Mortal Fear

by Greg Iles

  “What?”

  “You do it.”

  With that appalling request ringing in my ears, I turn the knob and launch myself into the sweltering night.

  Chapter 50

  I am leaping over Mayeux’s body when two gunshots boom through the night. I whirl and take Drewe’s weight full in the face, and we crash to the ground beside Mayeux.

  “Where is he?” she hisses in my ear.

  “Front,” I groan, rolling her off me. “Run!”

  “What’s he shooting at?”

  “I don’t know! Go!”

  I know I should run, but Mayeux is half covered with gasoline. I find his carotid artery with my left hand. There’s a pulse. Drewe is still beside me.

  “Go, damn it!” I hand her the .25. “Behind the toolshed!”

  She takes the gun but doesn’t run. Suffused by a wild anger, I lean over and put my right shoulder into Mayeux’s belly, then heave myself over so that he is lying across me. From there it’s a matter of brute strength, working the leverage until I get my legs under me and he’s lying sacklike over my shoulder in a fireman’s carry.

  With Drewe covering the corners of the house, I half stagger, half run across the grass to the toolshed and collapse under the fig trees behind it, depositing Mayeux on his back. Drewe hands me the .25, then begins testing the screwdriver handle sticking out of Mayeux’s chest. Having an immediate emergency to deal with seems to have restored her composure.

  “You’re going to leave that in him?” I ask, as she checks Mayeux for other wounds.

  “Better for him,” she says, probing gently under his head. “What makes the printer explode?”

  Before I can answer she says, “Look,” and pulls a short, feathered barb from Mayeux’s neck.

  “It’ll go off when Berkmann prints your message,” I tell her, peering around the corner of the shed. The yard is empty, the house silent. When I look back, Drewe is staring at me as if I’m an idiot.

  “Why should he print the message? He can just read it.”

  “Not without scrolling to the next screen.”

  “So?”

  “That keyboard is programmable. If you want your comma key where the semicolon key is, you can have it that way. All it takes is a few keystrokes.”

  “I still don’t get it.”

  “I reprogrammed every key that can take him to the next screen to issue the same command: Print Screen.”

  “The down cursor?”

  “Every cursor. And PAGE DOWN. Since you snipped off the mouse, he has to use the keyboard. The second he does, six hundred volts will zap through the printer’s corona wire, which is cut and buried in the black powder. A spark will arc between the wires, and good-bye, Edward.”

  Drewe stares blankly, as if trying to compute the odds of success. “Won’t he be suspicious? Expect some kind of trap?”

  “Probably. And if your message told him to print it, or tried to trick him into printing it, he’d never do it. But he won’t see this coming. The only question is, will he try to read the whole message?”

  She nods. “He’s addicted to it. The computer is his fetish. He may search the whole house first, but he’ll read that message.”

  “What did you put in it?”

  “Just what you told me to. I—”

  “Shh! Listen!”

  “What?” Her eyes wide with fear, Drewe cocks her head, listening for the wrong things.

  I close my eyes and try to gauge the distance; in the Delta some sounds carry for miles. “Siren,” I tell her, even as the sound fades.

  “It must be pretty far away.”

  “It is. But Berkmann will hear it soon. He’ll run.”

  I get to my feet. I’m not sure why, but doing something always feels better than doing nothing. Even if you’re doing something stupid.

  “What are you doing?” Drewe asks.

  “He could take one of our cars . . . make it to the plane. I’m not letting him get away now.”

  “You stay here!”

  I can’t leave Drewe without a gun, but I can’t go after Berkmann without one. Mayeux’s shoulder holster is empty. I’m almost resigned to waiting when an idea hits me. Dropping beside the unconscious detective, I pull up one of his trouser legs. Nothing but a hairy ankle. But when I pull up the other, I see the duct-taped grip of a snub-nose .32 revolver tucked snugly in a Velcro ankle holster. Mayeux carries a throwdown. After verifying that the cylinder is full, I hand the pistol to Drewe.

  “You’re not leaving me here,” she says.

  I don’t even try to argue. After switching guns, we cross the yard in a quick soundless rush, the grass damping the beat of our feet. At the back corner of the house, we pause in a pungent cloud of gasoline vapor.

  “I still don’t hear the siren,” she whispers.

  “The house is blocking the sound.”

  “Maybe we should light the gasoline.”

  “Are you nuts? It’s our house!”

  With Mayeux’s .32 in my right hand, I sprint along the side of the house, nearly stumbling on a coil of garden hose. When I make the front corner I hear the siren again.

