“Oh, well, I wouldn’t want to mess up your day. And mine’s pretty much fucked anyway.” She clapped a hand over her mouth, and he saw those blue eyes widen behind the crooked glasses.
The lady had a temper.
Just as quickly, he saw her face change. It was like she put on a Halloween mask. Only backwards. In this case, the wicked witch was the one behind the disguise.
“So you’re a detective?” she asked, as if she’d only just heard that part of his partner’s spiel. Her voice was a half octave higher, softer, her attitude polite instead of pissed, as if she wasn’t really just aching to kick him in the balls for hitting her.
“Yeah.” And I see right through you, he thought. You wouldn’t give a damn what you said to me if you didn’t know I was a cop. And that makes me wonder why it matters. “Here come the paramedics. Hey, Reno.”
“Hey, Mason.” Reno, an EMT Mason had known for three years, took her other arm and led her to the back of the ambulance. She handed Reno her bag and her stick, gripped the rail, found the step without a single miss, and pulled herself up and in as Mason watched her, thinking she was really good at being blind. And then thinking what a dumb-ass thought that was.
No wonder she was on the bitchy side. He would probably be a bear if he were in her shoes.
“Look, I’ll see how you’re doing later, okay?” He wasn’t quite able to walk away just yet. “I need to take care of things here, get that car out of the road, free up the traffic, climb the paperwork mountain. But I’ll check in on you.”
“No need. I’m not going to sue you.”
That’s what they all say, he thought. Right before they call a lawyer. That was one headache he didn’t need. “I’ll see you later, okay?”
She settled onto the gurney, still sitting up. “All right. Actually, there’s something I’d like to talk to you about, anyway.” Sweet smile, flung at him without warning. He hadn’t been expecting it, so its impact was stronger than it should have been. “Maybe…maybe this little accident was supposed to happen.”
Huh? What the hell did that mean?
He stood there puzzling on that after the ambulance doors closed, until Rosie came over and clapped a hand on his shoulder. “She’s way better-looking in person than on her book jackets, isn’t she?”
“I wouldn’t know, having never seen one. Who the hell is she, anyway?” They started back toward Mason’s car. There were uniforms out in the street taking photos, another one stopping traffic to let the ambulance pull out.
“Self-help author. Big celeb. On TV a lot. Preaches nonviolence, happy happy joy joy shit. You know, like Marlayna’s so into. Positive energy. Love your enemy and raise your vibe. What you get in life is always your own doing and all that. How can you not have heard of her?”
“Like you would have if not for your better half, pal? We’re not exactly vibing on her level, are we now?”
Rosie grinned. “Guess not, bein’ as we been up to our necks in bloodless crime scenes and MPDs lately.”
Missing, presumed dead. Twelve so far. Not a single body yet, though. But back to the blind chick. “Did you hear what she said to me, just before they closed the doors, Rosie?” Rosie shook his head. “She said maybe this accident was supposed to happen. What do you think she meant by that?”
“Shoot, I don’t know. I said I know who she is, not that I’m a true believer. I’ll ask Marlayna, though. She might have an idea.”
“Yeah, you do that.”
Mason’s phone chirped just then, and he pulled it out and looked at the screen.
His big brother Eric’s face—he looked fifty but was only thirty-eight—popped up beside the text message icon. He clicked through, and the message read: Take care of Marie & the boys.
What the hell?
“I gotta go.” Mason turned toward the car, moving on autopilot, then stopping. “Shit, I need a car.” He couldn’t move his until he got the okay.
“What’s up?” Rosie unsnapped his key ring from his belt and held it out.
“Don’t know. Eric’s at my place, showed up in the wee hours and wouldn’t talk to me. He had a fight with Marie or something.” He looked at the text again as he took the keys, a cold chill going up his spine. “Thanks, pal.”
“Holler if you need me, Mace.”
Mason gave a nod and headed around the corner to the parking lot behind the Binghamton P.D. Rosie’s yellow Hummer stood out just like its owner, the only black detective in a mostly white police department, so he didn’t have to look for it.
