Words

by John Inman

  Milo whirled around to scan the room, seeking a weapon, any weapon, but Logan didn’t bother. Hands balled into angry fists, he hurled himself through the bedroom door, so Milo hustled right behind him.

  The house was dark. Emerson’s piercing cries filled the shadows. Past the end of the hall, a figure crossed the path of moonlight seeping through the living room window. It looked like a man. A tall, thin man. He was moving toward them. Spanky was at his side. Oddly, Spanky’s tail was wagging even while the Yorkie still danced and bayed around the intruder, threatening him with mayhem if he proceeded any farther.

  When the figure stepped away from the noisy little dog, Milo instantly recognized him by his gait and his silhouette.

  “Bryce!” he bellowed, stepping forward and pushing Logan behind him. “What the fuck are you doing here, and how did you get in?” Then he remembered the crunch and tinkle of broken glass. Incredulous, he said, “Did you break a window?”

  Between Emerson’s yapping and Spanky’s happy hello barks aimed at the man he knew only as a friend, Milo could barely hear himself think. Angrily, he cried, “You, dogs! Come!”

  Spanky and Emerson slunk toward him, momentarily cowed by their master’s command. At the same time, the hall was suddenly flooded with light as Logan reached around Milo and flipped the wall switch.

  Bryce stood in the archway leading from the living room. The moment the lights came up, he froze in his tracks. Milo had never seen him so wide-eyed and unkempt. His hair was a mess, his clothes disheveled. There was a cut on the back of his hand. Blood was dripping from it onto the floor at his feet.

  “You’ve cut yourself,” Milo declared.

  Bryce stared at him. His expression was a mixture of stunned surprise and a little boy’s guilt at finding himself caught. With the first hint of rage twisting his features, his gaze trailed away from Milo to glare at Logan standing behind him. The fury in Bryce’s eyes morphed to hatred in an instant. His voice was ice. “I thought if I got inside, I could stop you. Make you delete the post. It’s the middle of the night. Maybe no one has read it yet.”

  Word had indeed traveled fast. There was no need to wonder what he meant. This time it was Logan who stepped into the lead, easing Milo to safety behind him. His eyes never once veered away from Bryce’s hateful gaze. “You know that’s impossible,” Logan said. “Even if I wanted to, it can’t be taken back now.”

  Bryce continued to stare at him. Then suddenly the hatred on his face began to fade, his gaze softened into emptiness, his eyes dulled. A tiny, horrendous smile arose, twisting the corners of his mouth. “So my goose is truly cooked, then.”

  Logan nodded. “Your publisher knows too.” His words were gently uttered and laced with pity. “It’s all over, Bryce. You can stop living a lie now. You can let all the subterfuge go, take a step back, and just be who you were meant to be.”

  “Who I was meant to be,” Bryce echoed, his shoulders slumped, his voice drained of emotion.

  Logan took a step forward, arms out in a consoling gesture. “Come into the kitchen,” he said. “Let Milo treat your cut while I make some coffee. Then we’ll talk.”

  At that moment, Milo spotted the gun in Bryce’s other hand. It was a small Saturday night special, so tiny that it fit snugly in Bryce’s fist, rendering it almost invisible. Milo recognized it as a Raven Arms MP-25, the .25 caliber semiautomatic Bryce had owned when they were together. Tonight was the first time Milo had ever seen it out of its box.

  Milo stood there, his eyes riveted on the gun. He stared at it for what seemed like hours. Then he reached forward and plucked at Logan’s sleeve, pulling him to a stop. Of Bryce he quietly asked, “What are you planning to do with that gun?”

  Milo’s words caught Logan’s attention. His gaze snapped to where Milo was staring at the gun. He stiffened.

  Bryce glanced down at the pistol in his uninjured hand as if surprised to see it there himself. He handled it clumsily, as though it felt alien in his hand. Still he never once took his finger off the trigger. “I guess you’ll find out soon enough what it’s for,” he said with a smirk. “But before all that, I thought I could scare you with it. That’s what people usually do with guns, isn’t it? Threaten? Frighten? Bully? I used it to break the window too, but still, a shard of glass fell and….”

