by Jason Dias
I had seen, through Ysabeau’s forced dreams, evil men do evil things. So long ago – but their spiritual sons lived here, in my town.
Helpless. The dog in the cage with the red light on, knowing the shock would come soon, no way to avoid it. I could lay down and take it. Or I could stand up and meet it.
“All right. One more kill. Let’s go.”
She had me drive north. As expected: a mover and shaker would live in a nice house, in a nice neighborhood. “I don’t understand something,” I said, once we were on the highway.
“What?”
“When you attacked Bishop Clearey. The younger priest drove you off with a cross and a prayer. The Bishop, praying and waving around a crucifix, was helpless. You laughed at him.”
“The younger man had faith. The older man betrayed his faith daily.”
“Oh?”
“He did not trust God to punish the wicked. He did not trust God to judge. Who was he to decide Rousseau was a traitor to the Church because he fathered a child? Clearey also fathered children, of rape rather than love, who he denied. He did not trust God to bring us together or to keep us apart. More, he feared Rousseau’s influence on the young men. He was a coward in the face of changing times. The Inquisition ended three hundred years before these events. But some men still put their faith in the barbarism of those times.”
“The young man trusted, and Clearey was afraid.”
“Yes.”
She indicated the exit and I took it. We slowed into a shopping district, then into dark neighborhoods. “If I were not afraid of you, I could escape your manipulation.”
She laughed. “I can make you afraid, no matter what you put your faith in. Here. Turn left here. Park under that elm tree.”
I wouldn’t know an elm from an oak or a spruce. Only one tree grew by the street, though, so I put the car against the curb.
“Faith is not what men think it is,” she said.
“I suppose you would know. Is there a god?” I clutched the wheel and did not look at her.
“No.”
“In your current form, dead, you don’t hear him or see him or…”
“Nothing. I look at the sky at night and see only the dark. No stars, no Heaven, no wonder. On the Earth, no beings made of light. No wonders. No souls, only blood.”
“You said you eat their souls. The people you kill. I watched you do it.”
“Soul. Their knowledge, all that they were, I take it. But all that they were was flesh. Memories. Nothing more.”
I tried to work out if the jibed with what she had said before, but she was moving. The door thumped shut behind her. I followed, hand on the pistol at my belt as if going into a hot crime scene. She went right through the front door of a huge house and opened it from the inside, as before. I followed. Upstairs, into a lavish bedroom decorated in hanging fabrics visible only by the streetlight coming through a bay window. In bed, two people snored softly.
Ysabeau snapped on the light. She didn’t need it: she wanted me to see. She pulled the blanket down. I did not recognize the man. Fiftyish, overweight, balding. A toupee waited on the nightstand nearby. The woman I knew. It took a minute to place her. Trim and fit for fifty. Hair askew but the faded gold of a woman well-kept but not vain. Mouth open, breathing, face lined and seamed without the makeup that armored her against the day. Dressed in shorts and an old T-shirt.
I was used to seeing her in a uniform or a professional suit. The Captain.
“No.”
“Yes, oh yes. She is the one who stopped you from taking on the Church. From bringing in the FBI for interstate crimes. She protected them from the consequences of policy. She put her needs and her rich friends’ needs over the work. Used her position. See the cross she wears? It has fallen to one side of her throat, against her ear. It will not save her. Each week, she meets with the heads of the Church. She knew all along. She suggested her town as a sanctuary for the disgraced because she could promise to keep her police out of their business.”
“No. Not this one. I can’t. Believe it. I can’t believe it.” But I did believe it. I just couldn’t cope with the belief.
“The last one. I promise you. No more after her.”
“I can’t believe your promises. You are evil. You have used me from the start. You said the last one was the last one.”
She smiled. “All true. So you do it. Use your gun. Or your hands. I do not care. If you kill her, I will not know anything more from her. The trail will go cold here in your city. I will go to Cincinnati. That is where the next link is in this chain. I will trouble you no longer.”
