by Rodd Clark
“What . . .?” he said. “Hey, Shea honey . . . sorry you just got me outta bed. What did you say . . . you’re looking for a buddy named Gabriel?”
He was a big man who could play on a stereotype: that of a muscular mountain of a man who had the brain of warm broccoli. His only hope was to convince her of his dubious skepticism and run with his lie, if only to keep her calm until a better plan could be formed. He stepped aside, rubbing his eyes and wiping his mouth, the consummate actor building his own contrivance. He was hoping Shea’s curiosity would pull her inside and he could see what annihilation Chris had done by spilling whatever he had.
“Come on in, baby . . . tell Daddy what’s going on,” he mumbled as if rocks had grown in his mouth as he slumbered. His outstretched arm beckoned her, inviting her to come inside and tell him about everything she was ranting about. His look conveyed the simple emotion that there was no harm in sitting down together and getting to the bottom of all this. He walked away from the door to show her that he wasn’t about to trap her inside, the way one might entreat a stray animal to come in from the cold—look, no worries, I’m not even close enough to slam the door and ensnare you in my home.
Shea took the bait, entering his apartment without even a hint of fear. She closed the door behind her before moving to an empty chair to begin her story. Gabriel considered himself expert at reading people. The reticence in her steps, the emotions seeping from her posture, as well as that begging look behind her eyes, were all telling him she needed him to prove it had been a mistake, or a lie . . . by someone who had a motivation to lie.
She sat rigid in the chair and told him all about her unexpected guest from the afternoon. Her wide-eyed, kittenish look pleaded for him to explain and to satisfy her curiosity. She had finally found someone she could see herself with, and even he could see she’d choose to fall under his spell, rather than risk losing him completely. He dragged a chair from the kitchen and sat across from her, a distance he could touch her should she need. He sat emotionless, listening intently as she recalled what Chris had said, trying to look both incredulous and amazed. The amazement may have been real, because it was disturbing how much Chris had confessed to her. Does he realize what danger he’s placed Shea under with his fucked up confession? He had wondered just how angry the man could’ve been with him to say the words and break their trust forever.
Her words spilled out, and Gabe tried to mask his own sick apprehension while simultaneously comforting her.
“I don’t understand why Max would say those things to you. I suspected a ways back he was queer . . . not that that matters to me,” Gabe said in a whisper, holding Shea’s tiny hand in his for comfort. “But I think when you and I started seeing each other . . . well honestly, I think he became jealous. Not that I’d ever given him reason to think, you know, that he and I ever had a chance.”
It was an effective lie because he could see Shea’s eyes beginning to soften and the scowl fading.
“Ya know, I figured it was something like that,” she said with an approving nod. “He looked kinda gay to me too, and he did seem like he liked you an awful lot.”
Her head tilted slightly, as if retrieving some memory of how Chris had first appeared to her. Those last words she’d uttered hadn’t been completely lost on Gabe, who found some security in knowing his lover, had at least, thought fondly of him as he was tearing down the walls that once protected them both. There was still plenty of concrete to fill into her story. She had to believe this lie, because whether she knew it or not, her life depended on it.
“Now I don’t know why he made up all that other crap about murders and shit . . . maybe he was trying to scare you away from being with me,” Gabe said with a pained look. His eyes became as big and transparent as he was. He was propping the story up with slight and unsteady timbers, yet making her believe she’d come willingly to the same conclusions he had. She nodded to indicate it all made sense, that she had been afraid of him after Max left. But before Gabe was sure he was in control, he watched a cataract form over Shea’s brown eyes—she was perplexed by a stray thought that refused to dissipate.
“He mentioned a bunch of people were killed, and you know they just found a dead body . . . it popped up at one of our parks. I remember his name it was Carl something or another . . . it was supposed to be bad. Now that’s a strange coincidence, ain’t it?”
