Shadow Man

by Alan Drew

  The wind gusted outside, rattling the window frames.

  “You can make it go away,” Wakeland said. “You could make that happen, couldn’t you?” Wakeland put his hand on Ben’s shoulder. “It could go away, and Rachel and Emma would never have to know.”

  Ben grabbed Wakeland by the throat. It was the man’s touch, his hand on him again, that set him loose. They fell together onto the couch, Ben’s thumbs digging into Wakeland’s jugular notch. Ben could feel Wakeland’s heart beating against his palms, erratic, terrified. He slapped Ben’s wrists, dug his nails into Ben’s forearm, but Ben was stronger, his limbs electrified with his strength. He buried Wakeland’s head in the cushions of the couch, and a memory flashed in his mind, the night he and Wakeland ate lengua in the Mexican restaurant, Wakeland forcing him to forgive himself for leaving his father in the ditch. When Ben said it then, he felt the relief of the words, but the relief didn’t last. He’d have to say it out loud over and over again, a thousand times and a thousand times more for that feeling to stick. “I forgive myself,” Ben remembered his thirteen-year-old self saying under the bright fluorescent lights of the restaurant. “Say it again.”

  —

  HE DIDN’T REMEMBER stumbling out into the greenbelt. He didn’t remember firing up the cruiser. He came to himself when he nearly ran a red light on Margarita Avenue, skidding to a stop at the last second. His hands, already sore, gripped the steering wheel, the flexor muscle that connected his thumb and forefinger cramping up. Shit, what have I done?

  Ben U-turned it at the next intersection and gunned the car back toward the hills. He needed to get back up into the darkness, into the wilderness on patrol. He was nearly to the turnout when the call came through on the radio. “Possible 921, 19786 Corazon. Man seen climbing through open window. White male, approximately five foot six, wearing dark pants and dark shirt.” Corazon was Rachel’s street in the Puente Madera apartment complex.

  Ben hit the lights, spun the cruiser around again, and gunned it across town, riding the emergency lane before finally four-wheeling it through the dust and mud of a construction zone. At the complex, he jolted to a stop, threw open the door, and slid along the side of the apartment walls, pistol drawn. Three apartments down, curtains blew through an open window. He crept through shrubs and barrel cactus to the edge of the window frame. When the curtains billowed, he glimpsed a woman’s legs kicking the tile floor. The wind caught the curtain again, and he saw the man bent over her, one hand on her throat and the other slapping at her pedaling legs. He was no bigger than a twelve-year-old, his face contorted, a malformed thing.

  Ben couldn’t shoot. It was too risky; the curtains sagged, the pantry door was swung open and blocked a straight shot. The curtains sailed again: The woman was scratching at the killer’s face. The killer ripped his hand from her throat, a hoarse roar leaping from her larynx, and crushed her nose with his fist. Ben could hear sirens wailing, the rev of cruiser engines racing down the street. The killer heard them, too, and he sprang to his feet, running for the sliding glass door at the back of the apartment.

  Ben hoisted himself through the window and popped off a shot at the killer, who kept running. Blood streaming from her broken nose, the woman grabbed Ben, swung her arms at him, pounded her fists against his shoulders, pummeled his chest.

  “I’m a cop,” Ben said. “He’s gone.” She threw up then, blood and mucus slicking the tile floor.

  The uniforms burst through the front door.

  “Call in an ambulance,” Ben said.

  Then he was burning the cruiser down Corazon, the light bar spinning circles; miraculously, he hit a green light at Mirador Road. Ben buzzed into dispatch. “10-80, Puente Madera, heading toward Laguna Canyon on Mirador.” Dispatch squawked out his location. “Black Tercel,” Ben said, clicking back in. “Registered to Ricardo Martinez.” Two units were already in pursuit. “Suspect’s turned south on East Arroyo,” one of the patrols called out over the scanner. Ben floored the cruiser down Mirador, the traffic in front of him clearing to the side with the sound of his siren. He got on the Motorola. Rachel’s phone rang and rang until the machine picked up.

  Shit. He called it into dispatch.

  “Get someone over to my wife’s place,” he said, “306 Corazon.”

