Rose forced himself to get closer to Sleepy Joe, the Glock held tightly in his right hand and pointed at the forehead. He felt horribly insecure without the support of his dogs, but at least he had the Glock. One step closer, another, jumping back every time the fallen man as much as stirred, and then forward again. The sirens were getting closer, and Rose hesitated, but then he made the risky move anyway, stretching his left hand out, with the finesse with which he would use chopsticks. A little closer and he could almost touch the guy, and then he rushed through the hardest part of the maneuver, which was bending over without giving Sleepy Joe an opening to strike him. A couple of inches more, and Rose’s hand dug into the clothes Sleepy Joe had left on the floor. The winter coat was pinned under the man’s weight. “Turn over, you fuck,” he yelled, feinting to shoot, and as Sleepy Joe stirred, Rose managed to kick the coat out of the way. And then he glimpsed a piece of what he was looking for: red canvas. He grabbed it and pulled it toward him in one swift move.
It was the red backpack María Paz had bought at the last minute in Colorado.
“And you remembered such a thing, just at that moment?” I ask.
“Well, it was not like Sleepy Joe was in any position to have invested in stocks,” he tells me, “or to deposit it in the bank. So he had to have the money on him… And there it was, or the red backpack was there anyway. And judging by the weight, he had not spent much.”
And then it was time to retreat without turning his back on the man even for a moment, undeterred by the sirens closing in. Alright. So far so good, as well as could be expected from someone who has leaped out of the seventeenth floor and was passing by the fifth floor or so. One step, pat pat, another little step, pat pat, back and away. Already at a safe distance, Rose started wiping the Glock with his shirt hem, a tricky maneuver, because at the same time he had to continue pointing it. And then, a moment later, at a safer distance, he threw the Glock as far as possible into the thicket so the cops wouldn’t find him armed and think he was the bad guy.
Again the sirens, this time more than one, right on them almost: the cars must have come upon the Gift from God. Rose knew that in a few minutes he was going to have to take off and run. That was the trick; he would count to a hundred, then run for his life.
But he did not count on the third and most grievously unexpected matter: a serious error in characterization. Rose had not counted on Sleepy Joe retaliating, given the sorry state he was in. But he did. He got up and started moving toward him, as if possessed, like the Incredible Hulk: a giant tortoise in his underwear, upright and wounded, his massive arms floating up as if separate from the body, the rather elfish head rising from his thick neck and coming out of the shell, meaning the shell of his torso bulging at the muscles on his chest and shoulders. It wasn’t hyperbole; this beast did indeed look like the Hulk, only not green but blue. Torturously dragging his shattered leg, but despite this handicap and the fact that he was unarmed, the age difference, the size, the weight training, and his newly invigorated state all played in his favor. And Rose, who was no longer twenty, and no longer had his dogs or the gun, began to fear the worst.
“Jaromil!” he yelled as a desperate last resort.
Hearing his real name, Sleepy Joe shrunk and squirmed like a slug sprinkled with salt. Who knows how many years it had been since someone had called him that?
“Where is Danika Draha, Jaromil? You dried her up, Jaromil, you, such a big little baby sucking on your mommy’s tit.”
An uppercut by Rose, not terminal but lethal, like David’s stone hitting Goliath. He won several seconds with the stupefaction that overcame Sleepy Joe, who until that moment must have wondered who this insignificant homunculus that set his dogs on him was, and couldn’t have cared less whether he was a gnome or a park ranger. But now he was suddenly stunned by this mysterious being who knew the name of his sainted mother.
“He must have thought that he was dead and that I was God,” Rose tells me.
But then Rose realized that his relative advantage was only momentary, because Sleepy Joe put two and two together and recognized him.
“I know who you are,” he wailed. “You are the old asshole from the Catskills with the dogs.”
A posteriori, Rose had made sense of things. He thought that ultimately it was not him who Sleepy Joe recognized, but the dogs, just as his dogs must have recognized Sleepy Joe, who during the days before killing Cleve must have prowled around the house in the Catskills, maybe unable to make it inside precisely because of the dogs, and hence nabbed John Eagles, who happened to be nearby, and ripped off his face. Then he waited for Cleve to go far from the house on his motorcycle to kill him.
“It makes sense,” he tells me. “But back to the Hulk. I heard male voices getting closer and closer. Sleepy Joe advanced, staggering, arms akimbo, blinded by the blood that dripped from his forehead, but advancing, advancing toward me. The cops were coming down, I could see them, and I ran toward them, shouting, ‘He’s armed! He’s armed!’ And the cops signaled for me to get out of the way and safe from the crossfire. And they moved in, shooting from all different directions. Sleepy Joe continued to advance, but surprise, surprise, not toward me; apparently I was not his goal because he passed right by me, stumbling, blinded and lame, as if drunk, suicidal, arms open and chest exposed, right into the endless volley of gunfire.”
And that’s it. Sleepy Joe fell, and nothing happened. The sky did not darken, torrential rain did not suddenly fall, the earth did not flinch nor stars cry. Nothing.
The police noted the white cross, of course, impossible to miss, and they realized they had come upon the fugitive they had been after for days, the celebrated Passion Killer, the biggest catch in all the US of A.
Ten or twenty minutes later, Rose, again surrounded by his dogs, played the part of the innocent neighbor who had gone for a walk on the mountain and been shot at by this man, and his dogs had jumped to the defense of their master. He answered a few routine questions from the lieutenant, who was friendly, euphoric even. There were several inconsistencies in Rose’s version of events that would have become known through a more thorough investigation, but the police were too excited about their own role in the case to worry about such things. “Thank you, lieutenant,” Rose said, squeezing his hand, “you saved me, thanks.”
“I would have wanted to say more,” Rose admits. “To say, for example, not to boast, ‘Lieutenant, you brought down the man, but my dogs defeated the god.’ But I squeezed his hand, and said that other thing instead, which I’m pretty sure is why he let me go just like that. At the end of the day, things came out well because I stuck to my script, as if I were a minor character in CSI.”
“Things could have turned out a lot worse,” I tell him.
“True.” He laughs. “Fatally so. But there was a good turn in the end, you know. A string of mistakes that led to a final success.”
Throughout that week and the following one, the news cycle focused almost solely on the end of The Passion Killer and the brave men and women in uniform who brought him down in a masterful operation. The Glock turned up in the bushes, and witnesses attested to hearing three shots, and inside the yellow truck the Gift from God the authorities found countless gadgets of death, crucifixion, and martyrdom, so they did not hesitate to claim self-defense and had no problem justifying leaving the body of the super serial killer with more holes than a colander.
“It was nearly noon when I finally returned to North Star,” Rose tells me, “and I almost didn’t find anyone there.”