“Baby, they find dead bodies throughout the city all the time. It means nothing. If this Carl Whiting dude was murdered then it had nothing to do with me . . . so relax.” He gripped her hand gently to show her all was right in her world, but her mystified expression proved he hadn’t convinced her well enough. She looked up with childlike wonder as her mind found the breadcrumbs she had tossed on the ground earlier.
“How did you know his name was Carl Whiting? I didn’t mention that. I’d plumb forgotten his last name, at least until you said it.” She was nervous in that flash but held some faith it was due to her lack of understanding and not anyone else’s.
“. . . I must have heard the same news report on TV that you did,” Gabe said with a smile intended to ease.
SHEA HAD been confident her new lover would clear up any confusion. She’d had her suspicions about this Christian character, and she had needed him to prove her right. But that smile chilled her to the marrow and seemed to linger for too long on his mouth, giving him that evil, painted clown feel, which had frightened her as a little girl and sent quick shivers along her spine like fast tiny spiders racing her back.
“I’m sure you did,” she said, trying to smile back. “It’s probably been all over the television and radio . . .”
SHE WAS stalling for time, he knew, trying to appear undisturbed and relaxed, when it was clear she wasn’t. She would surely make idle conversation before offering some lame excuse to leave, or she might just bolt for the door and run screaming into the piazza. Tense muscles held fast, and the weight of long seconds hovered anxiously in the air between them. For most of us the fight or flight instinct comes natural, but Shea was a diminutive woman and facing impossible odds. Her faint smile barely camouflaged her fear of the massive thing blocking her path.
Gabe recognized the game was over . . . and that he had lost. Even if he could change her mind, alleviate her fears, there would always be doubts. He couldn’t risk her calling the police or informing her friends about him. As much as he was regretting it in that moment, he knew she had to die. This didn’t surprise him as much as he thought it might, because the second Chris knocked at her door, he’d sealed her fate. He may have been the architect of even greater destruction, since he’d singlehandedly ended their relationship and destroyed a trust Gabe thought was rock solid. Moreover, he’d ensured this tiny, innocent woman would never see another morning light. And he may have even done more damage than that.
As if a starting pistol had exploded to indicate the onset of a race, Shea took that second to leap from her chair and run for the door. But she was never intended to be a strong match for Gabe, who extended his arm like the rapid strike of a rattler and grabbed her by the neck, complexly encompassing her throat with a single palm. Her scream was instantly stifled, and Gabe rose from his chair and pulled the woman up with him, her feet dangling two feet above the hardwood.
SHEA’S HANDS went out instinctively to break his grip, and even as she struggled, she knew the futility. The big man’s expression had never altered. His smile may have faded slightly, but something behind those pale gray eyes still reeked of pending violence. Tears began streaming down her porcelain cheeks as she hung suspended in his grip, knowing she was breathing in her last bits of oxygen. Images flashed in her mind of the two of them in bed and his gentle embrace after they’d consummated their love. This couldn’t be the same figure before her, she thought. But then she remembered the reporter from the radio and visions sparked in her head of a dead body lying in the weeds, one she had never seen but now imagined anyway. She begged silently through her expressio
ns, all the while trying to inhale enough air to offer her some strength and a fighting chance, however bare, for her survival. She whimpered through the convulsing sounds of her own tears, trying to convey something to her attacker that might save her life . . . but he only stood there holding her tightly above the polished wood floor.
IN HIS hands she’d felt like a broken-winged bird he’d picked off the ground. One twist of his wrist and he could snap her as simply as a twig. He didn’t enjoy having to hurt her, but he did enjoy the power of life and death he possessed over another living person. She was never supposed to die. Without that white-lighter light to guide him, she had only become an accident. Her death was too much like his very first homicide. It too was random and for reasons other than his godly mission. That first dead soul, and now Shea—neither had been an intentional part of his story. He was killing her because he had to, if only to protect him as well as Chris. That made Shea just as important as the others he’d murdered, just in a totally different way.
