Darker Than Night fq-1

by John Lutz

  Wilde sensed someone was there and turned, startled.

  “Luther! God, boy, you scared the crap outta me.” Wild looked more closely at him. “What are you doing here at this hour? Something wrong?”

  “Something’s plenty wrong, Tom!”

  Luther tried to explain everything to Wilde, but he soon began to cry. Ashamed, embarrassed, afraid, he sat down on a five-gallon paint pail and sobbed.

  Wilde let him cry. He placed a hand gently on Luther’s shoulder, a reminder that he was there, that he cared, and waited patiently, giving Luther all the time and tears in the world.

  When Luther’s raking sobs became less violent and frequent, Wilde walked over to a cabinet above the workbench and got down a bottle of Four Roses bourbon and an eight-ounce water glass. He poured about two fingers into the glass, then brought it to Luther. “Drink this. Gulp it down without breathing in.”

  Luther did as he was told, and the liquor hit him with a warm force that jolted his thoughts. He did breathe in now and immediately regretted it, inhaling the alcohol fumes and almost choking.

  “Keep breathing deep, Luther.” Wilde’s hand was back on his shoulder. “You gotta show ‘old man booze’ who’s in charge.”

  Luther sat with his elbows on his knees, his head bowed, breathing as Wilde had instructed. Gradually the choking sensation went away as he sucked in the cooling scent of the bourbon. It was clearing his head like a breeze on a warm night.

  He was better now, had his self-control back. Control. Control was so important. “I’m okay now, Tom.”

  “Good. Let’s talk. Things usually aren’t as bad as they first appear. And whatever’s wrong, maybe I can help.”

  “Nobody can help me now,” Luther said in a flat voice.

  “Lots of times people think that and they’re wrong. I’m your friend. Try me. See if I can help. You’ve got nothing to lose. Where’ve you been staying since you had your falling-out with Milford?”

  “I been with Cara.”

  “Cara? You mean Cara Sand?”

  Luther nodded.

  “I don’t quite understand,” Wilde said.

  Luther watched him walk over to the workbench, pour some bourbon into a glass for himself, and down it in one gulp. It didn’t seem to affect his breathing. He gave Luther his worn, wise smile.

  “Cara Sand, huh? Okay, I’m ready. You can tell me, Luther.”

  And Luther did, in his new, flat, so very calm voice.

  When Luther was finished talking, Wilde went over to the workbench and had a second drink.

  “I don’t wanna doubt you, Luther, but you sure you didn’t dream all this?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “How about we drive back to the Sand place and you can show me?”

  Luther stood up. “I don’t wanna go back there! I can’t!”

  Wilde looked at him and nodded. “Okay. Mind if I give them a call?”

  “Go ahead. They won’t answer.”

  Wilde used the phone on his cluttered desk and stood listening to the ringing on the other end of the connection, looking at Luther.

  “They oughta be home, this time of morning when it’s not even light out.”

  “They’re home,” Luther said.

  After a good three or four minutes, Wilde hung up the phone.

  He stood chewing on the inside of his cheek for a while, the way he did when he was thinking hard. Then he rolled the desk chair over near Luther and sat down in it so they were close and facing each other.

  “You need to go to the police and turn yourself in,” Wilde said. “I’ll go with you, and I’ll see you get a good lawyer.”

  “I can’t. I told you what I did. They’ll execute me or I’ll spend the rest of my life in prison. You know that’s true, Tom. You promised you’d be honest with me.”

  “Yeah, you’re right, that’s what’d happen if all you told me’s true.”

  “It’s all true. I’m not giving myself up!”

  “Then what you’ve gotta do,” Wilde said, “is get outta Hiram, go far away. You won’t do that in Milford’s car. The highway patrol’ll be looking for it and nail you within hours of the bodies being found.” He shook his head as if trying to clear it of unwelcome thoughts. “You need to go to a big city in another state, where you can change your name and make a new life. I know that won’t be easy, but unless you want to turn yourself in to the law, that’s your one and only chance. You’ve gotta become somebody else. A different you. It might not be much of a life, after what’s happened, but at least it’s something.”

