Into The Fire jb-4

by David Wiltse

  But it was not just fear for his well-being that made Cooper's punk cry.

  It was love, too.

  "You'll forget me, won't you?" Swann asked.

  "Naw."

  "Yes, you will," Swann said bitterly. "You'll forget all about me as soon as you leave, I don't give it a day. You won't ever think about me again.":'Sure I will," said Cooper.

  'No, you won't. I know how your mind works."

  "I said I would," Cooper said, getting annoyed at the line of the conversation.

  "Promise?"

  "What?"

  "Promise you won't forget me?"

  Cooper sighed wearily. The emotional demands of the punk sometimes made it not worth the effort, but tonight he could afford to be magnanimous.

  Tomorrow he was getting out of stir. Tomorrow he was going back to the world.

  "I promise," Cooper said.

  "What do you promise?"

  "Whatever you want."

  The punk was quiet for a moment and Cooper considered kicking him.

  Cooper wasn't through talking yet, but he didn't want to talk about the punk, he wanted to talk about himself. He had his own concerns about his impending release, but he did not know how to bring them up without giving the punk an advantage over him. Even the weakest of them could find a way to exploit a vulnerability, even someone whom Cooper had treated as well as Swann, even now with only hours left to go.

  When Swann spoke again it was in his babyish, wheedling tone of voice.

  "Can I come down there?" Swann asked.

  He didn't really feel like it, but Cooper grunted permission. If the punk only knew how decent Cooper was to him.

  Swann slipped into Cooper's bunk and cuddled against the big man.

  "Will I ever see you again?',' he asked. He sounded like he was going to start crying again.

  "Sure," said Cooper.

  "When?"

  "Well, not till you get out, because I ain't coming back here.

  "I won't be out for three years. If I can live that long without you."

  "You'll be fine," Cooper lied. "They know you're my punk. They wouldn't dare mess with old Coop's punk."

  Swann didn't bother to refute such arrant nonsense. For all he knew, Cooper believed it.

  "I wonder if you'll even remember what I look like after three years."

  "I remember everything," Cooper said. "There's nothing wrong with my memory."

  "I didn't mean that."

  "Ask me anything. Ask me about the Mexican."

  "I know you know about the Mexican and the girls and all the rest of them…"

  "And the faggot, don't forget."

  "I know. I know you'll remember all of that. I'm worried you'll forget about me. Can I write you sometimes?"

  "I don't write letters," Cooper said.

  "No, I'd write to you. You wouldn't have to answer.

  And I could call you, too, if you'd like that."

  Cooper was silent.

  "I could say things to you," Swann whispered. "I could talk the way you like sometimes."

  "All right," Cooper said uncertainly. He was never comfortable on the phone, the other voices got annoyed with him, they wanted him to answer them back too quickly when he needed time to think.

  The punk caught the uncertainty in his voice. "Everything's going to be fine," he said. "I know you're a little… " He groped for the right word. "Afraid" was not what Cooper wanted to hear. "… concerned about how it's going to go in the world."

  Cooper grunted noncommittally.

  "But everything is going to be just fine."

  The punk began to stroke Cooper's chest as if he were petting a large beast.

  "Just remember, you have two friends that you never had before when you were in the world."

  "Who?"

  "And you can ask both of them for help and they will always be there for you."

  "Who?"

  "Jesus, you have Jesus for a friend now, don't you?"

  "Oh, yeah."

  "You can always ask Jesus for help. You know that, don't you?"

  "I know that."

  "He will always answer you if you ask him, but it may not always be in a way you understand."

  Cooper snorted. Fat lot of good that would do him.

  "You said two friends," Cooper demanded.

  "And me," the punk said. His hand slipped lower and stroked Cooper on the abdomen.

  "Uh-huh."

  "You can always ask me for help, you know. You do know that, don't you?

  If you're in trouble, or if you're confused, you can always get in touch with me."

