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Are You Afraid of the Dark?
Seth C. Adams


Perfect for fans of Stephen King, Dean Koontz and Ray Bradbury You never know what’s lurking out of sight… Dealing with the tragic death of his father, 14-year-old Reggie finds the isolation of the woods near his house comforting. Until one day, a man – stumbling, bleeding, clearly distressed – emerges from the shadows.  Reggie hides the man in his treehouse, and helps the stranger recover. Each with stories to share, soon the pair form a strange friendship.  But then Reggie learns that his new friend is a ruthless contract killer. And when the killer decides to make a break over the Mexican border, with law enforcement in hot pursuit, Reggie must decide whether to honor the bond with his newfound father figure, or betray it and bring a brutal murderer to justice… A powerful, emotional, thrilling rollercoaster of a read from the author of If You Go Down to the Woods









Are You Afraid of the Dark?

SETH C. ADAMS







A division of HarperCollinsPublishers

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)


Killer Reads

an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

Copyright © Adam Contreras 2019

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

Cover illustrations © Shutterstock.com (http://shutterstock.com)

Adam Contreras asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, 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 hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © August 2019 ISBN: 9780008347673

Version: 2019-06-21


For Mom and Dad. Always. None of this would be happening if not for your unwavering love and support.


Table of Contents

Cover (#u00d73d44-8fc7-547d-9e34-c65e1d632865)

Title Page (#u0e3c42f2-1b74-5692-ad23-65be4480b066)

Copyright (#u127c18c9-6e10-564a-9e73-a6f635a89b90)

Dedication (#u763fd504-b485-50bc-b1c0-5862df67864f)

Chapter One (#u11678a83-50ac-54e9-a175-0236ef1796c8)

Chapter Two (#u9cbc71a0-0068-58a3-9735-4b9ab491850d)

Chapter Three (#u00f3bc6b-9abf-5ef2-8a2c-626bf6ccffae)

Chapter Four (#ube84e46c-8c24-5503-a023-aa368b0f2456)

Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Keep Reading … (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by Seth C. Adams (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)





CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_08178adc-34e7-534d-8385-e2f57a9caf13)

1.


The whisper-rustle of the grass and trees preceded him, like the conspiratorial murmurings of a gathering mob. Then the bloodied man appeared through the low-hanging branches and thick shrubbery, as if birthed from the trembling foliage.

He stopped when he saw Reggie. His hands pressed to his stomach where the blood soaked through. The scarlet blotch, thick and wet, made Reggie think of an ink stain spreading through the fabric of a nice starched dress shirt.

The man’s face was sweaty and pale. His breath was laboured, but he seemed otherwise calm and serene. Not as if he were bleeding to death, but rather as if he’d just entered a room at a party where he was a distinguished guest.

The man tried a smile; grimaced, stumbled.

Reggie set down the stick he’d been carrying and dropped the rock he’d been launching at wasp nests like a missile. He jogged over to the tall man.

The bloodied man staggered against a stout pine, leaned against it, slid down to a sitting position like a morning runner taking a break on a park bench. Reggie knelt down to offer the man what help he could. It was what you did when someone was in trouble and needed help.

The man stopped him with an upraised hand.

‘No ambulance …’ he coughed. ‘No police …’

He reached into his jacket for something. The effort was too great. He toppled over on his side; rolled over on his back. Looked up into the sky. Blinking, staring up as if at something grand and imposing.

The dusk-red sun shone off the blood in bright daggers of light, so that it seemed almost an astronomical phenomenon. Something caught by Hubble for science textbooks.

Then the man’s eyes closed slowly, like window shutters pulled shut, and his breathing slowed also, the chest moving up and down steadily like a billows coming to rest. It was then it dawned on Reggie that this was serious shit.

He leaned over to pull the man’s jacket open. Saw the bundle of money his hand was resting near in one pocket. As well as the shoulder holster strapped to the man’s side, and the obsidian-black surface of the pistol there.

Reggie wondered which of the two – money or gun – the man had intended to grab.

He took the money, pocketed it, looked around him.

The trees, tall and silent. Summer birds twitting and fluttering from perch to perch. No others watching, only the quiet earth.

He ran home as fast as his legs had ever carried him.




2.


He charged into the house, passing the kitchen in a blur where his mom stood over the sink, the water running and dishes clinking together.

‘What’re you up to?’ her voice bellowed after him as he ran down the hall to the bathroom. The cupboard doors under the sink opened on squeaky hinges, making him wince.

‘Just playing!’ he yelled back at her.

The water continued to run in the kitchen. He was safe for the moment and let his breath out. He grabbed the hydrogen peroxide, sterile pads, aspirin, and gauze from the First Aid kit and shut the cupboard again.

He flashed by the kitchen as fast as the first time, back to the front door and out.

‘Be back for dinner!’ she called after him.

‘Okay!’ he hollered back, already dashing across the yard towards the garage.

Inside he found the old sled leaning against one wall, unused for years, still where his dad had last put it. Reggie found a length of rope also, knotted it around the steering grips of the sled, looped the other end around his shoulder, and hefted the sled across his back.

Peroxide, pads, aspirin bottle, and gauze bundled and rolled in the hem of his shirt, sled over his shoulder, he started back down the dirt road towards the near and yet oh-so-distant woods and the gut shot man awaiting him.




3.


The man had awakened while he’d been gone, and pulled his gun on Reggie as Reggie skid to a halt a couple yards away. The man had crawled a good ways from where Reggie had left him, speckled blood trail dotting the leaves and dirt behind him like a snail’s slime tracks.

He stared at Reggie uncomprehendingly, like he was seeing an alien creature. The hand holding the pistol trembled slightly, weak, but also uncertainly, like an epileptic appendage.

‘I didn’t call the police,’ Reggie said, wondering why he hadn’t as he stood there looking into the barrel of the gun. It seemed deep and wide. A chasm of endless depth.

Calling the police was what you did when you saw someone with a gun. Calling an ambulance was what you did when you came across someone injured. He’d done neither.

Reggie thought of his dad sprawled in similar fashion, pressing his hands against a similar wound, and almost turned back then and there. It was a short run to the house, and he could be on the phone in minutes, the police and ambulance here almost as fast.

Then Reggie thought of the man’s admonition, and the gun aimed at his face. Even injured, squinting and gasping through the pain, the man’s face was intense. Focused. His eyes a bright arctic blue.

The man fell back again, looking up, his gun arm flopping to the ground like a reeled-in fish flopping its last breaths.

‘I brought First Aid stuff,’ Reggie said, stepping tentatively closer to the man.

Flapping fish-arm coming back to life, the man waved him over. Reggie didn’t like it when the pistol briefly pointed his way again with the waving. He thought of the gun going off, accidentally or otherwise, and blood coming out of him like it was from the man.

Or maybe getting hit in the face by the bullet and his head exploding.

Would he feel it? he wondered. Would he feel himself die?

He knelt again by the man, unrolling his shirt like a strip of carpet and the peroxide, sterile pads, gauze, and aspirin fell out in a clutter. The man rolled over, groaning, to stare at the stuff. Then he looked up at Reggie; blinked slowly again like a man in deep, leisurely thought.

‘I’ll need … your help …’ the man said, whispering.

Reggie nodded.

‘You took … the money …’ the man moaned. ‘Means … we’ve got an arrangement …’

Reggie nodded. That word – arrangement – stayed with him.

‘It won’t be … pretty …’ the man rasped.

Reggie paused this time, looking at the man’s bloodied middle. He thought of biology class and what was inside people. He remembered the videos they’d watched and the views given by the cameras. The pink and raw things inside everyone.

Slowly, he nodded again.

‘Then let’s get this … over with …’ the man said, and the hand holding the wound disappeared in the other side of his jacket, coming back out with a switchblade. A flick of his wrist, and four inches of wicked blade glimmered back sunlight like a jewel.




4.


When it was done there was more blood, all over the place: on the forest floor, on the man, on Reggie’s hands. Sticky and wet and slick. The dug-out bullet, dimpled and ruined, lay discarded nearby, gleaming with the wetness.

The man was delirious with the pain and effort, moaning, trembling, falling in and out of consciousness like a restless baby.

Parking the sled next to him, Reggie push-rolled the man onto it, his body shaking and straining with the work. The man was heavy and solid. It was like manoeuvring a sack of concrete, bulky and unwieldy.

It was evening when he started to pull the sled and its bloodied burden.

His mom would be wondering where he was. Stewing in irritation and maybe a pinch of worry. She might yell at him; shake her finger at him in scolding.

She might even cry.

She’d been like that since his dad had died.

The runners of the sled slid along the forest floor with surprising ease once he got moving. The layer of pine needles provided a rolling surface that eased the progress as Reggie tugged with the ropes looped over either shoulder. Knowing the woods well, he chose the most even, unobstructed path, avoiding creek beds, rocky areas, and fallen trees.

The tree house was about a football field’s distance from home, where the woods bordered his family’s property. He’d helped his dad build it a few years ago. Reggie still thought of the summer days cutting and measuring the wood boards; nailing the ladder to the trunk of the oak; passing supplies up and down. The sun bright and high and beating down on them. Pepsis and sandwiches in the shade; man and boy shirtless and smiling. Watching the becoming of the thing above them; the floor and the walls and then the roof. The pounding of the hammers and the buzz of the saws like a music of sorts, hypnotic and calming.

Reggie pulled the sled beside the oak. The tree house above put them in deeper shadow than natural from the early evening. The man seemed almost to disappear dimensionally, only his shoes sticking out from the shadow, so that Reggie had to kneel to see him more clearly.

‘I’ll be back later,’ Reggie whispered, though it would take a full shout for his mom to hear him at this distance.

He recalled the man’s words before he’d passed out again.

It’ll need … stitches, he’d muttered, staring from the bloody, crumpled bullet in his left hand, to the puckered wound in his stomach, dribbling blood like a lazy volcano.

There was nothing to be done about that just now, Reggie thought.

It was dinnertime and his mom was waiting.




5.


His hands in his jeans pockets when he approached the porch, his mom awaited him under the bulb of the porch light, like an archangel haloed by heavenly light ready to pronounce judgment. Reggie shrugged as if it all was no big deal, saying it all at once, their routine – I’m not a kid, I’m almost fifteen, don’t treat me like a baby, I can stay out late – without a word.