  He tore his gaze from the gun and stared at his bleeding hand with a funny expression, as if realizing for the first time that breaking a window probably wasn’t the smartest thing he’d ever done. Nor was packing a weapon. His eyes rose again, centering on Logan’s face. There was no anger in them now, just a weary acceptance, as if everything he had tried to do had come to naught and he was just beginning to realize it. “I thought I could stop it, is all,” he mumbled, his voice failing. “Just somehow scare you into… stopping it.”

  “You can’t,” Logan said again. “I’m sorry. Like I told you before, it’s already done.”

  “I know. I guess I knew before I got here.” Bryce gave a sardonic chuckle, as if he were starting to see the humor in it all. “A little birdie told me.”

  “A little birdie?” Milo asked.

  Bryce nodded.

  “Was it Adrian Strange?” Milo gently asked. “Is he the one who told you? What happened? Did he stumble onto Logan’s website? Is that how you found out?”

  “Yes,” Bryce said around a sigh. Clenching his injured hand, he caused the blood to drip faster. He didn’t seem to notice. “Earlier in the evening, a phone call woke us up.”

  “That was me,” Milo interjected.

  “Oh. I should have known,” Bryce said around an odd little smile. Then he picked up his train of thought. “Adrian doesn’t sleep well, you know. He’s up all hours of the night, roaming through the apartment, piddling with the computer. He saw Logan’s post only minutes after it went live. And then… he stormed out.” His eyes slid to Logan’s face. “But first, he woke me up and asked if it was true. I knew more lies couldn’t save me, so I told him everything. He said he didn’t want to be involved with me any longer. Not after the truth comes out. He said he wouldn’t let himself be dragged down with me. And that’s when he left. Without so much as saying goodbye. He practically ran out the door, never once looking back. He—he told me he loved me, you know. Not that I really believed him. People always say they love you, don’t they? I think sometimes it’s just the way they fill up the empty spaces in the conversation.”

  A sad smile turned up the corners of his mouth. “I don’t suppose I can blame him, really. For leaving, I mean. He has his own pitiful career to protect. In the grand scheme of things, that’s far more important than fucking a plagiarist, don’t you think?”

  Bryce studied Milo’s face. “Want to hear something funny? It was only tonight that Adrian told me he loved me. Can you believe it?” His eyes misted over. “I guess I wasn’t the only liar, huh?”

  “I’m sorry about Adrian. I am,” Milo said. “But then, why are you here? If you knew it was too late to stop it, why did you come? And why did you bring a gun?”

  Incongruously, Bryce giggled. He gave his injured hand a flip as if it was finally starting to hurt. Blood spattered the wall beside him, but he didn’t notice. He leveled his gaze on Milo’s face once again, homing in, the anger quickly surging back.

  “Oh, I’m here because of another little birdie who was fluttering around the internet and saw your lover’s post. A birdie with ideas.”

  Milo glanced again at the gun. “What sort of ideas? What do you mean?”

  “More death,” he said, his eyes bright and teasing. “It’s really very clever. Sort of a plot twist, you see. Or maybe you don’t see. Not yet anyway.”

  Milo was not only confused now, he was also getting mad. He practically spat out the words. “What the hell are you talking about? And what do you mean, more death? Are you saying there’s going to be more killing?”

  “He means us,” Logan said softly. “He means he’s going to kill us.”

  Milo whirled ar
ound to face him. “What?”

  Bryce stared at Logan, looking almost comically surprised. “You’ve got it all wrong,” he said calmly, too calmly. “Whatever happens in this house tonight won’t be done to you. Well, not really.” His eyes grew cold. “I can’t take back what you’ve done, Logan, but I can still watch you pay for it. I can make you both pay for it by doing what I have to do.”

  “Revenge.” Logan laughed. The word slipped through his lips as if he finally understood. “So that’s why you’re here. Not to apologize. Not to say you’re sorry. But for revenge.”

  Bryce offered his most charming smile yet. It was so free of guile, it was almost sane. “Yes, BookHunter. That’s exactly why I’m here.”

  “You’re crazy,” Milo said. “If you’re not going to kill us, then how do you plan on making us pay? And what do you mean, do what you have to do? What the hell sort of revenge are you talking about?”