It would be easy. Not the pistol; too simple to trace it back to me. But a sleeping woman, kept unconscious by Ysabeau’s mind control. She wouldn’t resist. I could smother her with a pillow. The husband would never wake. I looked at her face again. In sleep she appeared ugly. Wretched. Her bed cost more than my car. Her sheets had astronomical thread counts. How much department money funded her opulence? How many rich friends did she do favors for, always circulating in the right society?
I fell down Ysabeau’s hole into hate. I hated this woman.
Did I hate myself enough to kill her in cold blood? Not only would I lose everything, I would lose myself, too. All my notions of me as a force for good, as a warrior for the little person, peace and justice, protection and service – all gone.
It had been just a few weeks since I had been forced to shoot someone. My partner had been down. Bleeding out. The perp, knife in hand, charging me. No choice. I’d tried to wing him, using the last of my presence of mind, but he’d turned into the shot. Dropped, heart pierced. There wasn’t time for the life to leave his eyes, for slow comprehension; it was there and then gone.
Captain Daniels lay there, responsible. Not for the knife-wielding man, but for the retired priest who murdered little children. For the other one, the one in the safe house. For protecting the people who protected them. I would lose everything, but maybe one little boy would go home safe to his mother who would otherwise end up nothing but some clothes in a storage locker.
Ysabeau: “Do it. She is dead already. And if I do it, you know she will lead me to more.”
I did it. Moving slowly, I took the pillow from under her head. Straddled her chest, leaving god only knows how many fiber transfers. Pushed the pillow over her face. At first, she lay quiescent. After a minute with no air, she twitched, then thrashed, trying to buck me off, to push the pillow away with her hands. Her nails clawed at my wrists and blood spattered the scene.
Two minutes. Three. She fought like a devil. “I thought you would keep her asleep.” Ragged, panted out through the effort of murdering her.
“Nobody sleeps through suffocating. She knows nothing. Do not fear.”
Nonsense words. I heard but did not understand. Four minutes. She slowed. Stopped fighting. My heart rattled my whole body with its beating and sweat slicked my face. My shirt stuck to my back. Six minutes and I did not make the mistake of thinking she was done. Six minutes to be solidly unconscious, nine minutes to die. My arms trembled so I changed my grip on the pillow, laying over her body propped up on elbows and knees.
Nine minutes. I left the pillow over her face and checked for a pulse. Dead.
“Who the fuck are you?”
The husband. Awake. Staring up at me.
“I know you. You’re a cop.”
Shit.
“Ysabeau, you bitch!” But she’d already gone.
“What have you done?” The husband had absorbed the scene: me straddling his wife with a pillow over her face. “Did you kill her?”
Didn’t seem much point in lying. “Yes.”
“Are you going to kill me, too?”
The thought had entered my mind. Protect myself a little longer. No witnesses.
“There’s a camera. You must have seen it.” As if reading my thoughts. “It transmits straight to the Cloud. You’re on record coming in here.”
“I’m not going to k
ill you.”
If I expected him to relax, he disappointed. He edged slowly away, sliding out from under the covers to stand there staring. “I’m going to call the police now. The, uh, the rest of them.” He walked away, naked except for jockey shorts with blue pin stripes. He had a clothing tag stuck in the middle of his back. His hair floated in unruly wisps.
I rolled off the bed. Off Daniels’ body. Ysabeau had set me up. She could not be caught or punished, so she had no need of a patsy. This was pure random cruelty. Rage flashed through my chest again but it did not linger. I calmed.
The most dangerous spousal abuser is one whose heart rate drops when they attack. They’re a kind of psychopath. They never improve. Therapy just makes them better at manipulating. I’d learned about them at a conference for first responders. It hadn’t occurred to me until later that sometimes psychopaths are cops. Good cops. For some of us, the more outrageous the situation, the greater the danger, the more we become calm. Logical.
I sat there on the edge of the bed, listening for the rise of faint sirens in the distance, and debated whether to keep sitting there or to run for it. Split. We’d parked one street over. I could maybe escape before enough cops showed up to cordon off the neighborhood. The more I thought it over, the worse my chances. And go where?