There was a sick feeling in his stomach as he drove the oversized toolbox out into traffic. He was worried about his brother.
Nothing new there. Worrying about Eric had become the Brown family pastime. Habit, he guessed. He told himself that there was probably nothing wrong. Maybe Eric was quoting a line from one of those damn grim poems he was always reading, scaring the hell out of Mason for nothing.
But he didn’t think so.
* * *
ERIC CONROY BROWN had gone straight to work after dumping the body, worked the entire day and then headed home late last night just like he always did after the rat had been fed and had crawled back into its hole, leaving him to clean up the mess. It made him feel normal to lie in bed beside his wife and pretend he wasn’t a monster. He knew he was, though. The rat was him. No matter how hard he tried to convince himself it was some other being, some demon possessing him, some evil other personality trying to force its way to the fore, it was him. He was the rat, which was probably why he couldn’t get it to shut up and stay inside, much less kill it.
This time, however, home had provided no solace.
Marie had been angry, waiting at the door with one hand at the small of her back and the other on top of her basketball-sized belly. “Why didn’t you come home last night? Honestly, Eric, I told you yesterday morning that the boys would be home from camp and I was making a welcome-home dinner.”
He blinked. The boys. Baseball camp. They’d been gone all summer. Hell. “I’m sorry. I got busy at work and—”
“You left your cell phone home. Again. I called the garage three times last night.”
“You know the garage phone switches over to the service at five whether we stay late or not. This guy needed his car finished, and the boss asked if I could stay late and get it done. It got so late I just slept on the cot in the store room. I just forgot about the boys is all.”
“You forgot?” She’d stared at him for a second there as if she knew. Or suspected. As if she was trying to get a visual of the rat inside him.
Don’t let her see, don’t let her see, don’t let her see. Spackle. Plaster. Shhh. No scratching!
“Are they already asleep?” he asked. He’d stayed late. It was hard to face the family too soon after…
“It’s 2:00 a.m., Eric. What do you think?”
He sighed heavily. Then, unable to bear the way she was looking at him any longer, he went to the boys’ shared bedroom and closed the door behind him. He heard Marie huff and stomp off into the kitchen. He imagined her waddling and stomping at the same time and smiled. She was beautiful when she was pregnant. All the time, really. A blue-eyed blonde just like Mother. But pregnant, she was at her best.
He didn’t deserve her.
Joshua was sound asleep. His curly carrot mop had grown longer, and his freckles had undergone a summertime explosion. How did kids change so much over a single season? He hoped sixth grade would be a good one for Josh. He hated sending his kids to school. School had been nothing but hell for him. He’d suggested homeschooling, but Marie had insisted she had no time, and the boys had hated the idea. And really, the more they were out of the house, away from him, the better.
Besides, the boys weren’t like him. They fit in. They weren’t freaks.
He’d wondered, back then, if everyone would always be able to see the rat inside him as clearly as the kids in middle school seemed to. Because they saw it. He had no doubt that they saw it. Even wh
en he could keep it mostly silent and sleeping for months at a time, and only had to feed it a neighbor’s cat here and there, they saw it. Kids homed in on shit like that and tried to kill it. You know, like a litter of healthy animals, mom and all, will push the one sick one right out of the nest and leave it to die? He’d seen it on the Discovery Channel. Lions did it. Wolves did it. Birds did it. Kids were just like that. A weak one, a different one, a broken one, or even an especially gifted one—anything different—was to be shunned, banished, destroyed. It was probably a matter of self-preservation left over from the caveman days. You didn’t want anyone evolving faster than the norm or they’d be unfair competition. And you didn’t want anyone evolving slower than the norm, or they’d drag you down with them. And you sure as shit didn’t want predators—the kind who would prey on their own—because they’d eat you.
Kids always knew. Adults, not so much. Adults were mostly blind. Not his mother, though. His real one. She must have taken one look at him and seen that he was broken.
