against the wall with my .45 held at arm’s length in both hands, aimed at the landing, and started moving up slowly, one step at a time. The steps were wood and made enough noise to start a zombie revolution, but I was committed and there was no going back. I kept climbing. My whole body was rigid, expecting to get shot at any moment. I realized I wasn’t breathing. I exhaled and took another step.

  It wasn’t a landing. It was a room. It was stark and cold, with sparse, old furniture that exemplified the worst of the ’80s. There was a single, large window on the right. The drapes were open and the glass was black. Beneath the window there was a TV. It was off, angled across the room to a couple of couches set at right angles to each other around a nasty pine coffee table with a glass top. Teddy was sitting on the couch facing me. He was frozen, staring wide-eyed. I aimed the gun at his head and moved up the rest of the stairs. He watched me without speaking.

  A passage ran down to my left, opposite the TV. In the passage, there were two doors. The one at the far end I guessed was the bathroom; the one half way down would be the bedroom. I looked back at Teddy. He looked terrified.

  “Where is she?”

  He didn’t answer. His breathing became heavier and he swallowed.

  “Where is she, Teddy?”

  When he spoke his voice was a rasp. “Who?”

  I stepped closer to him, stared hard into his eyes, studied the texture of his skin, noted the rise and fall of his chest. “You need to understand something, Teddy. Detective Dehan is not just my partner. She’s the woman I love. I will do whatever I have to do to save her life. If I lose my job, go to jail for the rest of my life, that is fine by me. Where is she?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. What was that noise downstairs? It sounded like a bomb…”

  I jerked my gun at him. “Stand up.”

  He got to his feet with his hands held at shoulder height. I waved him toward the passage. “The bedroom.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I am going to blow your head off and ransack this building if you don’t do what I say, Teddy. I have probably already lost my job. Don’t push me any further!”

  “OK, OK… Stay calm. This is all a misunderstanding. I will cooperate.”

  He inched around the coffee table and moved toward the bedroom. I stayed close. He stopped in front of the door. “I’m going to open it, OK?”

  “Do it.”

  He turned the handle and eased it open, then reached in and flipped on the light. “Shall I go in?” He raised his hands again.

  “Go in.”

  He went in a few steps and I followed. It was as sparse and cold as the living room. The bed was made. There was no room under it for anything. There was a small wardrobe. I said, “Open it,” but I knew she wasn’t in there. He opened it and there was just a few shirts, pants and jackets.

  I could feel my heart pounding, close to panic. My belly was burning. I fought to keep control, to try and understand. “The bathroom.”

  He nodded, hurried to the bathroom door and pushed it open. There was an airing cupboard which he opened without being told. It was empty, as was the half-sized bath. I growled at him, “Where is she, Teddy?”

  “I swear to God I don’t know what you’re talking about, Detective!”

  I felt a chill creep over my skin. I was terrified at what I was about to do. My voice wasn’t my own. It was cold and quiet. “I am going to count to three. Then I start shooting. Where is she?”

  His eyes were wide. I saw his pupils contract, and now his skin went pale and pasty. “There is nowhere else in the house! What else can I show you? She isn’t here!”

  “One…”

  His voice began to rise. “What can I do? Tell me! For God’s sake! I haven’t got her! You can see…”

  “Two…”

  “She isn’t here! For Christ’s sake! How can I convince you…?”

&
nbsp; “Three.”

  I leveled the gun at his head. He screamed, “Wait! The cellar!”

  I paused.

  “Where we keep the beer barrels. If I show you, and she’s not there, will you believe me? I don’t know what else I can do. You’ve made a mistake.”

  “Shut up. Show me the cellar.”

  He moved past me to the stairs and I followed him down. We went through the kitchen and out to the darkness of the bar. The streetlamps gleamed eerily off the shattered glass and the Jag sitting there, with its dark windows and the door hanging open. He stared at the scene of wreckage and chaos with his mouth open. “Sweet Jesus,” he said. “You’re insane.”

  I snarled, “You’d better believe it. The cellar.”

