“What’s tying his hands and feet?” I asked, trying to see in the dim light that filtered through the bare limbs.
“I always carry a few police ties.” Orvid casually produced a thin, white piece of plastic no bigger than a strand of tagliatelle.
“That’s holding him?” I took a step back before I checked myself.
“Riot cops carry something like these to handcuff lots of people in big riots. They work.”
“So you hobbled him, dragged him, handcuffed him,” I said, touching my forehead again, brushing away wet blood, “and then came looking for me?”
“I was worried about you.” Orvid smiled. “If Frazier had killed you, it would have been very difficult for me to take care of your body. You’re really big and heavy.”
“Yes,” I answered drily. “I’ll try not to inconvenience you in that manner.”
“Okay,” Orvid said brightly. “Well, our work here is done.”
“Not by a long shot,” I insisted. “You understand I have about a hundred more questions.”
“Let me go,” Frazier muttered with absolutely no conviction.
“What questions?” Orvid asked me amiably, leaning a little on his cane, a generous smile on his lips.
“You’ve been studying me?” I tried not to sound completely dumbfounded. “Is that what you just reminded me of?”
“Where to begin?” Orvid mused.
The moon had freed itself completely from a prison of clouds, and the sky was polished with the soft light. All around us the birds and night frogs kept quiet, anxious to hear what Orvid had to say.
Even poor Hiram Frazier sat mute, breathing through his slack mouth, eyes closed.
“About three years ago, when you first returned home to Blue Mountain,” Orvid began, “you had been gone from there a long time.”
“Over a decade,” I agreed, nodding.
“People were curious about you, about why you were back.”
“They were?”
“Lots of people were glad to see you, of course,” he hedged, “but you have to know that you’re a strange person and people don’t quite know what to make of you.”
“Conceded.” The bloody place on my head was throbbing.
“People thought you might be back to stir up trouble,” he went on, “about your family. Even about my family—the rumors concerning your mother and my cousin Tristan. They’re still circulating. But that’s the thing about gossip, really: everyone likes to talk about it in private, but no one really feels comfortable if it’s made public.”
“Someone thought I was going to make those awful stories public ?”
“Some people in my family thought it was a possibility. That’s where my interest began, with the gossip concerning my cousin.”
“That’s really more about my mother than about me,” I said, clearing my throat, “but go on.”
“Let’s just say it sparked an interest. Professionally.”
“There it is,” I said softly. “The center of your hidden world, your profession. I don’t know how I would provoke an interest in a person such as yourself.”
“What do you think I do?” Orvid asked, his smile turning cold.
“Oh, I know what you do,” I said, trying to match his toughness. “I just don’t want to discuss it.”
“Why not?”
I tried to clear my mind and focus on the exact reason I didn’t want to concern myself with Orvid’s business.
“Maybe I’m afraid of you,” I said. “Or maybe, as I believe I told you, there’s enough bad news in my life at the moment and I don’t want to sully my subconscious with any more twenty-first-century desolation. Or maybe, finally, I actually do feel some sort of odd kinship with you, a burgeoning friendship of some sort, and I don’t want to be disappointed.”
“I see.” He shifted his weight. “You don’t want to be disappointed in me, but you really don’t know what I do for a living.”
“I do,” I insisted, my voice rising. “Skidmore knows too. And frankly, it’s as much a mundane cliché as it is a disappointing occupation for a man of your intellect.”
“Skidmore doesn’t know anything,” he assured me.
“He does. Damn.” I could feel my temper rising, my face warming. “He’s seen you fetch your little packages from the train. I’ve even pieced together the likely lines of connection: you to Andy Newlander at the movie house in Pine City, then Andy to Nickel Mathews, and finally from Nickel to dozens of young people in our county. Or is it hundreds?”
Orvid exploded with laughter.
Frazier was so startled he almost fell over, and my adrenaline level shot up, heart thumping, face hotter.