  Another smile twisted Bryce’s mouth. He seemed to have an endless supply, each one a little different than the others. This one seethed with a caustic irony. “You’ll see,” he said, while the blood dripped freely from his hand. “For now, I’ll just let you in on a little secret, guys. I’m not the only one who’s crazy here. That one’s crazy too. But crazy like a fox.”

  “Who?” Logan asked. “Who are you talking about? Tell us, Bryce. We don’t understand.”

  Milo could sense Logan trying to distract Bryce. He was getting ready to spring. Oh, God, what if he gets himself shot?

  But at that moment, a cell phone rang. The ringtone was muted and unfamiliar. It wasn’t Milo’s phone, or Logan’s either. It took Milo a second to realize the phone was in Bryce’s pocket.

  Bryce giggled, hearing it. “Oops,” he whispered childishly, conspiratorially. “Speaking of the devil. I bet I know who that is.”

  “In that case,” Milo said, his voice dripping with sarcasm, “maybe you’d better answer it.” If nothing else, it would give him a little time to figure out what to do. Or to stop Logan from doing something crazy.

  Behind Milo, the dogs must have felt the tension building in their masters. They started whimpering again, edging closer, trying to get past. Milo impatiently shushed them to silence and motioned them back.

  Bryce grinned insipidly at first Milo, then Logan, as if nothing about this scenario was odd at all. The anger and hatred on his face had fled, replaced by what looked like pure, unadulterated glee. But the glee never quite reached his eyes. Instead, what Milo saw there, mixed in with fear, was a manic glimmer of determination and a renewal of purpose that scared Milo more than anything else that had happened all night. The blood was staining Bryce’s pant leg now, dribbling onto his shoe. Milo could hear the slow patter of it when it fell. It was an eerie horror-movie sound that sent a chill up his spine. Without thinking about it, he edged closer to Logan. His harbor. His safe place.

  The phone continued to ring.

  Bryce seemed almost disinterested now, as if his mood had shifted yet again in the last five seconds. “Yes, I guess you’re right. I’d better answer it. The other little birdie might be getting impatient.” Suddenly his eyes danced merrily, and he gave an exaggerated shudder. “We don’t want to piss that one off, do we?”

  Bryce blithely pulled the cell phone from his pocket with his bloody hand and pressed it to his ear. A trickle of blood slid down his wrist. Milo glanced at Logan to see his reaction to everything that was happening, but Logan merely stood there staring at Bryce. Worry lines were etched into his forehead now, as if he was beginning to feel the first glimmer of fear.

  Strangely enough, with Logan at his side, Milo felt no fear. The situation was simply too flat-out weird for it to harbor any danger, either to himself or to Logan. The only real concern Milo felt was for Bryce—the emptiness in his eyes coupled with the glint of determination, the slack line of his jaw, the way he could warp into hysterical laughter from one moment to the next, the way he let his wound continue to drip blood onto the floor without trying to staunch the flow. All of it put together was just… nuts. And it was a bad cut. Surely to God it hurt. Why was he not doing something to stop the bleeding or alleviate the pain?

  And why is he still holding that fucking gun?

  Logan stepped forward, but Milo plucked at his arm, holding him back. “Wait,” he quietly pleaded.

  Milo sensed Logan was reluctant to obey, but he finally did. He stopped in his tracks and pulled Milo against him, as if with closeness he would be better able to protect him. When he did, Logan’s robe fell open. He casually pulled it back together, covering his nakedness, looping the cloth belt around himself to hold it in place, while with his other hand he gestured for the increasingly nervous dogs to stay back. Finished, he pulled Milo closer while his eyes never wavered from Bryce, who was still standing at the end of the hall with the phone pressed to his ear.

  “We can rush him,” Logan whispered. “Let me take the side with the gun.”

  “No!” Milo hissed. “He won’t hurt us. I know him.”

  Logan didn’t look convinced. His gaze fell again on the pistol in Bryce’s hand.

  Bryce spoke into the phone, his voice bright and cheery as if he were totally uninterested in what Logan and Milo were whispering about. “Yes?” The one word was lazily drawn out as if muttered by a sleepwalker. At the same time, he gave Milo an incongruous wink.

