by Mark Murphy
"You promised me you would not kill them if I did what you said. And I'm doing that," Malcolm said.
"We'll discuss that in a minute. We've got company to attend to," the killer said, pointing a thin finger at the street ahead.
There were three fire trucks huddled at the intersection of 15th Street and Chatham Avenue, lights flashing red. They were flanked by a pair of Tybee police cars—twin Dodge Chargers with their stuttering blue strobes. All were parked on the side of the road adjacent to an amorphous hulking shape blazing away at the bottom of a giant blackened crater. The flames leapt skyward like solar flares, hurtling upward forty feet above the edge of the crater. Malcolm could feel the heat through the windshield. Firemen in full gear trained their hoses on the blaze as thick smoke belched a mile or more into the sky. It looked for all the world like a meteor strike, like some celestial chunk of iron had streaked in from the heavens and blown a big frigging hole in the road right here, out on Tybee Island, where nothing ever happens except the routine incidents of public drunkenness, periodic drug busts, and sporadic arrests for indecent exposure.
The Tybee police had the road blocked off. A stocky blue-uniformed cop in mirrored aviator glasses held up a meaty palm, signaling them to stop. He was thick-shouldered, built like a kitchen appliance, and looked like he'd just finished playing college football someplace.
Malcolm looked at the wooden box in his hands.
Maybe I could. . .
The Shadow Man placed a hand on Malcolm's thigh and squeezed. Just for a second.
"Play along or they're dead," he muttered. "And close the box. Now."
He let go of Malcolm and rolled down the window.
"What's going on, officer?" he said. His voice sounded oddly effeminate.
"A car blew up. Chatham Avenue's got a big hole in it. You'll have to go around."
"You don't think it's a terrorist attack, do you? You know, one of those domestic terrorists, like Timothy McVeigh? I sure hope not. They scare me," the Shadow Man said.
He smiled, cocking his head to one side.
A momentary look of confusion crossed the young policeman's face.
"Don't think so. We really don't know right now," the cop said.
"Honey, let me tell you, you're cute. If I weren't taken up with this one right here, well, sugar, I'd be after you. I love a man in uniform.''
The Shadow Man squeezed Malcolm's thigh again.
The cop's broad face flushed crimson.
"You can take the detour down 6th Avenue. You guys headed to AJ.'s?"
The Shadow Man nodded.
"Well, the detour will take you right back there. You can avoid all of this."
"Thanks, Officer. Toodles!"
The Shadow Man waved an invisible hanky, then rolled up the window and turned right, taking the detour.
"What the hell was all that?" Malcolm said.
"If he's questioned about it later, all he'll remember is two gay guys going to AJ.'s. He wouldn't be able to describe us if he had to do it to save his life."
He waggled his fingers again, like he had earlier.
"Hocus pocus," he said.
The killer turned the car down 14th Street, gunning the engine. Malcolm could hear the Jeep's pistons rattling.
"I knew they'd cordon off the street. The chaos helps us. I even wired the house next to the car I blew up with multiple explosive devices. They'll find those when they investigate the site of the car bomb and will spend hours defusing them. It'll tie them up real good. Meanwhile, we'll conduct our business a mere two houses down, on the same block, right under their noses!"
He whacked the steering wheel with the heel of his hand, chuckling merrily to himself. The sound was ugly, like a pot of boiling mud.
"Not to mention the fact that the Chief is dead, too! An added bonus, if I do say so myself."
He gunned the engine again, pushing the Jeep over forty miles an hour.
"So what's the errand?" Malcolm said.
"Oh, it's quite simple. I'm a man of my word: I'm not going to kill your wife and child."
He turned to Malcolm and took off his sunglasses. His eyes, red-tinted and brilliant in the afternoon sunlight, glittered as if illuminated from within.
"You see, I don't need to kill them. Because you're going to," he said.
"Oh, hell, no!" Malcolm said, sitting bolt upright in his seat.
"Oh, hell, _yes. Because if you don't, I'll kill them first, right there in front of you. And then I'll kill you and set you up to be blamed for it. Either way, you lose, and they lose. At least if you kill them you could make it quick. Humane. Because I will not."