  Ben slipped the cruiser down the bike lane, his hubcaps riding the curb. He was about to skid left onto Alta—he’d cut the killer off at Arroyo—but as he hit the intersection, a Mercedes spun through the box, popped the curb, and folded around the stoplight pole. Then, just behind the Mercedes, the black Tercel barreled through the intersection, two black-and-whites riding his ass. Ben cut the wheel across three lanes and spun into the intersection, flooring the V-8, closing the gap between them. They were pushing 65 when the intersection light turned red. The Tercel swung across the lanes, hopping the curb and gunning down the bike lane that ran along the cement drainage. The patrols, too close to react, slammed their brakes to avoid taking out the line of idling cars, but Ben, still twenty yards behind them, stomped the brakes and fishtailed it over the curb.

  The Tercel was thirty yards ahead of him, the driving lights off now, a shadow riding the edge of the drainage. The bike path ended at Serrano Canyon Road. At the end of the path the killer would find a metal pole cemented into the ground to keep cars out and a closed emergency-vehicle access gate. Without headlights the killer would slam into the pole, likely pushing the engine block into his lap.

  But the Tercel swerved and took out the access fence, sparks crackling in the undercarriage as the car bounced onto Serrano Canyon. Ben floored the cruiser, sped through the busted gate, and jerked the car onto Serrano Canyon, too, heading toward the Santa Ana Freeway. Shit. He could see the cars from here, backed up, a parking lot of taillights.

  The killer sped the Tercel onto the shoulder, passed the line of cars stopped at the light, lurched into the intersection and up the on-ramp to the Santa Ana. Ben redlined the cruiser’s V-8, rocketing up the left side of the Tercel. He leveled his revolver through the open passenger-side window and popped off a shot. The killer’s window exploded, sending shards across the cruiser’s passenger seat. The Tercel swerved, clipping the cruiser’s nose, and both cars slid along the guardrail, metal screeching metal, until the Tercel righted itself and flew down the emergency lane, spitting rocks and shreds of tire onto Ben’s windshield. Flashing lights filled the rearview, and on Santa Elena Road, just off the freeway, a line of cruisers converged on the next on-ramp. The Tercel veered erratically, clipping the guardrail and then shearing off a Volvo’s side-view mirror. Ben was pressing the nose of the cruiser against the Tercel bumper, the speedometer pushing 70, when a BMW swerved into the emergency lane. The Tercel’s brakes lit up and Ben stomped the floorboard and then a fender smashed the windshield and his head slammed into the collapsed steering column.

  The brake lights outside went blurry, dashboard-indicator green bleeding down the edge of his vision. The Tercel was twisted in front of him, a puff of steam curling above the hood. And then the door opened and the killer’s legs slid out. Ben was pinned between the steering column and the door, but the killer unfolded himself from the collapsed Tercel, a line of blood running down his left shoulder. The killer stood there for a moment, looking at Ben just a few feet away. Ben heard the swirling pitch of sirens behind him somewhere, but the killer didn’t move. In Ben’s blurred vision, the killer’s face, Ricardo Martinez’s, was twisted and off-kilter, his eyes dark, nocturnal-looking, and he watched Ben as though waiting for him to die. And then he was gone, stumbling through the parking lot of cars driven by people trying to get home through traffic.

  15

  NATASHA WATCHED THEM THROUGH THE window in the door to his hospital room. Ben was unconscious—the left side of his face bandaged, an IV tube stuck in his forearm. Rachel’s forehead rested on the edge of the bed, and Emma rubbed her palm across her mother’s back.

  The accident had been on the late-night news—the videotape of the cru
iser accordioned on the side of the road, the slick of blood across the dashboard, Ben’s body being slid into the back of an ambulance—and she’d rushed down to Hoag Hospital, passing the site of the accident, panicked for lack of information. All she could think about was Ben laid out on one of her tables, Mendenhall charging her with performing the autopsy, knowing his body in that terrible way.

