Safer

by Sean Doolittle

  “Just slow down and breathe. Count to ten.”

  My heart is pounding against my ribs. My back is to Gardner. All at once, I’m afraid that I might actually pass out on him.

  I take Gardner’s advice.

  One. Two. Three. Four.

  “Okay.” A firm hand grips my shoulder. “Up we go.”

  Five. Six. I find my feet.

  “Good.” The hand goes away. “Keep coming.”

  I stand. Seven.

  “Now let me see your—”

  I turn and swing with all my weight, aiming for the sound of Gardner’s voice. Apparently, I’ve been deemed such a non-threat that he’s not even looking at me while he’s talking. He’s looking at the bodies a few feet away.

  He’s in mid- sentence when the bottom of the shovel blade catches him above the ear. The sound is a hollow, metallic tbonk, like a frying pan striking an unripened melon. The impact rattles up the shovel and into my hands.

  Gardner doesn’t even see it coming. His eyes seem to jitter in place, then glaze.

  Does he fall? I don’t know.

  I’m already running.

  42.

  SARA.

  As I crash blindly through the trees, away from the clearing, into the thick of the refuge, that’s the only thought in my mind. I’m begging God to let her be safe, even though I haven’t said a prayer since I was a boy. I don’t know if I remember how to do it properly. I don’t even know which direction I’m running.

  All I know is that I need to get to Sara before “Tommy” does. Detective Harmon. He’s already paid a visit to Darius Calvin, that much I know. Harmon told me himself. Good news. We found the guy who broke into your house. And Harmon’s still out there.

  A branch whips me in the face, cutting through the panic, bringing the dark woods into focus all around me. Snow falls through the bare trees. I try to listen. All I can hear is the sound of my own wheezing.

  I crash on. When branches rake my flesh, I keep going. When I stumble, I keep going. When I fall down, I get up and move.

  When fatigue overtakes me, I pause against the base of a tree and try to listen again. Blood roars in my ears. My breath fogs around my head.

  Behind me, all is quiet.

  Panting, rough bark at my back, I think of the day I called on Detective Harmon in his office. John Gardner was there. I remember the way they’d looked at each other when I came in; I remember wondering what they’d been talking about.

  I think I know now.

  None of us wanted to see it.

  John Gardner, Detective Tom Harmon, Van Stockman and his father. Roger Mallory. Five men bound by the same grim secret. Only two of them left standing now.

  At what point had Gardner and Harmon reached the conclusion their founding member had become their greatest liability? Was it Timothy Brand? Darius Calvin? Was it Brit Seward? Was it me?

  The exertion of running has caused my nose to start bleeding again; I can taste the coppery slickness on my lips. I’m getting cold. I need to keep moving. But I’ve caught my breath, and my head feels clear.

  I realize that I don’t need to get to Sara. I only need to get myself out of these woods. Back out into the world, where people can see me. If I can do that—

  I freeze at the sound of a snapping twig. My heart leaps, and my throat tightens. A few feet away, branches clatter in the darkness. I lunge from my spot.

  I make it about five steps before Gardner drags me down.

  • • •

  “Gotta hand it to you,” he says, hauling me to my feet. “That was a good shot.”

  Droplets of blood fall from my nose, spattering the snow. I look down and see my own footprints. I understand, all hope draining away, that he’s tracked me from the clearing like a wounded animal. I couldn’t even hear him coming.

  Gardner is bleeding himself, from the gash in his scalp I managed to produce, but it looks as though he’ll make it. His ear and neck are streaked and glistening, the collar of his camouflage hunting coat darkened and wet. Holding my spare cuff in one hand, he scoops up a handful of snow and presses it against the cut I gave him with the shovel. He smiles. “Almost didn’t know my own name for a second there.”

  “Your name is John Gardner,” I tell him. “You murdered Roger Mallory. And Van Stockman. James Webster.”

  He looks at me. His mouth turns up.

  “I guess that’s one theory.” Gardner tosses what remains of his bloody snowball to the ground, lifts his coat, and locks my free cuff to his belt. “Brace yourself, Professor.”

