The Complete John Wayne Cleaver Series: I Am Not a Serial Killer, Mr. Monster, I Don't Want to Kill You, Devil's Only Friend, Over Your Dead Body, Nothing Left to Lose

by Dan Wells

  I stepped back from the calendar, looking quickly around the room. Margaret was still in the corner, cleaning the removed organs, and Mom was fiddling with the pump. She looked up, met my eyes, then turned back to the pump with her lips pressed together. The sound of the embalming pump filled the room, a rhythmic heartbeat, and I breathed deeply. I have him, I thought. I’ve cracked his code, and I know how he thinks. I still didn’t know what this demon’s powers were, though its reliance on mundane weapons made me suspect that he didn’t have claws or super strength or anything like that. Nobody still might—I knew virtually nothing about her—so I needed to be careful of her. They were probably working together: he’d make a spectacle of himself to draw my attention, and as soon as I thought I had him, Nobody would jump out and attack me from behind. I needed to find a way to separate them. I need to lay a trap. I know the Handyman now; I can lure him somewhere and trap him like a rat. Once he was contained, I’d only have to deal with one demon at a time.

  Phase one: I need to make him really, really mad.

  16

  Dear Editor:

  The Handyman killer has announced to our community that he has come to purify our town; to save Clayton from the evil men who would lead her into temptation and sin. Forgive me if I call his bluff: nothing could be further from the truth! Are we to believe that this cold-blooded killer is a paragon of virtue? Are we to accept this unrepentant sinner as our spiritual guide? The scriptures tell us, “by their fruits ye shall know them,” and the Handyman’s fruits are unmistakably evil. He is a monster, a sinner more vile than the righteous men he claims to have punished, and we would do well to ignore him.

  To the Handyman himself, I have this to say: come back to the fold. The sins you have committed can be washed away; the heavy burdens that weigh you down can be lifted. Your hands can be made clean. It will be long and it will be difficult, but under the guidance of the Lord’s servants you can be purified again.

  Look not to false prophets. Trust in the Church, and in its leaders. We will not lead you astray.

  Sincerely,

  Father Brian Erikson

  “You ready?”

  Marci smiled and opened the door. “You better believe it. What do you think of the shirt?” She was wearing a black shirt with short, kind of puffy sleeves, and I nodded.

  “Yeah, it looks great. You’ve shown me that one before.”

  “I’ve got so many,” she laughed, “it’s hard to keep track.”

  “I’m glad you’re feeling better.”

  “I feel great,” she said. “I feel perfect.” She smiled. “Where we going?”

  “We don’t have to go anywhere,” I said, shrugging. It was getting too cold to go biking, or hiking, or any of the other things Marci typically liked to do. We’d spent the last couple of days hanging out at her house, watching TV or playing cards, and that was fine with me. The paper hadn’t run my letter yet, and I was too on edge to do much of anything else.

  “I can’t stand it in here anymore,” she said. “I need to get out—I need to see the world again.”

  “Sounds good to me. Any part of the world in particular?”

  “Food first,” she said, following me out to the car. “Something greasy and disgusting. The food in this house is almost too healthy to eat.” I chuckled as we got in my car. “Friendly Burger,” she said, buckling her seat belt. “I haven’t been there in a while.”

  I nodded and pulled out from the curb. Friendly Burger was one of those places you only ever see in small towns: a burger joint owned, operated, and patronized purely by the locals. The sign was a giant wooden cutout of a smiling cheeseburger with two little arms, giving a thumbs-up. You could see it for blocks.

  “You know what I love about this place?” asked Marci, nodding as the sign came into view. “It doesn’t have any franchises.”

  “And that makes you love it?”

  “It means it’s the only one,” she said. “You go anywhere in the world and you’ll find a McDonald’s—anywhere in the world. But there’s only one Friendly Burger, and it’s only here. It’s completely unique.”

  “So it’s only awesome because nobody else wants one?”

  “Oh, I think everybody wants one; everyone who’s been there, at least. What makes it awesome is that they refuse to sell out.”