  "I know," said Cooper, although it had never occurred to him. What good could the punk do while languishing in prison? Chances were he couldn't even help himself.

  "I'll give you postcards with a stamp and my address already on them.

  You can write a message if you want to, but you don't even have to. If I get the card I'll know you're thinking of me-and I'll pray for you right then. That would be good, wouldn't it?"

  Cooper grunted again.

  " 'Cause Jesus and I have one thing in common," Swann continued. His fingers were now brushing Cooper's pubic hair. "Do you know what that is?"

  Cooper was no longer attending the punk's words. His entire focus was on the other man's hand.

  "We both love you," the punk said.

  Cooper arched his back, trying to draw Swann's fingers closer. If the punk continued to tease, Cooper would kill him.

  "Shall we pray together?" Swann asked, his voice calling.

  "After," Cooper said. He pushed the little man lower.

  I could snap his head off, Cooper thought as he felt the tension rising in his body. I could squeeze hard enough so his head popped right off like a doll's. Not this time he wouldn't. He'd be caught. But starting tomorrow he could pull off all the heads he could find.

  Just before he cried out with release he imagined doing it to dozens of clerks and foremen and schoolteachers, one after the other. He saw their faces, men and women, looking so surprised as their necks broke and their heads rolled away.

  Karen arrived home to find neither Becker nor Jack there.

  A lamb stew sat on the stove, ready to be reheated for dinner. As was Becker's preference, she could detect the heavy presence of scallions and peppers and the usual concoction of Indian spices. The meal would be delicious and the house would smell for several days afterward of cardamom and coriander. This time a thick mat of dark green permeated the stew, giving it the appearance of something skimmed from atop a stagnant pond. With a fingertip, Karen determined that the algae-like substance was spinach cooked to the point of disintegration, and, yes, delicious. Becker's cooking was a fair model for the man himself, she thought: unusual, exotic, and ultimately very savory. But strange, always a little strange.

  Passing through the gap in the backyard hedge, Karen walked across the tiny center of six shops and the branch office of a bank that passed for the commercial hub of Clamden. Three years after moving to Clamden, Karen was still amazed that a town so determinedly semirural could exist within an hour's commute of New York City.

  Clamden's small-town flavor and undemanding pace was a tribute to the power of its zoning laws. Heavily if not predominantly peopled by refugees from Manhattan who still made their living there, the town nonetheless acted as if it were sealed off from the rest of America in a time capsule, a happy remnant of the 1950s. There actually were still stay-at-home mothers, Karen marveled. She encountered them at evening meetings for parents at the school when she swept in, always a bit late, always a bit harried, the cloud of concerns from her job still buzzing around her head like a swarm of gnats. They would be there in their slacks and Laura Ashley print dresses, chatting aimly about team suppers for the gymnasts and bake sales at the church while Karen sat uneasily in her business suit, a snub-nosed.38 automatic in her purse, her FBI badge tucked in her vest pocket. It was an incongruity that troubled her at times but to others was strangely s
oothing. Again, a fair description of her life with John Becker.

  She found Becker and Jack on one of the three elementary school playgrounds, kicking a soccer ball in the gathering dusk. Becker's friend Tee, the Clamden police chief, was with them, cheering for Jack and occasionally taking a big-footed swat at the ball himself. As was usually the case, it was Tee's voice that carried above the other two, full of self-mocking bluster and general good spirits. Jack was noisy, too, cheering himself and working hard at a sport that did not come naturally. Becker was mostly silent, parrying Jack's attempts to pass him with the ball, yet still quietly encouraging. He moved with an ease and athletic grace that seemed to be a part of everything he did.

  Karen thought of the incident with Jack during their climb. The patience that Becker seemed to demonstrate in everything he did, the careful explanation, the genuine understanding of Jack's fear. And yet the odd tilt of his perspective. The insistence on embracing one's fear.

