The Shadow Man

by Mark Murphy

  For she knew her mother was dying—if she wasn't dead already.

  Frantic, heart pounding, sweat pouring over her, Mimi tore the duct tape from her hands and ripped it from her legs. She shook her mother, who rolled limply to one side with her mouth agape, hands bound behind her just like Mimi's had been.

  Mimi put her head to her mother's chest. There was no pulse.

  "Jesus," she gasped. She ripped the blindfold from her mother's eyes and saw them half open, extinguished, her lids unblinking.

  Tearing the duct tape from her mother's wrists, Mimi rolled her onto her back and tilted her head back like they'd learned to do in CPR class at school. She gave Amy two quick breaths and saw her chest rise twice, then laced her fingers together over Amy's breastbone and locked her elbows to begin doing chest compressions.

  "Come on, Mom!" she said, crying, her shoulders hunched over.

  Mimi's tears spattered over her mother's face like rain. She tried to count but couldn't. It was impossible.

  What did the school nurse say about doing effective CPR? What was the ratio?

  Thoughts swirled in her head like a flock of crows circling, tighter and tighter.

  Mimi nearly vomited but choked it back down, cleared her throat, kept on pounding away at Amy's chest. She prayed and she cried and she prayed some more but her mom just lay there, staring blankly at the ceiling with a doll's eyes.

  Mimi heard her mother's ribs crack. Her shoulders were on fire, her eyes burning, heart spontaneously combusting with sorrow and regret.

  Outside, the sky was darkening, clouds crowding the edge of the coast. Gusts of wind ripped in from the Atlantic. Rain and hail began pelting the roof of the shack.

  Mimi heard nothing and saw nothing, at least not at first.

  And then there was a flash of lightning, an immediate deep-throated rumble of thunder. Mimi thought she saw her mother blink. Just once. Maybe.

  "MOM?" Mimi screamed.

  But the storm was only beginning.

  30

  Malcolm felt as naked as a frickin' jaybird.

  The phrase popped into Malcolm's head from the past. Malcolm's cousin Marcus had used it when they were middle-schoolers and Marcus had discovered his dad's stash of Playboy magazines, which were "hidden" beneath the towels in his parents' bathroom cabinets. Marcus convinced Malcolm to look at them by saying that he had seen some girls in that magazine that were as "naked as a frickin' jaybird," which for some reason struck Malcolm as incredibly funny. It was not nearly as funny when Marcus's dad caught them poring wide-eyed over the magazines and left a few less-than-casual belt markings across both of their adolescent butts.

  Malcolm wasn't naked, of course. He was instead quite fully clothed—hat on, sunglasses in place—and was driving the rather conspic­uous WKKR News van ("Savannah's News Leader," it said on the side, along with a giant-sized photo of a beaming Tina Baker) down White Bluff Road. His palms were sweaty, mouth dry, and his heart tripped along at about a hundred beats a minute. Every policeman he saw made his symptoms worse. Worse still, people kept staring at the van. Ogling it, even—craning their necks, turning around to look at it.

  "Why are people staring at me?" Malcolm said.

  Tina laughed.

  "Honey, they don't even know you exist. They are staring at me. Welcome to the world of small-town celebrity. I can't even eat a meal in a restaurant without being asked for an autograph or to pose for a picture. That was part of what drove Sam crazy in our marriage—sharing me with everybody else in this damn town. But it goes with the territory. I've become used to it. Sam never did."

  "Is that why Sam wears that ridiculous hat all the time? Is he trying to make some sort of identity statement?" Malcolm said.

  Tina laughed.

  "That started as he got older. I think he just wears that because he's going bald and he has an ugly head. His skull looks like a damn asteroid," she said.

  The stoplight on Windsor Road flashed from green to yellow. Malcolm slammed on the brakes so hard that smoke came from the back tires, billowing up around them with the sick chemical smell of burned rubber.

  Tina shot her eyes at him.

  "You're jumpy," she said.

  "I've been hiding from everyone for the last few days," Malcolm said. "This is a little bit of a high-wire act for me."