Malcolm slumped back in his seat. He felt like a caged animal.
"You said you wouldn't kill them!"
The Shadow Man grinned at him. His teeth were needle-sharp.
"Hey, I'm a serial killer. And I'm a fucking liar," he said.
They wheeled around the corner at Chatham Avenue too fast, the Jeep coming off the ground onto two wheels for a moment before slamming back down again. The impact almost jostled the heavy wooden box out of Malcolm's hands, but he caught it just in time. Its contents rattled like old bones.
They were once again in sight of the car bomb crater, the flames climbing so high into the air that it seemed that the heat burned the clouds and scorched the sun itself. Malcolm's heart was pounding and his mind was racing as the Shadow Man pushed the Jeep's speedometer over fifty miles per hour, anxious to get on with it, his alabaster-white hands clenched so tightly that they had no color left in them at all.
Malcolm looked at the box.
Box B.
Filled with souvenirs of 86 dead people and at least one, hopefully, who was still living.
Now or never.
Malcolm said a silent prayer and grabbed Box B by the handle with his right hand, steadying it from beneath with his left.
Using all of the strength he could muster, Malcolm slammed the heavy box against the Shadow Man, driving him into the door on the opposite side.
The Jeep lurched sharply, dancing on its two left wheels before bouncing back again.
"What the fu . . .?" was all the Shadow Man could get out before Malcolm slammed the box against him again, even harder this time. There was a sickening crunch, the sound of bones collapsing, and blood splattered the windows. The careeningJeep clipped a telephone pole and whipsawed across the street, lurching hard right. The impact tore the wooden box from Malcolm's grasp and it split open against the passenger side door, spilling its guts all over the car. The impact flung things everywhere; earrings and necklaces and ribbon-tied hair samples littered the floorboard. Drivers' licenses flew into the air like playing cards from a magician's deck.
"Damn you!" the Shadow Man screamed though his shattered mouth. His makeup had been wiped clean, revealing the pallid flesh beneath. The blood was a shocking crimson stain against his snow-white skin. He was an evil clown from a child's worst nightmare—eyes aflame with hate, broken teeth covered in gore, his nose and cheekbones collapsed, his entire face misshapen. The Shadow Man's hands clawed the air in front of Malcolm's throat, seeking to tear out his trachea and rip his pulsing carotids from their moorings.
The Jeep hit a fire hydrant head on.
It flipped into the air in a slow pirouette, wheels spinning towards heaven, before crashing upside down and tumbling wildly down the cracked asphalt of Chatham Avenue. The Jeep finally came to rest on its side, dead wheels turning lazily in the sun, its roof crushed flat, its windows smashed. The decapitated fire hydrant spewed a geyser of water fifty feet into the air. The final resting place of the Shadow Man's vehicle was a mere hundred feet from the searing heat of the car bomb crater.
The only sound coming from the ruined Jeep was the hiss of the steam escaping the fractured radiator. Otherwise, it was as silent as death.
39
The heat from the truck bomb's explosion was unbearable.
Billy conjured up images of the burned dead—the
parched corpses of Dresden and of Hiroshima, immolated, their skin scorched, eyeballs exploding in their sockets.
He covered Amy and Mimi with his body as the fireball rolled over them.
It's going to consume us, he thought. This is it. It's over.
Billy closed his eyes as tightly as he could and held Amy and Mimi beneath him, held them so that the boiling hot air could not touch them. His hat's broad brim caught the burgeoning sirocco and sailed away in the violent blast. White-hot bits of shrapnel struck him, biting into his back and legs and neck.
And then the maelstrom was over.
They had lived through it somehow, miraculously unscathed, and Billy could not help but think that he knew the explanation for it all.
God's will.
That was the only explanation Billy could come up with as he witnessed the inferno that lay before them after the truck bomb had detonated. The explosion had blasted the stately palms lining Chatham Avenue sideways like Tinker Toys, toasting their rigid fibrous trunks into blackened husks. The verdant leaves on the ancient live oaks had turned immediately to ash; the Spanish moss that had draped across their thick branches was now ablaze. Even Billy's hair was singed; the acrid stench of burnt keratin hung about his shoulders like a curse. Flame and smoke roiled into the sky from a crater so deep that it seemed to go straight to Hell.