  Karen was delighted that Jack had the influence of a man in his life and Jack adored Becker. She loved him herself, she thought. Or at least she did at times, and maybe a sporadic love was all anyone could hope for short of starry-eyed lunacy. It was better than no love at all, and Karen had decided to settle for it, especially as it was interlaced with a very real physical passion that had shown no signs of diminishing. His touch still made her shiver with anticipation and his kiss weakened her knees… And yet…

  Karen slipped back into the shadow of the forest that bordered the playground and continued to watch, unseen… And yet there were those moments, those odd, unsettling moments when Karen was not sure who or what she was living with. Nights when she would be aware of his lying wide awake beside her until daybreak, not tossing and turning in a fight with insomnia, but lying there, poised, as if listening for the sound of something that stalked him in the dark. As if only his constant vigilance kept the beasts away.

  In her experience all men wrestled with their particular demons, usually urges to infidelity, or drink, or general Responsibility, but those demons were nothing more than imps compared with the devils that struggled for possession of Becker's soul. He had explained his fears to her, of course, and that had only made them the more frightening because, despite her resistance, she had known what he was talking about, she had recognized some of his demons as her own.

  Karen walked back to the house she shared with Becker and waited for her family to return. In her purse she held the instrument that might free Becker's demon and allow it to control him once again. He had made no mention of the previous letter that she had brought to him, but his reaction of silent dread had told her how deeply it had touched him. She recognized the same postmark, the same typewritten address. Whatever it was, it continued.

  She thought of keeping the letter from him but knew that it was pointless. If the demon was stirring in Becker's soul, only Becker could deal with it. The letter writer would get to him some way eventually, and Becker would have to wrestle with the devil by himself.

  At first Becker ignored the letter, leaving it where Karen had dropped it on the coffee table. They went through the evening as if the envelope did not exist, sitting like excrement in the middle of the living room.

  It was only at night, when he heard the slightly labored breath that signaled Karen's deeper sleep, that Becker rose quietly from the bed and returned to the living room. The stationery caught the moonlight from the window and glowed, taunting him to continue to ignore it.

  The correspondent's device was the same as the first time, the masthead of The New York Times pricked with pinholes. Sitting in the spare bedroom that doubled as an office for both Karen and Becker, he deciphered the message with the Scrabble tiles.

  "i know why."

  The code at the top of the page was: — another box kite. Becker wrote down 1011 1, then translated it to the number 23.

  There was nothing to do but wait until the next day, when he could look up the relevant page and date at the library, so Becker sat in the den pondering the meaning of the code.

  His correspondent had chosen to encrypt his message, but why? Not to keep the contents secret from Becker, that much was obvious. Therefore he must have been concerned about interception when he wrote it or when he mailed it. Was he creating his message in the presence of someone who was involved, someone dangerous? Or was his mail read by someone before being sent?

  Becker tried to imagine a sequence in which his correspondent sat in the presence of a witness and poked pinholes in a carefully scissored masthead of a three-year-old copy of The New York Times-without attracting attention. It seemed unlikely. The advantage of course would be that the observer would not easily decipher the message, but would that not make the correspondent's actions all the more suspicious?

  A second alternative was that the correspondent was fearful of the message being found-once it was created.

  Which would seem to mean that there was no good place to hide it. How much space would be needed to secrete a few square inches of paper? But an addressed envelope might be harder to hide. Which might mean that the corspondent had no quick access to a mailbox. His message might have to sit around for some time before being mailed-if the correspondent was a shut-in, for instance.

  Or if the correspondent lived in some remote area far from the nearest mailbox.

  Becker studied the postmark again. Decatur, Alabama.

  Not exactly the middle of Alaska, but not New York City, either. Alabama was rural enough that mailing a letter could easily be a bit of a problem, and the postmark was never a very accurate indication of where a piece of mail had actually originated. Becker knew that his own mail frequently bore the imprint of a Stamford post office, and Stamford was thirty miles and at least four intervening towns away from Clamden and had an entirely different zip code. Decatur, Alabama, could be the funneling junction for outgoing mail for a surrounding area of hundreds of square miles.

