The black pistol glimmered like obsidian.
‘Things weren’t done between us,’ Reggie said, moving towards the base of the pillar beside Ivan and sliding down to a seated position.
‘I guess they weren’t,’ Ivan said.
Reggie pulled out the crackers too, and passed over a package to Ivan. Ivan took these gratefully also, and opened them with a crinkle of plastic.
‘There’s other things I want to know,’ Reggie said.
Ivan nodded.
‘I knew there were,’ he said.
And beneath the shadow of the stone tower in the woods, high above the world, Reggie asked the killer the things he wanted to know.
***
‘Was there ever someone you killed that deserved it?’ Reggie asked.
‘What do you mean?’ the killer asked.
‘You know,’ Reggie said. ‘Was there ever anyone you liked killing? Not just because you were paid to do it?’
‘Like my father?’ Ivan asked.
‘Yeah,’ Reggie said. ‘Bad guys, people that deserved to die.’
‘I told you I never ask about my targets,’ the killer said. ‘The less you know about them the better.’
‘Come on,’ Reggie pressed, smiling a little. ‘You never broke that rule? There was never anyone you just had to know more about?’
‘No,’ Ivan said. ‘I never broke that rule.’
Reggie looked away from Ivan. He didn’t know what to ask next.
‘But there was this one woman who freely told me about her husband,’ he said. ‘She paid a lot of money to have it done in their house, with her watching. They lived in a large hacienda in New Mexico. He was something of a cattle baron, though he’d invested in so many things that you couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was he did.
‘He was also something of a philanthropist and humanitarian,’ Ivan continued. ‘He worked with Immigration to employ Mexican immigrants legally. Gave them steady work on his ranch as they worked their way through the naturalization process. He also gave the workers’ families a place to stay. He had cabins built on his property that served as employee quarters. He was one of the few voices of reason in the immigration controversy.
‘And his wife thought him a child pornographer.’
Reggie didn’t say anything immediately. He let those words sink into his head; tried to grasp the meaning of what they meant. His parents had told him about staying away from strangers when he was younger. His school had visiting police officers give presentations, telling the students what to do should someone pull over in a strange vehicle or approach them at a park or something. He knew intellectually what could happen to kids who were abducted. But to hear from Ivan about these things – after what they’d seen and done together – made the reality of such crimes hit home.
In Reggie’s mind, images played of dirty children in seedy rooms. Shadowy and dark like basements or cellars. He saw big, burly men leering and towering over them. In this mind theatre the children looked like the frail and filthy creatures he saw on those Christian Children’s Fund commercials with flies buzzing about their heads. They were hopeless; the plight of their circumstances lost even on them who lived it; their faces devoid of emotions.
‘How did she know?’ he finally asked, in a voice hardly more than a croak.
‘She found pictures and videos,’ Ivan said. ‘She recognized some of the faces. They were the children of the immigrants working for them. She tried showing them to me, pulling them out of her husband’s wall safe.
‘I turned my head,’ Ivan said, ‘slapped them away, but she persisted. Shoved them in my face, telling me how her husband deserved to die. She wanted it slow, and she wanted to watch. She cried as she flung the pictures at me.
‘They fluttered down about me like dead birds,’ Ivan said, ‘settling on the floor all around so that I had nowhere to look that was safe. Some of them brushed against me as they fell and I felt dirty. It was like being touched by something grimy and soiled. I had the instant urge to wash myself.’
The breaking morning seemed to reveal everything. The world was alight and everything shone. There were no dark corners or deep holes. There seemed no hiding places for shadowy things. It seemed an impossibility, such evil, in the presence of such light. And yet Reggie knew it was out there. He’d seen it in the past couple days himself. Glimpses of what walked the world under human guise.
‘What did you do?’ Reggie asked weakly.