  Drewe collides with me from behind, a soft impact of breasts and hands. The yard is pitch dark, the drive still. Only the sound of crickets breaks the silence. Where our driveway meets the road, the deputy’s car sits motionless. Nearer to us, the Explorer and the Acura offer concealment. But I know Berkmann has left them behind.

  “I think he’s inside,” I whisper. “I’m going to look.”

  “Wait—”

  “Don’t worry. I’m not going in. Listen for doors or windows. He may come tearing outside when he hears the siren. You’d better take off that robe. It’s like a neon target out here.”

  Drewe shakes her head violently.

  “If you hear him, you take it off.”

  My back pressed to the clapboard, I edge along the front of the house holding the .32 against my right thigh like a quarterback running a bootleg. As I near the broken front window, I step into what feels like a draft of sea wind. It’s the conditioned air from the house, draining into the hot night like water from a leaking barrel.

  Berkmann must have heard the siren by now. I try to maneuver beneath the window to look through it, but there’s too much broken glass on the ground. Weaving around the fragments, I cover the ten feet to the second window, rise to the sill, and peek over it.

  Edward Berkmann is sitting at my Gateway 2000, his Byronic profile hauntingly illuminated by the amber glow of the screen. He leans slightly forward, facing right to left across my visual field, peering at Drewe’s message as though it holds the key to some eternal mystery.

  Berkmann hasn’t heard the siren because there are other sounds inside the office. The hum of the computer. The drone of the refrigerator. The hissing of the central air conditioner. He must have read the first screen of the message by now. Yet still he sits, staring. What is he doing?

  He’s thinking. The man who developed a worldrenowned computer model of the human brain is exercising his own to solve the oldest problem in the world. Survival.

  Berkmann is less than ten feet from me, the printer less than two feet from him, at the level of his chest. There’s a gun beside the computer’s keyboard. Nickel plated. Just the flashy kind of piece Buckner’s deputies carried. But that gun cannot protect Berkmann from the printer.

  My mind is telling me to raise my gun above the windowsill, but instinct stops me. The slightest movement—even lowering my head out of sight—could catapult Berkmann out of that chair with the gun in his hand.

  As if in response to my thought, he lifts his head like a bird-watcher detecting a faint call, and turns slightly to his left. Toward me.

  A bolt of pure terror strikes my heart.

  He hasn’t seen me. He’s heard the siren. But instead of jumping up in panic, he turns back to the screen, settles deeper into my chair, and closes his hands around its arms. Is he actually waiting for me to come back and try to
kill him, as the message promises I will?

  There’s more than one siren now. Several dissonant notes have separated themselves from the general whine, made Doppler-distinct by changing distances. Berkmann swivels my chair to the right, toward the wall that holds my guitars. What rogue impulses are firing through the synapses in that head? He could be guessing my next move or wondering what happened to his favorite eighteen-thousand-dollar urinal. Every fiber of my brain tells me to run, but instead I bring up the .32 with shaking hands and wait for him to swivel back to the left.

  He does, but the rotation stops with him facing the computer screen. With a deliberation that sets my trigger finger quivering, Berkmann reaches out and touches a key on the right side of the keyboard.

  I’m wondering which key it was when he turns in my direction. For an instant his gaze floats just above mine. Then it locks onto me like a laser, and I feel the nightmarish horror of trying to back away from some unspeakably sentient being as he rises from the chair and rushes toward me with the silver gun coming up and then disappearing in a white flash that seems to explode in silence.

  I am sitting on the ground blinking my eyelids, which feel like they are on fire. There’s a piece of bloody glass sticking out of my left arm and more blood pouring from my right shoulder. I start to pull out the glass, then remember Drewe leaving the screwdriver in Mayeux’s chest.

  Suddenly she is beside me. She seems to be yelling but I can’t hear her. When I try to speak, I feel a dull vibration in my throat but hear nothing. A white cloud is billowing out of the window above me. This tells me the flash was what I hoped it was. Nothing smokes like oldstyle black powder.

  Drewe takes hold of my left arm and tries to lift me. When I protest, she shouts words I can’t hear and pulls harder. Then her head whips up and to the side, toward the window. Following her line of sight, I see a black shadow arc through the smoke over my head and crash beside me in a rain of glass.

  I reach instinctively for Drewe, but she’s gone. I try to stand, wobbling on my knees, waiting for the black hump that must be Edward Berkmann to jump up and put a bullet through my head.

