The Killer in Me

by Margot Harrison

  “Nina!”

  Heart thudding, I withdraw my head from firing range, brace my back on the ledge, and roll on my side so I can aim the Sidekick into the hole. I’ll let him think I’m bumbling in unprepared.

  “Nina!”

  Silence. Smells of earth and mold. He’s down there with her, and she—

  A shiver on my nape makes me spring erect and scan the rocks. He could be coming at me over the ridge from his secret tunnel.

  As I point the gun around wildly, seeing only the dark blue sky and sinking half-moon, a voice speaks softly from the dark below.

  Her voice. My name.

  She helps me down the ladder, then finds a knife and severs the zip tie. Her face and hands are smudged with dirt, her eyes huge in the flashlight beam. And the whole time she’s helping me, she clutches a pistol in her free hand. A Beretta.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “How long has it been?”

  I don’t answer. I’m busy looking.

  Shadwell lies six feet down in a trench of dirt, his open eyes staring up. A bullet hole just north of the right one.

  It takes me a few seconds to register that he’s not looking at me, not blinking. Gone.

  It doesn’t seem real. I still see him pacing the cabin, telling me the story of the bootleggers’ passage. All his weird tics engraved themselves on my brain while I watched him like a wounded, frozen piece of prey.

  “He did it,” she says, probably seeing the question on my face. “I think I let him.”

  Dawn comes. We figure it out, sitting in the dark with our heads on our knees.

  Her plan is to bury him right here in the grave he dug, along with the Beretta emblazoned with her fingerprints. Hide the evidence like she’s guilty.

  Maybe in her mind, she is.

  For a while, I try to make a case for going to the cops. But, as Nina points out, the evidence doesn’t favor our story.

  When she gets up and starts tossing dirt on her brother’s corpse, I gently take the shovel from her. “You said there might be other people buried here. Victims.”

  “At least one.”

  “I want to know.”

  Despite the exhaustion, digging makes my adrenaline flow. I brutalize the earth with the shovel while Nina gathers her brother’s stuff. The 597 she places in a metal box, along with the Beretta that killed Shadwell. The box goes in his grave, along with the headlamp, tools, and duct tape.

  “What are we gonna do with the Sequoia?” I ask. “Drive it into a swamp like Norman Bates?”

  We decide that after dark, we’ll drive Shadwell’s Sequoia to the bus station. We’ll use his credit card to buy a ticket in his name—to LA, maybe. Or Alaska.

  When that’s done, she’ll use his phone to text his family. I love you all, but I’ve decided I need to seek my own path. Some vision-quest bullshit.

  “Honestly,” she says, “I don’t think they’ll look too hard for him. His whole life he’s been taking off whenever he felt like it. He’s the type of person you expect to disappear.”

  My shovel strikes something solid—probably just a rock. I bend again, my back protesting, and scoop dirt out of the hole as fast as I can.

  “What?” she asks.

  I stare for a few seconds before I say, “Come look.”

  Together we gaze at the remains of the homeless guy.

  He was a corpse over Dylan’s shoulder when I met him. An unwieldy weight that had to be levered between the rock ledges and allowed to tumble to the mine floor.

  How or where they crossed paths, I will never know. My brother was bursting with pride that night because he’d used his .22 in the city—albeit in a run-down, poorly populated neighborhood—and, damn, did the homemade suppressor work. Barely a pop. Half his thoughts were about his skills and his gear. The victim was almost an afterthought.

  The homeless guy still wears a navy jacket with a faded gas station logo on the pocket. He no longer has a face. In two years, whatever lives in this dry soil has shaved most of his flesh neatly from the bones.

  Does he have dental records? Maybe somewhere. Maybe he has surviving relatives, people who’d want to know. Kids.

  After the first shock of uncovering a desiccated skeleton, Warren sits back on his heels, his eyes glittering. “It’s real.”

  I wish I could give him the satisfaction of following through on his detective work, delivering this evidence to a forensics team. But I’ve made a promise and sealed it in blood.

  Not to Dylan. To Becca and the other people who loved him.