  He stared at me, swallowed and moved to a door that stood beside the bathrooms and was marked ‘private’. In the distance I could hear sirens. He fumbled in his trouser pocket and pulled out a bunch of keys. I watched his hands as he slipped one of the keys in the lock and opened the door. It gave onto a small, narrow landing. He hit the switch and the light revealed a short flight of wooden steps that led down to a concrete floor. There I could just make out a stack of steel barrels.

  “Go down.”

  He nodded and climbed down the stairs. At the bottom he backed up a little and watched me follow. I stood for a moment, looking around. There were stacks of crates: soft drinks, bottled beer, water. There were stacks of twelve-packs of cans, cartons of wine and against the far wall a wooden wine rack stacked with dusty bottles.

  I watched him a moment. He swallowed three times in rapid succession. He looked like he might start crying. I gave something that might have been a rueful smile. He shook his head and spread his hands. “You can see she’s not here. Honest to God, Detective. I have no idea where she is.”

  I nodded. After a moment I said, “Teddy’s Late Night Bar.”

  He blinked.

  “Your Australian barman was worried that we were after your license, because you stay open after you’re supposed to close most nights.”

  He went very still. “We close the door. Just a few regulars shooting the breeze.”

  I took a couple of steps into the room, staring around me. “Tonight you closed early. By eleven thirty, when I arrived to see Wayne, you were shut. What made you close early, Teddy?”

  He didn’t answer for a moment. Then he said, “They’re not worth it, Detective. Even the sweet ones are just whores.”

  My head exploded. The pain was shattering. Then a concrete wall hit me in the face and I knew I had fallen to the floor. A voice in my head told me not to let go of my gun, but a crushing pain in my hand made me cry out and I felt him levering the pistol from my fingers.

  “Get up.”

  I looked up at him.

  He was expressionless. There was no anger and no fear. He said again, “Get up.”

  I got to my knees. My hand was throbbing. The room swayed and rocked and I thought for a moment I might vomit. I steadied myself on a crate of beer.

  He said, “That’ll do fine.”

  I pushed myself to my feet. “If I’m going to die,” I said, “I won’t do it on my knees.”

  He snorted. It might have been a laugh.

  I said, “Is Dehan alive? Have you killed her?”

  He nodded. “Yes, but don’t worry. You’ll be joining her soon. I’ve never killed a man before. It’ll be a new experience. A cop, too. Two cops in one night. That’s something.”

  I felt empty. It was as though the floor fell away from under my feet. We don’t realize it, but we all live with pictures of our past and our future crowding our minds. The moments, hours, days and even years that have passed and are to come are permanent occupants of our minds. They give our lives coherence and meaning. In that one, brief instant, all of my future moments disintegrated. My future, my life, lost its meaning. All I could do was stare at him and try to make sense of what he had said. It had been a throw away comment, but with it, with that casual ease, he had thrown away Dehan’s life, and mine with it.

  Dehan was dead.

  NINETEEN

  He pointed at the wine rack. “It’s not as sophisticated as it looks.” He gave an almost apologetic laugh. “All I did was take the door off the annex and put some casters on the wine rack. Give it a push.”

  I frowned at him. “Is she in there?”

  He nodded and grinned. “Wayne likes his spot by the river. I prefer it here. It’s…” He shrugged. “I don’t know, more cozy. Push.”

  It was unreal. I felt that reality was slipping away from me. I shook my head. “Am I going to see her…?”

  He raised his eyebrows high on his forehead and smiled. “Yeah! Go on. Push.”

  It was too much for my brain to grasp. She was just a few feet away from me, on the other side of the wine rack. Every instinct in my body told me to go to her. But I had seen many times what strangulation does to somebody, and to see Dehan like that was unimaginable. All I had was the past: her looking at me from behind her shades, tying up her hair behind her head, raising her sunglasses to squint at me with that beautiful trace of a smile. I needed to preserve those memories, but I also needed to be close to her, however she looked now.

  I moved to the wine rack and pushed. It rolled easily to the side, revealing a gaping door with an old, peeling frame. There was a soiled mattress on the floor, a short coil of green nylon cord, a chair. Dehan was not there.

  I felt a hard shove in my back and I staggered forward. I turned, knowing what was coming next: the crack of the Smith & Wesson, the crushing impact of the hot slug on my chest, the burning, searing pain. I had felt it before, but this time it would be terminal.