  We pulled into the lot and parked under the sign. “You know what I always wonder about this place,” I said, pointing up, “is that sign. Would a hamburger really give a thumbs up if he knew you were going to eat him?”

  “Maybe being eaten is the culmination of all a hamburger’s desires. It’s like their heaven.”

  “But what if there was something that ate humans? And what if they started a chain of restaurants where you could buy people-burgers? Would you pose for sign and smile and wave about how happy you were to get eaten?”

  “Not if it was a franchise,” she said, grinning slyly. “I only pose for the one-of-a-kind people-burger places.”

  “At least you have standards.”

  “Now let’s stop anthropomorphizing our food and start eating it. I’ve got six whole grains like a rock in my stomach and I need some grease and ketchup to break it down.”

  We went inside and got in line. The place was fairly crowded, even on a Tuesday night, and we stood in the line chatting with various people Marci knew. She chatted; I just stood there, holding her hand. We didn’t need to read the menu because it hadn’t changed in five years.

  “Hey John.”

  I looked up in surprise and saw Brooke standing behind the counter, wearing a little paper Friendly Burger hat. It was our turn and we stepped up to the counter.

  “Hey Marci,” she said, “how’s it going?”

  “Great,” said Marci, her mouth hanging slightly open. “I didn’t know you worked here.”

  “It’s only been a couple of weeks,” said Brooke. “Since school started, I guess. I was at the parks all summer, on the water crew, so when fall came I needed something new.”

  “Cool,” said Marci. “You like it here?”

  “Depends what I’m doing,” said Brooke, laughing and rolling her eyes. “The counter’s not so bad, but sooner or later somebody’s got to clean the pop machines.” Her eyes went wide. “I mean, they get cleaned every day, of course, I just don’t like to be the one who does it. Sorry, that sounded gross.”

  “No problem,” said Marci, and she leaned in confidentially. “Anything we should stay away from?”

  “Of course not,” Brooke said loudly, glancing over her shoulder, then she tapped the paper menu on the counter, pointing at the chicken nuggets. Marci raised her eyebrow, and Brooke nodded.

  “Two Friendly burgers, then,” said Marci. “You want cheese, John?”

  “Actually, can I get the fish fillet? I don’t…”

  Marci stared at me, then laughed and shook her head. “Of course, sorry—the meat thing. One Friendly burger, one Friendly fish. We’ll share a fries and a drink.”

  Brooke wrote the order on a small spiral notebook, ripped out the page, and started punching it into the cash register. I dug out my wallet and dug inside it for bills. She told me the total, I handed her the money, and she opened the register to make change.

  “Kind of funny, isn’t it?” she said, counting out coins.

  “Huh?”

  “Last time we were here,” said Brooke, “we were on that side of the counter, and now here am I on this side.”

  Marci took my hand again, slightly tighter than before, and rested our balled-up hands on the counter. “You guys had a date here?”

  “Not really anywhere else to go,” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Brooke. “It was…” Her face fell. “The night Forman took…” She looked around at the crowded room. “Well, you know, I guess.” She handed me my change, suddenly quiet. “Number seventy-eight.”

  Marci and I stepped away from the counter to wait for our order, and Brooke smiled broadly at the next couple in line. She
looked bright and happy, eager to talk to people, and beautiful even in her hideous Friendly Burger shirt.

  Marci grabbed me in a hug, wrapping her arms tightly around my waist. I looked at her in surprise and saw her staring across the counter at Brooke. “Kind of weird of her to mention her last date with you.”

  “That’s just how she is,” I said. “She talks without thinking. If she knew you were upset about it she’d feel horrible.”

  “Maybe,” said Marci, and then she turned and smiled up at me, filling my vision. “I’ve got you now, though, don’t I?”

  I smiled back down, enjoying her closeness. “Absolutely.”

  Our food came, and we found the cleanest table we could. Marci filled the center of our tray with a huge blob of ketchup and stirred it idly with a cluster of fries.