  “Now you have your evidence,” I say, then clear my throat. “We’re going to bury him. Rebury him. Then…the other one.”

  Warren looks at the skull, still patched in places with salt-and-pepper hair. His jaw tightens. “People should know,” he says softly, like he’s already given up this fight.

  He knows my fingerprints are all over the gun. Maybe he even thinks I made the head shot in cold blood to put my brother out of his misery.

  It was almost like that. I let go of the gun. Knowing exactly what Dylan would do, I let go.

  I walk over to stand at the foot of Dylan’s grave, while Warren faces me at the head. My brother’s body between us. “Yeah, they should know. And they will. He told me where the Gustafssons are.”

  Warren skirts the grave and grabs me in a clumsy hug. His skin is warm, and a pulse beats under my hand as I let my head rest on his shoulder. “You did the right thing—the only thing,” he says.

  I hope I am doing the right thing—for the other family I almost had. For Becca.

  Warren picks up the shovel and drops a soft load of dirt on my brother’s face. The wound I made disappears.

  Good-bye.

  I take the shovel from him and finish it myself.

  I planned a trip to the desert, and somehow I got the coast into the deal.

  It’s nearly sunset of the following day when we roll into San Diego in the Legacy. There’s an exit for something called Pacific Beach, and that’s what we want. More specifically, a Pacific pier.

  Nina sits up beside me. She’d been cat-napping all day while I drove through the desert. “Where are we?”

  “Lost in suburbia. You missed the scenic part.”

  “I’ve seen enough desert,” she says.

  Last night, after we finished burying the bodies and cleaning up the cabin and ditching the Sequoia and returning the van, I insisted on crashing in our motel room. We both needed sleep almost more than air.

  At five A.M., Nina woke me. Our bags were packed, and the shadows under her eyes made her face look hollow. “You sleep while I drive,” she said.

  “Drive where?” The only place I could imagine going was home.

  She explained, and I protested.

  In the end, though, my aching muscles and bruises won out, and I collapsed in the backseat and lost consciousness within five seconds.

  When I opened my eyes, we were parked beside a little white house with wind chimes hanging from the porch. Morning sun slanted over acres of yellow desert, so we couldn’t have gone that far.

  I sat up and blinked my vision clear, groaning as all my pain receptors reignited.

  Somebody knocked on the window, and I jumped. It was Nina and a lady wearing a flowy dress, her long black hair held back with silver barrettes.

  “Warren, this is Becca. Becca, this is my boyfriend, Warren.”

  The instant Becca saw my bruises, she started clucking over me. She shepherded me out of the car and into her house, where she sat me down and fed me coffee, bacon, and pancakes while asking a million questions. Was I sure I didn’t need medical attention? Had I made a police report?

  Apparently I’d been mugged in Albuquerque the night before last. Hence Nina’s abrupt exit from Arizona, and there were further bogus explanations I didn’t bother to register.

  We buried a guy in an abandoned mine, and we’re letting his mom serve us pancakes. That’s where my head was at the moment.

  Most of the time
, though, I simply shunned coherent thoughts. Under the stiffness and pain, my body felt warm, almost glowing.

  She called me her boyfriend.

  And that is how I came to drive nearly eight hours more across the desert to the Pacific. The sun beat down on Nina dozing beside me in the passenger seat, and she kept stirring, waking, and saying, “Let me take a turn.”

  I shook my head. “I can tell you didn’t sleep last night. I got this.”

  Pacific Beach turns out to be a funky surf-bum town, full of bars with goofy names and little stucco houses. I park a few blocks from something called Crystal Pier.

  The sun paints the west a riot of colors as we reach the sand. The thin strip of beach lined with hotels stretches as far as I can see. The ocean is as flat as the desert. People with surfboards and romping dogs stand out against the fire on the rim of the world.

  “Wait here,” Nina says, gesturing at the pier. “I need to do this alone.”

  I shake my head. “I’m in this with you.”