The husband ruined my contemplation by showing up with a shotgun. Aimed at my head. He had both hands on it. My eyes flicked to the nightstand: his cell phone sat there, sleek and useless. He hadn’t called the police at all.
“That’s not the way,” I said.
“Be quiet. I’m going to shoot you. Whatever I say, they’ll believe. You murdered her.” He steeled himself. I steeled myself. He took aim, braced the stock against his shoulder. I watched his finger tighten on the trigger. Most people who have had a gun pointed at them report the hugeness of the gun, of the opening. I did not focus on that. I saw everything. I saw the sweat on his forehead. The whiteness of his knuckle.
Nothing happened. He squeezed and he couldn’t. Mentally he could, but the trigger just wouldn’t budge. He checked the safety. Turned the gun to look at it, unfamiliar, went to flip it to OFF with one thumb.
Self-preservation finally kicked in. My hand moved as if with its own mind. My revolver came out. The safety came off even as I drew. He finished working his safety catch and saw me moving. Dropped the butt, the quickest way to bring me back in the field of fire. I had him center-mass. Squeezed once. The gun chuffed, loud and flat. He fell.
The decision caught up to me. I had to defend myself. Not against arrest, but against murder. I had to live.
For what?
I hated Ysabeau. Standing in there with the two corpses, the bodies of the people I had killed, I hated her. Maybe I would hate myself later. For now, I hated her. With everything. No fear, no rage, no guilt. Just hate.
I understood, a little, how she could go on and on, decade after century, stalking and killing priests as if every one of them was Bishop Clearey. I would kill her. Somehow.
That meant I had to escape.
There were a dozen ways I could have tried to stage the crime scene. None of them were any good. They’d have to be foolproof. Certain. No, I’d face consequences for what I’d done. Gladly. When she died Even my hatred aside, she couldn’t be allowed to go on.
So I just left. Safety on, gun holstered, out the front door. By the time I made it back to the car, I could hear those distant sirens. There would be witnesses, then, someone who saw me coming out. I wouldn’t have much time. They would be waiting at my house, the speed of radio being faster than the speed of my car. They would find the coffin, perhaps.
I started the car and cleared out of the neighborhood, staying to side streets, wending and winding. They’d be watching the highway.
Free. And all I only needed someplace to go.
Destiny
I’d parked under a row of trees with big, bushy branches that reached out over the road. Some kind of evergreen. Ysabeau would probably know what kind. I’d squeezed between two pickup trucks, so close together that wedging the Caprice in there had been a real piece of performance art. But any passing cops would have to go out of their way to read the license plates.
Police band had led me here.
So far, I was not a topic of conversation. I’d assumed the sirens were about me. Thought briefly, crazily, of the old Carly Simon song. Even if that was right, though, it didn’t seem like my colleagues had found the Captain’s files on the Cloud server. Or maybe they knew I’d be on police band and were keeping quiet.
Obsessing so much, I was not going to be a good fugitive.
But I did hear chatter. Two blocks over, a citizen had reported a bad smell at a neighbor’s house. She’d hopped the back fence to peek in the back windows, concerned for her elderly neighbor, then called back with more than a bad smell.
As the last car left the scene, I imagined Jolene had taken the body away to check for obvious foul play. So far, no family had been contacted.
I needed to ditch my car. Ideally, I’d ditch my clothes and my face and my hair, too, but I could handle the car for right now. I waited until the chatter finished. Place should be empty. Keeping to shadows and walking with my head down, hands in my pants pockets, I made my way two streets over. The lights on a neighbor’s porch went out. Darkness ruled now. People roused by the commotion returned to their beds, reassured that death had come to visit their town but had ultimately passed them by.
Not hard to slip through a gate into the back yard, crunching softly over gravel. Or to enter the house from the back. The glass sliding door had been left unlocked. The deceased had been tidy enough. Clean dishes stacked next to the sink. Magazines arrayed on a coffee table in the living room. Couch blankets folded neatly. All this by light from streetlamps one row over.
