by Brett Adams
I jumped down from the drum and examined my find by the Medline’s light.
“What—?” began Tracey, and I held a finger to my lips.
Her gaze returned to the cellphone cradled in my hand. Its little red need-charge light winked plaintively.
I wonder to this day how differently this might have all turned out had I been a fraction faster to display my find to Kim.
But before I could show her, she spoke.
“Seeing as how it’s time for honest talk, Jack. How about you tell me what the hell happened to you.”
Wow. You pick your moments, Kim.
I glanced at Tracey, repeated the shushing gesture. She nodded. (Who was this mature young woman?)
I clicked the Medline display off, and covered the cellphone’s telltale light with my thumb, before I turned to Kim.
The orange ghost-image of the shed faded from my vision into utter dark. For a moment, the only sound was three sets of lungs pumping air. Sense-starved, we could have been transported anywhere in the world. A limestone cave in Western Australia. A submarine listing slowly into the Marianas Trench. Beneath the covers of a couch-tent—lacking only the marshmallows for a midnight snack.
The darkness, so often my crutch for difficult conversations, removed one stimulus too many. I couldn’t gather the threads I needed to keep my girls alive when my last glimpse of Kim before the light died had seen a woman looking so lost, crouched in the dust, hair in disarray, wearing yesterday’s clothes, eyes glinting with unshed tears.
“I got owned by an exchange student.”
A sigh in the dark.
“I know,” I said. “Not what you meant.” I groped my way forward, found Kim’s shoulder, slumped down next to her. Tracey settled against our backs, silent.
“Last will and testament, huh, Kim?”
“You were the one with the chronic aversion to communication, Jack. The most open you got was on morphine. I used to joke if I wanted to get inside your head I had to get your body into emergency.” She paused. “But this? I don’t know what this is, but I’ll take it. So—you left us nine years ago. Where did you go?”
“Can’t we discuss this later, over a sirloin and a nice red?”
Her only answer was a faint sigh.
“You want an answer?” I said. “What makes you think I communicate any better with myself?”
She snorted. “The writer can’t communicate.”
The writer? The writer was outside with a gun, no doubt watching the time. How much longer would he let this play out?
But weren’t there two writers here tonight? Could I call myself a writer?
After a decade suffering the open wound that was my novel, I think I’d earned the title. Yes.
So I’d be damned if I was going to let Hiero have it all his way.
Time to rewrite. To edit. To redact.
“I’m going to tell you both something, but I need you to promise you won’t freak out.”
They waited for me to go on.
“I mean it. You have to promise.”
“I promise, Dad.”
“Kim?”
A sigh. “Sure, Jack, I promise.”
This didn’t need to be the whole truth. Just enough for them to trust me.
“Good.” I cleared my throat, and plunged in. “The novel Hiero is writing with our lives is In Cold Blood.” No need to give either Tracey or Kim a synopsis. A full second later, Tracey’s gasp told me she’d got it. Kim pulled away from me.
“Jack, you asked me if we’d passed Holcomb. You meant that Holcomb?”
I rushed on. “When we got out of the RV tonight, we might have found a Kansas farmhouse, a mile out of Holcomb. Assuming weeks—maybe years—of meticulous orchestration, I wouldn’t have put it past Hiero to have arranged to get the old Clutter house all to himself, ready to reprise some version of that bloody night of fifty years ago as the climax of his novel.”
“But we’re not at a farmhouse.” Kim’s voice was flat with stress.
“No, we’re not.”
“Then you’re wrong,” she said.
“No, I don’t think so. Or—no, you’re right.” How much could I say?
“To expect the Holcomb farmhouse, that would be wrong. But it’s just surface detail. I haven’t stopped turning it over in my head. We’re in Kansas. There are six of us. It’s night, on the anniversary of the murders . . .”
The crisis loomed. If Kim and Tracey could absorb one more blow, and keep it together, we had a chance.
I dredged my will to continue.