  "Relax," she said. "After all, I'm the one riding solo in the van with an accused serial killer."

  Malcolm smiled, tight-lipped. His eyes were suddenly watery. He blinked a couple of times.

  "I'm sorry about the jumpiness," he said.

  "It's okay. I'm just kidding around with you. Trying to lighten the mood," she said.

  "You understand that a serial killer—a real one, not one made up by the media—has my wife and my daughter. And I don't know how that's going to turn out."

  Tina placed a hand on his shoulder.

  "Jeez, I'm sorry. Really," she said.

  The light changed to green. Carefully and deliberately, Malcolm accelerated the van back into traffic.

  "You feel like talking?" she asked.

  "About what?"

  "Your side of the story. Anything, really. I think the world would be interested in what you have to say."

  She pulled a small digital voice recorder out of her purse and waggled it in her hand.

  "Do you mind?"

  "I've got to focus on driving."

  She shifted her small frame in the seat so that she could face him.

  "Look, we've got at least a forty-five minute drive ahead of us. I'm a reporter. We could talk about what you've been through, about how you came into contact with this guy, about all of the things that you know that the rest of the world needs to know."

  "Tina, listen. Lord knows I want my story to come out. But my wife and my daughter have been kidnapped by the Shadow Man, and . . ."

  "What's that?"

  "What's what?"

  "You called the killer a name. What did you call him?"

  Malcolm blushed.

  "It's a name Billy made up. He calls him 'the Shadow Man.' The guy goes from city to city posing as some other guy—usually a surgeon, which makes us think he's got formal medical training—and sets up a completely false I.D. in each place, then spends a couple of years targeting his next frame-up victim before he springs the trap on him. Billy's brother was a victim in Florida. I'm the victim here. He kills people that have to do with his target, frames the target for the murders, and disappears into the shadows before moving on to his next target."

  Malcolm noticed that the red record light on the voice recorder was on.

  Tina's mouth was agape.

  "So this is real," she said.

  "You think I'm making it up?"

  "No, it's just . . . that's unbelievable."

  "Tell me about it," said Malcolm.

  "So it's a sport to him, like a game," Tina said.

  Malcolm nodded.

  "The murder victims are really just pawns. His real goal is to take down the guy he's determined is his mark," Malcolm said.

  "And it's always a surgeon?"

  "A far as we know. That's what Billy says, anyway. Billy's brother was a very successful surgeon before the Shadow Man targeted him."

  "And what happened to Billy's brother?"

  Malcolm glanced at Tina.

  "He died. Death Row, in Florida. Executed by lethal injection."

  "Jesus," she murmured.

  The sky overhead was darkening ominously. A few raindrops spat­tered the windshield.

  Malcolm sighed.

  "So I guess I need to tell you this. Where do I begin?"

  "At the beginning," said Tina.

  So Malcolm told her. He began the night he arrived home from the surgical conference in Miami and spared no details. He told her about the fake cop and the appearance of Billy Littlebear. He recounted his days on Green Island and his flight back to the mainland. She listened intently, taking notes occasionally, sapphire eyes sewn to him in a way that
seemed almost too intimate, too personal.

  And, when it ended, it was raining furiously. It was a rain that overwhelmed the van's decrepit wiper blades, which simply smeared grime across the windshield in a muddy arc. The storm slowed traffic to a crawl. Malcolm stared blankly at the red taillights as they gleamed dully at him through the filthy windshield.

  "My God," Tina said quietly.

  "What?"

  "You're telling the truth," she said.

  "Every bit of it," said Malcolm.

  "But the press all thinks that you're guilty. I mean, all of us. Each one."

  "It's why they have jury trials," Malcolm said. "Thank God we don't have to depend upon the court of public opinion for justice."

  "Malcolm, I've seen the evidence. It's overwhelming. You'd be convicted by a jury in a heartbeat," she said.

  Malcolm shook his head slowly.

  "That's why I've been forced to do this on my own," he said.

  "Thank God for your Seminole friend," she said.