‘Wash up,’ she said, too tired to fight, saving him the excuse he’d been planning to get to the bathroom to wash his hands before she saw them. She closed the front door behind him as he turned down the hall.

Locking the door, he turned on the faucet and grabbed the bar of soap on the sink. Scrubbing, he watched the pink swirl away down the drain. The whirlpool effect made him think of the ocean, a sinking freighter, and sailors being sucked down into the depths.

Reggie washed the soap clean as well. Grabbed some toilet paper from the roll and scrubbed down the doorknob where he’d left a scarlet smear. He peed and flushed the bloodied tissue away with his piss.

He looked briefly in the mirror. Saw how normal he looked. Not as if he’d just helped dig a bullet out of a man.

***

His food rolled around his plate aimlessly, like wanderers in a vast wasteland. Then he noticed his mom watching him and he ate to avoid suspicion. Silverware tinkled for a time against china before his mom tried conversation.

‘You were gone awhile today,’ she said, speaking around a mouthful of roast.

Reggie shrugged.

‘I was just walking in the woods.’

Her sharp, short intake of breath was just audible in the space between them.

‘You have to be careful out there, Reggie,’ she said. ‘There’s coyotes, bobcats, mountain lions. Not to mention squatters.’

When he didn’t respond, she continued.

‘You’re gone longer and longer,’ she said, staring at him across the table. Fellow travellers separated by a looming gulf.

He didn’t know what to say and so said nothing.

‘I know it’s summer,’ she said, ‘but it’d be nice to see you around more.’

She smiled to show her diplomacy and earnestness.

‘Maybe we could go see a movie,’ she said. ‘Wasn’t there a comic book movie you wanted to see? Maybe we could have lunch, make a day of it, like we used to.’

‘Like we used to’ meant when his dad was still around. It meant lots of things, but mostly it meant when things were still good. When things still made sense. When they still knew how to be a family.

She waited for him, but he had nothing to say. There was nothing worth saying.

He stared at his plate as if the answers were there. But there was only meat and potatoes, so he crammed these in his mouth to avoid answering. Still, she wanted something; he knew this would continue unless he gave her some acknowledgement, so he nodded vaguely, noncommittally.

In his peripheral, he saw her turn her attention back to her dinner. This submission saddened him in some indefinable way.

They ate in silence and went their separate ways.

***

Reggie lay in his dark room waiting for his mom to fall asleep.

With the door ajar an inch or so, he could see the occasional flash of the television from below like the stroboscopic lights of a landing aircraft. He would also be able to hear the buzz saw sounds of her snores, and know when it was safe for him to get up.

In the meantime, he was in the dark with his thoughts.

Sometimes the darkness frightened him. Other times the blackness was calming – or numbing – like a void. A neutral place where he felt nothing.

Occasionally, as now, the dark was a place in-between, where his mind drifted to things unseemly in the light of day.

Arms behind his head, stretched out on the mattress, at first his lazy thoughts threatened to invite sleep. But then, as so often happened, they converged on the wake in the funeral home not so long ago. He didn’t want them to, tried futilely to steer his mind in another direction, yet it betrayed him.

The place had a lot of curtains, he remembered thinking. The coffin was open at the front of the room. He had to walk down an aisle of mostly empty chairs to get to it. His mom sat off to one side in a black dress like a phantom, crying.

With each deliberate step the coffin drew teasingly nearer.

Until he could see over the rim of it and what was there wasn’t his dad but a facsimile of the man. Waxen and stiff and immobile. A mannequin or life-sized doll and not his father at all.

He stared at it for a time until his mom stopped crying and one of the employees there came up to him and led him gently away. But he glanced back, keeping the thing in the casket in his line of sight for as long as possible.

Then the coffin was shut and that was it.

***

When the deep, droning hum of his mom’s snores started, Reggie rolled out of bed and slipped his shoes back on. He hadn’t changed out of his clothes and his mom hadn’t checked in on him, so there was a minimum of rustle and noise before he was ready and moving downstairs.

He took the steps to the side nearest the wall to avoid creaks.

All the lights were off.

He felt like an intruder in his own home.

At the bottom he could turn to either the living room or the kitchen or hang a hard right down the hall. In the living room the blue flashes of the television screen lit his mom’s sleeping form in an eerie and solemn glow. Intermittent with her snores were higher sounds like whimpers, and he wondered what she was dreaming of. If her dreams were anything like his, it couldn’t be anything good.

He watched her for a moment longer, bundled under an afghan blanket in the glow of the television. She seemed small and fragile there in the dark, in the glow. She was alone in the dark of the room and for a moment he wanted to reach for her. Have her hold him, tell him it was all right.

Then he was heading into the kitchen, pausing briefly at one drawer. Out the back door, moving with a stealth borne of youthful practise, and heading across the lawn to the garage for the second time that day, the building small and squat and solid like a battlefield fortification in the night.




6.


The man was gone when Reggie got back to the tree house. The sled was empty where he’d left it; no trace of the man as if he’d been raptured for judgment.

Then he heard a noise from above, looked up, and saw a pale oval high over him looking down. It moved back and out of sight, and Reggie whispered, ‘I’m coming up’ and moved to the rungs of the ladder nailed to the tree.

At the top he crawled-pushed himself onto the floor and rose to a squat.

The old lantern his dad had given him for the tree house bloomed alive when the man lit it and put both them and the space between them in a dim yellowish light. They could have been Neanderthals huddled in a cave in some distant aeon passed.

‘I brought this,’ Reggie said, still whispering, holding out the spool of fishing line he’d taken from the garage and the sewing needle from the kitchen drawer.

He held it out to the man like an offering and the man took it, setting it down with the rest of their surgical equipment – the sterile pads, gauze, aspirin, and peroxide. The man wore only his heavy denim jacket against the night chill, having removed the shirt at some point. It lay in a bloody bundle in one corner. The flesh of his torso above and below the bandaged area was pale and ghostly.

‘This won’t be … pretty either …’ the man said, sounding stronger and more lucid than before. ‘You may not … want to stay,’ he said, looking across the small room at Reggie with eyes like stone.

‘I’ll stay,’ Reggie said, squatting and watching.

The man unwound a length of fishing line and threaded it through the eye of the needle. He awkwardly and stiffly dug out his wallet from his pants pocket and brought it to his mouth and bit down on it.

Then he started.

Reggie didn’t know what to expect, but what he saw was terrifying and captivating at the same time. The man unwrapped the gauze from around his middle and peeled the blood-sticky pads from just below his ribs. He dug into his pockets again and pulled out a lighter. The lighter was shaped like a boot and he flicked the flame to life and ran the sewing needle under it for about a minute.

Then he picked up the hydrogen peroxide, twisted off the cap, and trickled a good amount over the wound, as he’d done earlier. It fizzled and foamed about the raw flesh like the remnants of ocean waves on a shoreline. The needle poked at the flesh around the wound, reminding Reggie of a tent pole pushing up at the canvas. Resistant until the needle broke and slid through the skin and trailed the fishing line over the wound, then returning the way it’d come, criss-crossing the wound like train tracks.

As he watched, a memory of his mom talking to her sister on the phone shortly after his father’s death snapped to life in Reggie’s mind. He’d caught a snippet of the conversation from his hiding place just outside his parents’ room.

I saw him on the coroner’s table! He was patched up! his mom had said, fighting back tears, sniffling back sobs. Stitched up like a doll!

The man before him now groaned behind the bit of the wallet.

His eyes teared and he had to stop to swipe at them.

His hands trembled and he had to stop again to still them.

And then the wound was closed, trickling blood like a squinty, weeping eye. He motioned Reggie over. Reggie obliged without hesitation. The man took the wallet out of his mouth.

‘Bandage it again …’ he managed, his voice again tremulous.

Reggie nodded and found the unused gauze and pads and went to work, standing, crouching, moving around the man as necessary, bringing the gauze about his middle and over the sterile pads.

‘Make it … tight …’ the man said, and Reggie did so, using the enclosed clasps to bind the gauze. When it was done, he stood and moved back, looking at his work.

The man’s eyes fluttered. He settled back onto the floor, slowly, carefully, favouring his aches and pains.

‘No ambulance …’ he said, losing consciousness. ‘No police … we have an … arrangement …’ he muttered, repeating what he had said earlier. And then he was gone, out cold, and Reggie was alone in the tree house that his dad had built and a stranger now inhabited.





CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_f2e7ab65-a3f1-5007-b19f-e4d6b3bb7f59)

1.


The man awoke in the middle of the night. He sat up, saw Reggie there still watching him. Reggie smiled at the man, feeling dumb, but not knowing how else to greet him. A handshake or wave would have been even dumber.

‘How long …?’ he rasped. Reggie reminded himself to bring some water back for the man next time he went to the house.

‘A few hours,’ he said.

The man held up his arm, looking at his watch.

‘It’s two in the … morning,’ the man said. ‘You’ve been here … the whole time?’

Reggie nodded.

‘Won’t your … parents wonder where you are?’ he asked.

‘I snuck out,’ Reggie said.

The man nodded solemnly, as if considering something of immense importance.

‘You maybe … shouldn’t help me … anymore,’ he said, his voice gaining resolve, becoming stronger, more assured.

‘Why not?’ Reggie asked.

‘I’m not a good … person,’ the man said, choking back a cough, leaning to the side and spitting. Reggie looked at the spit, saw it was tinged with blood.

Then he looked back at the man.

‘Tell me about it,’ he said.

For a time the man said nothing.

Then he turned back to Reggie and did just that.

***

‘I kill people,’ he began.

‘Why?’ Reggie asked, mildly shocked by the man’s admission, and at the same time immediately interested. A part of him knew he should be scared if the man was telling the truth. Knowing the man was telling the truth, however, didn’t bother him as it should.

Reggie had seen death, close up, on a parking lot’s asphalt. And countless times afterward, replayed in night terrors. Its constant assault over the past year had numbed him.

‘For money,’ the man said.

‘Good people or bad people?’