  Ben’s chart was slipped into a plastic pocket next to the door. She snatched it from the wall and read it, her hands shaking. Hyphema, eye spasmed but intact. Inferior orbital blowout fracture. Split lacerations. Grade 2 concussion. She closed the file, breathed a sigh of relief. Not good, but it could be a whole lot worse. She stayed on the other side of the door, watching Rachel and Emma huddled at Ben’s bed. The bare toes on Ben’s right foot were exposed to the cold room, and Emma lifted the blanket to cover them. Rachel finally raised her head, eyes swollen and red, and Emma handed her a tissue. If Natasha had ever doubted Rachel’s feelings for Ben, it was out of her own hope and not for the evidence, she could see that now.

  “You can go in,” a nurse said.

  “No, it’s all right.”

  She retreated to the waiting room and watched the breaking news on the television that hung anchored to the wall—a shot of the collapsed cruiser and Ben’s police portrait, a grainy mug of the killer, and a helicopter shot of miles of freeway, the pictures cycled over and over again—until, an hour and a half later, she watched Rachel and Emma walk arm in arm out through the revolving door.

  —

  WHEN HE WOKE, his vision starred and syrupy, a blurry Natasha sat curled into the visitor’s chair, watching him. She leaned forward and took his hand.

  “Have I died and gone to the coroner?” he asked.

  She smiled. “I bet you feel like a million bucks.”

  He laughed, but it pounded his head. “Feel like I crashed into a steering column.”

  “I should tell you that Rachel and Emma were here before,” she said. “Not trying to be an impostor or anything.”

  “No, no,” he said. “It’s good to see you. There’re two of you, but they’re looking good.”

  “Well, you look like you crashed into a steering column.”

  “Don’t make me laugh,” he said.

  She told him what the chart said, about the concussion, about the blood in his eye, about the fracture to the orbital bone, about how he was lucky he wouldn’t need surgery. Then they sat for a while, her fingers running up and down the outside of his palm. He had hoped to wake to Rachel, but he wasn’t disappointed to find Natasha here, and it didn’t feel so terrible to have her fingers on his skin, either.

  “Did they get him? The serial?”

  “No,” she said. “He dragged a woman out of her Beemer and raced the emergency lane. All points bulletin, but they lost him on the 91.”

  “Helicopters couldn’t keep up?”

  “They got grounded because of the wind,” she said. “He’s bleeding, though.”

  He remembered getting the shot off, the driver’s side glass exploding.

  “They’re already calling you a hero on the news. You got there in time to save that woman.”

  “What about the highway patrol?” Ben said. “I mean, how could he get away?”

  “I don’t know, Ben,” she said, squeezing his hand. “Hasn’t been my first concern for the last few hours.”

  Then the rest of the night came to him in a flood of disjointed memories. Maybe it was his broken-down body, his head ballooned with pain, or maybe it was the medicine they had him doped up on, but something cracked open and he couldn’t hold it back. He told her everything she’d already guessed about Wakeland and about the things she didn’t know yet—the things he’d never told anyone, the things he thought he’d take to his grave. “It’s not your fault, Ben,” he heard her say.

  “I don’t know why I let him,” he said.

  Maybe he was telling it because Natasha already knew, and despite that knowledge she was here, holding his hand. He had wanted it to be known for so long, wanted it released from his body, and here she was taking it from him.

  “It’s not your fault,” she said again. And he kept talking, expelling it, and she kept whispering to him, “It’s not your fault, it’s not your fault,” with every disgusting detail he plopped in her lap.

  “I choked him,” he said, finally.

  “What?”

  “I met him tonight,” he said. “At the apartment. And I lost it.”

  “Ben, is he dead?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I really don’t know.”

  —

  THE APARTMENT KEY was still in the pocket of Ben’s jeans, which were folded on a shelf in the corner of the hospital room. She drove across town, past an investigative unit measuring the skid marks of a Mercedes wrapped around a light pole, past the flashing lights of patrol cars guarding the entrance to the attempted-murder scene at the Puente Madera apartment complex.

  She parked at the entrance to Wakeland’s cul-de-sac, took a pair of investigation gloves from the hatchback, and walked the darkened greenbelt path, her body charged with adrenaline. It wouldn’t bother her if the coach was dead, honestly, but it would eat her up if Ben had done it. She squeezed between the shrubs and the west wall of the apartment, glancing in the windows; a thin light emanated from a distant room. At the patio, she slipped the gloves on, pushed the key into the lock, and slid the door open, very slowly.