"My God," Mimi said, staring at the flaming crater.
Amy's lips moved in silent prayer, her eyes closed.
"You guys okay?" Billy asked.
Mimi nodded weakly. Amy said nothing, but her knees wobbled.
"Mom?" Mimi asked.
"I'm okay. Just . . . just banged up a little. Got dizzy. I feel better now."
Billy put his arm under Amy's shoulders and held her up. Mimi grabbed her mother's arm and held it tight.
They walked to the outer edge of the blast perimeter. It was like being too close to the sun. Billy picked a scorched shard of glass out of the side of his flak jacket. It had imbedded itself deep in the Kevlar and stabbed at his ribs like a tiny stiletto.
When Billy looked at the spot where they had weathered the blast, his breath caught in his throat.
Billy's silhouette had been burned into the earth. His broad shoulders had kept the flames at bay; his flak jacket had caught the errant glass projectile which might have killed either of the King women. A tide of understanding washed over him, filling him up.
This is why I was sent here. Not to avenge, but to protect.
It was something he had not been able to do for Janie. But here, now, he had been given a second chance at redemption.
Billy joined Amy in silent prayer.
The fire trucks arrived quickly. Billy saw the stark white Savannah-Chatham police helicopter buzz overhead, blades chopping through the air, heavy black smoke swirling around it as it headed oceanward and readied itself for another pass.
Billy heard the Jeep before he saw it—but he felt it before he heard it, sensed its innate malevolence buzzing around in his subconscious like a fly on a window screen. Billy's senses were heightened, his nerves on edge.
That vigilance was his salvation.
Billy spun Mimi and Amy around and shielded them once again as the Jeep rocketed past them, out of control, up on two wheels. It was so close to them that Billy could feel its foul exhaust on his face as it roared past. The Jeep struck a telephone pole, splintering it. Then there was a tumbling of metal and glass, a sound of disorder and discombobulation, and that was all.
Water spattered about them, spewing from a ruined fire hydrant. "Stay here," Billy said. "I'm going to go see what that was all about."
The others both nodded vigorously.
Blood was splattered around the Jeep's cab. Fresh blood, bright red mixed with maroon, spilled from some unseen source.
Billy peered inside through the ruined windshield.
Malcolm was unconscious, his eyes closed. His face was the bruised color of a stormy sky. He was still buckled in, but his upper torso had fallen on top of the Shadow Man. The killer's body was contorted, his legs trapped in the Jeep's wreckage. His ghostly white hands were locked around Malcolm King's neck.
And Malcolm was not breathing.
"Let him go, Walter!" Billy barked.
He dropped to his knees on the asphalt, reaching through the windshield to pull the Shadow Man's hands away from the neck of his friend.
"Not my name, Chief! Not anymore!"
The Shadow Man spat a mouthful of blood into Billy's face as Billy tore his grasping fingers from Malcolm's neck. Breathe, Malcolm, breathe . . .
"Another friend dead, Chief? Lover, perhaps? I remember your last lover. She was delectable! At least the gators thought so . . ."
Billy held the killer's hands together as they writhed like giant spiders, nails clicking together, a pair of unnatural things trying to escape Billy's iron grip. The Shadow Man's pallid face was twisted into a leer, his teeth dripping blood like the jaws of some vicious animal predator.
Which he is, Billy thought.
The killer spat in Billy's face again, cackling as the blood-streaked glob oozed down Billy's cheek.
"He's dead, you know. I've killed him. Just like I killed your brother. Just like I killed your wife and your unborn son."
The Shadow Man's voice was grating and high-pitched. Hysteria had baked it into a brittle and dangerous screech, a sound that wormed its way under Billy's skin and made the hair on the back of his neck stand up.
Billy wanted to kill him so very badly. The thought bored relentlessly into his brain.