‘Any people,’ he said. ‘Whomever I’m paid to kill.’

‘How many people have you killed?’

‘Many,’ he said slowly with a small nod of his head, as if confirming the answer. ‘Many people.’

‘How long have you been doing it?’

‘A long time,’ he said with another nod. ‘A very long time.’

‘Does it pay well?’

‘What?’ the man said, a slight note of surprise in his tone.

‘Killing people,’ Reggie asked. ‘Does it pay well?’

‘Yes.’

‘So you don’t need the money anymore.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I guess I don’t.’

‘So why do you keep doing it?’

He didn’t answer immediately. It was as if speaking gave the man strength, but in pausing his body rattled with laboured breathing. When he spoke again the tremors passed.

‘I guess it’s all I know how to do,’ he said.

‘Do you like it?’ Reggie asked.

‘Do I like it?’ the man repeated, taken aback once more.

‘My dad did many jobs until he found what he liked doing,’ Reggie said. ‘Then when he found the job he liked, he never left it. We don’t have to do things we don’t like. So you must like doing it.’

The man said nothing.

‘You must like killing people,’ Reggie said.

‘There’s a power in it,’ the man finally said. His hand roamed and found his gun, stroking it, almost as if he wasn’t aware of it. ‘Knowing you hold someone’s life in your hands. That you can end them and the world will continue as if they’d never existed at all.’

Reggie nodded as if he knew what the man was talking about.

But he didn’t speak. Waited instead for the man to continue.

‘There’s a thrill,’ the killer said, ‘a rush when I pull the trigger or tighten the wire around the throat or sink the knife in the belly. There’s no one to tell me what I can and can’t do. I answer to no one.’

‘Have you killed women?’ Reggie asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Have you killed children?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘What about God?’ Reggie said.

‘What about Him?’ the man asked.

‘What about hell?’

The man shook his head slowly. He smiled but it wasn’t a happy smile or even a smile of amusement, like he thought what Reggie said was funny or stupid or both. It was a sad smile, like he missed something he’d once been fond of.

‘I’ve never seen anything that would make me believe in a heaven or a hell,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen cruelty, and greed, and men and women pushing and manoeuvring to make it to the top. Only to find that when they’re at the top there’s somewhere else they want to be. Somewhere higher.’

‘Will you kill me?’ Reggie asked.

The man stared at him long and hard.

‘I haven’t yet, have I?’ he said.

‘That’s because you still need me,’ Reggie said. ‘You’re not healthy enough yet to get along on your own.’

The man smiled again and nodded sagely.

‘That’s very perceptive,’ the man said. ‘Always mind the details.’

‘Will you kill me when you’re better?’ Reggie asked.

‘No,’ the man said. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Why?’

‘Because we have a deal,’ the man said. ‘And in my line of work, a deal’s a deal. A man’s word means everything.’

‘What if I break it?’ Reggie asked. ‘What if I call the police?’

‘You won’t,’ the man said, looking at him intently, as if he were reading fine print on a contract.

Under such scrutiny, Reggie had to look away.

Not because he was scared, though. And not because of any suggestion of threat beneath the man’s words should the deal be broken. But because, Reggie realized, he knew he wouldn’t call the police.

He’d made that decision the moment he’d run up to help the man and hadn’t turned away even after seeing the gun beneath the jacket.

Reggie looked away because the killer, having known him only a few hours, already read Reggie like a book. This was the kind of insight that only a close family member had.

Someone like a mother … or a father.

They were quiet for a time, looking across the space at each other. The lantern was lit but carried hardly a few feet. Outside the open windows of the tree house the night was heavy and dark. As if the two of them were in the last habitable space in an abyss.

The man looked at his abdomen, then out the window nearest him, then at Reggie again. He looked tired, aware, and restless all at the same time, like how Reggie felt when he had a big test the next day at school. Something important that much else depended on.

‘You should probably go to bed,’ the man said.

Reggie nodded and moved to the ladder.

‘I think I’ll need something for infection,’ the man said.

Reggie looked back and nodded again.

The man gave him the names of some drugs. Some for pain, stronger than the aspirin, he told Reggie he could find in a store. Others, he’d have to look around at home, maybe search his parents’ medicine cabinet. The man told Reggie to be back as soon as possible in the morning with them.

Reggie nodded again and started down the ladder. Then he paused and poked his head back up.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

‘Ivan,’ the killer said.

‘I’m Reggie,’ he said.

The man nodded in his direction.

‘Good to meet you, Reggie,’ he said.

‘Are we friends?’ he asked.

The man smiled that same sad smile for the third time.

‘I guess we are at that,’ he said. ‘Now get along to bed.’

Reggie gave a little wave and descended the ladder. He jumped down the last few steps and turned back towards home.

The distance and darkness from the woods to the house seemed immense; shadows everywhere where things could hide. Yet he wasn’t frightened at all. He felt as if there was something watching his back. Something protecting him. Something that killed and wasn’t afraid of hell and didn’t answer to anyone.

In fact, the walk back was quite peaceful.




2.


Reggie awoke rested and energetic. He ate his breakfast fast and enthusiastically and this seemed to please his mom. He told her the pancakes were great and swallowed them down with a large glass of orange juice. This made her smile.

Dropping his dishes into the sink, he told her he was thinking of riding into town. This seemed to make her even happier.

‘It’s good for you to get out and do things,’ she said. ‘You’ve been holed up in this place too long.’

No doubt she assumed a trip to the comic book or video game store was his destination. Reggie said nothing to make her think otherwise. He just smiled back and walked out of the kitchen.

Upstairs, he showered, dressed, then left the house, wheeling his bike out of the garage for the first time in months. He checked the tyres, hopped on, and was soon down the road and turning onto the highway. The desert road twisted downwards, a serpentine thing, and the town out there ahead of him, miniscule but growing. Like a toy model magically rising to human dimensions.

A mile down the road he saw the sirens, flashing red and blue.

To either side of the highway desert fields stretched to the horizon in great white expanses. Sparse cacti and trees and bushes dotted the bone-white stretches like stragglers of a great migration. Periodically, ditches and arroyos dipped the surface like moon craters. Men and women in police department blue and sheriff’s department tan spread out to either side of the highway, moving further from the road and deeper into the fields. Some lingered by the shoulders of the road and leaned against open patrol car doors and spoke into radios.

A young deputy flagged him with a wave when Reggie rode near and he braked in front of the man. Reggie squinted in the morning sunlight and visored his eyes with a hand to look up at the deputy.

‘How’s it going, kid?’ the deputy asked. He chewed gum or tobacco like cud as he spoke, and hooked his thumbs in his belt like a movie marshal swaggering into town.

‘Fine, officer,’ Reggie said, being respectful as his parents had raised him to be.

‘Where you off to?’ the deputy asked, not really looking at Reggie as he asked the question. He looked this way and that to either side of the highway, like he wanted to be out there with the others, and not on the sidelines directing bicycle traffic.

‘Town,’ Reggie said. ‘It’s summer break.’

‘Yeah,’ the deputy said, turned and spat a large black wad, ‘well, just be careful.’

‘What happened?’ Reggie asked, following the deputy’s lead and turning and looking out into the barren desert fields where others were fanning out, checking ditches, peering behind pathetic gnarled trees and rocks.

The deputy looked at Reggie for the first time. A hint of a smile touched the corners of his mouth.

‘There’s a dangerous man out there,’ he said, not doing a good job at keeping the amusement from his tone. ‘A really bad, dangerous man.’

‘That so?’ Reggie asked, trying to sound interested and worried at the same time.

‘That’s so,’ the deputy said, grinning.

‘What’d he do?’ Reggie asked.

The deputy looked to either side again and then leaned in confidentially, as if he was sharing a secret. He motioned Reggie forward and Reggie pushed the bike closer with his feet on the ground.

The deputy cupped a hand conspiratorially around his mouth.

‘He raped and killed a woman and killed her kid,’ he whispered.

Reggie didn’t say anything.

‘You know what rape is, kid?’ the deputy said, speaking above a whisper now, but not by much.

Reggie nodded.

‘Do you really?’ the deputy said, cocking his head a bit like he didn’t believe Reggie. ‘Because I don’t think you really do unless you’ve seen the results.’

Reggie shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

‘We’ve got pictures,’ the deputy said.

Reggie didn’t know what to say.

‘Of the crime scene,’ the deputy elaborated. ‘I can show you, if you want.’

Reggie started pedalling again, steering around the deputy.

‘I’ve gotta go,’ Reggie said, his heart beating fast.

‘Stay on the road where people can see you!’ the deputy called after him.

The asphalt rolled along under him, the town drawing closer. The laughter behind him grew vague and distant and was gone. Leaving Reggie alone with his thoughts of pictures of raped women and dead children.

***

He chained his bike in front of the drugstore and walked in, the whoosh of the air conditioning meeting him in a cool wave. Brilliant white and sterile walls and floor made the place seem dreamlike. As he passed by the checkout area a clerk waved to him and said hi and Reggie said hi back and moved deeper into the store.

He found the pharmacy and drug aisles towards the back. A line mostly of old people stood in front of the window, behind which clerks in white lab coats browsed shelves for bottles and passed them over to the old people.

Walking past, Reggie peered down an aisle where a teenaged boy a couple years older than him was trying to discretely peruse the rubbers. He saw Reggie looking at him, and Reggie hurried past.

In the aisle with the aspirin and sinus and cold medicine he found some of what he’d come for. He had the names on a slip of paper in his pocket and pulled that out to compare it with what was written on the labels.

The man in the tree house had told him some of the drug names on the list wouldn’t be available over the counter, but Reggie thought he recognized them from bottles in the medicine cabinet at home. He grabbed a couple boxes off the shelves in front of him and headed back across the store to the checkout area.

Passing the aisle with the rubbers again, he saw the older kid and the kid looked up again as Reggie passed by. Reggie saw the torn box in the other kid’s hands, saw him moving as if to shove something in his pocket, before he stopped and looked up at Reggie.

‘What’s your problem?’ the bigger kid said. ‘Mind your own fuckin’ business …’

His words trailed off as Reggie moved past him and back towards the front of the store. He found the ten items or less express lane and put the packages on the counter. The clerk, maybe the same one who’d greeted him when he came in, said hi and smiled and Reggie said hi and smiled back.