His lover was to blame for this death, not him. It had been some jealous response to an insignificant, meaningless event. One he had no control over now. He could have made Shea understand they had no future together. Eventually she’d have moved on, and although it might have created some awkwardness between them whenever he bumped into her in the courtyard holding a bag of groceries or being accompanied by her new beau, she’d still be alive. Chris had upended this chance for them to be together, as much as her chance to meet her next beau. Any sadness he felt for her now was quickly becoming overshadowed by the lack of blame and responsibility of Chris’s actions.
With her fingers clutching wildly at Gabe’s hands, Shea’s face began to change. A dark blue color rose from her lack of oxygen. It crept upwards from her bruised neck and bubbled to the top of her head with spittle beginning to drain from the corner of her mouth—although she was fighting with everything her tiny body would allow, she was failing. Without air or the strength to break his grip, she was losing, and she could only watch while the screams in her head were trapped inside.
She was a weightless thing, one he could hold nearly all day with her just suspended there. But it wouldn’t take that long. She struggled until there was nothing she could do but wither away. When the light behind her eyes faded, she took everything she had with her: any dreams of becoming a great artist, the pain of losing her mother, and that daughterly devotion to a father who had botched it so poorly. Gabe held her for a minute longer to ensure she was gone, before picking her up gently and cradling her body in his arms. He then moved her to the couch and laid her lovingly, face up, and gingerly closed the lids of both her eyes. He couldn’t have her staring up at him and seeing him so sad.
Chapter Thirty
BACK INSIDE THE protection of his condo, Christian should have felt safe and isolated, but it was impossible not to have his conversation with Shea playing over and over in a loop. Sitting on his sofa, his knees pulled up, arms wrapped them like a vice, he looked like a kid who’d just realized he’d done something bad and was surely gonna pay the price when the folks got home. He didn’t even want to consider that come-to-Jesus meeting if Gabriel found out what he’d done.
He couldn’t believe he’d even built up the nerve to enter Shea’s place and tell her all the horrible things he had; it was so out of his character. He kept telling himself that he’d had his reasons and his little confession wouldn’t amount to much and that Shea would simply drop her attraction for Gabriel like a hot-handled skillet. She would just refuse to believe the words he’d told her . . . quite possibly think the man in her apartment had been insane, envious, bent beyond reason. Maybe she’d decide Gabriel wasn’t worth the effort because of the maddening lies and crap that had been thrown her way; a guilty-by-association whisper making her see that he wasn’t the man for her.
Either way, he’d fucked up royally. As strange as it sounded in his head, it had never dawned on him that Shea might go to the authorities with what she knew, even though she didn’t really know anything. It had never entered his mind that she’d confront Gabriel. He’d just refused to allow himself to see any resulting wreckage he might leave behind, like the flotsam and ugly litter now lining the once beautiful shorelines of the Puget Sound.
But he was seeing it now . . . as late as that was in the coming. He was feeling that oppressive cloud blowing in and knew it brought thunder. It frightened him to think what Gabriel might do if he ever discovered Christian had tried to warn off his one-time affair. Two things he’d learned about Gabriel were that he was methodic and cautious. Whatever he might’ve thought about motivations, he was still a murderer, one who was smart enough to still be walking free. If he suspected that Christian had confessed any of this to Shea, it would mean they would both be in danger. He didn’t fully understand to what lengths he’d go in an effort to protect himself, but he knew he was capable of killing them both—if only to save his own skin.
This whole thing is unsetting, he thought. He felt as if he’d been having a long nervous breakdown that began the day Church first sat down with him at the Cherry Street Grinder. There was nothing that seemed real in the events since that day. He envisioned himself sitting in an interrogation room again, trying to explain to straight detectives how he’d become attracted to Gabriel Church, and how he’d fallen so deeply that he lost all his rationality when he hadn’t run crying to the cops with a sordid story, one even he had trouble believing.