  Before I can brace myself, Gardner uses both of his hands to crimp the cuff on my arm as tight as it will go, just above the knobs of my wrist. There’s a bolt of pain. A hatchet blade biting into the bone. I almost can’t think of my own name for a second.

  “Cooperate,” Gardner says, “and I’ll loosen that a little. When we’re finished.”

  Even if I had the will to resist, I now have little choice but to cooperate. The pain of the overtightened handcuff is incredible; every movement makes the hatchet in my arm wiggle and twist. My revolution is over. My compliance is full.

  Back in the clearing, Gardner works with surprising efficiency for a guy with an English professor attached to his hip. He kneels us down beside Roger’s corpse, strips the latex gloves from Roger’s hands, and puts them on his own. Hands covered, he goes to work on his gun. He releases the magazine. Replaces the two rounds he’s fired with gleaming new bullets. He slides the magazine back into the grip and chucks it into place.

  He lifts Roger’s limp left hand and presses the gun into it. Holding the gun and Roger’s hand together, he fires two shots into the woods, aiming at nothing in particular. I can smell the gunpowder.

  We stand up. Gardner reviews the situation. He looks at the corpses on the ground. He makes an imaginary gun out of his left hand, points it at Van Stockman. Then he points his finger to his own head.

  Apparently satisfied, he produces a small flashlight, searches the ground, finds a glint of brass in the snow. He pockets the empty casing from the bullet he spent on Stockman earlier, just before I bolted.

  I’m with him every step of the way.

  “You can go ahead and believe what you want,” John Gardner tells me as we trudge through the timber. He now wears thermal gloves on his hands, a wool cap on his head. He’s traded his small flashlight for a high- powered spotlight, which he retrieved from the base of a tree along the way. “But those are friends of mine back there.”

  I’m only half- listening. Although he’s addressing me, Gardner doesn’t seem to be talking to anyone in particular. I feel like I’m dreaming, but I’m not.

  “Rodge and me, we came up through the academy together.” Gardner moves a bare limb aside with his arm, lets it snap back behind us. “And Vanny, hell—his old man was my training officer. I know that kid since he was yankin’ off to the swimsuit issue.”

  My teeth are chattering. I can’t stop shivering. My wrist is bleeding again.

  “You think I feel good? Leaving them back there that way?” Gardner might as well be talking to the trees. “Let me tell you something. If that’s what you think, you’re wrong as hell.”

  We keep moving. For a few minutes, Gardner seems to have said all he wanted to say. Then he shakes his head. “I didn’t create the situation.”

  He shines the powerful spotlight beam along the ground in front of us, making sure I watch my step. It’s almost as if he’s trying to make my walk comfortable. Though I can’t help noticing that he hasn’t offered me a turn with his gloves.

  “I mean, goddammit, all these years,” he says. “And now all of a sudden you just couldn’t know what the hell Rodge was apt to do next. Unless maybe you wanted him to listen to a little goddamn reason. You could just about bet he wasn’t apt to do that.”

  New- fallen snow crunches underfoot. I can hear it, but I can’t feel my feet anymore.

  “And Vanny, Christ. You’d think Rodge had him on a leash.”
<
br />   The timber seems to be thinning in front of us. The snow -flakes seem to be getting bigger again.

  “Meanwhile, here’s me and Tommy Harmon. Hell, I was his TO. Now he’s got a nice wife. A little girl who needs her daddy. I just got my first grandson.” Gardner sighs heavily. “You tell me what we’re supposed to do.”

  I can see an opening in the tree line ahead.

  “You want to talk about James Webster, I’ll tell you one goddamn thing,” Gardner says. “Almost ten years we planted that short- eye son of a bitch out here. And nobody’s come near finding him before now.”

  We finally come out of the woods, a mile beyond the clearing. The moon is long gone. The ground is white.

  As we enter open ground, Gardner finally stops and looks at me. “Listen, Professor. I know this probably won’t mean much. But the truth is, if I thought we could let you go, I’d—”

  Something warm spatters my face. Dimly, I recognize that I’ve heard a bang.

