Mortal Fear m-1

by Greg Iles

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “But you will do WHAT I SAY!” she proclaims in a voice so alien it sends a shiver through me. “BECAUSE I SAY SO. DO YOU HEAR ME, EDWARD?”

  A stunned silence. Then:“If you want to come out, why do you care about… him?”

  “I’m trying to resolve this, Edward. Don’t make it harder than it has to be.”

  “Prove you don’t care about him.”

  “I will.”

  Drewe pulls away from the window, her chest coming up with a sticky sound, her nipples hard from the coolness of the glass. “Do you see me, Edward? I’m not pretending, like that brown-skinned Indian girl. I AM THE ONE.”

  The shock of Drewe’s nudity combined with her brazen voice trips something in my brain. This is it. If she’s ever going to bring Berkmann out, it’s now. I only hope she remembers to slap the glass.

  “Are you big now, Edward?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very big?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s only natural. You want to touch me, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You need to.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you see where?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know what it’s like there?”

  A hiccup of silence.“I-”

  “It’s wet there, Edward. Burning.”

  “Please come out…”

  “Look, Edward. LOOK!”

  Shifting the phone from one hand to the other, Drewe lets the robe slip off her shoulders as casually as if she were stepping into the shower. A gasp of disbelief bursts from my lungs. I back far away from the wall, aiming the pistol at the crack of glass between the window frame and Drewe’s side, waiting for her signal.

  She shakes her hair into a fiery riot of copper and gold, then stands straight with her arms at her sides, as if to display every atom of her being in shameless pride. Her skin glows like veined marble. As when I saw Erin so many years ago, I cannot process the entirety of her nude image. I see her calves, the backs of her thighs, the small dimples above her rump, her shoulder blades-these are enough to hold my eye from its assigned task. Berkmann must be rooted to the ground.

  “Jesus Christ!” I hiss. “What are you doing?”

  “Edward?”

  “Yes….”A ragged whisper.

  Drewe moves her free hand around her hip, out of my sight. All I see is the muscle moving in her upper arm.

  “Help me, Edward. Show me your power.”

  With my gun arm quivering, I edge forward toward Drewe. I keep the.38 aimed just to the left of her hip, through the window, into the waiting dusk. As my pupils dilate I discern the silhouette of the Acura. It’s closer to the house than I remembered. Maybe thirty-five feet. My Explorer sits ten yards to the left of it, parked nose-in. The Acura is the natural vantage point for someone watching the window.

  But I see no one.

  In the near field of my vision, Drewe suddenly spreads her arms like wings and plants her bare feet apart. Her hands close into fists and her muscles go rigid, her body a hard quivering X in the lighted window. My heart thunders with fear and awe at the specter she has not created butis — woman revealed, the hidden unveiled, purity and carnality fused with power enough to stop the male heart.

  As I stare openmouthed, her right hand flattens against the window and begins rattling like a superheated kettle on a stove. I focus on the hand, then realize she’s trying to signal me with an arm incapacitated by terror. In the instant I look back through the window, Edward Berkmann rises above the roof line of the Acura, his enraptured face shining like an earthbound moon in the darkness.

  Time blurs, stops. We both stand transfixed, paralyzed by the realization that Drewe is everything he imagined in his messianic fantasies, and more.

  “Edwaarrrd!”

  Drewe’s scream jolts me back to myself. As I aim for Berkmann’s face, she hurls the cordless phone through the windowpane in an explosion of glittering glass. I shoulder her out of the way and open fire.

  My first shot is high and wild.

  The second punches a hole in the Acura’s door.

  Berkmann drops.

  Screaming like a lunatic, I fire two more rounds, then scoop up Drewe’s robe and throw my arm around her waist as she comes up off the floor. I try to pull her toward the door, but she won’t budge.

  “Did you hit him?” she asks, her eyes white and round.

  “I don’t think so!”

  “Get the light! Then shoot me!”

  After a stunned instant, I turn, steady the pistol, and blow the halogen lamp off my desk, throwing us into darkness.

  “Edwaarrrd!” she yells, her voice ringing across the yard.