“But the real In Cold Blood isn’t about the murders at all. It’s about the murderers. Two of them, alike in their crime, but so very, very different in nature. The kind of difference that spawned a new branch of criminal psychology.”
“Two murderers,” Kim echoed. My eyes were slowly adjusting to the dark, and I watched her square off to me, squatting in the dust. “Hiero is one.”
And he would make me the other. Kim got it.
I felt the phone, warm beneath my hand, and wondered if Hiero was getting it, too. Outside, crouched around the phone with Rhianne and Ghost, maybe sipping hot chocolate, was he happy I was connecting his dots?
“But why you?” said Kim.
I had my suspicions.
“How do the other two fit,” said Tracey, “Ghost and this Rhianne?”
What were the chances of a nexus like this, three terminally unbalanced tweens with the means to prosecute their shared delusion? In a world of billions, it was a downright certainty. Add to that another equally ineluctable truth—it’s the easiest thing in the world to murder. The human body is such a fragile organism. The hard bit is getting away with it.
All I said was: “U2 would be nothing without roadies.”
We were silent, each with our own thoughts. Outside, the mournful creaking of loose sheet-iron told of a rising wind.
Plucking up the courage before we ran out of time, I circled back to the beginning.
“The answer to your question, Kim—your first question—is: I didn’t go anywhere.”
I gripped her wrist to stall a retort, but she spoke anyway. “Sure, every day when we got home your body was there, or something like it let itself in late at night. Its keys jangled like yours, and it smelled of your aftershave. But you? The ghost had left the machine, Jack.”
“Don’t you get it?” My hands found her shoulders. “I didn’t go anywhere, because there was no me left to leave. I fell apart. One day I turned a corner in my mind and didn’t recognize the place.”
“I don’t know what that means! But you could’ve—”
“Could’ve? Life narrowed to a choice between three appalling options: I could be there but not there, not there, or nowhere. I chose door number one. Maybe I should have taken door three, checked out completely.”
She leaned close, right up in my face. Her breath touched my skin. She still smelled like Kim. She spoke one word, drawn out, pleading. “Why?”
But I fancied her eyes asked, ‘Was it me? Was there someone else?’
Someone else.
Someone else. The fear of a rival. Deep waters, those. Powerful currents. Did Hiero even know they were twisting through his narrative? Of course he did. If I guessed right, it was he that had unleashed them.
But sometimes the falling tree kills the beaver.
I had to believe that Hiero’s coterie was not three true believers, but two believers and one amoral opportunist.
And the panic and despair I’d seen in Kim’s eyes that threatened to drown her had finally given way to anger—at Hiero or me, I didn’t know. It didn’t matter.
Time to commit.
“The truth?” I said. Kim nodded. “Hiero still wets the bed.”
A flash of horror registered on her face, as if she thought I’d gone mad.
Raising the cellphone to my mouth, I said, “I’m not choosing, you colossal asswipe, so ball’s in your court.”
Silence followed, bro
ken only by the crackle of static.
“Dad.” Tracey’s hand touched my shoulder, and pointed. There, beneath the door, a fringe of light. It grew brighter.
Someone was coming.
85
In the silence, the sudden screech of rusted door hinges was startling. A shaft of light speared the gloom, leaving me momentarily blind.
The sound of footsteps. Puffs of dust rose and drifted through the stark light. A shadow moved above a high-power Maglite. My forehead felt the cool kiss of a gun barrel.
“Got that?” said Hiero. “Remember it. Now—empathise,” drawing out the last word with a sibilant hiss.
Rhianne and Ghost had followed Hiero into the shed. They moved apart and watched in silence.
With an economy of motion, Hiero took the gun away, and planted it on Kim’s temple, who flinched at its touch. “The time of choice has arrived. What’s it to be? Contestant number one, the ex-wife, estranged yet stretching for more, and—” He interrupted himself, seemed genuinely annoyed with me. “I mean, come on. The woman asked why you left. She wants you, you dolt. Isn’t it obvious? And you can’t muster up one straight answer for the mother of your only child?”