  “That’s all I’m looking for, a chance. Something. Because right now I’ve got nothing. I don’t care what the odds are, Tom. Worse comes to worse, they’ll catch me and I’ll be right where I’d be if I gave up now.”

  Wilde smiled sadly. “Very logical, Luther.”

  “Ain’t it?”

  “It’ll be dark for a while yet. You drive Milford’s car a few miles outside of town and park it well off the road. I’ll follow in the pickup and drive us both the rest of the way.”

  “Rest of the way where?”

  “To where my fishing boat’s tied up. They’ll be looking for Milford’s car, but not a boat.”

  Luther didn’t like the idea of being all alone in a small boat out on the wide, dark river. Still, he’d be safe there from everything but the river.

  “You take the boat downstream. I’ll give you some tackle and a casting rod so it’ll look like you’re fishing, if anybody takes note of you.”

  A boat… The idea was growing on Luther. For the first time he felt a twinge of hope. Maybe he could escape this, after all, get away clean from what he’d done, somehow start over, make it right. Make his whole life right.

  “You’ll be with the current, so you can get pretty far downriver before daylight. Then, when it’s light, when you see a likely spot, you dock the boat and…”

  “What?”

  “Then you’re on your own, Luther. I’ll have helped you all I can.”

  “What about you, Tom? I don’t wanna get you in any trouble. Won’t you be suspected as an accomplice?”

  “I don’t think so. Nobody’ll notice my old boat’s missing. And I sure won’t bring it to their attention. If it is found downstream, it’ll look like it came untied and drifted away. Wouldn’t be the first time.”

  Luther swallowed. He looked ready to begin sobbing again. “Tom-”

  “Don’t thank me, Luther. Do it by going somewhere and creating a good life for yourself. That’ll be my thanks.”

  Wilde stood up from the desk chair.

  “It’s not the end of the world, if we won’t let it be, Luther. Let’s get moving while it’s still dark out.”

  Wilde kept his small wooden rowboat pulled up on the bank, near a deserted A-frame cabin built by a weekend fisherman years ago. The cabin had been abandoned after flood damage. The receding water left what remained of a small wooden dock, and a narrow, rutted dirt road that ran from the county highway almost to river’s edge. The road was overgrown and disappeared in spots, and even after a light rain, it was muddy and almost impassable.

  As Wilde parked the pickup near the A-frame, Luther could see why nobody would notice the boat was missing. Hardly anyone other than Tom must come back here. The only place that there was a break in the trees was a low, marshy stretch of ground that was a breeding pool for the mosquitoes that closed in on the two men as soon as they got down out of the truck.

  Wilde slapped at one of the voracious insects on his arm and reached into the pickup’s rusty bed for his heavy metal tackle box.

  Luther went to the back of the truck and got the casting rod, another tackle box, and a net. With both hands full, he felt a mosquito sting the back of his neck but couldn’t slap at it. “Damned bloodsuckers!”

  “Aren’t they, though?” Wilde said, and led the way down the steep mud path toward the boat and the sloping riverbank.

  The boat was pulled up about twenty feet from the
water. It was a wooden fourteen-footer with a couple of oars lying in the bottom beneath three plank seats. Its hull was mud-streaked and rotted in places and had once been a light green with a red stripe around the waterline. Now it was mostly a weathered gray color, and the waterline stripe was hard to make out except near the bow. Though it was far from the water, this was flood country and sometimes inaccessible, so a thick, slack rope ran from a cleat on the bow and was knotted around what looked like an old automobile axle driven into the bank.

  “You sure this thing floats?” Luther asked seriously.

  Wilde laughed softly. “It’s like you, Luther, more seaworthy than it looks.”

  “I don’t plan on going all the way downriver to the sea,” Luther said.