“Oh my God,” Orvid finally managed, all but supporting himself on his cane. “You think I’m the county drug lord?”
He dissolved again, ending in a mild coughing fit.
I talked over his wheezing.
“But, see, how would you even know that the subject was drugs simply from my mention of Andy and Nickel,” I reasoned only a little weakly, “if you weren’t connected with that business?”
“I am an observant sort,” he said uneasily, pulling out his inhaler, “as I thought I had demonstrated. I see things; I learn. And with the boys we’re talking about, it’s not exactly deep-cover spy operations, is it? I mean, Nickel Mathews, God bless him, has the IQ of a radish.”
“You’re not the drug guy?” I said thinly.
“No.” He was smiling again. “That’s Eppie Waldrup.”
“What?” I felt like sitting down.
“Why did you think Eppie was so aggressive about getting you to intervene with Skidmore on his behalf? Slow as Skidmore is, he’s thorough, I’ll give him that. He’s going to find Eppie out one day, with Deputy Melissa’s help.”
“He’s not involved in stolen cars?” I stammered.
“Not that I know of,” Orvid wheezed.
“All those boys who always hang around Eppie’s.” I swallowed. “They go there for drugs?”
“Drugs and car parts,” Orvid said brightly. “If there were handguns available too, it would be the complete American one-stop shopping experience, don’t you think?”
“Eppie Waldrup?” I pictured him sitting in his tortured chair in the junkyard.
“What do you think would induce a man to create a musical instrument like the one Eppie made?” Orvid said, his eyebrows arched. “Except for drugs?”
I had to admit it seemed a more reasonable explanation than I’d ever thought of for Eppie’s weird xylophone-gamelon setup.
“Sadly,” I agreed, “I see that you may be right.”
“Oh, I’m right. I’ve watched him sell weed a hundred times. And recently he’s gotten into ecstasy. But I think you know that.”
“So you’re not the drug supplier in my hometown.” I shook my head. “I have to absorb that. For some reason, I do believe you’re telling me the truth. Skidmore is going to be embarrassed.”
“Not if he catches Eppie,” Orvid said reasonably. “Which he will pretty soon now. Especially if you suggest it to him.”
“Right.”
The wind picked up.
“You’ll admit, now,” Orvid said after a moment, “that you don’t know what I do for a living.”
“I guess I would have to admit that. Can I do anything to persuade you to tell me what you really do?”
“Well, as a matter of fact, it relates to our task at hand, as well as my aforementioned professional interest in your return to Blue Mountain. I’m reluctant to tell you everything, but for some reason I have an odd inclination to explain the basics.”
“Now I’m not sure I want to know,” I said.
Without warning, Hiram Frazier arched his back and tried to get up.
“He’s a killer!” Frazier spat. “He’s going to slit my throat!”
Frazier tried to wiggle sideways, away from Orvid.
Orvid flicked his cane and tapped Frazier a good knock on the back of his skull.
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“Ow,” was all the complaint that Frazier made, a weak one at that. “He’s going to kill me.”
“He’s not going to kill you,” I assured Frazier, sighing. “We’re going to take you back to Pine City, like I wanted to a minute ago. Only now you’re all tied up and hit in the head and everything. But he’s not going to kill you.”
“Well,” Orvid drawled. “Not so fast, Tex.”
I met Orvid’s eyes. They were amused, but they were made of steel.
“Actually,” he continued, “that is what I’m here for. And I mean here in the larger sense of the word.”
“Sorry?” I thought I was misunderstanding him.
“That’s my job.” He shrugged. “I’m a Final Solution Technologist.”
I stared blankly, I could hear the sound of my own breathing.
“Sometimes in the movies or on television,” Orvid explained simply, “a person like me is called a hit man.”
“A hit man?” I felt Orvid had tapped me in the head with his cane.
“I hate that terminology. I think Final Solution Technologist is much better. Funny, you know? Like the new politically correct style speech.”