  “What was he like?” she asked, staring at the ketchup.

  “Who?”

  “Clark Forman. I saw him a few times, of course, but I didn’t really know him. Not like you did. Not like Brooke.”

  “Brooke was only there for a few hours,” I said, watching the ketchup as she played with it—deep and red, like thick blood. “Forman was dead for most of that time, anyway. And I was there two days, I guess, but I still don’t think I ‘knew’ him. I knew ‘about’ him, though; enough to get away from him.”

  “He was horrible,” she said, spitting out the words like they tasted vile. “He was a monster and he deserves whatever death he got.” She looked up, meeting my eyes. “I still can’t believe you had to go through that.”

  I stared back at her, trying to read her face: bitterness, and anger, but also tenderness. She lifted her hand from where it rested on the table, and reached across to hold my arm. Is this affection, or is she being possessive? I glanced back at the far side of the room, to the counter where Brooke was talking; just a tiny glance, a fraction of a second. Marci tightened her grip.

  “When we were in Forman’s house,” I said, trying to move her thoughts away from Brooke, “I spent most of the time locked up—alone, for the first night, then in the basement for another day and a night.”

  “It must have been horrifying.”

  “I suppose,” I said. “I think I was more angry than scared. I’m not as emotional as most people. When everyone else was traumatized, I was able to think it through and find a way out.”

  “That’s what makes you better than them,” she said firmly.

  “Better?”

  “You’re the one that saved everyone, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  She nodded, and looked back down at her ketchup. She stirred it again, then put the fries in her mouth, chewed, and swallowed. “So, how are the plans to save everyone from the Handyman?”

  I cocked my head to the side, confused. I guess she’s gotten over whatever was bugging her about it at the dance.

  “Not bad,” I said. “If all goes well, he might not ever kill anyone else.”

  She looked up. “Does it usually go well?”

  I shook my head. “It never has before.”

  * * *

  On Wednesday morning I got up early, again, and watched out the window for the paperboy. He came at six, tossing the newspaper in the general direction of the mortuary, and I raced outside in the cold to get it. Back inside, I ripped off the rubber band and spread the paper out on the kitchen table, searching for the editorial page. There it was, right at the top of the “Letters to the Editor” section: my letter to the Handyman, attributed to Father Erikson. They actually printed it. I was worried they would hold it back as too controversial, or call and check with Erikson before they ran it, but they didn’t—they took the name at face value, thought it was a message of hope in troubled times, and printed it.

  Everyone would read it that way, except for the Handyman. To him, this was practically a dinner bell.

  I need to call Erikson, I thought, but I forced myself to be patient. This had to look convincing or he’d never believe me—if I called too soon he might suspect that I was the one who wrote the letter, and then he’d never go along with my plan. I sat on my hands, then paced the room, then turned on the TV, flipped through the channels, and turned it off. What if the Handyman sees the letter as early as I did and decides to kill him now instead of waiting for nightfall? The two weeks was up—if she waited fifteen days, like she usually did, the Handyman would strike that very night: Wednesday. If she got back on her old schedule she might wait until Thursday—and if she struck early, like she had before, then I’m already too late, and she killed somebody last night. I turned the TV back on, clicked through it for news, but there was nothing about another body. I turned it back off and started pacing again.

  Waiting was agony.

  Finally, when Mom started moving around at eight o’clock, I took the phone into my room, locked the door, and dialed the priest’s home number. He picked it up on the second ring.

  “Hello?”

  Showtime. “Father Erikson? You’re okay?”

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s me,” I said, “John Cleaver—the kid who talks about demons all the time.”

  “Oh.” Pause. “Do you need something?”

  “I needed to see if you were okay,” I said, trying to sound urgent. “I just read your letter in the paper and I thought something might have happened.”

  “What letter?”

  “Your letter to the editor—I just read it. I don’t know what you were thinking when you wrote it, but the Handyman is going to be seriously pissed off.”

  “I didn’t write a letter to the editor.”

