Kiss Them Goodbye
Page 32
She sprang helplessly forward. The blade fell back out of sight. Just the breaths again.
“Are you going to kill me?”
No answer.
She had to reach him. There was a human in there somewhere. “You don’t have to hurt me. I could help you.”
No answer.
“I’m very interested in why you do this.”
Nothing.
“I could interview you. Would you like that?”
No answer.
She began to feel faint again. She stopped to shake her head clear. The piece of steel pressed against her buttocks. She shivered, started crawling in a panic. She heard the voice.
“Don’t pretend you like me. I know who you like.” The voice was angry. Breaths.
“How do you know that?”
“Because he and I had a vibration.”
“Don’t you still?”
“No. He went too far. He violated me, desecrated my home.”
She had an uneasy feeling now. “How did he do that?” Sounded patronizing. Think!
“He’s a rapist!”
Maureen was feeling hot beads of sweat breaking through the back of her dress now. It was stifling down here. No air. Her knees were bruised. She had to say something.
“You still have a connection with him though.”
An eerie pause. “No.”
“He wants to be close to you.”
“Too late.”
“Why is it too late?”
“You came into the picture.”
It all hit her suddenly. He was going to kill her out of jealousy, out of some primal force she couldn’t control. Her imagination began to run. There were her own breaths, the breaths behind her, the hands and knees trudging through the dark loam. She started to cry.
“Don’t hurt me, please.”
Maureen heard squeaks, wails, little cries in the distance. Her voice was hoarse. “What’s that?”
“Be sure they don’t run up your dress.”
Little scramblings in the dirt.
“What is it?”
“Rats.”
As the screeching increased, the light behind her shone down the tunnel. She heard him begin to laugh. She saw red eyes, a sea of them moving toward her.
She screamed.
61
MAUREEN OPENED HER eyes. It took her a moment, then she realized: She had been chloroformed again. A rope was tied under her chin, forcing her head up, another was around her chest, and her arms were strung up above her head, ropes taut across her breasts. The rope holding her weight was strung to heavy wire cables above her. She was bound to the top of the water tower. She was gagged.
The figure appeared in front of her standing on the slant of the roof. He leaned in so the black scarf almost blotted out the sky.
“He should be here shortly.”
Maureen couldn’t scream. She was too busy thinking. The figure took a stiletto out of his cloak. He flicked the razor-sharp tip just below Maureen’s Adam’s apple. A sprinkle of blood emerged.
He ratcheted the blade this time just over the Adam’s apple. Another trickle of blood sprang to the surface. He pressed the knife under her neck and let the cuts ooze droplets of blood along the blade.
Maureen wanted to wrench her body from side to side, but she reasoned that if she stood her ground, she might live longer. She held perfectly still.
The knife’s point again grazed the flesh of her neck. The line of blood was so thin, it was almost invisible for a moment, then it began to seep down along her skin. Maureen was beginning to tremble.
Drops of blood began to hit the tar shingles.
He again held the stiletto under the fresh wounds; red dripped on the blade. Then, as if a primeval bird had flapped its wings, the cloak was off, the scarf down, a strange distorted clown face moving toward her, the eyes iridescent, the lips frozen in a smile.
A rasp of the roof door stopped him cold. He turned.
NICK HEARD THE grating sound echo over the tar. He and Cary stood staring across at the chimneys, the skylights, the immense cornices that dominated the corners of the building, and the sky beyond. The water tower was dark against the sky. A single star was hanging in the heavens.
Fowler stopped to catch his breath, moved the bundle to his other arm. He pulled his gun out, reloaded it, and closed the chamber. He whispered in Ballard’s ear.
“Stay behind me.”
They crept along the west wall, occasionally bringing their heads over the top of the wall to stare into the gloom. They saw nothing. Suddenly Fowler heard a moaning sound, a woman’s voice. He crawled faster. He paused at a corner, staring at a section of the roof where hundreds of chasms were hidden in the brick facing. Fowler pointed silently in that direction and crawled around the corner.
The boy had fallen behind. He was tired, scared, physically dragging as he strove to catch up with Fowler. He heard a sound above his head. He wheeled, raising his hands. A black winged figure descended upon him and, like a vulture, grasped him around the neck. The figure took his fist and punched the boy viciously across the face. Cary fell down, appearing to be unconscious. The hands readied a syringe, lifted up the boy’s sleeve.
Cary abruptly reached up and pulled down the scarf.
He was staring into the stunned white face of Mr. Elliot Allington, the new headmaster.
They looked at each other.
Ballard felt a flood of memories pouring into his mind as he looked quietly up into the man’s eyes, now watery and ashamed.
“I saw you when I was a child. You killed my father. Didn’t you?”
The eyes seemed to reignite. A quiet sneer spread across the thin lips. “And what if I did?”
Cary stared into the man’s eyes. “Why?”
