by Jeff Gunhus
“She’s coming with me,” he said. “I promised her a slow ending because she wasn’t very nice to me. I like to keep my promises when I can.”
Allison braced for shots from Mike. They would come from right behind her. Any second.
Any second.
Silence.
Except for her heart pounding.
There was something wrong.
Mike was taking too long.
The man took aim.
Oh, Jesus.
She jumped to the right just as the man fired. Two bullets hit their mark. Allison twisted in midair from the force, smashing into the metal support beam next to her.
Her last image as she lay on the ground was of Mike walking out from the door. Gun raised. Aimed at the man. He was too late to save her, but there was still a chance for Natalie. Mike stepped past her without so much as a look.
Then everything went dark.
46
Natalie looked up from the ground as the shots rang out, but she wished she hadn’t. Allison’s body twisted and jerked violently at the impact and then collapsed to the ground in a heap.
She tried to get up, but the pain in her leg sent the world spinning. The length of rebar was nearby, but what good was that going to do against a gun? Still, she dragged herself toward it. She wasn’t about to just lie there and wait for the man to come finish her off or stuff her in the trunk of the car. After everything she’d endured in her life, she’d refused to run away when she’d gotten free from the car. And now she refused to die a victim.
Another gunshot behind her.
She flinched and tried to turn around to look for the source, but her body was rebelling against her. The world turned on its side and she found it hard to focus. A distant part of her mind, the part she’d learned to carve out for herself when she was being hurt, the same place she’d gone when her stepfather had forced himself on her over and over, stood by and watched with clinical interest. It wondered whether another bullet had just dug into her flesh. If so, she hadn’t felt a thing, which was good as she didn’t want to feel any more pain. But it also meant she was in worse shape than she thought. Pain was there to drive her forward. This drowsy feeling she had, this warmth creeping through her, that wasn’t good.
Still, she let her eyes drift shut, the pull of the comfort there was just too welcoming.
“Let’s talk about this,” Harris said behind her.
Natalie’s eyes shot open. Even in her weakened state she heard the fear in his voice. She liked that. Wished she were the one who’d put it there and she’d pay good money to see what had. It was the incentive she needed and, with what seemed like herculean effort, she rolled herself over.
It was the man who’d been with the FBI agent.
Gun in hand, he walked straight toward Harris, expressionless.
Harris, a bloodstain spreading from his shoulder and down his arm, stood with his hands to his side.
“This was never about you,” Harris said, his voice sounding like he was under water. “Can’t we work something out?”
“Where’s the backup hard drive?” the FBI agent’s friend asked.
“I have it. If you let me go, I’ll just––”
The man put a bullet between Harris’s eyes. Natalie watched in equal parts horror and fascination as the back of her tormentor’s head blew out in a spray of tissue, bone and hair. The body teetered for a few long seconds as if it might continue to stand just out of long-standing habit, then it finally toppled to one side.
Natalie felt her body jerking and it took her a few seconds to realize she was sobbing. She had survived again. Beat up, in need of help, almost delirious from the loss of blood, but she was alive. Another man had tried to destroy her and failed. Even with all the pain, even as she fought to stay conscious, she felt a swelling pride in that.
A shadow passed over her. She looked up and saw it was the man who’d saved her.
She wanted to say thank you, and her lips might even have moved to form the words, but no sound came out.
“Shhh…” he said, sounding farther away than she knew he was. “You’ve lost a lot of blood. Hit an artery looks like.” He looked over his shoulder. “They’ll be here any minute. They might be able to save you.”
He stood and walked away.
Might be able to save you.
Those words rolled over in her mind, tripping alarms as they went. Her body found one last store of adrenaline and her rising panic cleared her mind.
Might be able to save you.
She wasn’t out of it yet. She was hurt worse than she thought and she needed help. With effort, she twisted to the side to look for the man. She assumed he was running for help, but he was bending down near Harris’s body. When he stood up, she saw that he had Harris’s gun in his hand.
“Get…help…” In her mind, she screamed the words, but they came out as a barely audible whisper. “Someone…help…”
The man walked back to her, scanning the warehouse as he did.
He stood over her, positioning himself so that she could see his face without having to move. She expected to see concern on his face, but there was none.
“Help,” she whispered to him.
“I wish I could believe there were no more copies of that video,” he said, shaking his head. “This is messier than I wanted it to be.”
He raised Harris’s gun.
“But I think the story will hold together, don’t you?”
Natalie didn’t understand what was going on. The man was supposed to be helping her. Why wasn’t he trying to stop the bleeding? Why wasn’t he getting help?
Then, somehow, even in her confused state, she pieced it together. It clicked. And once it did, all the energy drained from her. The defenses her mind had erected were torn down and all the pain came through in a torrent. She wailed, less from the pain, and more from the hopelessness.
The man seemed to understand her reaction. He nodded and gave her the gift of certainty.
“You’re right,” he said. “I’m the one.” He raised the gun, holding it in his left hand.