  “Sure you did,” I said. “It’s right here: ‘The Handyman killer has announced to our community that he has come to purify our town.’ I’m sure the paper thought it was innocent enough, but—”

  “I didn’t write that,” he said. “Does it have my name on it?”

  “‘Father Brian Erikson,’” I said. “Isn’t that you?”

  “That’s my name, but I didn’t write it.” Pause. “What else does it say?”

  “Who do you think wrote it, then?” I asked.

  “I have no idea,” he said, and over the phone I heard a door close. “What else does it say?”

  “A whole bunch of stuff tailor-made to enrage the Handyman,” I said, “including his hatred of authority and his focus on religion. You know how mad that’s going to make him. You even called him out as a sinner.”

  “I told you, it’s not me.” I heard another door.

  “Let me read it to you—”

  “Never mind, I’ve got mine right here.” I heard the rustling of paper followed by a long silence. After a minute or two he spoke again: “I have to hang up, John. I need to call the paper and—”

  “No!” I said. “You have to get out of here.”

  “Out?”

  “Don’t you see what this means? Whether you wrote that letter or not, the Handyman thinks you did, and that almost guarantees you’ll be his next target.”

  “But—”

  “And if you didn’t write it, that means someone else did it in your name to make you a target. That means there’s two people who want you dead.”

  Pause. “How can you be so sure?”

  “Read it again,” I said, looking over my own copy. “The Handyman is obsessed with religion, and with authority figures—by his own admission, in the letter he sent to the homecoming dance, he’s here to purify the town by killing the people who lead us astray. That suggests a very strong sense of buried guilt stemming from a religious background—that’s Criminal Profiling 101. This letter throws that sense of guilt right back in his face, and from a religious leader, which makes it even worse. Then you’ve got the way the letter flaunts your own superiority and tells the town to ignore his message. The Handyman’s message is so important to him that he threatened an entire school with a bomb—telling people to ignore it and to follow you instead is like asking to be killed.”

  Silence.

  “This lett
er uses the Handyman’s own words against him,” I continued, “with phrases like ‘you can be purified,’ and ‘we will not lead you astray.’” It also talks about the killer’s hands, I thought. That would probably set her off more than anything else in the letter, but I didn’t want to mention that to Erikson—there was no way to explain the significance of it without revealing how much I knew, and that would only make me look suspicious. “Basically,” I said, “you attack everything he believes in, you insult what he’s trying to do, and you dredge up the same emotional wounds that probably made him into a killer in the first place.”

  “But I didn’t write the letter—”

  “It doesn’t matter who wrote it!” I shouted, a little too loudly. I was trying to sound desperate and I hoped it was working. “It doesn’t matter who wrote it,” I repeated more quietly. “What matters is that your name is on it, and that’s all the killer is going to see. You’re the next target, whether you like it or not.”

  Silence.

  “What if he doesn’t read the paper?”

  “He’s written two letters to the editor; he reads the paper.”

  More silence. “Okay,” he said at last. “You’re right. But if the paper can print a retraction—”

  “Then you’ll look like a guilty coward, trying to go back on what you said.”

  “Then I need to call the police.”

  “So another one of them can die?” I asked. “I tried to warn the police two weeks ago, after you and I figured out the religious connection, and they tried to protect William Astrup. The killer found out about that and killed the sheriff in retribution. For all we know the killer is one of the police. Do you really want someone to die trying to protect you?”

  “What else am I supposed to do? I can’t just sit around and wait for him to kill me.”

  This is it. “You can leave,” I said. “You can pack some things and get out of town—visit some family in the city, or take a vacation you’ve been meaning to take. Anything. If you’re gone he can’t kill you, and if there’s no police protecting you then he can’t kill them either.”

  “What about my neighbors?”

  “As long as you don’t tell them anything, they’re innocent,” I said, “and the Handyman goes out of his way to keep innocents safe. Look at the homecoming dance—the bomb was fake and his gun wasn’t even loaded.”