‘I gathered the pictures and handed them back to her,’ Ivan said. ‘And then we waited with the lights off. In the dark she told me how she wanted it done. She told me the tools to use. She told me details that only a wife could know. Fears and worries shared and discovered over thirty years of marriage. She instructed me on things to say to heighten his terror. To trigger emotional responses. Childhood insecurities. Parental disappointments. Things to inflict psychological torture as well as the physical.’
Ivan shifted on the stone and groaned. He held his bloodied middle and winced at the touch. His fingers left scarlet prints and smears on the stone. The wetness glimmered in the morning sunlight. Reggie looked at the blood with intense scrutiny. The whorls of the fingerprints and red of the blood combined in strange impressionistic pictures.
‘She wanted to be a weapon for me,’ the killer said, ‘is how she put it. “I want to be a weapon for you. I want to be part of his suffering”, she said. “I want to know that when he screams, it’s because of me.” Her hatred startled me. Yet I understood it.
‘Her husband had fooled her,’ Ivan said. ‘She’d thought they were living one life, and all the while she was unknowingly part of another. Under her own roof, on her watch, something terrible had been happening for years. She’d been oblivious to it, or so she told herself. And in her ignorance she’d been party to it.’
Ivan shifted again. A slight kick of his leg sent a small cascade of pebbles and grit down over the edge of the stony shelf they sat on. Reggie listened and could hear the descent of the tiny avalanche. How far it fell and the dwindling sound of it.
‘Her husband came home at three in the morning,’ Ivan said. ‘We heard the engine before we saw him. His car came up the long, twisting driveway and the headlight beams swept over the windows of the house. We waited for him in the bedroom with the lights off. The shadows in the room grew large in the sweep of the headlights and moved along the walls like skulking monsters.
‘I could see the woman’s face for a moment as the car drove past,’ Ivan said. ‘I could see her smile. She rocked in her chair with anticipation. She leaned forward and put a hand on my knee like we were old friends. “I want his cock fed to the hogs,” she said.’
Reggie wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the rest of the story, and yet, like before, he didn’t stop Ivan. There was something about the telling that he felt he had to know. When he listened to the killer speak he felt like a student before a skilled teacher presenting an important lesson. And this was the sort of information that would definitely be on the final exam.
He thought of his father, dead in a parking lot. He thought of the deputy, dead at the bottom of a cliff. That death could come at anytime to anyone seemed part of this lesson. That some people – like the wife in the story, and the killer before him telling it – thrived in the dealing out of death, seemed another part.
And that Reggie was starting to understand all of this frightened him. In some ways, even more so than the lesson itself.
‘It was so quiet as we waited,’ the killer continued. ‘I could hear him unlocking the front door. The rattle of his keys. I heard the opening and closing of a closet as he set things down. His footsteps as they crossed the foyer tile and reached the stairs. The creak of each step as he started up.
‘I got up and walked softly across the room,’ the killer said. ‘I stood behind the door and took out a vial of chloroform and a handkerchief. I wet the handkerchief and pocketed the bottle just as he reached the room.
‘He tur
ned on the lights,’ said the killer, ‘and saw his wife sitting across the room.
‘“Hi honey,” he said. “What are you doing up so late?”
‘I stepped up behind him and shoved the cloth to his mouth and nose. He struggled, snatched in a breath reflexively, breathed in the chloroform, and passed out.
‘I dragged him to the chair and propped him up,’ Ivan said. ‘I retrieved a reel of fishing wire that I’d brought from my car, parked behind their house out of sight. I tied him to the chair and turned to his wife when I was done.
‘“Are you ready?” I asked.
‘“Yes,” she said, smiling that same smile I’d seen earlier. She wasn’t just a wife horrified at the things her husband had done. She was enjoying this. She was having a good time.’
And what about you? Reggie thought, watching Ivan. Were you having a good time? And what about me? he thought. For wanting to hear this? For asking the killer these questions? Was there something wrong with me?
Reggie thought of the satisfaction he’d felt beating up Johnny Witte. Of the similar feeling stirring inside when he’d seen his mom’s recent submission, allowing Reggie to do what he wanted, when he wanted.