  Without a word, John Gardner is suddenly on the move, pulling me back. He drops the spotlight; the beam swings up and stabs the sky. For a moment, I think that we’re retreating back into the woods. Then Gardner pulls me straight to the ground on top of him.

  The impact jars my broken nose, filling my eyes with water. I can’t see for a minute. I feel Gardner’s stubble on my neck.

  I blink. Little by little, my vision clears. Gardner and I are still on the ground together, still face- to- face. His eyes are open.

  There’s a hole in his cheek.

  Hands pat me down. I feel a throb in my arm, followed by a flood of pain. Then a trickle of relief. My cuffs are gone.

  I push myself up, off Gardner’s body, and scramble to my feet. In the cast of the spotlight beam, through the falling snow, I see Detective Harmon pointing a gun at my face.

  “Quiet,” he says.

  I say nothing. I think nothing. Snow falls. I stand.

  Still holding the gun on me, Harmon keys a mobile radio and says, “David 42, Central, immediate backup on Branch Road, two miles north of the twelve- mile marker on old Route 20. Armed suspect on foot inside LH State Wilderness. All available units, K-9, over.”

  For the first time, I’m able to make out dark shapes in the distance behind Harmon: two vehicles parked along the side of the snow- covered road. Only the lead vehicle has snow on the windshield. I look down at what I presume must be its owner.

  John Gardner’s eyes are still open. His wool cap is missing. He looks like a camouflaged snow angel with a red halo.

  Beep. Crackle. “Central, David 42. Repeat your position, Tom.”

  I look at Detective Harmon. His hair has gone white with snow. His gun hand hasn’t wavered.

  He keys the radio and pumps urgency into his voice, keeping his eyes on me. “Shots fired, shots fired! Ten seventy- eight on Branch Road, two miles north of the twelve- mile marker, old Route 20, suspect down. Repeat, shots fired, suspect down.”

  Beep. Crackle. “Copy, David 42. Units responding. Sit tight.”

  Harmon lowers his weapon.

  For the second time tonight, he tells me, “Here’s what’s going to happen.”

  43.

  HOW DO WE TELL A CONVINCING LIE?

  By sticking as closely as we can to the truth. The facts are these:

  On the night of December 20, retired Clark Falls police lieutenant John G. Gardner murdered CFPD Sgt. Van Stockman, along with retired CFPD Sgt. Roger Mallory, at the site Maya Lamb, in a lustrous career moment, dubbed “Hemlock Hill.”

  From that same site, in the weeks following the slayings, forensics personnel retrieved and identified the remains of James Martin Webster, former resident of 34 Sycamore Court.

  After executing Roger Mallory and Van Stockman, John Gardner manipulated the scene to create the appearance that Mallory had shot Stockman in the back of the head at point-blank range, then turned the gun on himself.

  After manipulating a deathbed confession out of retired Clark Falls police captain Gaylon Stockman, I had become Van Stockman’s prisoner.

  I had then become Gardner’s prisoner.

  Gardner subsequently was shot and killed by Lieutenant Detective Thomas J. Harmon, who took me into protective custody and delivered me to the care of Clark Falls Mercy General Hospital.

  These are the facts, and none of them are in dispute. If you were to print them on index cards and lay them out on a conference room table, they would portray the truth, which is this:

  More than two years after Brandon Mallory’s remains were discovered in a shallow grave in the Loess Hills State Wilderness, four men—Gaylon Stockman, Van Stockman, John Gardner, and Roger Mallory—had taken James Webster to the same spot in the woods and buried him deeper.

  But the facts don’t tell the whole story.

  I tried.

  Maybe I should have started at the beginning. Instead, I started by expressing to Detective William Bell, and a hospital room full of other officials, my belief that Lieutenant Detective Thomas J. Harmon—in addition to being the fifth member of the James Webster posse eight years previously—had personally caused the death of Gaylon Stockman, as well as the death of a man named Darius Calvin, whose details they’d find in the employee records at Missouri Valley Medical Shipping & Warehousing Incorporated.