Eric smoothed Josh’s hair and turned toward Jeremy’s bed, then stopped where he was, shocked by how much more of the bed Jeremy took up. He couldn’t possibly have grown that much taller since May. Could he?
He moved closer, surprised when Jeremy rolled over and opened his eyes. They were brown and accusing. “You forgot, didn’t you?”
But it wasn’t his words that made Eric’s blood chill in his veins. It was his look. He didn’t look like a kid anymore. He looked like a young man. Tall, lean, lanky, with brown hair he’d let grow all summer long, and deep brown eyes with heavy brows and thick eyelashes.
He looks just like they all look.
And that hot scratching began deep inside Eric’s brain.
“No,” he whispered. “No.”
Scratch, scratch, scratch.
“No? Well then, where were you?”
Eric backed away from his son.
Jeremy rolled his eyes and gave an exaggerated sigh. “Come on, Dad, can’t you even talk to me?”
But he couldn’t. The rat was coming out. He felt it scratching, clawing, gnawing. The plaster hadn’t even had time to dry, and already the rat was breaking through. Its twitching nose was sniffing through the first tiny hole.
Eric backed out and closed the bedroom door. The digging intensified. That scratching rat inside his brain had caught the scent, and it was demanding to be fed. And the meal it wanted this time was Eric’s own son.
He couldn’t stay at the house. Not once that feeling had begun. It never went away once it started. Nothing would stop it, nothing but killing.
He heard Marie banging pans in the kitchen, warming up leftovers for him. She was always worrying about what he ate, his cholesterol, his weight, shit like that, shit that didn’t even matter. His body wasn’t diseased, his brain was.
He walked quietly back through the house. It wasn’t a bad house. Small, only three bedrooms. The boys each had their own, but Josh had given his up to be a nursery, so they were sharing now. The living room was a mess. The boys’ sneakers scattered randomly all across the rug, jackets flung over chairs, backpacks spilling out onto the floor. He looked at the clutter, at the out-of-place sofa pillows and the TV, turned on, volume muted, running an infomercial about an electronic gadget you plugged into the wall to drive away pests. Mice and ants and spiders…
Not rats, though. Once you’ve got a rat, you’ve got a rat, that’s all there is to that that that.
He went out the front door, barely making a sound. He knew how to move in silence. He was a predator, after all. A hunter.
He got into his ‘03 F-150, and drove back the way he’d come, over the bridge onto 81, and twenty minutes south to Binghamton. To his brother’s apartment. Mason let him in, groggy, only a little curious, but too tired to stay up long enough to grill him. Just pointed at the couch and scuffed back to his bedroom. A minute later he brought out a pillow and a blanket. “You need to talk, bro?”
“No. Maybe tomorrow.”
“All right. Get some sleep, okay?” Mason handed him the bedding, and went back to his room.
Eric hadn’t slept, though. He’d thought. All night long, he’d paced and he’d thought.
He guessed he’d probably been hoping to stumble onto another solution. A different answer. But he knew down deep that there wasn’t one.
And now it was morning. He’d pretended to be asleep while Mason was getting ready to go to work, knowing his brother wouldn’t wake him. Better that way. If he spoke to Mason first, his detective instincts would tell him something was wrong. So he faked sleep and waited until Mason left.
And now he was alone, and he was ready. Everything was done. He’d showered, and he’d gone down to his pickup to get his stuff out of the locked toolbox where he kept it. A man’s toolbox was sacred. Like a woman’s purse, according to Marie. People didn’t snoop in a man’s toolbox. Not without a damn good reason, anyway, and he’d always been careful never to provide one.
So he was ready. His duffel bag was on the floor, up against the wall on the far side of the room. He’d returned the blanket and pillow to Mason’s bedroom, and unrolled a sheet of plastic on the sofa and out across the floor for several feet all around it, because this was his brother’s place, after all. He didn’t want to ruin it entirely. And he always had plastic in his truck. For moving them. His letter was written, and though it was short, that had taken the longest, ‘cause what could you say, really? Sorry? Sorry didn’t even begin…
Didn’t matter.