  High above the waves, the pier feels miles long. We pass tourists, patient fishermen, and even a motel built precariously atop the wood struts. When we reach the end, I look down and see surfers carving the foamy swells, staying just ahead of the turbulence that will wipe them out.

  “All done,” Nina says.

  I didn’t see her send the text message or toss Shadwell’s phone in the ocean. It doesn’t matter, though—like I said, we’re in this together.

  We bought him a bus ticket to San Diego, and that’s where the last trace of him will be found. From there, his mom and girlfriend can imagine that he hitched to Alaska or Mexico or boarded a freighter bound for Asia, never to be seen again.

  Nina seems to like this idea.

  “I’m starving,” I say as the sun slips below the horizon.

  She jabs my shoulder playfully, then apologizes when I wince. “Of course you are. We can grab something on the way back to Albuquerque—I’ll drive.”

  “You’re kidding, right? It’s eleven hours.” At least, I hope she’s kidding. Now we’ve come all the way here, I want to spend some time on the beach.

  “I’m totally rested.”

  “No, you’re not. You need a full night’s sleep that’s not in a moving car.”

  “No, really,” she says. “I’m good. We’ll drive back tonight, and I’ll sleep tomorrow.”

  Is she worried somebody will see us here and connect us to Shadwell’s disappearance? That’s a long shot, and I’ve got no intention of letting her get behind the wheel.

  To buy time, I steer her to a Denny’s a block from the beach, where we both order huge breakfasts in defiance of the dusk outside.

  The adrenaline of the trip has ebbed away, and I’m so tired I can barely see straight or keep my head upright. Nina looks worse.

  “We need a bed. Mattress. Pillows,” I say. “Maybe we can get a spot at that tacky motel on the pier before we pass out.”

  She shakes her head, and I realize that she’s clenching her fist, digging nails into her palm.

  I take her hand, coax it open. The other diners, broad-backed tourists and goateed stoners in surf gear, fade into a blur and hum around us.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask.

  She just shakes her head, and I pull her against me.

  Her head stays on my shoulder, her breathing evening out, while people come and go. I finish my giant breakfast and some of hers. The waitress brings the check and asks if my girlfriend is okay.

  “She hasn’t slept for a while,” I say, and ask for another cup of coffee.

  Ten minutes later, Nina wakes with a jerk. She sits up, rubs her eyes. “I’m so sorry. You should’ve woken me.”

  “It’s okay. You needed it.”

  That’s when I notice her eyes are bright with tears. She takes both my hands and says, “I didn’t want to sleep after sunset.”

  “Why?” Finally it dawns on me. “That’s when you saw him.”

  “When I fell asleep. After dusk. Only then.”

  I don’t believe in an afterlife. If Shadwell’s spirit did end up anywhere, I don’t want to know where that is.

  “It’s okay,” Nina says, folding my hands against her chest. She blinks the tears away and smiles. “He made me scared of the nothingness, but it’s fine.”

  “It was nothingness?” I ask cautiously.

  She nods. “But it doesn’t make me want to kill myself. It’s not like that at all.”

  “Jeez, I hope not. It’s just like not dreaming, right?” I disentangle one hand and wrap my arm around her. At least I’ll be with her tonight, and tomorrow night, and for as many nights as I can manage.

  “It’s like—for a second he’s with me. But not in a bad way. Maybe it’s just a memory. Then he slips away, and it’s like I’m looking out at the desert or the ocean at night.”

  When she wakes, I’ll be there. I’ll be there when she mails the letters to the police departments in Schenectady, New York, and Hereford, Texas—letters we’ll print in a shop in San Bernardino and fold and seal into envelopes with gloved hands. Letters we’ll drop into two random mailboxes off random exits as we make our way back east. Letters that will uncover corpses while leaving their killer an enduring mystery for crime hounds to speculate about on message boards until one day he’s forgotten.

  Maybe someday we’ll start forgetting him, too. I draw her close, knowing that day can’t come soon enough for me.

  “Nina—hey, Nina! Didn’t you hear the bell?”