  Wilde untied the boat and tossed the rope into the bow. Luther pushed while Tom Wilde pulled, and together they slid the boat along grass and mud and into the water. Standing knee deep, Wilde wrapped the bowline around a slimy branch that extended out low from the bank.

  Luther and Wilde went back to where they’d left the fishing tackle and carried everything down and loaded it into the boat. Moonlight glanced dully off the water. They were in a small cove, and though a stretch of the black, tree-lined opposite bank was visible, Luther was sure no one was observing them. He slapped at a mosquito, this one trying to lance blood from the back of his wrist, and felt the insect mash beneath his hand.

  “Once you get out on the river,” Wilde said, “they won’t be bothering you. They can’t abide the current.”

  Both men were breathing hard from their efforts with the boat and heavy fishing tackle. They stood silently for a while, catching their breaths, trying to figure out how to say good-bye.

  For the first time escape seemed not only possible to Luther, it seemed likely. He might actually take the boat downriver, sink it or dock it in some secluded spot, then make his way to safety and another chance, another life. He could be someone else entirely, the person I want to be, as Tom Wilde suggested.

  Tom Wilde, who’d been like a father to him, but who was also the only one who could implicate him in the murder of Milford and Cara.

  Luther, his head cleared by passing time, had been thinking about that. There was plenty to indicate he’d been in the house at the time of the killings, but if caught, he could always say he was also an intended victim of an intruder who’d murdered the Sands. He’d claim he defended himself with the kitchen knife, then dashed through the house and outside and escaped. He knew how it would look for him, so, of course, he ran away. In that situation anyone would have run.

  His life on the streets had taught him the value of having a cover story in case he needed one.

  But it was a cover story Tom Wilde could contradict, and would, if he was under oath in a court of law.

  Luther looked at the heavy steel tackle box in the boat, and the thick bowline. He realized he was different now. Someone else. Someone harder. He’d gone through a door and now he was confronted by another. Whether to open it was his choice.

  “I guess this is good-bye, then,” Wilde was saying.

  Tom Wilde, who’d been kind to him and taught him a craft-an art. His mentor and only friend.

  His greatest danger.

  “I guess it has to be,” Luther said.

  Neither Wilde nor Luther ever returned to Hiram. Milford Sand’s Ford Fairlane was found parked among some cottonwood trees off the highway outside of town. It was assumed Luther had murdered the Sands and made his getaway in the car. But without Luther, how the murders occurred was only speculation, and Luther was never seen again.

  Tom Wilde’s old pickup truck was found parked next to the ruined A-frame near the riverbank. A week later his boat was discovered capsized in the weeds five miles downriver.

  It was assumed he’d been fishing and perhaps struck his head while falling from the boat and drowned.

  Every so often, the river claimed a life that way.

  42

  New York, 2004.

  Finding out where he lived had been easy. He was in the phone book.

  It was the first place Anna thought to look, but she’d been surprised to find Quinn’s name, address, and phone number. It was unsettling, how simple it had been. As if he might also be in the Yellow Pages under RAPISTS.

  So here she was this morning, not at Juilliard with her viola, but across the street from Quinn’s apartment with her gun.

  What’s a nice girl like you…?

  She wasn’t sure herself.

  Anna was running on pure emotion now and knew it. This wasn’t smart. In fact, this was totally dumb, what she was doing. But something in her was making her do it; to resist it would have been to escape something that had the most powerful hold on her she could imagine. That, too, was unsettling, that people could be made captive and controlled by something inside themselves. One of the reasons it was disturbing was that it explained in part why Quinn had raped her, almost provided him with an excuse.

  There is no excuse for evil. It has to be-

  There was Quinn, emerging from his apartment building! Quinn in the flesh!

  Anna felt dizzy; for the first time in years, she laid eyes on the monster of her memory. He was big, but not as big as in her fearful thoughts and terrifying dreams. She knew larger, more ominous-looking men. Her friend Agatha’s father, and Professor Fishbien at Juilliard. But Quinn did look like what he was-a thug, a rapist, a liar. Not that he wasn’t dressed respectably enough, in brown slacks and a tan sport coat. He was even wearing a tie.