Billy heard a shuddering sound, a sound like the rush of wings, a sound that seemed to come from everywhere at once. The sound made it hard for him to breathe. The sky dimmed suddenly into an amber hue as if there was a total eclipse of the sun.
In the dim half-light, Billy thought he saw someone standing there—just for a second. A man, perhaps. A familiar figure lingering in the fine edge of reality.
But then the figure was gone.
"I know why you're here, Billy," the Shadow Man said. Billy didn't answer.
"Kill me, Billy," the Shadow Man whispered.
Billy tried not to look at him but it was hard, so hard, with those reddish eyes staring out from someplace in hell and the feathery voices echoing inside Billy's skull telling him to do it, do it, do it now before he gets away again . . .
"I know you're thinking of it. And by golly, I'm tired," the Shadow Man said. He flicked his lidless red-blue eyes twice, bloodied teeth slightly parted. His scrabbling hands stopped moving suddenly and went flaccid, as if an unseen puppet master had cut their strings.
"I'm tired of running. Tired of the lies, fatigued with the deceptions. I just want to buy a little country house and live out my days with a wife and a dog . . . and a few hungry alligators . . ."
The Shadow Man's soulless eyes sought out Billy's, feasting on the rangy Seminole's suffering, sucking the life from him until all that was left of his soul was the last black cinder of hatred and regret.
Billy pressed the Shadow Man's hands closer together, feeling the strain of the killer's bones and tendons as he did so.
"Kill me, Billy," the Shadow Man said again. He closed his eyes. Billy could see the hammering pulse in his neck, could see it beating faster and faster as Billy's hands wrapped around the killer's own, constricting them like an anaconda about to devour its prey.
And then the rushing sound came back, and the eclipse. Billy looked up at the sky, incredulous.
A huge flock of blackbirds whirred overhead, horizon to horizon, blotting out the sun.
Everything seemed to stop. The spatter of water from the fire hydrant, the ebb and flow of the crashing surf, the staccato cries of the seagulls were all drowned out by the whispers as they spoke to him, murmuring behind his eyes in their wordless voices. It was louder than it had ever been, louder than he would have even thought possible, a roar that rolled over him like a tsunami.
The wordless tsunami
carried Billy to memories of Janie and of Jimbo and of the crushing loneliness he felt every single blasted day, every minute, and the thought hit him: why not?
What did he have to live for, anyway?
Ever since Jimbo died, the quest to clear his name had been Billy's raison d'etre, his driving force. Even after Janie's death (how strange that sounded!), the drive to catch the Shadow Man had given Billy a dragon to slay. As long as he had a distraction, the pain could not overwhelm him. But now that journey was at an end. The One Ring was destroyed, the White Whale no more, the Death Star a mere collection of space debris.
Suddenly Billy felt poison in his veins.
He would never have Janie back. The child they had longed for would never be born. The future he had dreamed of had turned to ashes in a single bloody instant.
Kill him and be done with it, the whispering voice in his head said.
All of the angst in Billy's life was a stone in his chest, a plethora of painful memories frozen in the matrix of his fractured life, nightmare creatures trapped forever in a prison of impenetrable rock. Here, now, it would end.
Billy's hands closed around the Shadow Man's neck. The killer's back arched. He did not fight. His grimace dissolved into a beatific smile, eyes still closed, his hands clasped in front of him.
Billy stared down at the pale hands, nails stained with blood, their fingers gently interlaced.
They were a murderer's hands, evil and unclean.
They were the same hands that killed Janie.
Kill, kill, kill, kill, killkillkillkillkillkill. . .
The pounding in Billy's brain was an incessant drumbeat, the visceral throbbing pulse of a cannibal tribe somewhere on the dark side of the world. The sound made him want to rip the Shadow Man apart with his bare hands and eat his dark heart whole.
Just then, Malcolm's eyes fluttered open as a sucked in a huge, shuddering breath.
"What the hell happened . . .?" Malcolm said, his voice a hoarse croak.
Billy looked at his hands locked tightly around the Shadow Man's neck and an electric shock went through him, searing his nerves. He felt it all the way into his fingertips.
My God.
His hands flew away from the Shadow Man's throat as if it were on fire.