It was becoming more and more evident to him there would be no Panama, no San Blas Islands getaway, no chance that he and Gabriel could remain free and together. They couldn’t even go two days without a major fight, and he knew one furious argument was creeping up from behind, and it would be a big one. He couldn’t help but feel the futility of it all and remember an awful incident from college once. He had a friend. They’d met in class; she was lovely, but they never dated. They had become friends though. He could see now that she was more fag hag than girlfriend, but at the time he didn’t suspect that.
She’d been an overly dramatic girl from a wealthy family. She lived an outdated hippy lifestyle of drugs and casual sex, which no doubt was meant solely as an act of rebellion and the intended frustration for her parents. She’d rung up Christian in the middle of the night one evening. Just to talk, she said. Initially it was hard not to notice the slurring words and the dreamy quality of her voice. Thinking she’d simply drunk dialed him, Christian was amused at first. But he became more alert and interested when she told him she’d taken a half bottle of Nembutals and was just hanging out there, waiting to die. She began moaning about the futility of her life, rambling about nonsense he could no longer focus on in the wake of hearing about the pills. His heart began racing when he suspected she would die on the phone with him at the other end. He liked her a lot, and he didn’t want his voice to be the last one she ever heard. Racing across the quad, he immediately burst into her room. He had to wrestle the phone from her grip as she fought back the delirium and uttered nonsensical banter. He then called 911.
He’d watched as she pulled away in the ambulance, standing in a crowd of anxious and curious students. He watched the blue lights and listened as the siren became a distance wail in his ears. She had survived that attempt but became furious with Christian that he’d intervened. Days later, he tried to reconnect, to help her through her depression, but she refused his calls, and left him standing there outside her dorm room door, disheveled and remorseful.
His friend dropped out of college two weeks later. He never saw the car that came and picked her, and her things, up at the curb. She was just gone. He was informed by friends that her parents had checked her into some posh hospital facility upstate. He was assured she was in good hands, and he hoped she might learn to forgive him, after some much-needed therapy. A month later someone stopped him in the quad between classes and blurted out she’d heard the girl had killed herself, right there in the hospital. The reality hit Christian in that second that she h
adn’t ever been asking for Christian’s help to get better, she’d been asking for his company while she died. Whatever futility she suffered under had crept into his life, knowing he hadn’t been able to save her because she never wanted saving.
He felt that same wash of empty needlessness while sitting on his sofa. It seemed some things were prewritten and you couldn’t control them. Church had been a killer before they’d even met. Christian never had the opportunity of altering that. Knowing him now as he did, he understood how he couldn’t control the events that were playing out, and it would be an ineffectual, fat-handed approach if he were to try.
The rest of the day was spent in jittery anticipation of the fall of that other shoe. Christian moved through his apartment like a ghost caught between planes. His evening wasn’t any better. He wrestled inside sweaty sheets half awake, expecting either a knock at his door or it to be kicked in, and an angry Gabriel to be standing there in the shadows. The lack of contact made him fear that Gabriel had just picked up and left town, possibly after finding out Shea had been visited that awful day of their fight.
He bounced from trepidation to anguish. He wanted to apologize to his lover and force him to see the reasons he’d done what he had, but he was also afraid. He was scared of what Church was capable of and couldn’t help but wonder if that tiny artist had gone and made matters worse for all of them. He could have filled a novel with everything he didn’t know. He didn’t know about Carl Whiting, had never guessed that Church was still committing murderous acts when their worlds first collided. And he didn’t know that Shea Baltimore was still lying face up on a couch, face frozen in a lifeless pose.
Christian had done the irreversible, the sin that would fell all his angels to earth. It would all come crashing down because of his freaked-out jealousy, and the weight of that was crushing him like heavy stones. It seemed strange to think about other times with Gabriel: being in a club while the multitude of quarter-sized lights raced along the walls from a suspended disco ball, those long walks along Pioneer Square, and the joy of waking up in glorious ecstasy because he was waking with such a beautiful creature. The dichotomy of all the different sides of Gabriel was something he was just barely learning to comprehend, and now he was afraid he was going to witness another personality emerge, and that worried him.