“Forget Jaynes. You’re the one who reactivated his plan. Formoney, Stanley. You’ve been planning your big score for years, thinking over every detail, right down to sending money to Nadine Reynolds, so that when you started bombing, people would think Michael Jaynes was still alive.”
“I was helping her,” he snapped from behind the light. “Michael used to tell me his girlfriend was just barely getting by. I got her name and address from his wallet, sent her what I could, every now and then.”
“That’s right, Stanley, just like when you called out to Clarinda every once in a while and left Michael’s name. You’ve been jerking Nadine Reynolds around for years, letting her go on believing Michael was going to show up someday. You’re a prince of a guy, Stanley.”
“What would you have had me do? Send her a little note, telling her he was dead? You don’t know, Mr. Elstrom, but it’s better to live with false hope than to live with no hope at all.”
“I know one thing, Stanley. I don’t believe you when you say this isn’t about money.”
“I didn’t say that, Mr. Elstrom. This most certainly is about money.” He paused and then said, “You heard about my son?”
“Nothing other than Anton Chernek said he died.” Slowly, I moved my hands down to the concrete floor.
“We lost him one year, seven months, seventeen days ago. He needed an operation, but the insurance said it was an experimental procedure, and they wouldn’t cover it. I went to Mr. Ballsard, asked if I could get the money from my Crystal Waters life insurance. He said it was term insurance, no borrowing value. So I asked, can I borrow the money from the homeowners association? Know what Mr. Ballsard said?”
“He’s a shit, Stanley.” My palms were flat on the floor now, my legs as tensed as I could get them. I started easing forward.
“He said the association wasn’t a bank. All those years of watching out for the Members, of driving their kids home from the policestation after they’d been picked up drunk or goofy with dope. All those years of guarding their fancy homes when they were off on their cruises, skiing vacations, and shopping trips to London. After all that time, all he can tell me is they’re not a bank?”
“So you decided to start killing people?” I’d have to grab the knife left-handed and then charge. And hope I could cut him before he could get to his gun. Or to the wires.
Above my head, the air moved.
“Nobody was supposed to die,” he yelled.
I pushed off the wall.
The spotlight swung on me; the gun flashed loudly from behind the glare. Something whispered past my ear.
I dropped to my knees. I hadn’t even gotten close to the knife.
“I’d hate to shoot you, Mr. Elstrom.”
I backed up and immediately bumped the tunnel wall. I’d gotten three feet. I sat against the wall again, my ears ringing from the sound of the gunshot.
The wires began to dance again above my head.
“I like you, Mr. Elstrom. You’re not from here,” Stanley said in that same maddening conversational voice.
He shifted the spotlight beam toward the floor at his end of the cross tunnel, and for the first time I saw him in profile. He was close enough to have killed me with that shot; he was only twenty feet from me, sitting under a nest of wires dangling down from the ceiling. He squinted at a blueprint on the floor.
“Yes, sir. I always liked you.”
“That’s crap, Stanley. You used me to keep the Board from calling in the Feds.”
“No, sir, that was their own greed. Mr. Ballsard didn’t want the federal agencies in here because word of that would get out and destroy the house values.”
“You played me for an idiot, sent me off to look for a dead man.”
He reached up to twist some wires above his head. “You didn’twant the money, Mr. Elstrom? Even though you kept saying you weren’t qualified for the investigation, you didn’t need that money?”
“Not bad enough to follow the wrong lead while you killed a family.”
He dropped his hands from the ceiling and turned his head abruptly toward me. “They weren’t supposed to be home.”
“Sure, you liked me, Stanley,” I said, trying to find a button, any button. “When everybody was giving up on the idea of finding Jaynes, you liked me enough to give them a new candidate: me. You passed a quiet word to Till about my background, no doubt suggesting I was prone to irrational behavior. That got him to put a tail on me. And when I told you I was coming to get Amanda’s paintings, you realized I might discover the hole you’d opened up to the tunnel. Then you liked me enough to set off a cube of D.X.12 in my shed, to tighten the link between me and the bombings.”
“There was no D.X.12 in your shed, Mr. Elstrom, just a slowburning fuse and an old can of paint stripper. Your own turpentine did the rest. Agent Till thinks somebody walking along the river tossed a cigarette into your shed.”
His hands worked in the nest of wires. There couldn’t be any time left.
“You’ll die, Stanley. And you’ll take a hundred firemen, cops, and medical techs with you.”
And Amanda. She was out there, too. But I couldn’t give voice to that.
“I don’t know how much that matters, Mr. Elstrom. My boy is dead. My wife is dying because she can’t bear that, and I’m dead, too. All because of Crystal Waters. Michael Jaynes was right. This place must be destroyed.”
Just around the corner, next to the knife that I’d never get close enough to use, lay the timer bomb.
I started getting up then, slowly. He raised his spotlight to shine right in my eyes.
I looked away from the light. “I liked you, too, Stanley. I liked you when the lamppost blew up, when I couldn’t get past the idea that the bomb had been triggered from inside Gateville. I liked you when, miracle of miracles, you came up with the name of Michael Jaynes, and I didn’t think to question the sudden appearance of such a good lead. I liked you when that family got blown up, when you kept waving that Member vacation roster around, insisting they weren’t supposed to be home. I liked you, Stanley, too much to take a hard look at you.”
I was on my knees. “Even tonight, I liked you, when I was badgering Amanda to tell me it was you who had hit her. She wouldn’t believe that, and I didn’t want to believe it, either. Because I liked you. You weren’t Crystal Waters. You were a working guy, a guy carrying a load, like me.”
I was all the way up now, hunched an inch from the ceiling. “But most of all, Stanley, I liked you because you didn’t put a clown hat on me last Halloween. You took me away from Crystal Waters, paid for a room at the health center because I was too drunk and too broke, and you left me with enough dignity to get through the night. I liked you for that, Stanley, and it made me blind.”
He lowered the spotlight. His right hand, his gunhand, was raised, steady and motionless, but his head was moving, up and down, like he was laughing. Or crying.
“But I don’t like you enough to sit here and watch you kill a hundred people.” I turned and stepped into Amanda’s tunnel, out of his sight, and stopped-to pick up the bomb. I gave the dial the slightest of twists, turned back around, and straight-armed it around the corner, toward the spotlight. Then I ran, crouched, down the tunnel toward Amanda’s basement.
I remember what came next, but the remembering takes longerthan the time it must have taken. I remember the sound of my lungs wheezing in the dry, cold air, and the incredible pressure of my heart thudding in my chest as I pounded down the tunnel, hunched over like a broken man. I remember the speck of green growing in the blackness ahead of me as I got closer, and praying that it wouldn’t dissolve into a flash of orange. I remember hitting the concrete wall of Amanda’s basement, hard, the pain stunning me for an instant before I thought to reach up. I remember the way the ragged, chiseled cement cut into my gut as I started to pull myself over the ledge.