  For my efforts, I received temporary arm restraints and a long- acting sedative.

  Later, Detective Bell explained that Darius Calvin and Captain Gaylon Stockman were, in fact, both alive. He explained that it was Detective Harmon himself who had taken Darius Calvin into custody, acting on information he’d gathered in his own investigation. Furthermore, Calvin had corroborated my every claim regarding the break- in at 34 Sycamore Court on July 12.

  Gaylon Stockman expired peacefully in his hospital bed two days after the Hemlock Hill killings.

  Class, can you see how these points undermine my reliability as a narrator?

  I’ll concede that we’re considering a convoluted story, one that features a large cast of characters, a time span of nearly ten years. And yet, in all of that, there exists only one fact which differs from the reported truth:

  Detective Thomas J. Harmon shot first. And then he used his radio. That’s the way it really happened, not the other way around.

  It’s a three- minute plot hole in a ten- year story. Of course, it’s to be expected that a man in my traumatized state may have misperceived the exact sequence of events. As for Detective Harmon’s claims that he pieced the whole thing together by connecting the attempted burglary at our address with a missing-person report he himself had taken eight years previously?

  There’s not a person left alive on Earth who can prove otherwise.

  Such a person asks himself: if the lie is so close to the truth, is there really a meaningful difference?

  In the end, Brit Seward’s death does not go unpunished. A wolf in schoolteacher’s clothing does not go unpunished. James Webster, a probable monster- in- training, doesn’t live to repeat himself, as the experts say such monsters will.

  Harmon gets a commendation.

  My charges are dropped.

  It’s still the raccoons who get into the garbage.

  Isn’t it?

  They buried Brit Seward the morning after Christmas. Sara and I wanted to be there, but we couldn’t bring ourselves to intrude.

  I went to the house and packed up a box of Brit’s favorite books. I put the box on Pete and Melody’s doorstep, along with a letter I’d written to each of them. If I’d been Pete, I think I would have thrown away my personal letter from Paul Callaway without opening it. But I left it for him anyway.

  Sara and I spent the rest of the day together, some in Douglas Bennett’s office, most in his guesthouse. We talked all morning. About Brit. About Melody. About Darius Calvin.

  It got cold in the afternoon, and we started a fire. Bennett had a subscription to the Sunday New York Times, and he’d left the recent edition on the stoop for us. Sara took the business pages
. I took the Book Review.

  At one point, I dozed off reading and woke to find her watching me from the small couch on the other side of the room. The logs were still crackling in the fireplace. The fire was warm. She looked pretty in the light.

  After a long, quiet minute, she said, “I wonder if I’ll ever be able to trust you again.”

  I didn’t know how to answer.

  “Of course, you appreciate the irony,” Douglas Bennett told me, a month after the national media had left town. They’d all wanted interviews, but I’d kept my word. Maya Lamb had the exclusive. She wasn’t long for Clark Falls.

  “I’m a professor of English literature,” I said. “You’ll need to tell me the specific irony we’re speaking about.”

  “All these cameras of Mallory’s actually helped save your bacon,” Bennett said. “Legally speaking.”

  It was true. The possession of Timothy Brand’s pornography had been a sticking point in my case—at least until Roger’s surveillance footage showed Roger himself entering our empty home on half a dozen occasions. Not only our home but, at one time or another, the homes of everyone else in the circle.

  Back when the tech guy from the university first set me up to log on to the campus network from home—a lifetime ago, it seemed—the same tech guy had installed, as a standard policy, some kind of security software that kept a log of all activity on my computer. Because he’d also given me a password, all activity theoretically came from me alone. But Douglas Bennett’s experts, using date- and time- stamp information from Roger’s video archives, had been able to place Roger in our house on the day and time certain digital photos first appeared on my hard drive.

  Bennett had made plenty of hay with these findings, particularly in combination with my own sloppy habit of recording online passwords on sticky notes, which could be found in the materials the police had confiscated as evidence when they’d searched my office. When it came to building a trial- worthy criminal case against me, the county prosecutor’s office, finally, had found cause enough to reconsider its charges.