"Stupid motherfucker!" Stokes yelled, getting up.
Before Marcus could right himself, Stokes booted him in the ribs. Holding himself, Marcus struggled to his feet and kept going, half doubled over, laughter ringing behind him. He pressed on through the crowd, then turned the corner and hurried down the side street toward Bowen amp; Briggs.
The thick, humid air burned in his lungs. His chest felt banded with steel, the pressure crushing against his cracked ribs. Small, sharp pains burst through him with every breath. His face was on fire. He tore off the painted mask and threw it in the gutter. It was no disguise compared to the mask Annie had worn. Betrayal with the lawyer was the least of her crimes. The slut. He had overlooked and rationalized and made excuses for her, sure that she would see in the end how right it could be between them. She deserved to be punished for what she'd put him through. He punished her in his mind as the emotions tore through him. Love, rage, hate. She would be sorry. In the end, she would be sorry.
He felt as if he'd been eviscerated. Why did this have to happen to him time and again? Why couldn't the women he loved love him in return? Why did his feelings grab hold so hard and refuse to let go? Love, passion, need, need, need. He was an otherwise normal man. He was intelligent. He had talents. He had a good job. Why did his need have to overwhelm him again and again?
As he let himself into the Volvo, tears rolled down his face, scalding with both pain and shame. His body was rigid and trembling with anger, the tension magnifying his various injuries, the physical pain further humiliating him. What kind of man was he? The kind other men kicked and scorned, the kind women sneered at, the kind women sought restraining orders against. He didn't think he could endure it any longer. The emotions were too much, too big, too painful. And in the back of his head he could hear his mother's mocking voice, telling him he was pathetic.
He was pathetic. That truth nearly crushed him with its weight.
He was sobbing as he passed the drive to the house where Pam had died. Her death would hang over him like a shadow for the rest of his life.
What kind of life was this to lead? A suspected murderer, a pathetic wretch living with his mother, spurned again and again by the women he loved. How many times had he wished himself away from here, envisioned a better life-with Elaine, with Pam, with Annie? But he would never go, and that better life would never happen. He would never live on the Gulf in a beach house and spend his evenings with Annie or any other woman. He would only become more pathetic, more isolated, be more loathed. What was the point?
He turned the Volvo down his driveway and gunned the engine. A sense of urgency had joined the other emotions writhing inside him like snakes. He slammed the car into park alongside the house and went inside.
Victor sat on the landing of the front stairs, wearing one of their mother's feather masks and rocking himself. He sprang to his feet and thundered down the steps, rushing to within inches of Marcus, shrieking, "Red! Red! Red! Red!"
"Stop it!" Marcus snapped, shoving him back. "You'll wake Mother."
"Not now. Enter out, Mother. Red! Very red!"
"What are you talking about?" Marcus demanded, cutting through the dining room. Against his will, he glanced at the wall. Of course the paint didn't match. "It's after midnight. Mother is in bed."
Victor shook his head vigorously. "Then and now. Enter out, Mother. Red!"
"I don't know what you mean," Marcus said impatiently. "Where would she have gone? You know Mother doesn't drive at night. You're being ridiculous."
Frustration grabbed hold of Victor as they reached the door to Marcus's rooms, and he stopped beside the wall and banged his head against it, keening in his throat.
Marcus grabbed hold of him by the shoulders. "Victor, stop it! Go to your room and calm down. Go look at one of your books."
"Then and now. Then and now. Then and now!" he chanted.
Marcus heaved a sigh, feeling a deep sadness for his brother. Poor Victor, locked inside his own mind. Then again, maybe Victor was the lucky one.
"Come along," he said, quietly.
Taking Victor by the hand, he led him upstairs to his room, shushing him the whole way.
"Red! Red!" Victor harped in a whisper, like a bird with laryngitis.
"Nothing is red, Victor," Marcus said, turning on the lamp.
Victor sat down on the edge of the bed and rocked himself from side to side. The peacock plumes that arched up from the corners of his mask bobbed like antennae. He looked absurd.
"I want you to count to five thousand by sixteenths," Marcus said. "And when you're done, you let me know. Can you do that?"
Victor stared past him, his eyes glassy. Chances were good that by the time he reached five thousand he would have forgotten the source of his distress.
Marcus left the room and paused, looking at the door to his mother's room farther down the hall. Of course she would be in there, the spider in her nest. She would always be there-physically, psychologically, metaphorically. There was only one escape for any of them.
Purposeful, he went down to his bedroom, locked the door behind him, and went to the drawer where he kept his Percodan. The doctor had written the prescription for seventy-five pills, probably hoping he would take them all at once. He'd taken a number of them in the days and nights since his beating, but there were plenty left. More than enough. If he could find the bottle. It was gone from the drawer.
Victor? No. If Victor had taken an overdose of Percodan, agitation would not be the result. He would be lethargic or dead-and better off, either way.
Marcus turned away from the bed and continued on into his workroom. He had cleaned up the mess his rage had created the night before. Everything was in its place once again, neat and tidy. The pencil portrait of Annie was on the drawing table. How fitting that it was torn, he thought, running his finger over the ragged edge of the paper. He imagined that the blood smeared across it was hers.
He turned to his worktable and the tools aligned with the precision of surgical instruments, contemplating the sharp razor's edge of the utility knife. Picking it up, he ran his thumb down the blade and watched his blood bloom along the cut, bright crimson. Tears came again, not at the physical pain, but at the enormous emotional burden of what he was about to do. He set the utility knife aside, disregarding it for his task. A butcher knife would serve the purpose, symbolically and literally. But first, he wanted the pills.
Going to the hidden panel in the wainscoting, he opened the cupboard, confronting his past and his perversion. That was what other people would call his love for women who didn't want him-perversion, obsession. They didn't know what obsession was.
The small tokens he had taken from Elaine and Pam and Annie sat in clusters on a shelf. Memories of things that might have been. A wave of bittersweet nostalgia washed over him as he chose a beautiful glass paperweight that had belonged to Pam. He held it in his hands and touched it to his face. It was cool against his tears.
"Drop it, you slimy, sick bastard." The voice was low and thick with hate. "That belonged to my daughter."
The paperweight rolled from Marcus's hands and fell to the floor as he looked up into the face of Hunter Davidson.
"I hope you're ready to go to hell," the old man said, cocking the hammer on the.45 he held. "Because I've come to send you off."
46
He'd been right from the start. The trail, the logic, led back to Renard. And if he had maintained his focus, if he hadn't allowed his past to leach into his present, Marcotte would have remained a bad distant memory.
Nick lit a cigarette and drew hard on it, trying to burn the bitter taste of the truth from his mouth. The damage was done. He would deal with the repercussions if and when they arose. His focus now had to be on the matter at hand: Renard.