“I don’t believe you,” I choked.
“It’s true. I was pulled into the business by a teetotaler,” Orvid said as if he were telling a campfire story. “He was a man named Lincoln Favor, friend of Judy’s family in Chattanooga. He never took a drink in his life. He was married to Mattie Jenkins—you know the Jenkins family?”
All I could do was shake my head. Orvid’s strange pink eyes sparkled in what little moonlight they captured.
“No,” Orvid said cheerily, “I guess there’s no reason you would. But Mattie, she loved Lincoln Favor for eleven years. Until she found out why he was so sober. And he was militant about being sober. Every Christmas, for example, Lincoln’s brother would bring out a cup of kindness, and every year Lincoln would get into a fight about it, then he and Mattie would go home mad. There’d be a big buzz in the community about it for a week or two, and then the brothers would make up and things would be back to normal. Apparently, one year Mattie even asked Lincoln why he carried on so with his brother, who was by no means a drunk, about something so innocent as a simple Christmas toast. Lincoln said that drink was the devil’s tool, that drink clouded a man’s judgment and unsteadied his hand. Well, Mattie didn’t understand why a man needed that much clear judgment just to collect government subsidy, run a little bitty truck patch, and sit at a roadside vegetable market three months of the year, which was Lincoln’s public occupation. But she found out. October thirtieth ten years ago, Lincoln Favor was arrested by the FBI because he had killed seventeen men for money. That was Lincoln’s private job, his real work: somebody paid him lots of money to kill people. And that’s a kind of work that would require a steady hand. Mattie was so scared by the whole thing that she moved back in with her mama in Griffin and hasn’t spoken a word, not a syllable, in the years since. She’s a mute now. And Lincoln Favor escaped. The FBI put him in prison in Chattanooga, which is where I met him. I was there for cutting up somebody in a fight when I was drunk. Lincoln kind of took me under his wing and got me off the booze. Then some men came and got him out and they took me along. The point is: you never know. Lincoln was just like anybody. Judy talked to him many a time in the store. He seemed to have the same face as most any man. But it was a mask. He seemed a stern member of his church congregation, a hardworking man, a Christian in a little Southern town. But he killed seventeen men for no other reason than money. I learned a lot from him.”
The black air around me seemed a net in which I was caught, a dark web, and I felt I couldn’t move.
“Does Judy know?” I whispered. “Does she know what you do?”
“Are you serious?” He seemed offended. “We don’t keep secrets from one another. I told you this was all her idea, remember?”
Everything in the clearing had gone still. I had to force the air out of my lungs to ask the question I didn’t really want to ask.
“How does that have anything to do with me? You said your profession related to your studying me.”
“I have an intuition about these things.” He took hold of the top of his cane. “I always research interesting people like you.”
“What for?” I asked, desperately wanting the answer to be anything other than what it had to be.
“In case someone in my family wanted me to kill you,” he said softly.
He drew his blade from its hiding place.
Nineteen
I was too senseless to move.
Orvid displayed the three-foot length of steel; it slashed a silver cut in the black air beside him. His face had not changed expression.
I could feel something struggling in my chest, only gradually realized it was my heart, like a caged animal, beating at the sides of its prison. Blood pumped past my ear in loud explosions. My stomach was made of ice.
Every nerve ending in my body was screaming at me to run, but my muscles were dead, and my brain was paralyzed.
I felt my jaw fall open; heard sounds pour out of my mouth. Were they words? Was I actually talking?
“So what are the bundles you get,” I seemed to be asking in some desperate attempt to gain time to think, “thrown from the train?”
“I have my jobs delivered that way,” he said brightly, not moving. “Clients send their requests to me in packages that are thrown from the train. A certain conductor is paid very well to deliver what he’s told is mail to a rural eccentric at the junction in Pine City. The packages are in a sealed bank courier pack that has a computer-code lock. They contain details of the job, photos, schedules, final decisions. I wait in the abandoned station in Pine City; when I see that the coast is clear, I pick up the bundle and make my final decisions about the job. Does that answer your question?”