He felt more than heard someone step into line behind him.

Reggie didn’t want to but looked.

It was the bigger kid who’d been stealing rubbers.

The bigger kid smiled at Reggie, and Reggie turned away, pulled out some money from his pocket, paid for the medicine. He thanked the clerk and headed out of the store and to his bike.

Bending, turning the dials on the lock to unchain his bike, he heard footfalls coming up behind him. Heard them stop very close. He could also hear the breathing of the kid behind him, like the puffs of breath from a prank caller.

‘Ain’t you the kid that cried last year?’ said the older boy.

Reggie ignored him and finished putting in the combination of his lock.

‘Hey,’ said the condom bandit. ‘I’m talking to you.’

Looping the chain out from around the spokes of the tyre, refastening it around the seat bar, Reggie rose and lifted a leg to swing over onto the bike. Caught off balance, the otherwise light shove of the older boy’s palms against his back sent Reggie toppling over.

His temple struck the wall the bike rack was bolted into.

Tangled with his legs, the bike clattered along with him and the pedals and spokes scraped him good along the calves and thighs. Pushing away from the bike, disengaging himself, he stood on shaky legs and touched his head where he’d hit it. His fingers came away without blood, but his temple throbbed smartly.

‘What the hell’s your problem?’ he said to the bigger kid, wishing he sounded braver and less pitiful.

‘I said ain’t you the kid that cried last year?’ the older boy said. He had a lazy smile on his face like this was nothing more than another day.

Reggie knew what he was talking about but didn’t say anything.

The older boy seemed vaguely familiar, like maybe he’d seen him around school. But being a couple years older, a senior most likely, Reggie probably hadn’t seen him much and couldn’t put a name to the face.

‘I don’t want no trouble,’ Reggie said. ‘I gotta go.’

He pulled his bike up and looked around the parking lot. There were people walking to cars and walking from cars, but none of them were terribly close by.

‘Yeah,’ the older kid said, ‘you’re him all right.’

He chuffed a wicked little sound that was something between a laugh and hocking a winner of a snot bomb.

‘You were walking to the office and crying,’ said the bigger kid. ‘Crying like a little faggot.’

Drugstore bag of medicine in one hand, gripping the handlebars, Reggie tried to steer away. The older kid stepped in front of him, placed a hand on the handlebar, a foot on the front tyre.

‘Did you poop your diapers that day?’ said the older kid. ‘Or did your boyfriend dump you?’

Reggie wanted to leave. His heart was thudding, pounding against his chest like a beast shackled. His vision blurred and reddened. He wanted to leave but the bigger kid was in front of him.

For some reason he thought of the man in the tree house. He thought of the crumpled bullet dug out of him. He thought of the shiny black gun.

Something in Reggie loosened. The pounding stopped. The blurry and red vision cleared. His formerly white-knuckle grip on the handlebars relaxed. He looked up at the older kid, looked him square in the eyes.

‘My dad died,’ he said.

The other kid blinked. His mouth worked like he wanted to say something, but didn’t know quite what.

‘So why don’t you go back to stealing your rubbers,’ Reggie said. ‘And while you’re at it, find someone with a dick who could actually use them.’

And just like that the older boy’s flustered moment was gone.

His fist found Reggie’s eye and down he went again, bike on top, hard sidewalk beneath. The older kid leaned over him and grabbed a fistful of Reggie’s shirt.

‘You watch your fucking mouth, dip shit,’ he said and shook him, making Reggie’s head bounce against the concrete under him.

‘Hey! What’re you kids doing there?’

The older kid looked up, let go of Reggie, turned and ran.

Reggie, slowly standing, touching his throbbing eye gingerly, saw the store clerk who’d greeted him jogging his way. He got back on his bike, turned it, and started pedalling. Across the parking lot, onto the street, the long way home before him.




3.


He handed Ivan the medicine and a bottle of water. The man didn’t look good. He was still pale and clammy, but he was conscious and alert, which Reggie took to be a good sign despite the pasty flesh of the man’s face, and the shakes that occasionally passed over him.

The man downed a couple of the Amoxicillin tablets Reggie had found in his mom’s medicine cabinet, coughed and spit up some of the water, wiped his mouth, and looked at Reggie. He pointed at Reggie, touched his own temple and eye in indication of Reggie’s.

‘What happened?’ he asked, reaching for the antiseptic cream and Ibuprofen Reggie had purchased at the drugstore.

‘Some asshole from school,’ Reggie said.

‘Why’d he do it?’ the man asked.

‘I told him he had no dick.’

Ivan smiled, and this made Reggie smile. Though a smile on Ivan’s face didn’t look so much like a smile, as it did a crocodile or shark showing its teeth.

‘That’s likely to piss someone off,’ the big man said. ‘Why’d you say it?’

‘He made fun of me crying once in school,’ he said.

‘Why were you crying?’ Ivan asked.

‘My dad died,’ Reggie said.

Ivan looked at him a long moment before he said anything. Reggie wasn’t sure he liked those blue eyes staring at him so. They weren’t like eyes at all, just as his smile wasn’t exactly a smile. His eyes were like gems, bright but lifeless.

‘Tell me about it,’ the killer said, and to his surprise, Reggie did.

***

‘My father died doing that job it was he liked doing so much,’ Reggie said.

‘The one that took him awhile to find?’ the killer asked.

‘Yeah,’ Reggie answered.

‘And what was it?’ Ivan asked, trembling briefly with a pained breath. ‘What was it that made him happy?’

‘He was a minister,’ Reggie said, watching the man’s face closely for some slight indication of how this made him feel. What killers thought of ministers was something that suddenly piqued his interest.

The killer said nothing; gave only a small nod.

Reggie continued.

‘Dad used to say that he was confused much of his life,’ Reggie said. ‘That he never knew quite where his life was going. As a kid in school he got Cs and Bs, completely average, never excelled at anything. He didn’t play any sports. Didn’t do any after-school stuff either.’

Ivan nodded.

‘I’ve been there before,’ he said. ‘Confused.’

‘He said his parents were worried,’ Reggie said, ‘but didn’t know what to do. It wasn’t like their son was misbehaving or falling in with the wrong crowd or anything like that. So they couldn’t yell at him or punish him or nothing.’

‘So they left him be?’ the killer asked.

‘Yeah,’ Reggie continued. ‘He got through high school, did some college, but eventually dropped out. He went from job to job, worked at just about everything a man could work at. Construction, retail, clerical; he even went back home at one point and did nothing but volunteering, living off Grandma and Grandpa again, saying there wasn’t any point in making money.’

‘But none of it made him happy?’ Ivan asked.

‘No,’ Reggie said, shaking his head.

‘And how’d he come about finding God?’ the killer asked.

Reggie searched the man’s tone for any sense of mocking or contempt, but found none. The gut shot man seemed genuinely interested, but Reggie kept watching, intent, wary of the man and interested also.

‘Dad used to tell me Grandma and Grandpa were what he called social Christians,’ Reggie said. ‘They went to church because that was what people were supposed to do. But they never really talked about church stuff, never went to any functions. There was a Bible around the house that found itself moving from table to table, shelf to shelf, but no one ever read it.’

The killer was like a child at a campfire ghost story, rapt and attentive.

The words came easier than Reggie would have thought, talking to a stranger about his dad. Almost as if they had always been there, waiting to be said.

‘Until one day Dad did,’ Reggie said. ‘He read it cover to cover on his time off from jobs or volunteering. Then when he was done, he read it again. The third time through he started taking notes, cross-referencing things he read.’

Ivan was nodding again.

‘I’ve known people like that before,’ the killer said. ‘Get caught up in religion. Only to give it up again.’

Reggie nodded.

‘That’s what Dad said too,’ he said. ‘He’d talked to co-workers, heard people at church or in public praising God for everything from cancer remission to baseball games. And that’s why he never really took it seriously as a kid.’

The killer nodded his agreement.

‘Then he read the book for himself,’ Reggie said. ‘And things changed. He said much of the scripture made no sense at first. But some of it did. And as he kept reading and rereading, more of it did.’

Reggie paused, looking at the killer. The expression on the man’s wan face seemed pensive, attentive, and Reggie waited for the big man to ask a question or say something. When he didn’t, Reggie continued.

‘Eventually, Dad said, it got to where the more he learned, the more it seemed there was to learn. Frustrated but committed, he figured he’d try to strip it down to the basics. He figured the most important stuff had to be what the faith was named after. So he started to focus on the Gospels, the things Jesus said.’

‘I’ve listened to that sort before,’ the killer said, almost speaking over Reggie. ‘Jesus this and Jesus that. How we’re all sinners and it’s the grace of God that saves us. How there’s an end to things coming and a new thing starting.’

‘What do you think of it?’ Reggie asked, cautiously, hearing a note of annoyance in the big man’s voice.

‘I told you before,’ the killer said, and Reggie remembered. ‘I’ve had people pray to God before I killed them, and a few pray for me. Ain’t nothing changed the outcome of what happened. Just me and my gun and the silence after.’

Reggie propped his chin in his hands, thinking about this. He was thinking of his dad and there was some of the old hurt. He was thinking of things his dad used to say, and weighing them without really doing so. Just kind of letting the memories float about smoke-like.

‘Let me guess,’ the killer said, breaking the brief silence. ‘Your dad studied, prayed, and eventually started his own ministry?’

‘Yeah,’ Reggie said.

‘How’d he die?’ Ivan asked, startling Reggie with the sudden change in the conversation. Though this was where it had been heading the whole time, Reggie realized, and he’d just been taking a detour. Sightseeing before he got to the destination.

Taking a breath, Reggie told him.

‘One of his parishioners shot him,’ he said, meeting the man’s eyes.

The killer’s response came quickly but calmly, not missing a beat. Almost as if he’d had such a response planned for a long time.

‘I guess that just about says all that needs to be said about God,’ the killer said.

‘I guess it does,’ Reggie said, then fell quiet.

He stared at the walls of the tree house and the whirly patterns in the wood. He stared at the floor too. The killer said nothing as well. They stayed that way for awhile, high up in the little house, silent with their thoughts in a place all their own.





CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_9c9d2afd-4de6-5d17-8905-f51a983c1b61)

1.


The sheriff’s department came around about an hour later. The white and green Ford could be seen over and through the trees from their perch in the tree house, crawling up the road at a leisurely pace.

Reggie moved for the ladder and Ivan grabbed him by the arm.

‘Remember our arrangement,’ he said, not a question but a statement.

Reggie nodded.

‘In my line of work,’ he said, ‘there’s consequences for breaking your word.’

Reggie didn’t remember actually giving his word about anything, but nodded again anyway. Then he was moving down the ladder and emerging from the woods and jogging back to the house across the dry field of the front yard. A slight summer breeze stirred things and made a whisper in the air over the expanse. He walked in the back door just as his mom was leaving the kitchen to check on the sound of the car pulling up out front.

He watched from the hall as she opened the screen door and stepped out on the porch to greet the man walking up. The cadence of heavy boots pounding up the steps to meet her sounded like heartbeats.

‘Good morning ma’am,’ the man said. Through the mesh of the screen door he was a vague form with a wide-brimmed hat and a gun belt. ‘I’m Deputy Collins,’ said the man and they shook hands.

The voice was familiar and Reggie wanted to reach out and pull his mom back inside and lock the door behind her.

‘Good morning, officer,’ his mom replied. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘We’re driving around notifying nearby residents about a situation,’ the deputy said. How the same voice that had tauntingly asked You know what rape is, kid? could now disguise itself with civility, was beyond Reggie.

Such a trick seemed dangerous to him. Something a predator did to lull its prey into a false sense of security. Just before it flashed its claws and dragged the hunted into a dark den.

‘What situation would that be?’ his mom asked. Interest rather than concern tinged his mom’s voice. Serene calm or outbursts of emotion when he was late home for something or wasn’t where he was supposed to be were her only two moods since his dad had died. One or the other. Nothing in between.

That was almost as troubling to Reggie as the deputy’s dual personalities.

‘Not to cause any alarm, ma’am,’ the deputy began, ‘but it seems there’s a dangerous man on the loose.’

‘You don’t say?’ said his mom.

‘Unfortunately so,’ said the deputy. ‘Yesterday morning a man escaped from a police escort taking him to the county jail in Tucson.’

‘What’d he do?’ she asked. She leaned nonchalantly against the door, her back pushing against the mesh and bending it inward.

‘He’s a killer,’ said Deputy Collins, friendly neighbourhood peace officer and tormentor of bike riding boys.

‘Who’d he kill?’ his mom asked, her tone still mildly interested, like someone spying a squashed bug on the sidewalk momentarily before passing.

‘Many people,’ the deputy replied. ‘He’s a contract killer.’

‘My word,’ his mom said.

‘Yes, I know,’ said the officer. ‘Who’d think such a man loose in our town?’

They each shook their head at the wonder of it all.

‘If you see this man,’ the officer said and held up a photo Reggie couldn’t see through the screen door, ‘stay away from him and get to a phone. Give us a call and we’ll be there lickety-split.’

They shook hands again, and the deputy walked away, climbing in his car and driving off. Plumes of dirt billowed into the air and then settled like battlefield detritus. His mom stood on the porch for a time, looking at the photo without really looking at it, and then came back inside.

Reggie left silently by the back door.




2.


‘Tell me about the first person you killed,’ Reggie said after climbing back up the ladder and settling down again across from the killer. Together they’d watched the patrol car weaving away in the distance, until, crawling first up and then down a hill, it blinked away in the white horizon.

Despite the deputy’s unsettling offer to let him see crime scene photographs, Reggie thought about what the officer had said to him by the side of the highway: He raped and killed a woman and killed her kid. And about how Ivan himself had admitted to killing women and children only a short time ago.

Reggie idly wondered if he could get to the ladder before the killer drew his gun. If, peddling fast, he could catch up to the patrol car on his bike before it reached the highway. But these were just fleeting thoughts without substance, like the remnants of vague dreams upon awakening, drifting away.

The two of them had an arrangement, a deal. And in Ivan’s line of work, a man’s word was everything. Ivan had rightly judged Reggie when he’d asked what if he called the police and the killer had said he knew Reggie wouldn’t. Reggie was likewise sure the man would keep to the terms of the deal. He was safe as long as he didn’t betray the killer’s trust.

At least, he was pretty sure.

‘My first hit?’ Ivan asked. ‘Or the first person I killed?’

‘There’s a difference?’ Reggie asked.

‘There is,’ the killer said. ‘A hit is never personal, just business. Killing someone because you want to is an entirely other thing.’

‘The first person you killed then,’ Reggie said, nodding with the decision. ‘The very first.’

Reggie thought it might take him a moment or two to call forth the memories. So many killed over so many years, he figured the killer might have to close his eyes against the tide. Take himself back and carefully reel in the memory out from the rest. But Ivan answered immediately.

‘That would be my father,’ he said, looking now not at Reggie but at some spot above and past him. He was indeed reeling in the memory, Reggie realized, only it wasn’t difficult at all. This was something that was at the core of the man sitting across from him. It was there all the time, merely waiting for him to draw it forth from beneath the surface.

‘Why’d you kill your own dad?’ Reggie asked. He thought of his mom and his own dad. Such a thing – killing one of them – didn’t make sense. He couldn’t even fully develop the thought.

‘I caught him touching my sister,’ Ivan said. ‘You know, in the way grown-ups aren’t supposed to.’

Images came unbidden to Reggie’s mind. Dark basements; old corners; unlighted children’s rooms at night. A large, hulking figure standing over a frail one with sheet covers pulled to her chin. Again he thought of the deputy on the side of the highway, and later on Reggie’s own front porch: Do you know what rape is, kid?

‘How many times did he do it?’ Reggie heard himself asking. He realized what he was saying, and he thought of the gun lying beside the man across from him. But Ivan didn’t show any reaction to this question, and Reggie relaxed a bit.

‘I only saw him the one time,’ Ivan said. ‘But there’s no telling how long it went on before I saw him.’

‘Didn’t your sister ever call for help?’ Reggie asked.

‘She had Down’s syndrome,’ Ivan said, making a vague gesture at his own head to punctuate the statement. ‘She wasn’t all there, you know?’

Reggie nodded though he didn’t know, not really. He’d seen people with handicaps before, of course. Coupled with their caregivers, guiding them or pushing them in wheelchairs, such people were obvious. But they were just people all the same, and Reggie had never given the mentally or physically challenged much thought.

As a minister, his dad had always told him God created all people as they were for a reason. People with disabilities weren’t to be looked down on, or even pitied. But the way Ivan pointed to his own temple in indication of his sister’s condition told Reggie that the killer didn’t see things quite the same way.

‘We lived up north in a mountain town,’ Ivan said. ‘I went to school in the city. Took a bus home. It was a short day, they let us out early, and I came in through the back door. The hinges didn’t make a sound, and the television was on, so I guess they didn’t hear me come in.’

Reggie pulled his legs up to his chest, hugged them about the knees. He rested his chin on his right knee and stared down at the floor at a spot near Ivan’s booted feet. He couldn’t look at the man just now, and he didn’t know why.

‘My sister’s room was across the hall from mine,’ Ivan said. ‘I had to pass it to get to my room. The door was ajar and I looked in as I walked by.’

Reggie stared hard at the wooden floor. He felt like he had when the deputy asked if he wanted to see the pictures. The rape pictures. Not wanting to be in a certain place, and yet held there by another.

‘She was on the bed,’ Ivan said. ‘He’d pulled a chair up close beside it. His pants were around his ankles. One hand was on her, one was on himself.’

Reggie wondered what was on television. He tried hard to think if there was a book that maybe he could read. He wondered if his mom still wanted to see a movie, go have lunch.

And at the same time he was rooted to the spot. It was as if the very floor of the tree house had sprouted invisible vines, shackling him. He couldn’t leave and he wasn’t sure he would if he could. With an effort he pulled his gaze from the floor and looked at Ivan again. He was staring right at Reggie.

‘What’d you do?’ he asked.

‘Right then?’ the killer asked. ‘Nothing.’

Reggie waited. He knew the story wasn’t over.

‘He finally saw me and turned to look at me,’ the killer said. ‘He took his hands off my sister and himself, but didn’t bother trying to pull up his pants or explain anything. He just sat there half-naked in his chair and looked at me.’

Patiently, Reggie remained silent.

‘I walked to my room and closed the door behind me,’ Ivan said. ‘I did my homework at my desk by the window. Watched the day pass into evening. He knocked on my door once and said that dinner was ready. I told him I wasn’t hungry and had a project to finish. I heard him go upstairs to his room not too long after.

‘I chopped wood for us,’ Ivan said. The change of subject jolted Reggie, but he remained quiet. The set of the killer’s face – all hard lines and solid planes – told Reggie they were getting somewhere. Somewhere important. This was something told in a way only the teller could determine, in his own time. Like when Reggie had to tell his mom or dad about a lie he’d told, or something bad he’d done at school.

‘I loved doing it. It was hard work and repetitive, and the rhythm of the work set me at ease. And then watching the logs crackling in the fire and the smoke going up the chimney seemed a fitting conclusion to the work. A cycle of a kind.

‘The hatchet I’d bought from a hardware store with the money from one of my first summer jobs. I kept it in my room rather than outside in a shed or with the cords of firewood. I kept it under my bed wrapped in an old blanket.’

The snowy expanse of the killer’s northern home came alive for Reggie. Hills and forests and mountains. A small town of quaint, warm houses. And in one a young man in a room, kneeling to reach under his bed for a cherished bundle.

‘My father was a heavy sleeper and snored loudly,’ the killer said. ‘The walls in our home were thin and I could hear him clearly when he was asleep. I climbed upstairs without a single squeak of the floorboards beneath me, which was unusual. It was an old house, and the creaks and pops of its structure was a background noise you got used to. That day, however, it was silent, as if the place itself approved of my intentions.’