“Your mother deserved to know what it was like to lose someone . . .” Allington murmured. “She left me to have a child with your father. That child was you.”
“So you’ve tortured me all these years.”
Allington nodded silently. The shock at being discovered had passed quickly out of his dark features. An evil resolve broke across his face.
Cary raised his voice. “I’m not afraid of you anymore.”
“Oh no?” There was threat in his tone.
“You’ll never haunt me again.”
“Because you’re dead inside, little boy.”
“Like you?”
A sadness on the clown face. “Yes.”
“You can’t control me anymore,” Cary said calmly.
The hands were suddenly on the boy’s throat, pushing him down.
“The spell is over!” Cary choked out. “I’ve broken free of you.”
The syringe went into the boy’s arm. Within a few seconds, his eyes had rotated up under his lids. The man placed a bloody stiletto in the boy’s hand and crawled away.
MAUREEN WAS SHIVERING, her neck marked by streaks of red. She heard steps, felt tension on the ropes binding her. The figure stood up behind her. She stiffened, fear twisting through her body. She saw a cloak catch on one of the ropes. A knife appeared in front of her face—but her eyes widened when she saw it was a pocketknife. It sliced the rope around her chest, then the one holding her arms. Behind her the masked figure whispered, “It’s me.”
It was Fowler’s voice.
He ripped the tape away from her face, dabbed her neck with his hand. “I’m going to get you down. Hold on.”
Maureen turned around to smile at him. She saw something loom in the sky. It rose up even higher than the figure standing behind her. It was another figure. She screamed. Suddenly hands were around one figure’s neck. The man behind Maureen was wrenched backward, the other man rooting under his cloak. A gun fell to the tar. The two men began striking each other, a rain of fists against the scarves. They clasped each other’s faces, the masks pulled down, and rolled off the side of the water tower, as one white face kept coming up like a new moon rising. They both plunged ten feet into a crosswork of cables, which bro
ke their falls. More fists, figures scrambling across the shingles. Nick could now see the face he had known belonged to the killer.
Allington kicked the revolver and it slid along the tar into a corner. Fowler sprang forward and threw his weight against the man’s knife arm. They rolled across the shingles, grunting, kicking, clawing at the weapon. He lost his grip on the stiletto arm. The blade plummeted. He rolled away just as it dug into the tar. He pitched himself under the water tower. Above him Maureen was trying to wriggle free.
Nick crawled out from the other side of the tower just as Allington flew at him, his cloak billowing behind his white face. They thrust their knives, parrying around the side of the water tower, lunging at each other along the west wall. A single star plunged down between their straining faces.
Suddenly Allington feinted high, but charged low, piercing Fowler’s leg. Nick grunted, falling on his hands and knees, gasping at Allington’s feet. The tall man lifted the knife in both hands, about to bring it down on Fowler’s neck.
Maureen threw the brick at the back of the head. It struck Allington with such force the knife was jolted from his grasp and flew off the side of the building, the tall man collapsing for a moment on Fowler’s body. Allington wheeled and stumbled to his feet, dazed. He instinctively leapt toward Maureen.
Maureen ran toward the north wing of the roof. She ran hard, her adrenaline pumping. She could feel the heavy gasps of air fueling the deadly machine behind her. She heard the huge legs striking the tar right where her feet had been a split second before. Behind them, Fowler somehow struggled to his feet, fell, then started to crawl along the tar.
Maureen was only inches ahead of Allington. She saw the fire escape ladder and darted, throwing the man off. She then vaulted her body toward the metal ladder, turning around to climb down when Allington grabbed her by the hair and yanked her back up onto the north wall.
The first bullet caught him in the shoulder. From the west wall, Fowler had found the gun and was pulling the trigger. Maureen saw the blood squirt out of the body above her. Allington staggered backward. There was a crushed look of disbelief on his face.
He started to clamber along the wall of the roof. The next bullet grazed his neck. The blood sprinkled the ledge of the building. The pattern of the drops was not a dance but an emblem of evil, a mythic bloodletting that showered the stone.
Allington jumped the Ardsley wall and landed on top of the stone arch. He was limping away, bleeding badly now. Fowler jumped the wall too, landed and rolled. He took several steps along the top of the arch, approached the man, his gun raised. “Why did you kill the boys?”
Allington stood very still, breathing hard. Fowler advanced slowly, the gun aimed. Allington stared down the muzzle. “I had to . . . finish the drama.”
Fowler looked down at his father’s pistol. He understood at that instant what the man meant.
Allington let out a wail and lunged toward him. Nick fired two rounds into his chest. The body was still coming, hands around Nick’s neck, choking, squeezing. Two more shots. The hands still garroted around his throat. Nick was starting to asphyxiate, his legs collapsing, his vision blurred. He arched his neck forward, fell underneath the man and, with all his might, heaved.