  I fire my last bullet in her direction, and watch in horror as she flies backward like a GI taking a round in house-to-house fighting.

  The silence is absolute. Not even crickets cheep in this strange lacuna of time.

  Then Drewe is beside me again, naked in the dark. Lifting her robe toward her, I sense something like a horsefly beside my left ear and swat at it even as the tranquilizer dartthwack s into one of my guitars, filling the room with jangling noise.

  We hit the floor and crawl like alligators toward the office door. I feel a strange weight in the robe. It’s Drewe’s.25. I pause, raise the gun, fire two quick rounds through the intact front window, then feel my way to the door. When I look back, the bright amber message on the screen of the Gateway 2000 floats in the darkness like a tablet of fire brought from a mountaintop. Just as it should.

  “What did you do?” Berkmann asks, his voice a fusion of fear and fury.

  Drewe’s hand grips my shoulder like a claw.

  “It’s the answering machine!” I whisper, at the same time noticing the faint glow of the EROS screen to my right. While Drewe ties on her robe, I raise the.25 and fire through the EROS monitor, shorting it out with a shower of sparks. Now the Gateway screen is the only light.

  Holding the hot pistol to my chest, I switch off the hall light, then slide Drewe around in front of me. “Ready?”

  She nods.

  The second I jerk open the door she scrambles up the hallway toward the kitchen, but I force myself to walk, backward, keeping the.25 pointed at the front door in case Berkmann comes through it. When I reach the kitchen, I turn and run to the washroom where Drewe waits. The smell of gasoline is strong here too. Drewe leans into me, clutching my shirt like a child.

  “Maybe we should stay here,” she says in a meek voice.

  “We can’t.” I hug her tightly. Her whole body is shaking, as though the bravura performance at the window drained every bit of courage out of her.

  With the.25 I part the curtains that cover the small window in the back door. The yard looks blue-black in the moonlight. The long tin roof of the toolshed gleams, beckoning. My eyes move lower. There is a man lying flat on his back just outside the door. His eyes are closed, and there is a screwdriver handle sticking out of his right upper chest. I let the curtain fall closed.

  “Drewe, there’s a man on the ground outside. It’s Detective Mayeux from New Orleans. He’s probably dead, but we only heard one shot. He could be alive.”

  “I’ll get my bag,” she says automatically, as though someone had just passed out in church.

  I squeeze her arm. “We can’t help him. I’m telling you so you’ll step over him.”

  She blinks rapidly.

  “When I open this door, we’re going to run straight back to the cotton field and keep going. Okay?”

  She nods once.

  Gripping the.25, I unbolt the door, then freeze as a high brittle plea crosses the space between us. “Don’t let him get close to me, Harper.”

  “I won’t.”

  Her fingernails dig into my arm, causing me to twist sideways. “If he hits you with a dart, and you can’t see him anywhere… shoot me.”

  “What?”

  “You do it.”

  With that appa
lling request ringing in my ears, I turn the knob and launch myself into the sweltering night.

  CHAPTER 50

  I am leaping over Mayeux’s body when two gunshots boom through the night. I whirl and take Drewe’s weight full in the face, and we crash to the ground beside Mayeux.

  “Where is he?” she hisses in my ear.

  “Front,” I groan, rolling her off me. “Run!”

  “What’s he shooting at?”

  “I don’t know! Go!”

  I know I should run, but Mayeux is half covered with gasoline. I find his carotid artery with my left hand. There’s a pulse. Drewe is still beside me.

  “Go, damn it!” I hand her the.25. “Behind the toolshed!”

  She takes the gun but doesn’t run. Suffused by a wild anger, I lean over and put my right shoulder into Mayeux’s belly, then heave myself over so that he is lying across me. From there it’s a matter of brute strength, working the leverage until I get my legs under me and he’s lying sacklike over my shoulder in a fireman’s carry.

  With Drewe covering the corners of the house, I half stagger, half run across the grass to the toolshed and collapse under the fig trees behind it, depositing Mayeux on his back. Drewe hands me the.25, then begins testing the screwdriver handle sticking out of Mayeux’s chest. Having an immediate emergency to deal with seems to have restored her composure.