Reggie wondered about that. Could a place think? Could a house or building have a memory? He thought of the church and its parking lot. He thought of his dad’s plot at the cemetery. How he’d avoided both places for the better part of a year. The very air of each of them seemed heavy and difficult to breathe. At the wake in the church and the funeral at the cemetery, Reggie had felt as if he’d been watched the entire time, and not merely by the people who’d gathered to say their goodbyes.

Shifting uncomfortably, he didn’t think that was such a strange idea at all.

‘He was face down on the mattress,’ the killer continued. ‘He never awoke, never saw me coming. I did it with one swing. Cleaved his skull in two.’

The killer took a breath, let it out slowly. Then another. Reggie was reminded of a bull chuffing, its nostrils flaring, as it stared at an intended target to gore. Measuring the distance to the tree house ladder, Reggie hoped he wasn’t the focus of the man’s quiet, bestial fury. When the killer spoke again it was in a noticeably quieter tone, so Reggie had to strain to hear.

‘I wonder if maybe he knew I was coming and slept soundly because of it. Maybe in his own way, he wanted to be punished.’

He looked at Reggie with those stony eyes.

‘What do you think, Reggie?’

Reggie didn’t think much of anything at that moment, and said as much:

‘I don’t know.’

‘How does a man sleep after doing what he did?’ Ivan asked. ‘I like to think he knew I was coming and slept in comfort knowing that it was over. Maybe he knew the things he did were wrong and wanted them to end.’

‘How do you?’ Reggie said.

‘How do I what?’ Ivan said.

‘How do you sleep, knowing the things you’ve done?’

The cold blue eyes twitched but nothing more. One hand slipped beneath his jacket and roamed, idly searching, and finding what it sought, stroked the item gently. Whether gun or knife or some other secreted instrument, Reggie didn’t know, and didn’t want to.

‘I’d like to be alone now, Reggie,’ the killer said after a time.

Reggie nodded and stood up. Moving down the ladder he stopped and looked back at the man leaning against the far wall.

‘I’ll bring you a sandwich or something for lunch,’ he said. ‘Lemonade or something to drink too.’

‘That sounds fine,’ the killer said, his gun now beside him. That Reggie hadn’t seen the motion that brought it forth was unsettling.

The man’s fingers ticked slightly, as if they yearned to touch the weapon. So close, only inches away.

Reggie moved down and out of sight.




3.


In his room, Reggie moved to the dresser, opened the top drawer, and reached under his socks. His fingers found the bundle of money he’d filched from Ivan’s jacket, pulled it out.

He flipped through the bills, made a quick tally. Three hundred dollars. More than he’d ever had at one time. Once, he’d gotten over a hundred dollars combined for Christmas, from both sets of grandparents. He’d felt rich then, and his mom and dad had to remind him not to blow it all at once.

Now with three times that amount, Reggie felt momentarily overwhelmed with the possibilities. He could get a new bike. Or the new Xbox everyone at school had been talking about.

Then his excitement was quickly squashed as he considered the source of his newfound wealth. Where it had come from. How it was obtained.

We have an arrangement. We have a deal.

There’s consequences for breaking your word.

Suddenly, Reggie wasn’t sure if he really liked the terms of the deal. If he spent the money, it would be as if he agreed to it. But if he didn’t spend it …

Shoving the bundle back under his clothes, Reggie shut the drawer and walked out of his room, then downstairs, putting as much distance between himself and the cash as possible.

***

His mom did indeed want to go to lunch and a movie; Reggie didn’t know how to get out of it, and it was all because of the bruise on his face. She overreacted when she saw it, as he’d known she would.

‘It’s just a bruise,’ he said, trying to push her hand away as she cupped his face and turned it in the light of the kitchen for a better look.

‘How’d it happen?’ she asked.

‘I fell off my bike,’ he said, not quite lying.

‘You need to be more careful,’ she said, just short of a shout. ‘I can’t watch you twenty-four seven, Reggie!’

‘I know,’ he said, hanging his head low, hoping submission would end the interrogation.

‘You’ve got to be responsible, Reggie!’ she said, wetness gleaming at the corner of her eyes. ‘No one else is going to look out for you!’

‘I know,’ he said.

‘Your father would be disappointed,’ she said, peering so close and intently at his discoloured temple Reggie could feel her breath. ‘He’d never approve of such recklessness.’

In Reggie’s mind flashed backyard wrestling matches with his dad. Hikes along forest trails. Woodcrafts in the garage, the table saw buzzing, sawdust sprinkling the floor.

He was sure she knew the untruth of what she said. Her husband, his dad, had done many things with certain risks, and invited his son to all of them.

But that wasn’t the point, and Reggie knew this as surely as she knew the reason for her harsh words. Without his dad around, certain things just weren’t safe anymore. As his death had shown, anything was possible at anytime.

Only vigilance could assuage disaster, and that only with luck.

She went to the freezer and got out a bag of frozen peas, came back and pushed it at his face. He tried pushing it away but she prevailed, pressing the cold bag against his temple.

‘Hold it there for a bit,’ she said.

‘Mom,’ he began.

‘Don’t argue with me,’ she said in near hysterics, pushing him onto the sofa.

So he sat there in the living room, reached for the remote and turned on the television. Onscreen, the starship Enterprise blasted at vicious Klingon cruisers. Uninterested in the explorations of the crew that had in years past previously enthralled him, Reggie changed the channel, found a talking head on a cable news station. Sat back and tuned out the world to the droning white noise of the smartly suited anchor. His mom moved about the house in an imitation of work – dusting this, rearranging that – but always found her way back to the living room. After a dozen or so circuits, she stopped in the hall and looked in at him.

‘Want to go see that movie?’ she asked.

Her arms were crossed and that meant that though she’d calmed down outwardly, internally her gears were still turning, her mind working.

Reggie knew there was no arguing when she was in such a mood.

‘And lunch?’ he asked.

‘And lunch,’ she said, smiling.

‘Pizza?’ he said, figuring he’d go whole hog if this was his sentence for the day.

‘Pizza it is,’ she said. Her arms fell away from her chest in a motion approaching relaxation, and she strode away to get her purse and keys.

***

The movie was a comedy, not the comic book movie he’d initially wanted to see. For some reason he wasn’t in the mood for violence and action, even stylized and cartoonish like in a Marvel Studios film.

The comedy was of the slapstick Leslie Nielsen variety, and made them both laugh in their high seats at the back of the theatre. In the dark of the theatre with the lighted screen in front of them and their laughter echoing it was almost as if that was all there was. The world relegated to four walls and their easy laughter, and for a time things didn’t seem so bad.

After the movie they ate their pizza on the patio of the restaurant and the soaring summer sun cast everything in bright hues. In the warmth and a light breeze with the food and cool drinks before them, they recalled some of the best gags in the movie and laughed again.

They walked back to the car side by side and to Reggie it seemed there was a lightness in their step and stride. As they drove he hung an arm out the window and the wind of their passing buffeted his hand like a sail and it felt good. Along the dirt shoulder of the highway, padding heavily in the opposite direction, a pregnant stray mutt made her way down the road, head down and sway-backed with the weight of her burden.

Reggie averted his gaze.

For a time, with the Dodge rolling along in the quiet of the day, the bleached hills sliding past, nothing mattered. Not the man in the tree house. Not the deputy offering up his rape pictures. Not the condom bandit with his hard fists and taunts. Certainly not a pitiful dog treading down the highway.

Then they were approaching a certain familiar turn-off and a large, bold bronze and stonework sign and something in him froze. At first thinking it accidental – that his mom was just taking a different route home – Reggie tried to calm himself. But then they were pulling into the parking lot of the place, and his anxiety kicked up a notch.

He thought of the conversation he’d only just had with Ivan. His ideas about places and memories.

His mom steered the car into a space and put it in park.

He felt sick in his stomach, like he might throw up.

He looked around at the rolling green hills and the stones about them stretching in all directions from the perimeter of the parking lot.

‘I know it’s hard, Reggie,’ his mom said, touching him lightly on the shoulder.

‘Mom,’ he mumbled.

‘But I think this is for the best,’ she said.

‘Let’s go, please,’ he said, shaking a little. He had a tight grip on the passenger door handle. His other hand gripped a fistful of his pants legs.

‘I think you should visit him,’ she said. ‘It’s been awhile.’

He surprised himself by laughing. It was a short, wicked noise.

‘There’s no “him” to visit,’ he said. ‘He’s dead.’

‘Reggie,’ his mom said in a soft voice like a caress. ‘You can talk to him. Tell him how you feel. It might help.’

‘He can’t hear me,’ he said, his voice rising. ‘He’s worm food.’

‘Reggie,’ his mom said, her own voice changing from softness to warning. ‘Don’t be like that. That’s your dad you’re talking about.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s not. It’s a fucking corpse.’

‘Don’t use that kind of language, young man,’ she said, the softness gone now, leaving only a menacing tone he hadn’t quite heard before. There was an unspoken threat in it, but he didn’t care.

‘Its fucking eyeballs have fucking popped out and it’s fucking being eaten by fucking worms,’ he said, and then added for emphasis, ‘Fuck.’

She slapped him.

He didn’t see it coming but he felt it, hard and loud against his face.

She gasped when it was done. He touched his flushed, stinging cheek.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, tried to touch him again on the shoulder as she’d done before. He flinched away from the gesture as if from a hornet.

‘You’re a bitch,’ he said, flat and clear.

She slapped him again.

Reggie turned away; stared out the window.

But he could see her vague reflection behind him in the window.

She almost cried, a glimmering wetness at the corners of her eyes before she wiped it away. She gripped the steering wheel as a tremor passed through her. Then she started the car again and they pulled out of the place.

But in the rear-view Reggie could see the gentle hill and the tree atop it and the plot beneath where his father was, and though seen only fleetingly through a mirror, it felt as if he were being watched. A guilt and shame rose in him and he squashed it with indifference and old pain. Then he turned away from the mirror.

It kept showing him things he didn’t want to see.




4.


‘What happened?’ Ivan asked when Reggie climbed back up into the tree house. It was early afternoon and hot and Reggie handed over the sandwich and lemonade to the man across from him.

‘What?’ Reggie asked, settling down again in what was becoming his spot against the wall immediately to the right of the ladder.