Now, he felt only shame. He had the sudden urge to tell Ivan to stop, that he’d heard enough. But he didn’t, and listened to the rest of it.
‘I also had smelling salts in my jacket,’ the killer said. ‘When he was tied securely to the chair, I used them to bring him back around. I waited for him to gather himself. When he saw me, then saw his wife, you could see the panic building in him. You could see it in his eyes.
‘“What the hell’s going on?” he said, trying to sound commanding, in charge. But it really sounded like a whine. Like he was about to cry.
‘His wife gathered the file of photos that she’d shown me and set them in his lap. She knelt beside him and opened the file. Her movements were gentle and graceful, like a waitress of a high-class restaurant setting a table. She flipped the glossy photos one by one, slowly, allowing him to really see each of them.
‘“I know what you’ve done,” she said to him. Her tone wasn’t angry. She was like a parent scolding a disobedient child. “I’ve seen it with my own eyes,” she said, turning the last of the photos.
‘“What the hell is this?” he said. “Get those away from me.”
‘But his words were weaker than before. He was almost begging.
‘“Under our own roof,” she said. “In my own house.”
‘He said nothing. But he was trembling now. There were tears at the corners of his eyes. He looked at me. He tried blinking away his tears.
‘“Who are you?” he asked. “Do you know any of them?” he said, nodding towards the photos in his lap.
‘I shook my head.
‘“Are you with the police?” he asked. “The FBI?”
‘I shook my head again.
‘“Then we can make a deal,” he said. “I can pay you a lot of money. I can leave the country. You’ll never see me again. Neither of you will,” he said, looking at his wife.
‘I shook my head a third time.
‘“That’s not how it works,” I told him.
‘“Let’s get on with it,” the woman said, and I nodded, and he started to scream.
‘I hit him in the stomach, cutting off the scream. I tore off a strip of duct tape, which I’d brought from the car along with the fishing wire. I wrapped it around his mouth and the back of his head. By the time he caught his breath and tried screaming again, all that came out from behind the gag was a muffled groaning.
‘I had a small valise that I’d stowed out of sight under a dresser. I pulled it out, set it on the bed, and unsnapped it. Lifting it open, I turned it so the husband could see what was inside. There was a hammer, pliers, a nail gun, and a box cutter.
‘I lifted the hammer and held it before him.
‘“I’m going to break your fingers with this,” I told him.
‘He screamed behind the tape, lost control of his bodily functions.
‘I grabbed his right hand and tried to straighten his forefinger. He tried curling his fingers into a fist so I couldn’t get at them. But I got his finger, held it down with one hand, and swung the hammer with the other.’
Reggie stood and turned away.
He didn’t want to hear anymore. This wasn’t why he’d come all this way. At least he didn’t think it was.
‘You’re the one that asked the question,’ Ivan said.
‘I know,’ Reggie said. ‘Just … no more right now, all right?’
‘Fine,’ Ivan said.
Reggie stared out over the forest for a time. Then he turned his gaze to the south and the long stretch of the desert, red-orange under the morning sun, like a barren Martian landscape. The vast emptiness of it, and the lifelessness.
He turned back to Ivan.
‘He really did those things to those children?’ he asked.
‘I saw the pictures with my own eyes,’ Ivan said.
‘And you killed him?’ Reggie asked.
The killer nodded.
Reggie nodded too.
‘That’s all I needed to know.’
***
‘Do you ever think about writing?’ Reggie asked him.
‘No,’ Ivan said.
‘Come on,’ Reggie said. ‘It was your dream.’
‘I told you,’ Ivan said. ‘I don’t think about it.’
‘That’s impossible,’ Reggie said, sitting beside his friend, looking out over the woods. The tops of the trees swayed together like elegant dancers. A murder of crows suddenly launched themselves from the branches, blacking out part of the sky. ‘It was your dream. People never forget their dreams.’