She closed her eyes and tried to calm her mind. She refused to die in fear, cowering in front of any man. Instead, she forced herself to go to one of her favorite memories, the same memory that had been her escape during the years of abuse at her stepfather’s hands. It was with Tracy at Smith Lake. They were just teenagers. Dreams and hopes intact, well before the world had torn them away. The two of them laid on the grassy shore, holding hands. She could almost feel the sun on her face even though she knew there were tears streaming down her cheeks in the real world.
In her memory, Tracy turned and smiled. “Everything’s gonna be all right,” she said. “Better than all right. Things are gonna be really great. You’ll see.” Natalie held on to Tracy’s hand. Her last thought before the bullet ended her life was how happy she would be to see her beautiful sister again.
47
Allison woke up pissed off.
Someone kept banging on the door to her room. A rhythmic pounding so loud that it felt like the room shook from it. She yelled for them to stop, but it did no good.
Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam.
She had half a mind to get up from her bed, open the door and catch the asshole making the noise in the act.
Only she didn’t want to do that.
Because she knew who it was without getting up.
It was Sam Kraw, his evil grin filled with chiseled, yellow teeth. His eyes that looked right through her. He was standing outside her door with his head blown off, using a little girl’s decapitated head to pound on the door. A wet, red stain growing with each beat as the little girl’s face was smashed into a pulp.
She yelled again for him to stop. Screamed at him.
“Stop it, you mother fucker. Stop it or I’ll kill you again.”
But he didn’t stop.
Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam.
Then Craig Gerty was next to her in the bed.
; “You want me to stop him for you,” he said. “I only need one thing in return.”
He crawled on top of her, pinning her down. His hot breath and tongue on her face. Hands shoved between her legs.
She kicked and clawed, twisting away from him.
“Allison,” came a different voice. “Calm down. You’re OK.”
Her eyes shot open. Craig Gerty was gone. Mike was there instead. Her neck was immobilized. She tried to lift her arms but couldn’t. All she could move was her eyes. She saw an IV bag suspended to one side of her and a bag filled with blood to the other.
Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam.
That wasn’t knocking on a door. It was the sound of helicopter blades.
Mike smiled and shouted over the noise.
“You’re going to be fine,” he said.
Allison remembered saying those same words to the man on the tactical team who died in her arms after Kraw’s cabin exploded. The man whose face was half-gone, with shrapnel riddled through his body.
Hearing the words scared her.
Mike moved back to make room for a woman who attached a syringe to Allison’s IV port. She wore medical gloves and a jacket that made her look official. More importantly, the woman had the look of steely competence given off by medical pros who knew what they were doing.
The woman noticed her staring up at her and smiled back.
“He’s right, you’re going to be OK,” she said. “Can you move your toes for me?”
Allison did as she was asked. With her head in a brace she couldn’t look down, but the woman seemed pleased.
“Good,” she said. “Just hang tight. We’re ten minutes out.”
“N…na…n…nat…” Allison could have screamed from the frustration of not being able to get out the single word. The lights inside the helo were dimming. Or her eyes were drifting shut, she couldn’t be sure which. Whatever she’d been given through her IV was doing its work but she fought against it, the need to know what had happened to Natalie burning in her chest. She struggled to remember what she’d seen before being shot but it was all a blur, like a dream scattering in the seconds after waking up.
She felt Mike take her hand and felt herself settle down. It was nice that he was there with her. If he was there, then he must have saved her. Must have saved Natalie.
She closed her eyes, allowing herself the comfort of his hand holding hers and the logic that if she was alive then Natalie must be as well. Slowly, the world drifted off, even the pounding on the door slowly faded into the distance and then finally disappeared altogether.
48
Mike sat in Allison’s hospital room draining his fourth cup of coffee, trying to decide what to do. Nothing had gone the way he’d planned. In fact, since the moment Tracy Bain had pulled the ski mask from his face in her Georgetown apartment, everything had pretty consistently gone to shit.
The life he’d spent the last decade so meticulously constructing had unraveled in just a matter of weeks. And now he was forced to just wait to see if the woman on the bed in front of him was going to wake up and finger him as the killer. There was no way he could tell what she’d seen, what she’d remember. All he could do was wait it out and be ready to take decisive action if things went the wrong way. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d been in a tough spot.
What a ride his life had been. Even before his first kill, there had been years of thinking about it, preparing for the day. His interest had always been there; even as a teenager he was fascinated with serial killers and mass murderers. There were the greats: Dahmer, Gacy, Bundy. Then there were the young nut jobs like Klebold, Harris and Lanza. He’d considered that path for himself at one point. Going out in a blaze of heavy artillery, taking a record number of civilians with him before turning the gun on himself. But that ending seemed unsatisfying. As did the years of sitting in prison if he survived the inevitable capture, going through the endless appeals process as the state tried to put him to death.
No, early on he’d decided that the only way to scratch his particular itch was to do it smart and not give in to the desire to go on a spree. He wanted to do it like the guys he admired who got away with it for years. Only better because the only reason he knew about them was that in the end, they got caught.