The long line of driver’s licenses was on the coffee table, one neat straight row. He’d texted Mason. Mason would know what to do. He would take care of everything. He always did.
So…it was time.
He picked up the gun in his right hand. It was heavy. He’d rarely used the thing, kept it just in case. He’d avoided the question, in case of what? It wasn’t really his gun. It belonged to the rat. But he was going to use it now.
He was shaking hard as he pressed the barrel to his temple. It worried him how hard he was shaking. He didn’t want to mess this up. He didn’t want to suffer. He didn’t want to feel it. Barrel in the mouth didn’t always work. He’d read that somewhere, hadn’t he? So, to the temple. And it wasn’t like he had to be too precise, anyway. The gun was a .44. He wrapped his left hand around the barrel to keep it from bucking with the recoil and just blowing off the top of his head. And yeah, it would burn his hand—that barrel would be hot. But he didn’t think he’d feel it for more than a second or two, and it was better than letting the gun buck and not getting the job done. That wouldn’t be pleasant. He might survive that.
Gotta do what must be done, burn my hand on the red-hot gun.
God, I’m scared.
He had to do it. Mason would be here soon. It had to be done before Mason got here to stop him.
Is there really a hell? God, what if there is?
He took a deep breath. Then another.
It’s gonna hurt. I know it’s gonna hurt.
He heard footsteps outside. Hell, Mason was already here.
Just do it. It’ll only hurt for a second. Just do it already. For Jeremy.
“Yes, for Jeremy.”
The rat was scratching frantically now. Its claws had broken through. It was ripping away the plaster. If it got out, it wouldn’t let him go through with it. He knew that.
Do it do it do it!
Mason’s heavy steps came to a stop just outside the door. Then the door opened and his brother’s eyes found him sitting there. They went wide with horror as Mason lurched forward, reaching out with both hands, yelling, “No, no, no!”
Eric squeezed the trigger, felt his brain explode in one all-consuming white-hot mixture of deafening noise and blinding pain. And then as blackness descended, he felt the rat squeeze through the hole in the wall and plop onto the floor. Or was that a handful of his brain?
He never did feel the hot barrel burning his hand.
2
A COP CAME to the hospital to take my statement. It wasn’t Detective Brown, though.
My imagination and sixth sense had joined forces and decided to visualize Mason Brown as gorgeous, buff and sexy as hell. He probably had a wide, strong jaw and a corded neck. No long rock-star hair, though. Not on a cop.
Another cop, a short fat one, I guessed, was sitting in a chair by my bed writing down my answers to his questions. He wore glasses. I could hear him adjusting them over and over, up on his head, then down on his nose again. Up when he was addressing me, down when his pen went scritching across the notepad.
“You should just give in and get bifocals,” I said.
He looked up, or that was what I guessed by the sound: movement, then stillness.
I loved this. Shocking people by showing off. It was almost like I was a magician doing parlor tricks for the crowd. Some of the blind—okay, visually-impaired is the PC term, but I’m not visually impaired, I’m fucking blind—hated being under-estimated by the sighted. I enjoyed letting them think I was some kind of wonder-kid. It was good PR and amused me to boot. And amusing myself was hard when I was in the hospital and therefore in public, and therefore forced to play my Positive Polly role to the hilt. No slips allowed. BW would have my head.
BW, by the way, was my agent. Belinda Waubach, aka Barracuda Woman.
“Those are store-bought glasses, right? You got them off a rack at a Walmart or a CVS, didn’t you?”
“Price Chopper. I only need them for close-up stuff.”
“It’s the corneas. You need a transplant to fix it. Sadly, they save them all for people like me—not me specifically, of course. My body hates foreign corneas. Rejects them almost before the surgery’s over.” I smelled sweet pea and jasmine. “Are we about finished? My sister’s here to see me.”
“You—” He stopped, and I heard him shift positions, probably to look behind him at the doorway where Sandra stood.
“Is she messing with your head, Officer?” she asked.
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