‘Your face,’ Ivan said, gesturing with one hand at Reggie’s cheek where his mom had hit him, taking a large bite of the sandwich with the other.

Reggie touched his face absently.

‘My mom hit me,’ he said.

‘Why’d she do that?’ Ivan asked.

‘I called her a bitch,’ he said.

‘You sure have a way with people,’ Ivan said, finishing the sandwich and washing it down with the glass of lemonade. ‘Hit twice by two people in one day. Do you see the common denominator?’

‘What do you mean?’ Reggie asked.

‘You know why you were hit, don’t you?’ Ivan said, brushing crumbs from his hands and off his lap.

‘Because I called one guy dickless and called my mom a bitch,’ he said.

‘It’s more than that,’ Ivan said.

‘How so?’ Reggie asked.

‘You let people hit you,’ Ivan said. ‘You let them get away with it.’

‘The kid from school was bigger than me,’ he said.

‘So?’ the killer said.

‘My mom’s an adult,’ he said.

‘And?’ the killer said.

Reggie said nothing. He wanted to argue, wanted to defend himself, but didn’t know how. Also, some part of him thought maybe he deserved it – the hard shove to the ground, the stinging slaps. Why and what for, he couldn’t say.

‘The common denominator is you,’ the killer said. ‘People know you’re weak, so they know they can hit you if they want, and you won’t fight back. You have to change the common denominator, and the equation changes.’

Reggie didn’t reply, but he considered what the man said.

‘Tell me about the man who killed your dad,’ the killer said.

At first he didn’t want to. Caught off guard, Reggie struggled to find the words. The words to refuse this man before him, but more than that, to refuse the memory. He thought again of the rear-view mirror casting back his father’s gravesite, and the shame that simple reflection had stirred in him.

Reggie’s thoughts and feelings whirled, collided, then solidified into something clearer. He focused and it came to him, and surprising himself, he told the killer in his tree house about another killer, the one who’d taken his dad from him with a single bullet.

***

‘Where’d it happen?’ the killer asked.

‘In a parking lot,’ Reggie said.

‘What was his name?’ Ivan asked. ‘The man who killed your father.’

‘I never asked,’ he said. ‘I never found out.’

‘Why’d he do it?’

‘Because he was a drug addict,’ Reggie said. ‘And my dad tried to help him.’

‘Explain,’ Ivan said.

‘He was a parishioner at my dad’s church. My dad caught him stealing from the tithing box one day,’ he said. ‘Dad asked him why he was doing it. The man broke down and cried and told my dad. He said he needed the money for a fix. He couldn’t take it not having a fix. It made his body burn. It made him see crazy things. Only the drugs made it go away.’

‘What did your dad do?’ the killer asked.

‘Dad talked to him, and listened,’ Reggie said. Suddenly he had to do something with his hands. He rubbed them on his jeans; plucked at his shoelaces; scratched his arms. He needed to move and he stood, took a couple steps, settled down again and brought his legs up to his chest as he’d done before. For a strange and uncomfortable moment, Reggie wondered if this was how the drug addict had felt that day. ‘He told the man about programmes that helped people like him. He told him the church sponsored these programmes and could get him in at discounted rates or even free.’

‘Did he go?’ Ivan asked.

Reggie stared at the man across from him. Lowered his gaze to the large bandage about his middle, and the great red stain there. Again, he thought it looked like an eye, even through the bandage. A third eye looking at him, seeing him. Seeing through him.

‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘He went.’

‘But it didn’t work, did it?’ the killer asked.

Reggie superimposed himself on that large red eye. Looked with it back in time to the past year. He saw the parking lot clearly. His dad lying there in a pool of blood.

‘For a time it did,’ Reggie said. ‘The guy went to a rehab centre for two weeks. My dad went to see him every day. Came back and told me and Mom how the guy was doing over dinner.

‘“He’s really going to make it,” Dad said. “He’s going to turn his life around,” Dad told us. “That’s great,” Mom said. “That’s good,” I said.’

Reggie rubbed his eyes but found no tears. He felt inside like he should be crying, but he wasn’t. There was a numbness and a dull sorrow, yet his eyes remained dry. He wondered if it’d be like that until he died, and somehow that was sad too.

‘My dad was so happy when he was helping people,’ Reggie said. ‘And it made me and Mom happy to see him that way. He liked giving people hope. He’d take calls from the congregation at any hour.

‘He woke in the middle of the night once to talk to a man whose mom had died from cancer. Another time, he drove twenty miles across town at 2 a.m. to console a couple whose son had died in Iraq. He even helped bury a little girl’s dog that’d been hit by a car.’

‘And helping this particular man got your father killed,’ the killer said.

Reggie nodded.

‘How’d it happen?’ Ivan asked.

‘My dad got a call from the security company that had set up the church’s alarm system,’ Reggie said. ‘It was late when they called and told him one of the window sensors had been triggered. I heard his half of the conversation from my room, where I lay in bed watching TV. He drove off to check it out.

‘Mom asked him not to. She told him to call the police. He said it was probably just an animal or kids throwing rocks. And he left us.’

Something started to come through the numbness inside him, and Reggie pushed it down again. The pain was old and tiresome and he was tired of hurting.

‘He was gone for hours for what should have been a twenty-minute drive there and back,’ Reggie said. ‘Mom finally had enough, grabbed her keys, and dragged me along. I’d never seen her drive so fast, and yet the drive there seemed so long.

‘I remember how dark it was on the highway,’ Reggie said. ‘It was like we were driving through a long tunnel. And those little homemade crosses on the side of the road where people mark accidents that have happened? They were so bright in the dark. Like signposts.’

He looked at the man across from him.

‘And then we were there.’

Like his mom earlier on the way back from the movie and cemetery, Reggie felt a wetness at his eye and swiped it quickly away.

‘We saw him in the parking lot, lying on the ground. The tithing box was broken in pieces around him. The money was scattered all over the place. A couple dollar bills blew around like trash.’

Reggie smiled at the killer across from him.

‘The police counted it later and told us,’ he said. ‘There was sixteen dollars and seventy-two cents on the pavement. After all that trouble, he killed my dad and left the money.’

Whether he’d expected sympathy, some simple display of concern, from the man or not, Reggie wasn’t sure. In the two days he’d known Ivan, he’d seen little to suggest the killer knew such simple things as human emotions. But what he definitely didn’t expect was what the big man said next.

‘Some things live. Some things die. Remember that, Reggie. There’s no sense to it, and you waste your time trying to find any.’

At first, a hint of anger rose up in him. Reggie thought of seeing his dad dead there in the parking lot, and the killer’s casual dismissal pissed him off. He clenched his fists, on the verge of saying something, like he’d said to the older kid at the drugstore. But as quickly as it had come, the rage slipped away.

Instead, Reggie found himself repeating those words in his head, the killer’s voice echoing in his mind. Some things live. Some things die.

Reggie found his gaze drifting again to the shoulder holster and the pistol slid snugly into it. Ivan watched him, saw the direction of Reggie’s glance. Quickly, Reggie looked away.

With nothing left to say, they sat in silence.





CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_e1680b9e-2894-5f4c-b007-d6e57b18fc08)

1.


That afternoon the killer let him hold the pistol.

He wanted to walk around a bit, which Reggie didn’t think was a good idea. But Ivan insisted and they went down the ladder; Reggie first, the killer slowly following. He said he needed to know if he could move if he had to. Reggie knew that meant escape if he had to, but he kept that to himself.

The killer limped along, occasionally stopping to lean against a tree, holding his abdomen, catching his breath, but otherwise making steady progress. They had walked for about twenty minutes when Ivan told Reggie to stop.

The killer walked over to a fallen tree and set their empty water bottles on it. Making his way back to Reggie, he sat on a stump and pulled out his gun. He checked the safety and held it out to Reggie.

The gun was heavy and solid and cool.

‘Feel the weight of it,’ the killer said. ‘Become familiar with its contours, how your fingers feel around it.’

Reggie did so, feeling the heft of the thing. It was heavier than he would have thought. It felt large in his small hands.

‘Always keep it pointed away from you,’ the killer said. ‘Never point it at anything you don’t intend to shoot.’

Reggie lifted the gun and aimed at the bottles on the fallen tree several yards away. Ivan rose and stood behind him.

‘Keep your right arm locked,’ he said. ‘Now bend your left at the elbow a bit. Keep your legs apart and the left one forward.’

Reggie did as he was told, and looked down the sight at the bottles. Ivan reached over him and towards the safety. Reggie looked up at him.

‘Won’t someone hear?’ he asked.

Ivan smiled and reached in his jacket. From a pocket he pulled out a black metal tube and reached again over Reggie. Screwing the silencer on, he then flicked off the safety.

‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘Give it a try.’

Reggie sighted down the pistol at one of the bottles. His finger curled around the trigger, but he didn’t pull it. He thought of his dad in the church parking lot and the blood on the asphalt.

‘Pull, don’t squeeze,’ said the killer.

Then he was thinking about the older boy at the drugstore. And his mom slapping him at the cemetery.

He pulled the trigger smoothly and deliberately.

There was a low whoosh and dirt kicked up about a foot in front of the tree. The recoil shook in his arms and made his muscles twitch.

‘Again,’ said the killer, soft but firm, and Reggie pulled the trigger again.

A silver-dollar sized crater appeared in the bark just below the bottle on the left. The thunk of the bullet sounded like something heavy dropped on carpeted floor. The bottle did a little wiggle and twirl like a tired dancer, but came to rest still upright.

‘Again,’ the killer said, and Reggie pulled the trigger.

The low whoosh again and the bottle disappeared, pulled out of sight like something yanked out of reality. It was there, and then it was gone.

‘Good,’ said the killer. ‘Now the other one.’

He adjusted his stance and aimed. Pulled the trigger and the other bottle likewise was yanked away.

‘Very good,’ said the killer. ‘You’re a natural.’

Ivan reached out and over him to take the gun. For a moment both their hands were over the weapon, and Reggie didn’t want to let go. When he did and it was out of his hands, Ivan considered him with a curious look.

It felt good holding the gun, and when it was in his hands he wasn’t afraid of being hit by anyone.