On three different occasions while studying journalism and criminal justice at Colorado State, he followed young women to their cars at night, a knife and duct tape in his jacket pocket. But he always decided something wasn’t quite right and he bailed out. There was a time when he thought he didn’t have the nerve. That he was the guy who dreamed his whole life about skydiving, only to find once he was in the air that he was too scared to jump. To test himself, he adopted a small dog from a shelter a few towns over. It was a mutt, cute as could be, and ran up to him the second Mike walked into the play area with all the other dogs. The shelter worker insisted that people don’t choose dogs, the dogs choose the humans, and that little Rex had obviously chosen him. Hours later, Mike drove Rex up into the mountains, the dog hanging out the car window, tongue out, his mouth somehow turned up into something Mike could have sworn was a smile. Mike stopped at a McDonald’s to get his passenger a burger, which he scarfed down in only a couple of bites.
Finally, they took a random dirt road, an old logging trail, and drove fifteen minutes into the woods. Rex thought he’d gone to heaven, whimpering with excitement, ready to explore the great outdoors. Mike parked the car, let Rex out to pee, then stomped the dog to death with the heel of his boot. As he stood over the little carcass, he understood that he wasn’t a sociopath; he did feel remorse over what he’d just done. But even greater than the sense of guilt was the incredible relief that he had it in him to take life, to scratch the itch that kept him up at night. He buried little Rex and, in a testament either to the power of canines or the horribleness of humans, the dog remained the only kill that Mike regretted.
Allison stirred in the bed and Mike stood, waiting for her eyes to open. That first look when she saw him would mean a lot, more than any words she might say. There was a chance she might have seen him kill Natalie; he couldn’t be sure. And he needed to know. But he’d have to wait a little longer. Allison settled back down into the bed, her breathing smoothing out into a comfortable pattern. Mike sat back down, allowing his mind to wander back through his journey to the precarious spot in which he now found himself.
Right after college he’d sought out a job at the Washington Herald, writing about killers, learning about them, trying to understand them. It seemed to others like just the luck of the draw, a beat he pulled just like other guys at the paper might be assigned court cases or celebrity feuds. But there had been no accident. He threw himself into the work not only as a reporter, but as a student.
He quickly learned that his admiration was poorly placed. The real heroes were the guys who were still out there. The guys who didn’t have the vanity to pick a modus operandi that ended up giving them publicity-friendly nicknames. The Boston Strangler. Son of Sam. The Zodiac Killer. They all blew it as far as Mike was concerned. Raising too high a profile that brought too much attention.
The truth is there are thousands of unexplained disappearances every year across America. Some of them are teenaged runaways, wives running from men who beat them, prostitutes getting away from their pimps, drug addicts wandering the landscape looking to score. These were the hunting grounds of men just like him. Quiet. Smart. Able to control the impulse to kill until it was just right. That was who Mike wanted to be like. Only better.
The first kill was messy and would have ended his career before it started if he’d done it in the States. Instead, he took a trip to Thailand by himself, enduring all the ribbing from his buddies about him taking a sex trip. He planned on doing that too, but in the end, he went to pop a different kind of cherry and prove to himself he had what it took.
The first one was a prostitute, so whacked on drugs that she didn’t even seem surprised when he pulled out the machete purchased in
the outdoor market earlier that day. Probably thought the Westerner wanted to play out a sick fantasy with her.
In a way, she was right.
Her expression changed once he clumsily plunged the blade into her stomach. She screamed louder than he thought possible, turned and ran from the room, the machete still lodged in her gut, flopping up and down as she ran. He didn’t know what to do. The only other way out of the room was a high window. He pushed the bed that direction and was about to climb up on it when two men ran into the room and tackled him. The girl’s screaming returned, coming closer to the room until she was pushed through, falling to the floor at his feet. Behind him, an angry man with a burn covering half of his face entered, brandishing the blood-soaked machete and shouting at him in Thai. Mike raised his arms to his face, thinking he was about to die, when he realized the man with the burned face had switched to English.
The trouble, it seemed, wasn’t that Mike had tried to kill one of his girls, it was that he hadn’t paid for the right to do so. A brief bargaining followed, a price set, then the man handed over the machete. The men left the room and the girl started to scream, understanding what was about to happen. And it did happen. Five different times on that trip, all bought and paid for from the man with the burned face. When he returned home, his buddies joked that he must have had a good time because he was like a different person. More confident. More assured. More comfortable in his own skin.
He couldn’t have agreed more.
Allison stirred again. This time he saw her eyes moving behind closed lids, as if she were having a dream. He went to his darkest thought first, imagining that she was dreaming about the shooting at the warehouse, replaying the events, including seeing him blast Harris and Natalie. He cursed himself for not checking on her before the sheriff and all his local yokels had arrived. He could have just finished her off. If he had, he’d be home free. Now there was a chance, however slight, that she’d be able to finger him. Not that he would ever let it get that far. He’d spent a decade creating the perfect cover for himself and he wasn’t about to let it get blown now.