  It was quiet inside, reeking of bleach, nothing but the hum of a refrigerator motor rattling from the kitchen. In the living room, she found a knocked-over cocktail tumbler and a dark spill on the carpeted floor. The light was coming from the bathroom, the door half closed, just an incandescent sliver cast against the hallway wall. She pushed open the door, holding her breath, and found a towel on the floor and a spit of blood in the sink but no body, no Wakeland sprawled out on the linoleum.

  She checked the bedroom, the master bath—nothing, thank God.

  She stood in the hallway, thinking. She wanted to get in here, go forensic on the place. She found empty filing cabinets in the office, a drawer of matchboxes and screwdrivers in the kitchen. She ran her hands between the novels on the bookshelf in the living room and found copies of Penthouse in the guest-bathroom magazine rack. She went back to the bedroom, her heart pounding in her ears with the memory of all Ben had told her. She rifled through the bureau—a few articles of clothing, a watch, cuff links, a couple of birthday cards, a Dulces Vero candy wrapper. She slid her hands inside the heels of leather shoes in the master-bath closet, fingered the chest pockets of two sports coats, and got down on the floor and ran her hand into the dark space in the back of the closet behind the shoe rack. Then her fingers grazed something: the edge of a small cardboard box. It was wrapped in rubber bands, a half dozen of them crisscrossing one another. When she pulled them off and opened the top, she only had to glance at the Polaroids to know what they were, and when she set them aside, feeling dizzy, her back against the wall, she suddenly broke down and let it all spill out of her.

  —

  FROM WHERE BEN was laid up in Hoag Hospital, he could see the crush of news crews gathered outside in the parking lot. He’d watched the reports from his bed, his photo hovering behind the L.A. newscast anchors on the evening reports; he even made the national networks. Two days after the accident, Emma had read out loud Daniela Marsh’s article about him in the Rancho Santa Elena World News. He had grown up in Rancho Santa Elena before the town had incorporated, when it was still a ranch. He had been a star swimmer in high school. He had been a decorated L.A. detective but returned home to “serve the community.” He had saved a woman from the grips of the Night Prowler, and even though Daniela’s story was full of stock platitudes about the selfless actions of “our men in black,” he enjoyed listening to his daughter pronouncing him a hero. When she said it, he almost believed it.

  But the serial was still out there, hero or no hero. Ben remembered the killer staring dow
n at him when he was crushed against the steering column. You can’t get me, the killer seemed to be thinking. This close and you can’t get me. How the killer walked away from the crash, Ben didn’t know. He was like a ghost, slipping through twisted metal untouched. All of the basin was looking for him, from the Colorado River to the Pacific, from Bakersfield to the Mexican border, and all Ben could do was sit here, his hyphemaed eye dilated with atropine drops, his skull feeling like two jagged pieces of a misaligned puzzle.

  On Sunday, Rachel came to collect him from the hospital. She parked in the back to avoid the camera crews angling for an interview with the wounded hero, and Ben was forced to sit in the wheelchair like some invalid while Rachel rolled him into the late-afternoon sun. The wind was down now, but the scoured air was an explosion of brightness; even with the sunglasses on, halos of light attacked his vision. On the ride home, the sunlight glanced off windshields and freshly washed hoods, sending bolts of pain through his eye. The socket throbbed, too. They’d doped up the area with steroids to keep the swelling down and prevent the eye from being pushed into the broken socket.

  It was strange, this nominal blindness, this helplessness he was forced to endure with Rachel. It was strange to see her next to him, as though in the foggy image of a dream, and when they rolled up the driveway, beneath the still branches of the eucalyptus, among the familiar smells of sun-heated leaves, of dried hay and horse manure, he felt, for a moment, that the past had been erased. There was a kind of hope in being injured, in letting go of pride enough to allow yourself to be cared for. Maybe he should have let it happen years ago; maybe that’s what was missing with them. He never let Rachel take care of him, never allowed her to give that kind of love.

  He let her take his elbow as he climbed out of her car, let her press her hand against the small of his back as she led him into his house, and when he got inside, Emma was already in the kitchen, dicing onions and tomatoes, meat sizzling and popping in the pan.