  A third possibility was that someone read the correspondent's mail before it went out. Becker had seen Karen do it with Jack's letters to his school pen pals. And she had actually made him make corrections in thank-you letters to grandparents. But then Jack never had a stamp and usually neglected to seal the envelope as well. Becker knew that his correspondent was not a child. He wished that were the case. He wished that he was on the receiving end of a prank, some more sophisticated version of eight-year-olds calling strangers and giggling through their hands as they asked if the hapless adult on the other end of the line had Prince Albert in the can, and if so to please let him out.

  What Becker had on the other end of his line was an adult, an intelligent one who was afraid of something, or someone, and trying, probably at some risk to himself, to get help. If he or she was attempting to give Becker information about a long-dead girl who had been found three years ago in an abandoned mine, then the most obvious conclusion was that the correspondent was hiding his actions from someone who had some reason for the information not to come out.

  But why me? he wondered. Why not just the FBI in general? Any of the agents could have decoded the message and gotten onto the case immediately. Why select an agent who is no longer active?

  He knew the answer without thinking about it. Because he was known. The correspondent had either heard about Becker, or, worse, had encountered him. If he was one of the latter, Becker thought, if he was one of the psychopaths whom Becker had stalked and captured…

  He had never caught one easily. They were all too clever to be tracked down by traditional police work, that was why the cases were given to Becker. It was never a case of just finding a fingerprint or a laundry mark or a dropped match book with the name of the bar where the killer worked. Old-fashioned police work was necessary, and it helped, but there was any number of cops and agents who could do it and ultimately it was never enough. Ultimately it was Becker who immersed himself in the case in a way few others could-or would allow themselves to do. He put himself in the killer's skin and sank into the ki
ller's mind, forcing himself to think his thoughts and dream his fevered dreams.

  There was nothing mystical about it as many of his colleagues thought.

  There was no ESP at work. His therapist understood the way it worked-and the price Becker paid. No one understood a thief better than another thief. An arsonist understood an arsonist. And men who killed because of the incomparable thrill it gave them were best comprehended by…

  Becker left the den and walked quietly through the darkened house, pacing and cursing in his mind the intrusion of the correspondent. I was clean, he thought. I was out of it and away. Part of a family. Building a life. Then the tentacle of his own insatiable beast reached out for him, slithering through the cracks of his jerry-built security. He could feel the slimy touch on his leg, tugging him downward even as its coils reached upwards for his throat.

  He eased open the door to Jack's room and saw the in the moonlight, one arm thrown above his head as if he slept hanging from a branch. Becker loved to catch the boy unawares, the look of innocence radiating from him. Becker was in awe of the cleanness of Jack's life, the purity and the simplicity. He was a boy, doing boy things, thinking boy thoughts, and feeling only those emotions that a boy of ten should feel. At his age Becker had already been put through the terrors of abuse that had shaped him and brought him to his present crisis. He regarded it as a small miracle that he was able to share Jack's youth, and almost as much as he feared for himself, Becker feared that his own past might in some way taint Jack's future.

  In the darkness of the living room, Becker forced himself to sit quietly and to contain his anxieties within his own center. If his was an addiction over which he had attained a certain amount of control, he had done it without the twelve-step self-help groups that existed for every other type of addiction. There were no meetings for people with his affliction. Others who shared his problem were shifting silently through the shadows of the outside world, preying on the innocent. They did not come forth for treatment. Unlike drunks and druggees who might seek counseling when they hit bottom, the creatures in whom Becker specialized yearned for the bottom. It was what they had sought all their lives, and it was there and only there that they and the release that they needed, even as they sank ever farther in the booze. For them there was no limit to how far they could sink, because each successful kill only increased their depravity and furthered their heed. There was no bottom. All that limited them was time. How long could they go on before they were caught? Becker had no doubts that there were many who were never caught, who killed and killed until their own hearts gave out with the sheer excess of joy of it all.