Ivan didn’t say anything.
‘Come on,’ Reggie pressed. ‘If you were to write something today, what would you write about?’
Ivan turned and looked at him square in the eyes.
‘I’d write a story about a kid who asks too many questions,’ he said, ‘and one day he disappears because he doesn’t know when to shut his fucking mouth.’
Reggie looked away. He fumbled with his hands in his lap.
‘That’s not cool,’ he mumbled.
Neither of them said anything for a time. Reggie thought of Ivan bringing the garrotte around his throat, strangling him, and dragging him off somewhere in the woods. He thought of the big man stringing him up in a tree like the hound or rolling him off a cliff like the deputy. He wondered, not for the first time, why he’d come all this way.
He wished he knew why, so he could do whatever he needed to do and get on home. And at the same time he didn’t want to be anywhere else. With Ivan, things happened, the world moved. At home, all there was for him was the numbing pain of day after dreadful day. The emptiness of the house and the emptiness inside of himself.
‘I did try writing one last time,’ Ivan unexpectedly said into the quiet that had befallen them. ‘Once, a long time ago, during a lull in my work.’
Reggie knew ‘work’ meant ‘killing’. For the first time, the killer’s substitution for the word – his sanitization of it – disturbed him. Because killing wasn’t work. It was something else altogether. Something wrong.
Something … obscene.
‘I was staying in some cheap motel off the beaten path,’ Ivan continued. ‘Just some run-down joint in Texas. I’d collected a big payout, and didn’t need to work for awhile. Always wanted to go to Texas, so I went.’
‘Why not stay in some fancy hotel?’ Reggie asked, not knowing why he did. It wasn’t an important detail, for one. Also, he thought what the killer was saying was leading to something important, and so Reggie should just shut up and wait for it.
‘In my line of work, it’s those that flaunt their money that get caught,’ Ivan said. ‘Wearing fancy clothes, driving expensive cars, people tend to remember who you are and what you were doing. It’s better to go unnoticed, to be unremarkable.’
Another first: Reggi
e looked the killer over with new eyes, seeing the big man in a new light. Other than his height, the killer was indeed unremarkable. From his choice of clothes to the way he carried himself. If you hadn’t seen what Reggie had seen in the past couple days, you’d probably not give the man a second look. Maybe not even a first.
And that only added to the killer’s ever-present threat, Reggie realized. To move around in full view, mingling with people like some chameleon blending into the landscape, all the while holding each person’s life in your hands.
Reggie again had the feeling he’d had earlier in the tree house. Of the walls closing in around him, pushing him nearer the killer. Even out here, atop the hill under the crook of stone and the broad desert sky, he felt trapped.
‘I bought a pad of paper from a market down the street,’ Ivan continued. ‘Sat in the little motel room with the window open. Stared at the top sheet, pen in hand.’
Sitting against the upright stone, Ivan stared into his lap, his hands splayed out, as if he held the pad of paper even now. Looking at the empty space there, Reggie knew the man was looking through that space into that other time.
‘But no matter how hard I tried,’ the killer said, ‘the words wouldn’t come. I moved from the bed to the chair in the corner. I stood at the window, sat on the floor. It didn’t matter. Nothing came to me. Not one sentence. Not one word.’
Ivan looked up from his empty hands and met Reggie’s eyes.
‘It was like I was empty,’ he said. ‘Up here.’ He pointed to his temple. ‘And in here,’ he added, tapping his chest. ‘You see, Reggie, whatever was in me when I was a boy was … gone.’
The killer leaned forward for emphasis.
‘None of us is what we were yesterday or the day before or last year. When things are gone, they’re just gone.’
He held his hands up as he said this last, like a magician giving the poof! gesture.
Although Reggie didn’t want them to, he couldn’t deny that the killer’s words made a certain sense. Then what the man had said the other day came back to him.
Are You Afraid of the Dark? Page 14