  Kirby leans over my desk, brows hoisted, hair straggling out of her ponytail. Behind her, beyond the classroom window, scarlet leaves drift from sugar maples in a hazy blue sky.

  It’s a perfect October day. Why am I in this stuffy room? What class is this again?

  Oh, right—French. Madame Verger was explaining the subjunctive when my left eyelid twitched, and I forgot where I was for a while.

  No, I knew exactly where I was. Back on that ridge in New Mexico, under the stars, having a conversation that never ends.

  It doesn’t have to be this way, I beg.

  It does, he says. Over and over.

  Kirby raps on my desk, her enormous shoulder pads making her look like a Reagan-era secretary. She’s been dressing in hipster vintage ever since she started dating her SAT prep tutor, a nineteen-year-old Brown sophomore.

  “We’re gonna be late for English,” she says. “Did you finish your college-app essay?”

  “Uh, almost.” The one where I write about my trip to the desert, but not about rediscovering my birth family.

  Warren appears in the classroom doorway, making c’mon, let’s go gestures. I go to him and slink my arm around his waist, trying to ignore the din in the hallway, sneaking my fingers under the hem of his army jacket to feel the heat of his skin.

  Kirby says, “You guys are so cute you’re giving me a sugar rush.”

  Warren whispers in my ear, “Outside. Need to show you something.”

  “See you in English!” I call to Kirby—who shakes her head in mock exasperation—and follow him out the side door just as the bell rings.

  In our old spot in the cedar grove, Warren takes out his phone. My limbs go heavy when I see the cued-up video with the WRGB logo.

  “They finally found them.”

  He nods. “Took them long enough. Or maybe the cops were making the press sit on it till now.”

  Together we watch as a blond, bug-eyed anchorwoman announces that the remains of Ruth and Gary Gustafsson have been identified using DNA. We see jerky footage, taken from a distance, of cops behind yellow tape.

  In the background, I spot that cabin, too familiar, its slanted roof weighed down with blackish moss. I shudder, and Warren pulls me against him so I feel the beating of his heart.

  The Gustafssons’ grown son talks to reporters. “A very sick individual is still out there,” the Schenectady County district attorney proclaims next, his mouth an unforgiving line.

  I tremble so hard Warren sto
ps the video. “This is good, Nina.”

  “It’s not enough.”

  We stay there for a while, my face in the hollow of his neck, his pulse to my ear, till he says, “We’ve got Calc coming up.”

  “Screw Calc.” I want to stay outside under this blinding blue sky, watching the airborne leaves, feeling the last balmy breezes before winter sets in. He could never stand to be inside on a fine day.

  Then I nod, defeated. I have to maintain my GPA so we can graduate and go to college together in California. Warren finally told his mom he wants to study film at USC, and she’s half-reconciled to it. We’ll get jobs out there and spend our days in the sun, forever and ever.

  That sun won’t dispel the night in my head, the night that closes over me every time my eyelid twitches. Not the real night where I lose myself in unconsciousness, but the night that exists only in my waking imagination, because he’s gone.

  We dawdle back into the building, the noise melting away around us, because I’m already somewhere else.

  He’s not gone entirely. Never gone. Every time I read a headline about someone who went missing without a trace, he stands beside me and says, There are so many more you don’t even know about. People no one will ever miss.

  You aren’t there, I tell him back. I don’t miss you.

  That’s okay, he says. I’ll be waiting for you on this ridge when you need me.

  I’ll never need you. I tug Warren closer. A few girls at lockers eye us briefly and look away.

  This conversation is over, I tell the imaginary person in my head. Over, over, over.

  Someday maybe it will be.

  I’ll wait for tonight—for the nothingness that he feared and I don’t. My sleep will be a blackness like the abandoned mine. His step will never be heard there, his headlights won’t sweep the dark away. The night goes on without him.

  This book was born one winter’s night as a disturbing idea; a raft of intrepid readers helped make it a reality.

  My tireless agent, Jessica Sinsheimer, read with an editor’s eye and contributed invaluable elements to the story. Thanks to her, I will never be able to shop at a Home Depot without noticing all the sharp objects it contains.