  “You’re going to leave that in him?” I ask, as she checks Mayeux for other wounds.

  “Better for him,” she says, probing gently under his head. “What makes the printer explode?”

  Before I can answer she says, “Look,” and pulls a short, feathered barb from Mayeux’s neck.

  “It’ll go off when Berkmann prints your message,” I tell her, peering around the corner of the shed. The yard is empty, the house silent. When I look back, Drewe is staring at me as if I’m an idiot.

  “Why should he print the message? He can justread it.”

  “Not without scrolling to the next screen.”

  “So?”

  “That keyboard is programmable. If you want your comma key where the semicolon key is, you can have it that way. All it takes is a few keystrokes.”

  “I still don’t get it.”

  “I reprogrammed every key that can take him to the next screen to issue the same command: Print Screen.”

  “The down cursor?”

  “Every cursor. And PAGE DOWN. Since you snipped off the mouse, he has to use the keyboard. The second he does, six hundred volts will zap through the printer’s corona wire, which is cut and buried in the black powder. A spark will arc between the wires, and good-bye Edward.”

  Drewe stares blankly, as if trying to compute the odds of success. “Won’t he be suspicious? Expect some kind of trap?”

  “Probably. And if your message told him to print it, or tried to trick him into printing it, he’d never do it. But he won’t see this coming. The only question is, will he try to read the whole message?”

  She nods. “He’s addicted to it. The computer is his fetish. He may search the whole house first, but he’ll read that message.”

  “What did you put in it?”

  “Just what you told me to. I-”

  “Shh! Listen!”

  “What?” Her eyes wide with fear, Drewe cocks her head, listening for the wrong things.

  I close my eyes and try to gauge the distance; in the Delta some sounds carry for miles. “Siren,” I tell her, even as the sound fades.

  “It must be pretty far away.”

  “It is. But Berkmann will hear it soon. He’ll run.”

  I get to my feet. I’m not sure why, but doing something always feels better than doing nothing. Even if you’re doing something stupid.

  “What are you doing?” Drewe asks.

  “He could take one of our cars… make it to the plane. I’m not letting him get away now.”

  “You stay here!”

  I can’t leave Drewe without a gun, but I can’t go after Berkmann without one. Mayeux’s shoulder holster is empty. I’m almost resigned to waiting when an idea hits me. Dropping beside the unconscious detective, I pull up one of his trouser legs. Nothing but a hairy ankle. But when I pull up the other, I see the duct-taped grip of a snub-nose.32 revolver tucked snugly in a velcro ankle holster. Mayeux carries a throwdown. After verifying that the cylinder is full, I hand the pistol to Drewe.

  “You’re not leaving me here,” she says.

  I don’t even try to argue. After switching guns, we cross the yard in a quick soundless rush, the grass damping the beat of our feet. At the back corner of the house, we pause in a pungent cloud of gasoline vapor.

  “I still don’t hear the siren,” she whispers.

  “The house is blocking the sound.”

  “Maybewe should light the gasoline.”

  “Are you nuts? It’s our house!”

  With Mayeux’s.32 in my right hand, I sprint along the side of the house, nearly stumbling on a coil of garden hose. When I make the front corner I hear the siren again.

  Drewe collides with me from behind, a soft impact of breasts and hands. The yard is pitch dark, the drive still. Only the sound of crickets breaks the silence. Where our driveway meets the road, the deputy’s car sits motionless. Nearer to us, the Explorer and the Acura offer concealment. But I know Berkmann has left them behind.

  “I think he’s inside,” I whisper. “I’m going to look.”

  “Wait-”

  “Don’t worry, I’m not going in. Listen for doors or windows. He may come tearing outside when he hears the siren. You’d better take off that robe. It’s like a neon target out here.”

  Drewe shakes her head violently.

  “If you hear him, you take it off.”