He stepped sideways, and planted the gun on Tracey’s temple. “Contestant number two. Young woman of grit, who, bucking the trend, doesn’t hate the father who left her, but strangely holds some affection, even love, for him. How about that? You guys are writing this yourselves. It’s a thing to behold.”
He glanced at me. “How’s it feel, Jack? Wet?” He laughed. I remembered the night in my office an eternity ago when he laid a knife blade to my hand and asked me how it felt. Asked me to choose between fingers and thumb.
“You need to choose, but if you refuse, I will ‘glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends.’” He was quoting Frankenstein. Cute.
“Choose.” He whipped the gun back to Kim’s head. She flinched. “Wife.” He planted it on Tracey again. “Daughter.” His arm switched back and forth. “One. Two. One. Two.”
Then, faster. “Thumb. Fingers. Thumb. Fingers. Man up, and do the humane thing, or I will. Eenie, Meanie—”
“Stop!”
“—No. Choose. Minee, Mo.”
“I’ll choose, I’ll choose, godammit! Just put it down.”
He fell silent, but the gun continued to travel, back and forth, tick-tock, from Kim to Tracey. The Maglite still gripped in his left hand made a blazing circle in the gravel at our feet. The reflected light carved shadows in all the wrong places on his face.
“I promise,” I pleaded. “I’ll choose. But, please, just give me a minute. I have to know why. This novel—”
The gun halted midair, poised between Kim and Tracey.
“I’m listening.”
In a rush, I went on. “I have to know if this is all my fault.”
He laughed. “Jack, you’re the antagonist. Of course, it’s your fault.”
I felt rooted to the ground, and I couldn’t think rooted to the ground. I needed to pace. It’s what I do when my plot is in knots. But I doubted Hiero would indulge me tonight, so—
“I can’t think while you’re pointing that thing.”
“Oh,” he said, and raised the gun to point at the roof. He pulled the trigger and the report crashed against my eardrums. “Hey, it works. Unlike Rhianne’s stage prop—another bluff you bought.”
Stage prop? There was only one gun here, and I’d willingly handed it over.
Hiero continued. “But go, on.”
Through the hole torn in the iron roof by the bullet’s passage, a tiny star glinted. From outside, far away, came a sound like a low, hoarse scream.
“Where the hell are we?” I said.
“We’re—wait. What’s this place called, Wheeler?”
“You know very well.”
“Oh, Sandstone Ridge or something. Bison reserve. A few miles from Garden City. That noise was probably a bison, or maybe a golfer with a triple bogey. There’s a golf club around here, too.”
“You’re not going to get away with it, you know.” I was speaking to Hiero, but cast my eyes at Ghost and Rhianne in turn. “Your plot is full of holes.”
“Do tell,” he said, smirking. I’d hoped to ruffle him, but pressed on.
“In your version, I’m the predator. You’re the hero, fleeing the rabid professor, ready to put him down if necessary.”
He nodded. A fair assessment.
“You tease me into showing up at Rhianne’s—the almost rape victim. I’m almost arrested right there, at her bedside, snooping out the damage.”
“You were a darling,” whispered Rhianne. “Your concern set my heart aflutter.”
“Next I’m in Hong Kong, seen moments before the discovery of the body of Li Min. Then Vienna, running from attempted murder—”
“Actual, not attempted, Jack. Fatal brain herniation. Your news is stale.”
Rhianne actually smiled.
I grasped for something to wipe the smile from her face. “Hiero probably told you it didn’t mean anything when he kissed these girls—just like the movies, right?”
Her eyes darted at Hiero. It was a small satisfaction.
Of course, it had been Rhianne who had visited the bedside of Annika Kreider, Chalky, and taken a lock of her hair, God knows why. Maybe it was a perverse kind of trophy? Detective Thomas had accused me of doing it, called me a psycho, and I wondered if he’d taken my advice and checked if Li Min had all her hair.
“Then the deranged professor is blogging his exploits to the world, like the clichéd megalomaniac you’ve cast him to be.