“How do you get these clients?” I asked him automatically, exactly the way I would ask a folk informant.
I think I had the idea in mind that if I kept him talking, I would eventually come up with a plan of defense. It was clear to me that Orvid didn’t mind talking about his work in the presence of two people who would be dead in a few moments.
“You know,” he said casually, “it’s mostly a word-of-mouth business. That’s really your best advertising. Most of my clients know nothing about me, but occasionally one has heard rumors of a little person with a big knife, and they find it intriguing.”
“How many jobs have you had?”
“I stopped counting at thirty.”
“You’ve killed thirty people?” My voice was as thin as the moonlight and quavering.
“Men,” he corrected. “No women, no kids. That’s one of my rules.”
“You have rules?” I rasped.
“Lots of them.” He sucked in a deep breath. “I’m something of an avenging angel.”
Frazier twitched.
I finally managed a step backward, away from the blade.
“Really?” I’d missed the casual tone I was aiming for, missed it by a mile.
“Without going into too much boring information,” Orvid said, his voice solid, “I’ll tell you that I only take on jobs when I believe I’ll be righting some wrong. I know that may seem idealistic to you.”
I didn’t have any inclination to argue that murder was hardly, by any conception of the terms, an idealistic pursuit.
“I don’t know what you mean.” Anything to keep him talking.
“The last few jobs I’ve taken should suffice as explanation. Let’s see. A man hired me to kill two twenty-year-old boys who raped his eleven-year-old daughter and escaped prosecution on a technicality. I researched the case thoroughly, found the boys were, indeed, guilty. They’d even confessed. When I caught up with them, they were in the process of kidnapping another child, I assumed for the same purposes. The strangeness of our judicial system is a labyrinth in which many a Minotaur might hide.”
“You killed two boys?” I heard my
voice as if it were coming through a tunnel from the other side of the world.
“I killed a congressman who beat his wife repeatedly but was never even arrested.” Orvid went on as if he hadn’t heard my question. “His wife hired me from a hospital bed, certain that he would eventually kill her.”
“And somehow people send you information in a package that’s thrown off a train?”
“It’s perfect,” he answered. “In a high-tech world, my other-century approach usually escapes notice. Not to mention how dramatic it all is. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that our family’s always had a flair for the theatrical.”
I began to see white spots out of the corner of my eyes, little flares of light. I had to sit down.
I crumpled clumsily to the ground. It was wet, solid; reassuring in the most bizarre way.
“It’s a lot to absorb, I’ll grant you that,” Orvid conceded, acknowledging my collapse. “And I wouldn’t be telling you this much if it weren’t for the fact that Judy and I are leaving the country together fairly soon.”
“You mentioned that,” I said as if we were having a conversation over Sunday dinner.
“My point is,” he insisted, “that I want to explain why I have to kill this man.”
He looked down at Frazier.
Frazier began whispering softly to himself, praying, I thought.
“Judy didn’t exactly hire me,” Orvid went on, “but you had a hint of how insistent she can be when she sets her mind to something. She believes it’s the right thing to do. He took away her girls. I take him away.”
“Eye for an eye,” Frazier said, more to himself than to us.
“I understand that you think your cause is just,” I said to Orvid slowly, “that your work is right. But ultimately it’s all semantics and rationalization. Killing another human being, Orvid, takes a toll. It taxes your spirit. It leads you down the wrong path. It eventually destroys the fabric of humanity.”
“No,” he responded simply. “It restores balance. The way I do it.”
“Balance,” Frazier echoed weakly.
I saw in a flash that, despite Hiram Frazier’s previous insistence that I might be his other half, Orvid was Frazier’s true mirror. They both believed in the same theory of a balanced universe; though it was clearly a theory born of an unbalanced mind.
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