I crept to the front door, careful for unseen furniture. Lucky: she had a peg-board shaped like a key on the wall in the entry. I grabbed all the keys. Tiptoed to the attached garage. Two cars: a ten year old Nissan sedan, sensible and anonymous; and a sixties Mustang convertible with most of its engine in the back seat. Probably a restoration project undertaken years ago by a now-deceased husband.
I sorted the keys. The key to the Nissan was obvious. Big black fob with “unlock” and “start” buttons. The key to the resto car rested in the ignition. But I also held a GMC key.
I switched off the garage light and snuck back out into the rear yard. I’d gone right past a camper parked against the back fence. Not a purpose-built RV, but an old full-size truck with a shell on top. The keyring with the truck key also had a door key for the camper shell.
Perfect.
Relatives would miss a car if they happened to show up soon. They would not likely miss the camper from the back yard. Not with the work of grief on them. And no sane cop would check campers for fugitives because no sane fugitive would drive something so conspicuous-feeling. But there were thousands of them on the roads, even in winter. It would blend into the scenery, into the background. Into anonymity.
I replaced the rest of the keys, taking only the keys to the truck. Opened the gate and climbed into the cab. It started after a few seconds, the battery weak from not being driven much and sitting in the cold. I let it idle a minute, then drove through the gate with the lights off, returning to close the gate behind me. I didn’t see anyone watching through slits in their curtains. All the lights stayed off.
The next risky task: park under those trees, collect all my gear from the car and transfer it to the truck. That amounted to the gym bag from the trunk complete with a change of clothes – two, if you wanted to count the sweaty Lycra – as well as my tablet and the police radio Velcroed under the dash. My wallet contained everything else of importance.
I left the key in the car. In the door, obvious. Car theft remained rampant even as the economy started to improve. I was on a lucky streak; maybe it would extend to someone stealing the Caprice. My tracks would be covered.
The truck�
��s fuel gauge read close to E. I found a gas station with an all-night convenience store. Parked around the block. I’d be on camera, so just fueling up at the pump would waste all the effort of stealing a new ride. I went in and bought two gallons of fuel in a big red jug. Since I already appeared on camera, I used the ATM, too, taking the maximum cash of four hundred dollars. Then out, back to the camper.
Almost dawn.
I drove away from the sun, west, towards town’s central park. Not all our homeless folks lived outside. On the north side of the park, by an old mission church, a row of trucks and RVs just like mine parked along the curb. As long as they didn’t produce trash, the cops didn’t bother the people dwelling in their campers while they waited on social security cases or parts for their cars so they could drive back east. These were the working poor, the recovering, the temporarily inconvenienced. The anonymous.
Easy to park among them. To lock up the cab, crawl into the back, and lay down on the unmade stowaway bed in the dark.
Not so easy to sleep.
Wherever Ysabeau was right now, she was leaving me alone. That was reassuring. But, now that the practical elements of survival had been seen to and only rest and recovery occupied me, anxiety wormed its way back into my system. Last night, I had killed two people and felt next to no remorse. I’d thought mostly about myself, my losses, my anger, my shame, and nothing about what it meant to take a life even in self-defense. I’d stolen from a stranger to cover my tracks, to survive, with no hope in mind but to kill one more person.
She’s not a person.
Problematic assertion in the light of day. Sunshine had a way of bringing doubts into the matter. After all, vampires could not exist in daylight.
My tablet rattled with a near-constant stream of incoming calls and texts. Rather than look at them and hope they were routine, I put the thing on silent. It rested on my chest, a reminder that the world still existed that I remained connected to it.
Shadows moved against the fogged-out plastic windows. People moving from their trucks to the mission for showers and fresh water. I’d been called out here enough times to know the routine. I tried shutting my eyes but shadows moved against my eyelids, too. Doubts. Facts so ludicrous as to fail as evidence.