  He does neither. He doubles up on the gasolinesoaked ground and, with what appears to be colossal effort, rolls over onto his back. His face is scorched black and riddled with white plastic shrapnel. His shoulderlength hair has been burned off, and blood runs from his nose and ears. His mouth opens in a wide O defined by white teeth, and the first sign that I’m getting my hearing back is a high keening wail that I realize is no distant siren but a human scream.

  Feeling Drewe at my side, I reach out and close my hand around hers. Berkmann’s whole body is smoking, but his eyes are open so wide that the irises look like blue buttons on white saucers. Even as I see the nickel-plated pistol still gripped in his right hand, I realize that both the hand and arm are shattered.

  “Can you do anything for him?” I hear myself croak.

  “I could,” Drewe says. “But I won’t. I have other patients.”

  Berkmann’s empty left hand jerks, and I yank Drewe back, afraid that he’s trying to get the gun into his good hand. But he isn’t. The scorched hand rises into the air and reaches toward us, as though beckoning to Drewe. But the blackened fingers close on nothing, and the arm slowly falls.

  The instant it touches the ground, the gun in his other hand fires, igniting the spilled gasoline in a blinding blast of heat that drives us backward into the dark. Berkmann’s charred body curls away from the flames like burnt paper from a trash fire. As I stare into the inferno, Drewe drags me down the drive, away from our cars. Yielding like an exhausted child, I gaze up the road at my neighbor’s cotton fields. A regiment of red flashing lights is hurtling toward us like a train of flaming chariots.

  All I want to do is lie down.

  Bob Anderson arrived before a single deputy. Drewe had set up shop just outside the toolshed, and was working on Mayeux and me by the light of the burning house. Bob and Patrick and Special Agent Wes Killen came charging around the house like marines clearing a hostile ville. I recognized Killen by his nose bandage.

  Bob told us he’d seen a man lying on his back beside Drewe’s Acura, but had no idea who he was. Killen was afraid it might be Mayeux. While Drewe bound my shoulder with a towel, I asked Bob whether the man was dead. I had visions of an ambulance bundling Berkmann into its antiseptic belly and spiriting him away to a miraculous recovery. Bob said the man wasn’t dead but would be soon, and would be better off when he was.

  I told Bob who the man was.

  He stood there a moment, his mouth working silently. Then he took a deep breath and walked back toward the roaring fire.

  Nobody followed him.

  Patrick took over treating Mayeux, Drewe explained to Wes Killen what had happened, and by the time she was done Bob was walking back toward us, a black silhouette against the flames. We all looked quietly at him until he said, “He’s dead now.”

  We sat some more while Drewe removed a shard of glass from my leg and Killen talked to Daniel Baxter on his cellular telephone. I asked Drewe if she could get the other piece of glass out of my right shoulder, and she told me she couldn’t because there wasn’t any piece of glass. I’d been shot. Berkmann had gotten off a round during the second that the message was being transmitted to the printer. The bullet went clean through.

  Sheriff Buckner arrived with an army loaded for bear but found the bear already dead. He might have been unpleasant about that, but Bob’s presence had an amazing effect on his demeanor. He couldn’t seem to do enough for us.

  Now everyone sits or stands watching the house burn while we wait for the paramedics to arrive. The sight of a human dwelling being consumed by fire is a powerful, almost sacred thing. It eats at our sense of security, reminds us that all we have built can be wiped away in a matter of minutes. Ironically, the fire seems a fitting ending to me, who was born and raised in that house. My past has always been a chronic wound. Now it’s being cauterized before my eyes.

  The paramedics load me into a double-wide ambulance beside Mike Mayeux. He’s still unconscious, but Patrick hovers over him, monitoring his vital signs. Drewe squats between the front seats, her hand on my forehead. The pain in my shoulder is becoming a serious nuisance, but then I think of Berkmann. He’s riding a couple of spots back in the convoy, in a plastic bag in Sheriff Buckner’s trunk. The son of a bitch is right where he belongs.

  A lot of lonely and innocent women died because of Edward Berkmann. Most of them I never really knew. But one I did. Better than I should have. And because of Berkmann, she is gone. Holly has no mother. Patrick has no wife. Drewe has no sister. I share that guilt, of course. If I hadn’t pushed myself into Berkmann’s path, Erin would still be alive. The temptation to second-guess is strong. But I must remember one thing.

  Life is simple.

  You are healthy or you are sick. You are faithful to your wife or you aren’t. You are alive or you are dead.

  I am alive.