  There was a scream. It filled the small room. It was like a banshee exploding from the gates of hell. I saw the muzzle of the pistol pointing at me. I saw it spit fire and kick. At the same time I saw Dehan, tall, lanky and wild, leaping at Teddy through the doorway, gripping the barrel of the automatic with her left hand and pummeling his belly with her right fist.

  Next thing, she had levered the weapon from his fingers and smashed her right foot into his gut. He staggered back and crashed into a stack of red Coke crates, spilling them and shattering them in a spreading pool of foaming black liquid.

  I said, “Dehan…” but my throat was too tight to let the word out.

  She threw the gun on the floor. It fired and I stared at it for what seemed like an hour but was less than a second as a plume of dust erupted in slow-motion from the wall, where the slug had buried itself. I looked back at Dehan. She had her fists balled and was advancing on Teddy, who was crawling backward, trying to get to his feet. I saw blood trickling down his arm from where he had fallen on the shattered bottles. And, as he struggled away from her, I saw the jagged glass edge of a broken bottleneck.

  I said, “Dehan, no, wait…”

  But it was like a nightmare where you need to call out, but your throat is paralyzed. He scrambled to his feet and rushed her, swinging the cruel glass blade at her face. She weaved back and it missed her. Three jabs followed into his face, left, right, left, and she was roaring at him, “Come on! You want to strangle me, you piece of shit? Come on! Do it!”

  He was bleeding from the nose and his eyes were wild. He stormed at her. I watched the blade miss her again by an inch as she delivered a right cross to his jaw. His leg wobbled and he staggered back three steps. She screamed at him again. “Come on! What’s wrong with you? You’re the big man! You’re the killer! You get off killing women! Come on! Kill me!”

  Upstairs I heard the wail of sirens, loud. They slowed, seemed to stab the air a couple of times. I snapped out of my trance. It had been just a couple of seconds. But it was a couple of seconds too long. I bent, picked up the pistol and stepped out. I aimed the gun at Teddy and said, “Freeze. It’s over. Put down the bottle.”

  Dehan glared at me. There was rage and resentment in her eyes. She wanted to take him. I ignored her and focused on Teddy. He was swaying and
panting. He was still holding the broken bottleneck. I said, “Drop it, Teddy. Let it go. Lie face down on the floor. It’s over. Wayne is dead. We know everything.”

  He blinked. “Wayne?”

  “He’s on his way to the ME right now. They’ve seen my car. They’re coming in. Put it down, Teddy.”

  He frowned. “Wayne?”

  I coughed, gathered my voice and shouted, “Down here! In the cellar! Detectives Stone and Dehan!”

  Then I saw Teddy’s face and I knew it was too late. It twisted into an ugly mask and he screamed. It was not a word. It was a primal, bestial, terrible noise and he rushed Dehan. I saw her eyes go wide and her mouth open. I fired at his head and watched the slug explode in red dust against the wall. By the time I’d pulled back the hammer again he was on her. The bottle plunging in, in a low thrust at her belly.

  It was too fast to follow, too fast for thought. She had stepped to her left. The bottle had torn her blouse, but she was behind him now. His wrist was in her right hand, but her left arm was in a lock around his neck, and in an instant her right hand had released his wrist and was pressing the back of his head. She jerked and he went limp. She let go of him and he dropped to the floor in a strangely unnatural heap.

  She stared at me. She said, automatically, “I did it without thinking. I had to stop him.”

  I nodded. “He had to be stopped.”

  I stepped over to her and put my arms around her, whispering over and over, to her and to myself, “You’re alive. Dear God, you’re alive.”

  I felt her arms around my waist, squeezing tight, and she started to sob, warm, living tears into my shoulder. On the wooden stairs I heard the tramp of feet, and the inspector’s voice shouting, “John? Carmen? Are you there?”

  I ignored him. I just held her, and a moment later I heard his voice again, no longer shouting but gasping, “Dear God, what in the name of hell…?”

  I kept my eyes firmly closed and whispered again, “Thank God you’re alive…”

  EPILOGUE