  Then, clearly from the cell phone Bryce held to his ear, Milo heard the caller’s sharp, agitated voice spilling out into the room.

  “Don’t just do what you said you’d do! Kill them first, you fool! Kill them now!”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “IDIOT,” THE traveler spat.

  Dressed in coveralls, latex gloves, and a watch cap in case the night got bloody, which was a distinct possibility, the figure in the shadows stuffed the cell phone back inside a rear pocket while staring up the steep canyon wall, surveying the terrain.

  The undergrowth had been cleared from around the edge of the house, a common practice in drought-stricken California to limit property damage from wildfires. It made the approach far easier than it otherwise might have been. The tall figure could have simply walked up to the front door of the house and knocked, of course, but why risk being seen by the neighbors when Bryce might very well do what needed to be done without any help at all?

  It was a long shot, of course. Bryce was weak. Otherwise he wouldn’t be in the mess he was in. Of course, being in that mess was what made him so easily exploited.

  After all, it was time to wind this up, and a better opportunity would never come along. The killings had garnered enough publicity. Trolls on the internet were holding back now, being less cruel with their reviews, showing more civility, probably out of fear of being punished for their bad manners, as they damn well should be. Consequently, the work was finished. It was time to end it now, not with a light touch, but with a grand statement, a big showstopping finale. Something they wouldn’t soon forget. It was time for the traveler to tie up the loose ends and go back to a normal life. But to do that, a scapegoat had to be found. If the police weren’t convinced they had unearthed the real killer, they would never give up. So it was time to cough up a sacrificial goat. And this one last explosive act, this final bloody crime scene, should very well do the trick.

  If the wooden fence at the back of the property had been six inches higher, it would have proven unscalable. As it was, however, the tall figure scrambled across the top easily enough. The people inside the house would pay no heed to the sound of someone scuffling up and over the back fence. They had other things to worry about. Someone else sneaking onto the property would be the last thing they’d expect after good old Bryce came crashing through the living room window with all the finesse of a rampaging elephant.

  The patio lights had been turned off for the night, but the underwater pool lights were still lit. Filtered through the shimmering water, they cast an eerie green rippling light across the back of the house. It was kind of creepy,
actually, looking for all the world like the bilious green glow from a radar screen in a darkened com center in the bowels of some far-off ship plying a lonely sea.

  The lean figure chuckled. Nice simile. Might be able to work that into a book someday. An unplagiarized book. And that thought fired up another chuckle.

  Stepping carefully around the glowing pool, the shadowy figure heard voices now coming through the open patio door that led into the house. The first footfall across the threshold into the kitchen brought the dogs running. The figure hastily stepped back outside, and the dogs shot through the door in chase. As they began to bark and wail at this new intruder—jeez, it must be an exciting night for them—the figure quickly stepped back inside the house and closed the sliding door in the dogs’ faces. They obviously weren’t the smartest watchdogs in the world.

  The traveler wagged a mocking, admonitory finger through the glass at their furious upturned faces and then quickly turned away to walk deeper into the house, letting the dogs rant and rail and scratch at the sliding door all they wanted. Once again, the occupants were too busy with their own problems to be worried about anything else, least of all a couple of moronic mutts yammering on and on…

  …while a real murderer strolled in through the back door.

  The figure stood frozen, listening to the sounds in the other parts of the house. Voices. Two closer, one farther away. The one farther away was Bryce. Why the hell was he still talking? He should be acting. Taking matters into his own hands. Wreaking his revenge, like he had said he would. Owning the situation. Not for the first time, the figure suspected the person chosen to help wrap this thing up might not be entirely up to the task. Bryce’s weaknesses made him easily coerced, but those same weaknesses made him unreliable as well.

  Of course, this whole plan was pretty much a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants operation. It had been sheer luck spotting Logan’s blog post. And from there, it was the simplest thing in the world to assume that Bryce would be itching to confront his accuser. A quick phone call unearthed the fact that Bryce already knew about it, and not five minutes before, his new lover had dumped him because of it. Adrian Strange always was a selfish little prick. The figure standing in Milo’s kitchen was not in the least surprised Strange had taken off running at the first whiff of trouble, leaving his poor young lover to deal with it on his own.