  Sheep’s clothing…

  As Quinn buttoned his jacket, Anna caught a glimpse of a leather strap and knew it was part of a shoulder holster.

  I have a gun, too! I have a gun, you bastard!

  Quinn glanced up at the sky as if checking for rain, then began walking. He had a lumbering yet athletic gait, relaxed but poised to move fast on short notice. He seemed amiable but at the same time dangerous, a man who would enjoy a cruel joke. Staying on the opposite side of the street and well back from him, Anna began to follow.

  Quinn walked only a few blocks and entered a diner, where he no doubt would have breakfast.

  Anna decided to wait for him.

  She found a spot across the street and moved back into a shadowed stone angle at the base of an office building. Hardly anyone paid attention to her as they hurried past. If they did happen to glance at her, as far as they were concerned, she was just another young woman waiting for a friend or a lover, or she was building up nerve to go for a job interview. She was like thousands of others who were tending to business, professional or personal, in the city.

  Still, Anna felt as if she were being stared at, maybe because of the gun in her purse. She pretended to be bored, and now and then, more for herself than for anyone who might be observing her, she glanced at her watch as if concerned with the time. Waiting for someone…that’s what I’m doing…

  Anna watched people coming and going at the diner for almost an hour. Then Quinn emerged, with two people she’d seen go inside not long after she’d taken up position across the street. One was a balding, middle-aged man in a horribly wrinkled brown suit that emphasized his stomach paunch. The other was a short, dark-haired woman with vivid features, even from this distance, wearing a conservatively tailored gray skirt and dark blazer that didn’t disguise her curves.

  They must be the other detectives Anna had read about in the papers. “Team Quinn.” The rapist’s friends and helpers.

  Anna felt an overwhelming curiosity about Team Quinn. She wanted to know where they went on days off from work, what food they liked, which TV shows, what were their hobbies. How did they spend their free time, the time when she was trying to think about anything other than Quinn and what he had done to her? What did the other two think about Quinn’s second chance? Quinn, who had never seen the inside of a courtroom as a defendant, much less spend a day in confinement. They were supposed to be hunting a killer, and catching him would somehow-at least in the
minds of some-rehabilitate Quinn.

  A real rapist. Real detectives. How will they spend their workday?

  The three detectives walked slowly and casually along the sidewalk, talking and gesticulating to each other. Then they stopped near a plain white car and chatted a few minutes more. Quinn stood with both hands in his pockets and seemed to be doing most of the talking now.

  The baggy-suited man got into the car, and the dark-haired woman walked around to the driver’s side. But before she did, in the brief time the other man was in the car and she and Quinn were alone on the sidewalk, she dragged her fingertips lightly along Quinn’s arm and smiled at him.

  Interesting…

  Still smiling slightly at Quinn, who stood motionless watching her, the woman slid into the car behind the steering wheel.

  Quinn still didn’t move as the car waited for a break in traffic, then pulled away from the curb. Several pigeons, which had been pecking away in the gutter, flapped into the air to get out of the way, then circled and settled back down exactly where they’d been.

  When the vehicle-probably an unmarked police car-had rounded the corner, Quinn began walking. He moved easily, with one hand still in a pants pocket, not in any rush. At a magazine kiosk near the corner, he stopped. The hand came out of the pocket and deposited some change on a stack of magazines, and he picked up a newspaper. After a glance at the paper, he tucked it under his arm and continued on his way.

  There was no doubt in Anna’s mind what she should do. She had no car, so obviously she couldn’t have followed the other two detectives.

  That left Quinn.

  Don’t do it. Turn around and go home. Dumb, dumb…

  But here she was and she had nothing to do but follow him.

  Anna gave up trying to talk herself out of it. She was already walking behind Quinn, anyway, though she hadn’t made the conscious decision to do so. It was as if choices were being made for her by some higher power.