  My back pressed to the clapboard, I edge along the front of the house holding the.32 against my right thigh like a quarterback running a bootleg. As I near the broken front window, I step into what feels like a draft of sea wind. It’s the conditioned air from the house, draining into the hot night like water from a leaking barrel.

  Berkmann must have heard the siren by now. I try to maneuver beneath the window to look through it, but there’s too much broken glass on the ground. Weaving around the fragments, I cover the ten feet to the second window, rise to the sill, and peek over it.

  Edward Berkmann is sitting at my Gateway 2000, his Byronic profile hauntingly illuminated by the amber glow of the screen. He leans slightly forward, facing right to left across my visual field, peering at Drewe’s message as though it holds the key to some eternal mystery.

  Berkmann hasn’t heard the siren because there are other sounds inside the office. The hum of the computer. The drone of the refrigerator. The hissing of the central air conditioner. He must have read the first screen of the message by now. Yet still he sits, staring. What is he doing?

  He’s thinking. The man who developed a world-renowned computer model of the human brain is exercising his own to solve the oldest problem in the world. Survival.

  Berkmann is less than ten feet from me, the printer less than two feet from him, at the level of his chest. There’s a gun beside the computer’s keyboard. Nickel plated. Just the flashy kind of piece Buckner’s deputies carried. But that gun cannot protect Berkmann from the printer.

  My mind is telling me to raise my gun above the window sill, but instinct stops me. The slightest movement-even lowering my head out of sight-could catapult Berkmann out of that chair with the gun in his hand.

  As if in response to my thought, he lifts his head like a bird-watcher detecting a faint call, and turns slightly to his left. Toward me.

  A bolt of pure terror strikes my heart.

  He hasn’t seen me. He’s heard the siren. But instead of jumping up in panic, he turns back to the screen, settles deeper into my chair, and closes his hands around its arms. Is he actually waiting for me to come back and try to kill him, as the message promises I will?

  There’s more than one siren now. Several dissonant note
s have separated themselves from the general whine, made Doppler-distinct by changing distances. Berkmann swivels my chair to the right, toward the wall that holds my guitars. What rogue impulses are firing through the synapses in that head? He could be guessing my next move or wondering what happened to his favorite eighteen-thousand-dollar urinal. Every fiber of my brain tells me to run, but instead I bring up the.32 with shaking hands and wait for him to swivel back to the left.

  He does, but the rotation stops with him facing the computer screen. With a deliberation that sets my trigger finger quivering, Berkmann reaches out and touches a key on the right side of the keyboard.

  I’m wondering which key it was when he turns in my direction. For an instant his gaze floats just above mine. Then it locks onto me like a laser, and I feel the nightmarish horror of trying to back away from some unspeakably sentient being as he rises from the chair and rushes toward me with the silver gun coming up and then disappearing in a white flash that seems to explode in silence.

  I am sitting on the ground blinking my eyelids, which feel like they are on fire. There’s a piece of bloody glass sticking out of my left arm and more blood pouring from my right shoulder. I start to pull out the glass, then remember Drewe leaving the screwdriver in Mayeux’s chest.

  Suddenly she is beside me. She seems to be yelling but I can’t hear her. When I try to speak, I feel a dull vibration in my throat but hear nothing. A white cloud is billowing out of the window above me. This tells me the flash was what I hoped it was. Nothing smokes like old-style black powder.

  Drewe takes hold of my left arm and tries to lift me. When I protest, she shouts words I can’t hear and pulls harder. Then her head whips up and to the side, toward the window. Following her line of sight, I see a black shadow arc through the smoke over my head and crash beside me in a rain of glass.

  I reach instinctively for Drewe, but she’s gone. I try to stand, wobbling on my knees, waiting for the black hump that must be Edward Berkmann to jump up and put a bullet through my head.

  He does neither. He doubles up on the gasoline-soaked ground and, with what appears to be colossal effort, rolls over onto his back. His face is scorched black and riddled with white plastic shrapnel. His shoulder-length hair has been burned off, and blood runs from his nose and ears. His mouth opens in a wide O defined by white teeth, and the first sign that I’m getting my hearing back is a high keening wail that I realize is no distant siren but a human scream.