Allington pitched over his head, off the arch.
His legs caught the stone gargoyle above the vault and his body flipped over twice. Fowler watched him somersault, his white face coming back to see the sky halfway down, twisting in the air down seven stories until he landed, skewered on the great fence. The gigantic steel uprights rang out as they plunged through his body, throwing up a spray of blood. He hung limply, his intestines tangled with wrought-iron shafts, his spine crushed, his face still staring up with a strange look of shock.
62
MAUREEN HAD BEEN so traumatized by the incident she quit her job and flew back to San Bernardino. She wrote Nick a letter, saying it was good to be back. She was spending a lot of time in the sun, letting the desert air bake down on her. She might even look for work out there. She was sorry, she said.
Nick was sad she had left. He thought he loved her, but he wasn’t sure after all what that was.
He drove back upstate, spent a few weeks in Buffalo, but most of his time fishing high up on the Niagara River. He saw some friends, even took his ex out for a drink. He told her what had happened. She didn’t get it. She criticized him, still in the grip of some old anger.
Nick drove back to Ravenstown. It was the last race of the cross-country season, and Cary had called to tell him the coach had let him come on the team late. The boy had been training hard. He felt good and was applying for a full scholarship for his sophomore year.
Nick parked his car and sat in the stands. It was one of those blustery fall days when the wind was high and the trees were swaying and the leaves were blowing across the fields with a kind of reckless, wild incontinence. Gray cirrus clouds were knifing across the horizon.
Nick kept his field glasses trained on the far side of the golf course, where the runners passed in the middle of the race, only visible for about a mile before they disappeared into the woods until the finish. Through the glasses he saw a few runners out in front, coming down the hill, then came the pack, and finally the rest. He saw Cary struggling far back, but not in last place. He could tell even from this far, the boy was having a rough time. Still, he looked strong and Nick was proud, given his short time on the team. He was going the distance.
When the runners threaded behind the oaks, out of sight, he put his field glasses down and realized Allen Weathers was standing beside a cruiser down on the side of the stands. Robby Cole was getting out of the passenger door. They looked up at him. Cole was wearing shades. It seemed incongruous to Fowler that someone would wear sunglasses on a cloudy day. He watched them stroll up through the bleachers, making a number of spectators uneasy. They turned around to see where the cops were headed.
Weathers stopped a couple of rows down. He nodded. “Lieutenant,” he said.
Nick nodded, didn’t really have anything to say.
“Look . . . uh . . .” Weathers sighed, uncomfortable at best. “I owe you an apology, Fowler. I was running scared. The brass were coming down on me . . . it’s no excuse, I know.”
“No,” Nick muttered.
“Guess I lost my principles. You taught me a big lesson, though. You saved lives. Saved my ass too. I’ve asked the governor for a special commendation.”
“Thanks, Allen.”
Cole wandered up, looking ashamed, reached a hand out in silence to Fowler. “I’m sorry.”
Nick couldn’t bring himself to smile, but he took Cole’s hand.
Weathers cleared his throat nervously. “And I’m sure you wouldn’t be interested, but in case you are, I’d like to offer you your job back, with a raise.” A long silence. “Think about it.”
Nick nodded with appreciation. “I will, Allen. Thanks.”
He watched them leave. Both men seemed embarrassed to have to do this, yet relieved, perhaps. He knew he would never work with them again, but it was nice to be asked.
Nick picked up the field glasses and swept the fairways looking to see if the runners were coming in. Out in the middle of a grassy field, something caught his eye. A flash of red. He focused the glasses on a woman turning in his direction. He saw a smile, but it was the wrong face. An older woman. He instantly felt an ache of longing reach down inside. He looked up at the clouds for a moment. He put the glasses back up to his eyes.
Maybe he would buy that plane ticket.
He saw the pack coming down the homestretch. Cary had come from behind and was moving up. The people in the bleachers were up on their feet, cheering. Cary rode out his kick and placed third.
In the distance the trees were bent over in the wind, the leaves still swirling across the grass. Higher up, the sky was threatening to clear.
About the Author
JOSEPH EASTBURN is a playwright and screenwriter who lives in Los Angeles.
josepheastburn.com
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Credits
Cover design by Emin Mancheril
Cover photograph © Nic Skerten / Trevillion Images (house): © Shutterstock (texture)
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
KISS THEM GOODBYE. Copyright © 1993 by Joseph Eastburn. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST WILLIAM MORROW PAPERBACK EDITION
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Eastburn, Joseph.
Kiss them goodbye : a novel / by Joseph Eastburn.
p. cm.
EPub Edition December 2015 ISBN 9780062490322
ISBN 978-0-688-04598-2 (Hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-06-244402-8 (Paperback)
1. Police—New York (State)—Fiction. 1. Title.
PS3555.A6958K57 1993
813’.54—dc20 93-10405
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