“On the train from Vienna, you played a dangerous game. But, maybe not so dangerous. You”—I jabbed a finger at Ghost—“were there, head down over your laptop, making sure I didn’t screw-up the narrative.”
The laptop, ever present, sat snug in a leather messenger bag slung over his shoulder.
“I had to keep my head down,” Ghost said. “One look at your face when you were padding up and down the corridor like an asthmatic bloodhound playing hot and cold, and I nearly shot coffee out my nose.”
Hiero flicked the gun in my direction. “When are we getting to the holes, Jack? Dawn is coming, and you promised me a decision.”
He was getting impatient, but I hazarded a guess I could play him for more time.
“Your IT genius here isn’t as good as he thinks he is. The blog made me realize I couldn’t do it alone, so I called in help. And the first cracks began to appear in your façade.”
Ghost snorted. “The hack from your home town?” He was trying to appear confident, but was clearly irked at the suggestion his work had a weakness.
“Hack?” I laughed. “He tore your walls down. Showed me what you were up to. And he has a copy of all of it. He recorded the hosting account—I wonder who owns the attached credit card? You said that was all you, right?”
Hiero glanced at Ghost, but oddly didn’t seem upset that the entire contents of his fictional blog were safely copied away, ready to be given to the police.
“That’s your first problem,” I said. “But not the last. Here’s what you’ll have to talk yourself out of when you’re tried for homicide, Randall Todd.”
The only sign my use of his real name had registered was the gun barrel dipping to point at my guts.
“Your history at Germanton, home of the Lawson family Christmas massacre? There’s a young woman happy to tell all.”
Rhianne shot a sideways glance at Hiero.
“Want me to keep going?”
Hiero’s smile returned. He nodded, gracious.
“You and Rhianne must have overlapped somewhere before coming to Australia. A university perhaps, fishing like you were with Tracey? Another massive coincidence.
“My laptop password was removed. I didn’t remember until later. Ghost tells me he stuck money in my account. That’s all got to show up, right?
“Chalky’s landlady in Vienna; I was the
second guy asking after Chalky that day. The first had an American accent. You willing to bet the landlady can’t pick you out of a line-up?
“No matter what happens here tonight, you’re not walking away from this. Not one of you. But you can stop it now. We’ll testify to your remorse. Whatever it takes.”
Hiero turned to Ghost. “Please tell me you’re still recording. That was pure gold.” Ghost nodded.
“I’m serious,” I pleaded. “Smith and Hickock hung for In Cold Blood. They won’t hang you, but they’ll lock you in cell and throw away the key. Let us go—all of us, and you have a chance at a life.”
“Jack, you do realize the body count for In Cold Blood is four. If we were still doing In Cold Blood do you think I’d have given you a choice? In Cold Blood leaves you all dead. The job lot.”
“Choice or no choice, Hiero. It’s not going to work. Alone, maybe you could have slipped away.” I glanced at Rhianne and Ghost. “But you had to cast the roles of Bait and Rigger. You couldn’t do it alone.”
Hiero said, “In the end, we’re all alone.”
He drew nearer. The fire of a strange intensity burned in his gaze.
“So make your choice. Please. The mother or the child. Or your choice is both.” And he raised the gun.
I let my shoulders slump.
“I choose—”
Rehearsed a hundred times in the last few minutes, it had been smooth, swift and powerful. My right arm, cutting down on Hiero’s forearm, knocking the gun clear; my left swinging my fist into the side of Hiero’s skull. The force of the combined blows sending him reeling sideways into Rhianne and Ghost.
In reality, my right arm tangled with his outstretched arm when it collapsed at the elbow. The blow spun him to face me, and the fist meant to club him away, caught him in the throat. He retched and collapsed towards me.
So I improvised.
I lifted my right knee. It met his chin as he fell, and propelled him backwards onto his rump. The Maglite fell with a clunk to the ground. Its light sheared the gloom at a crazy angle, and for a heartbeat froze everyone in place.
Good enough. The way to the door was clear.