It takes her fifteen minutes to get to the house she wants, the van warming up early in the drive. She rubs her hands together. Warms up her fingers and grabs her handgun. It’s an okay neighborhood. Not great. Not cheap. Just okay. The kind of place people living by themselves tend to flock to. Two-bedroom dwellings, small yards, not old, not modern, but okay—heaven for people who are in love with all things bland. TVs are glowing from behind windows, lights are on in lounges and bedrooms, but otherwise there are no signs of life, other than a couple of cats sitting at opposite ends of a fence. Last time she was here was three months ago. It was warmer. A lot warmer. She made a mess. A big mess. There was blood and tearing flesh and crying. A lot of crying. Through it all she knew that she would be back here tonight.
She parks the van out on the street and locks the door and knows the entire plan will fall apart if somebody steals her ride. She walks up the path. The garden is neat and tidy. There are the legs of a garden gnome and no body, just jagged edges where the body used to be attached. Out there other gnomes are suffering the loss. There are lights on inside the house. She can see patterns of moving colors from a TV behind the curtain. She climbs up the step and holds her finger on the bell for half a second. She doesn’t have to wait long before the footsteps come toward her.
Melissa holds the gun down by her side, just slightly out of view.
The door swings open.
The woman doing the swinging is dressed in winter pajamas and a robe that are a little too big for her, even though the woman is a little too big herself. Still, she’s not as overweight as she was in the papers twelve months ago after she jumped on Joe during his arrest, or even as she was three months ago when Melissa came to see her. Her face is somewhat flushed. She looks like she is running late. She’s wearing a crucifix around her neck. A little Jesus on a little cross. A little Jesus who doesn’t seem happy to be hanging where he’s hanging.
“I thought we had a deal,” the woman says. “You promised you were going to leave me alone.”
“And I have until now, Sally,” Melissa says. “But I’m here to make another deal. You need to start by letting me in,” she says, and she raises the gun and sticks it into Sally’s chest, right where Jesus is doing his best not to look. “Or if you prefer I can shoot you in the stomach and leave you here to rot.”
Chapter Forty-Nine
Raphael wakes up expecting fate to intervene, that he’ll have a sore throat or a bad stomach from something he ate, maybe a racing heart from too much bad food, or at the very least a hangover—even though he didn’t really drink that much yesterday. Fate has never been one for the Can’t we all just get along school of thought, there are too many sad stories in the city that prove that, so for he and Fate to be on the same page about Joe seems like a small miracle.
He holds his hands in front of his face in the six a.m. light and can barely make them out, but can see them enough to tell he doesn’t have any signs of the shakes. For a guy who hardly slept last night, he’s doing remarkably well. It’s been a clock-watching night, where every passing hour his mind would do the math, telling him just how much sleep he wasn’t getting. His mind was racing. In the beginning it was racing with positive thoughts. Then around one a.m., the first negative thought came along. Within thirty minutes the balance had shifted. The negative thoughts were chasing away all the good ones. By three a.m. there were no positive thoughts, just a bunch of frayed nerves he was struggling to keep under control. When he finally fell asleep at around four, he entered a dream world and somewhere in that world all the bad shit disappeared, and he’s woken up feeling good.
He throws back the covers. Even though he sleeps alone these days, he still sleeps on the side of the bed he has slept on since being married. The other side barely has any wrinkles in it. He puts on his robe and slippers and walks through to the kitchen. The house is warm thanks to two heat pumps that have been running during the night. He has no appetite, but forces himself to eat anyway. A bowl of cereal and a glass of orange juice and his hands stay calm the entire time. These are, he thinks, the hands of a killer. He makes toast and burns it so he tosses it into the trash. He puts in four fresh slices and gets it right, but doesn’t eat them, just leaves them in the toaster. It was the same way when he killed the lawyer. Same way when he killed the second one too. No appetite. No reason this morning should be any different.
It’s cold outside. For some reason he’s suddenly transported back to when he was a kid, when he’d have to bike to school in freezing-cold weather along with thousands of other kids across the city, icy roads and frosty air, breath forming clouds in front of his face. Only right now it’s a bit darker than what it was when he used to leave for school. It’s still only seven thirty. People are driving to work with the lights on and with coffee cups in their drink holders, driving to a job involving numbers or materials or words or physical labor—none of them, he imagines, with the idea in mind of killing somebody. It’s too early for the protesters to be showing up. He turns on the radio. Not too early for the protesters to be calling in.
He parks on the street between the office building and the courts, thinks better of it, then moves his car just around the corner, adjacent to the building he’ll be shooting from. Soon this whole area will fill up, and after the shooting he doesn’t want to get caught in a traffic jam ten yards from the back entrance to the court.
It’s a thirty-second walk back to the office building. He takes the stairs up to the third floor and unlocks the office door. The duct tape has held the drop cloth in place, so the office is dark. He paces the office for half a minute, then sits down and leans against the wall. He’s brought a thermos with him full of coffee, and he pours himself one and slowly sips at it and watches the office as it slowly becomes lighter. He takes a photograph of Angela out from his pocket and rests it on his thigh.
What are you doing? she asks him.
“Today’s the day,” he tells her.
You’re going to kill him?
“Yes,” he tells her, but of course she isn’t really here, he knows that, but boy, wouldn’t it be great if somehow, somewhere, she really could hear him. “I know it doesn’t bring you back,” he tells her, “but I hope it makes you feel better.”
You think killing him honors me? she asks. You think taking a life in your daughter’s name is something mom would want? Or I would want?
“Yes,” he says.
She doesn’t answer him.
“Isn’t it?”
Yes, she says.
“I wasn’t there to protect you. This isn’t going to make it right, but it’s all I can do.”
I’m sorry you weren’t there to protect me either, she says. You were meant to be there. That was your job.
“I know,” he says, and he’s crying now. “I’m sorry.”
Thank you for killing him for me, she says, and I’m glad you’re doing it in my name. Make him suffer, Daddy. Make him suffer and then he can rot in Hell. I just wish you could kill him ten times over. A hundred times over.
“I miss you, baby,” he says, and he puts the photograph back into his pocket and reaches up into the ceiling for the gun.
Chapter Fifty
I wake up at seven o’clock. We all do. A loud buzzer goes off. It rips into our dreams and puts an end to any of the good stuff going on in there. Though in this case the good stuff was me remembering the blank look on Ronald’s face when the hammer cracked open his skull. He just stood there staring at me for a few seconds. I think he knew he was dead, but his body was still catching up. I thought he would have dropped like a rock, but it took two or three seconds for him to fall. It was the strangest thing, a physics-defying thing. Killers like to say they don’t remember what happened—that they just snapped, that it was a dream. But the exact opposite is true. Killing has a way of making you feel alive—who the hell would want to forget that?