  "I already have," said Malcolm.

  The van crossed the Lazaretto Creek bridge. A blue heron flapped its way across the marsh and skimmed the creek, looking for food. Malcolm looked at the boats that were tied up along the docks, bobbing in the wind­swept water, and felt a slight pang in his chest.

  Amy loves this place, he thought.

  They were on Tybee Island.

  It was 1:57 PM.

  31

  Billy was puzzled.

  The GPS signals from Mimi's and Amy's phones seemed to be moving.

  He walked down the cracked gray sidewalk beside Butler Avenue at Tybee. The four-lane roadway, lined on either side with palm trees for most of its length, ran north-to-south, a vector parallel to the beach.

  Maybe it's the rain, Billy thought.

  The storm was dragging ponderously inland as it dumped the contents of the pregnant clouds on the dunes and sea oats. Lightning flashed and thunder growled and the wind whistled a haunted tune, rocking the sheet metal road signs to and fro.

  He crossed 3rd Street and headed south, pulling his hat low over his eyes to keep the rain off of his sunglasses.

  He glanced at his phone again. The GPS signals were now near 15th Street and Miller Avenue, having moved six city blocks in less than minute.

  Damn, he thought.

  And then it hit him:

  They're in a car.

  Of course. It made sense. He was moving them, keeping their true location a mystery because it wasn't really a single location.

  "Damn!" Billy said out loud.

  A rat-faced old woman sauntered past him walking her dog, a pop-eyed Chihuahua with a tremor that made it look hopped up on caffeine. The woman was dressed in an outlandish amalgam of baggy shorts, a threadbare poplin blouse and a giant floppy hat, looking like a nightmare refugee from an old Woody Allen movie. The woman squared her thin shoulders, uttered a brittle "Hmmph!" and shot him a poisonous glare as she jounced past. Even the Chihuahua turned its nose up at him and looked away, mortified.

  "Sorry," Billy mumbled.

  The dog still ignored him.

  I can't outrun a car, he thought. If they keep moving, I'll never catch them.

  He had just about decided to stay in one place, waiting for them to come to him, when he noted that the dots had stopped moving.

  He stared at the display on his phone.

  Still there, he thought.

  They were stationary at 15th Street and Chatham Avenue.

  Billy started moving again. The rain was picking up, stinging his face like icicles. He could see whitecaps on the slate-gray waves out beyond the beach.

  It took Billy twenty minutes to jog the distance from Butler Avenue to 15th Street. His muscles were sore. His knees ached. There was a time, not so long ago, when every nerve, every joint, and every muscle in his body worked to perfection. He had been a machine, ruthless and perfect, capable of killing a man in a second if necessary. There were no doubts in his mind then about what he could do. But he was older now; his reaction time was slower, and his strength was not nearly what it used to be. Age had taken something from him. Janie's death had taken even more.

  Will I be up to it? Can I do what must be done?

  For the first time, he had to admit that he had doubts. There were misgivings.

  The Seminole uttered a curse against aging, against time, and against the weather, which had turned nasty beyond all comprehension.

  But he saved his most vehement curse for the man who called himself Walter Jernigan or Joel Birkenstock, the chameleon he called the Shadow Man.

  "I will make the Shadow Man red with blood, and then blacken him in the sun and the rain, where the wolf shall smell of his bones, and the buzzard shall live upon his flesh," Billy muttered.

  It was a curse that his namesake and ancestor Osceola uttered once, centuries before, when he had been wronged.

  Billy meant every word.

  He thought of Janie. A pang of regret stabbed at his heart. But her memory gave him strength. Something vital hardened in him, interlacing itself in every sinew and every fiber of his being. Determination settled down and took root. His doubts dissipated and blew away.

  As Billy turned the corner at 15th Street, he glanced again at his phone. The GPS signals had not changed.

  Billy jogged past a thick aggregation of azaleas, their pastel lavender and fuchsia flowers gyrating in the burgeoning wind. The Spanish moss was being torn from the branches of oaks, and palm fronds were tearing loose and sailing away unfettered, like kites freed from the flimsy tethers of their earthbound masters.