‘Let’s head back,’ Ivan said, holding his side and starting to walk, each step placed gingerly and with care. He holstered the gun and Reggie watched it until it was out of sight beneath the flap of the jacket hem.

He could still feel it in his hands, like a phantom sensation.

Like it belonged there.

***

‘Was there ever someone you wished you hadn’t killed?’ Reggie asked when they were back in the tree house.

The walk and climb back up had exhausted Ivan, and the man settled back down in his spot near the far window with a groan. Outside, a summer wind stirred the branches and made the structure moan likewise, as if returning Ivan’s grunt like a separated beast calling for its pack. The swinging branches brought the sun in fits and starts of bright light, casting alternating bars of sunlight and shadow across the floor and the walls of the tree house. This pattern fell over Ivan, making the man seem caged, behind bars.

He thought of what the deputy had told his mom earlier.

Yesterday morning a man escaped from a police escort taking him to the county jail in Tucson.

‘No,’ said the killer, the answer snapping Reggie back to the moment. ‘There were two people I wish I hadn’t killed.’

‘Who were they?’ Reggie asked.

‘Just a woman and her son,’ the killer said. ‘No one special.’

‘Is it the woman you raped and killed yesterday?’ Reggie asked.

Ivan looked at him sternly.

‘What are you talking about?’ he said.

‘When I rode into town for the medicine,’ Reggie said, ‘there were police all over the highway. One of them stopped me and told me about the woman and kid you killed when you escaped.’

‘I didn’t kill anyone yesterday,’ he said.

‘But the cop said …’ Reggie began.

‘I don’t care what the cop said,’ the killer interrupted him. ‘A state trooper recognized the car I was driving as reported stolen. Pulled me over. A second highway patrol vehicle happened to be passing and pulled in behind me. They cuffed me, searched the vehicle.’

‘What were you doing here in Payne, then?’ Reggie asked. ‘Were you sent to kill someone?’

‘Only if necessary,’ the killer said. ‘I was sent to find something. Not my usual business, but the money was good.’

‘How’d you get away?’ Reggie asked, interested in what the killer was supposed to find, but deciding to save that question for another time.

‘There are a few ways to work yourself out of handcuffs if you know what you’re doing,’ Ivan said. ‘I waited until the two police cars were separated in traffic before I made my move. The trooper was young, inexperienced, and panicked when he saw me free of the cuffs. He crashed into the concrete divider, the window shattered, and I crawled out.’

Reggie’s uncertainty must have shown on his face, because the killer elaborated a little more. That the man wanted Reggie to believe him seemed somehow important, and so he filed that away in his mind.

Always mind the details, he thought, and was slightly disturbed by the killer’s voice replaying in his head.

‘I escaped yesterday from the police, beat them up pretty bad, got my stuff back, but I didn’t kill anyone. And I don’t do rape.’

‘So the woman and kid you’re talking about …’

‘Happened a long time ago,’ said the killer.

‘The officer said he’d show me the pictures,’ Reggie said, thinking of the deputy standing in front of his bike, blocking him, and later on the porch with his mom. ‘You know … of the crime scene.’

‘He was fucking with you,’ Ivan said.

Reggie thought of the deputy, and the bigger kid knocking him off his bike. He thought of holding the cool, heavy gun and pulling the trigger. He thought of what Ivan had said to him earlier.

The common denominator.

People know you’re weak.

He hadn’t felt weak with the pistol in his hands.

‘What about this woman and her son?’ Reggie said, changing the subject back again. ‘The ones you killed a long time ago.’

After a brief pause the killer spoke, and Reggie listened.

***

‘There was a woman who left her husband because he hit her. And we’re not just talking about how some guys do when they’re drunk. He hit her a lot.

‘Like many women in the same situation, at first she tried to placate him. She thought it was her fault. Maybe she didn’t pay enough attention to him. Maybe she wasn’t pretty enough. Lots of maybes with no answers.

‘He never gave her answers. He just hit her. And she took it, because a wife was supposed to be obedient to her husband. That’s how she was raised, and so she just took it. Until he hit their son.

‘That’s when things changed. That’s when she couldn’t take it anymore.

‘So one day she left him. She packed a couple suitcases when he was at work, took their son, and left. Didn’t leave a note or anything.

‘There was only one problem,’ the killer said. ‘Her husband was someone important. Or, more accurately, his father was. Her husband was a coyote for human traffickers. His father was the man financing that operation, and many others.

‘Her husband’s family had their hands not only in human trafficking, but drugs, prostitution, weapons procurement, and pornography. This family was used to getting what they wanted, and once they had something it was theirs until they no longer wanted it. And her husband wanted her back, just not alive.

‘He didn’t even need all of her. Just the head would do, he said.

‘Furthermore, since his son was a quiet kid, a reader, and not at all likely suitable for the family business, he saw no reason to let the kid live either.

‘So the husband called me. He explained to me what he wanted, and offered me a lot of money. I accepted the job.

‘I found the woman less than a week later. She was working as a card dealer in some Indian casino. The kid was going to school nearby.

‘I waited for them at their home. The kid came first and I knocked him out and tied him to a chair. The woman called some time later and left a message on the machine. She told her son she was going to cover a shift for one of the other dealers and wouldn’t be home until the following morning. She told him not to wait up.

‘My initial plan was to do them together. Let the mom watch me kill her son, then kill her. The husband said he wanted her to suffer, but he didn’t specify how. I thought that was as good a way as any. Sometimes emotional pain is greater than physical.

‘Remember that, Reggie,’ the killer said.

Reggie did just that, adding it to the litany of other things the killer had already told him:

Always mind the details.

Some things live. Some things die.

‘But I didn’t see any sense in making the kid wait that long,’ the killer continued. ‘He’d woken up at the ringing of the phone, took stock of the situation, and was crying. He’d also peed himself, and I thought that was enough so I shot him in the face.’

The offhand manner in which the killer relayed the story at first bothered Reggie. At the mention of the kid in the story getting shot in the face, Reggie thought of the gun in the holster under Ivan’s jacket. He thought of holding that gun only a short while ago, squeezing the trigger, watching the bottles get whisked away. The power he’d felt with its weight in his hands.

But picturing one of those bullets punching into the face of a boy like himself was another thing altogether. And then the faceless boy in this mental movie was replaced by his dad, sprawled in the parking lot of the church.

Shifting uneasily against the tree house wall, Reggie looked out the window, then looked to the ladder again. But he didn’t move, and listened as the killer continued.

Ivan likewise shifted against the wall he sat against, a hand to his bandage. A barely audible moan escaped as he shuffled for a more comfortable position. But otherwise there was no hint of pain – either physical, or the greater sort he’d just mentioned as he’d confessed to killing a child.

‘It was just after midnight when I shot him.

‘She came home at around five in the morning. She saw her son tied to the chair, but she didn’t see me. She ran over to him and cupped his head to her, crying, shaking him, telling him to wake up.

‘I walked out of the hall and hit her over the head.

‘I tied her to another chair. Took a seat on the living room recliner, turned on the television, waited for her to wake up. I watched three episodes of a Twilight Zone marathon before she woke.

‘She was gagged so her scream at seeing her dead son again was muffled and not that loud at all. I held a finger to my mouth for her to quiet down. That didn’t work. So I pulled out my switchblade and that got her attention.

‘I turned the recliner so I was facing her.

‘I told her who sent me, though I’m sure she knew.

‘I told her what was going to happen to her, and she grew quiet and resigned. She got control of her breathing and hung her head like she was tired. I watched her for a time, letting her gather herself.

‘When finally she looked up at me, she used her eyes to indicate the gag. I understood she wanted to say something, didn’t think she’d be any trouble, and so I took the gag off.

‘“When did you kill him?” she asked.

‘“Just after midnight,” I told her.

‘“Did he suffer?” she asked.

‘“No,” I told her.

‘“Would you wait and kill me after midnight?” she said. “Kill me the same time you killed him?”

‘I thought about it, thought her request was interesting, had never heard anything quite like it before. People had begged, people had prayed, told me the things they could do for me. The money they could get me. The women they could get me. Cars, houses, drugs. I’d been offered everything. Heard every conceivable plea.

‘But no one had ever requested what time I would kill them.

‘I was intrigued, so I agreed.

‘We watched the marathon together, episode after episode. All the classics were played, and I remembered why I liked the show so much as a kid.

‘I got her a glass of water when she asked.

‘I followed her to the restroom when she said she had to urinate.

‘And when she asked if she could sit on the sofa with her son, I said yes, and watched her untie him, pick him up, and carry him over to the couch. She held him in her lap as the clock slowly ticked away the time. Morning to afternoon to evening, slowly, so slowly, the longest day I’ve ever lived.

‘Until, at five minutes to midnight, she spoke again.

‘“You didn’t have to do this,” she said.

‘I was briefly disappointed. I’d heard this many times before. The appeal to my humanity. That I could choose to be better. That I didn’t have to kill the person I was sent to kill. So often, this tactic quickly led back to begging.

‘“No,” I said. “I didn’t. But I did.”

‘She nodded, and that was it. No pleading. No anger. No cursing.

‘I was pleased and gave her a little smile.

‘When the clock ticked midnight I walked over and put the gun to her head.

‘“Thank you for waiting,” she said. And I told her she was welcome.

‘Then I pulled the trigger and it was done.’

***

‘Why do you regret that one?’ Reggie asked. ‘Of all the people you’ve killed, why do you wish you’d never killed her and her son?’

Ivan didn’t answer immediately. He cocked his head a bit like a scholar considering a great question.

‘I think it was because she was polite,’ the killer said.

‘Because she was polite?’ Reggie asked, surprised. He didn’t know what answer he’d expected, but ‘she was polite’ wasn’t it.

‘She didn’t fight me,’ the killer said, nodding. ‘She didn’t curse me. She didn’t demean herself by begging. It was as if she knew it was merely my job, something I had to do.

‘Killing for some people is fun,’ the killer said. ‘They take pleasure out of hurting others. It’s amusing when they kill someone and the target shits or pisses their pants. They get off on it. I knew this one guy who used to collect things from his targets. Little objects they’d owned – a knick-knack, a photo, a piece of jewellery. Sometimes a body part: a swatch of skin or a finger.’




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