  Lightning bolts stabbed the horizon. Thunder rolled across the sea, a sound Billy felt deep inside his bones.

  He was not afraid. The aches and pains he had felt before were gone, washed away in a tide of endorphins and adrenaline. He felt the power of his ancestors surging in him. Billy remembered his Janie's dark eyes and his brother's smiling face and he recalled why he had made this journey.

  I'm ready, he thought.

  As he neared Chatham Avenue, Billy stopped.

  There was a long black Chevy SUV parked in front of a ramshackle clapboard house.

  The car had Florida plates.

  The house was a filthy one-room fishing shack, the first of a row of five or so identical dwellings in various stages of disrepair. This one was taped off and marked for demolition, its shattered windows boarded up with plywood. An ugly stump of a brick chimney jutted from its rusted tin roof. The shack hung precariously over the broad expanse of Tybee Creek, which opened onto the Atlantic Ocean. The barnacle-encrusted pilings that supported its back half had largely rotted away and collapsed. The area beneath the house looked like a set of bad teeth in the puckered mouth of an old man. Waves crashed beneath the house, hammering the decaying pilings. Each wave made the old shack shudder a bit.

  The GPS signals were coming from inside the SUV.

  This is it, he thought.

  Billy had a choice to make.

  They might be in the house or the car. If I pick wrong, I might lose the element of surprise. It's like cutting the right wire on a bomb.

  And then it hit him.

  Something cold and deadly curdled inside Billy at that moment.

  He decided to circle around from the neighbor's yard so that he could get a better look at the house and not be in view of the SUV. The windows of the house were boarded up on that side. No one would be able to see him coming.

  Billy picked his way across the weed-infested yard, avoiding concrete yard gnome and some ancient black-painted cast iron lawn furniture that seemed more rust than metal. Carefully, he pushed through the dark green tea olive hedge between the two houses.

  "Aw, shit," he said out loud.

  He could see the pilings beneath the fishing shack more clearly now. They were precarious, all right. Each breaker seemed to drop the shack a little closer to collapse.

  But he knew that this had been too easy. And his battle instincts had to
ld him that, told him that something was not right. He'd had that feeling a dozen or more times in Iraq and it had saved his life every time.

  The pilings were wired.

  Each piling had been booby-trapped with an explosive device. And while Billy had no doubt now that this was the right place, he also realized that if he had entered the building, it would have been blown to kingdom come.

  32

  Mimi saw black spots before her eyes.

  She kept doing compressions, looking back down at her mother's face, and she found the strength to keep going, although there was a moment there when she thought she would pass out. She fought it off, taking some deep breaths and saying another prayer in her head.

  She suddenly wished she had been to church more. Maybe if she'd had better faith this would not have happened to them, or maybe she'd be able to deal with it better. Every time she prayed she got the feeling that she just wasn't very good at it, like she was not following standard protocol or something. She finally settled for something like God help us, which sounded suspiciously like something out of Dickens, but it was all she could come up with. That and Please, God, don't let Mom die.

  She wished for other things, too.

  She wished she'd been more appreciative of her mother. Wished she'd told her she loved her every day. Wished she had cleaned her room and made up her bed and hugged her mother every time she'd had the chance. There were a million tiny regrets that welled up inside her like a swarm of bees, stinging her heart. Mimi swatted them away, trying to focus on what she had to do, but they kept coming back, relentless.

  God, her shoulders hurt.

  It was getting harder for Mimi to breathe because the muscles between her ribs were cramping. It felt like someone was poking her in the chest with a stick. Still, she could not quit. Not now.

  Mom's got to make it.

  She gave her mother two quick breaths, feeling the deep-seated ache in her deltoids as she did so, and then started compressions again.

  Two more lightning strikes hit in rapid succession, right on top of them. The flashes blinded Mimi for a minute. Thunder exploded in her eardrums, impossibly loud, leaving her ears ringing.

  God, those were close, Mimi thought, glancing up.