Keep going. Only a few more blocks. A few more steps.
He watched his boots slide across the cement, toes scraping, catching on cracks.
He could feel his muscles hardening. His penis became engorged, growing as huge as an arm, throwing him off balance.
Walk. Walk.
When he was little, his grandmother used to talk him out of his fits. She would distract him.
"Look at the pretty flowers. Look at the tree. See how the leaves are whispering? Telling you to breathe gently, telling you to breathe softly. Grandma's here. Grandma's here to catch you. Grandma's here."
His grandmother died when he was ten. Murdered in her own kitchen while two apple pies cooled in the window. Gavin had found her there, on the kitchen floor, her throat slit with a butcher knife. He'd tried to run, tried to turn and scream, but the blackness had come over him with the thickness and weight of a heavy blanket.
See the flowers. See the pretty flowers.
He was found unconscious, with blood on his hands, lying next to his dead grandmother.
Walk, walk.
It was coming. Coming fast.
His muscles began to contract, his penis shrank. He tried to run, but couldn't. There was his house. He could see it, just past the two-story brick apartment building.
Run, run, run.
I can't.
You can. You can do anything.
He moved faster. Crossing the last street, he fumbled in his pocket, pulling out a set of keys.
Keys to the Kingdom. Keys to the Kingdom.
Around back. Past the shed and the flower garden.
To the kitchen.
He unlocked the door and fell inside.
Gavin came awake with a jolt. Disoriented, he finally realized he was lying in the dark on the kitchen floor. He dragged himself to a sitting position. His hair was soaked and plastered to his head, his clothes were drenched. He put a tentative finger to the corner of his mouth. Dried blood. He could feel his tongue, thick and swollen and sore.
In his confusion, his first thought was to call Gillian. But she'd told him not to call her again. When he was in prison, she wrote to him. She even came to see him. And when he got out, she was there waiting for him.
He thought she loved him. He thought she'd been waiting for him all that time. He thought he would go to her place, and they would live together, maybe even get married. But when he told her how much he loved her, she got weird, pushing him away.
"Gavin, no," she'd said as he clung to her, struggling to pull her close, struggling to kiss her. He could see unease in her eyes, and he suddenly felt like crying.
"I thought you loved me," he said.
"I do love you. But not that way. I love you as a friend."
Friend? Oh, shit. Oh, fuck. No, no, NO!
His future, the future he'd dreamed about all the years he'd been in prison, dissolved before his eyes.
A friend.
It was so hard. Hard to keep going. He just wanted it to end. He, didn't want to get cancer or anything; he just wanted it to be like a pulled plug. Over. He just wanted it over.
He shoved himself to his feet and turned on the light. Opening the nearest cupboard, he pulled out a bottle of whiskey, unscrewed the cap, and took a long swallow. He spent the next several minutes drinking and leaning against the counter, waiting to stabilize. He wished to hell he had something better than alcohol, but he hadn't been out of jail long enough to make any drug connections.
He hadn't had any attacks in a long time. It had been so long that he'd quit taking medicine, but now he'd had two attacks in one week.
The visit from Gillian's sister had brought on this second one. That was obvious.
Finally steady enough to walk, he made his way down the hall to the bathroom, where he took a piss.
The house had belonged to an old lady who'd spent the last ten years bedridden. The place had been so run-down and had smelled so bad that nobody wanted to rent it. An ex-con and convicted murderer didn't have much chance of finding a place to live or getting a job, but Gillian knew some people, and she'd helped him.
The place still looked like an old-lady house-with floral wallpaper and shit. Some of her clothes were still hanging in the closet. Jars of canned food lined the basement shelves. He'd originally planned to give the place a coat of paint, but he didn't give a shit anymore. He'd managed to hang some of his black-and-white photos before deep depression had washed over him. He had more photos. Lots more…
He didn't have much furniture-he kept his clothes in cardboard boxes under a bed that was shoved into the corner of the room. Bad feng shui, he sometimes mockingly told himself, but what the hell? The house and everything about it was a reflection of his soul.
In the living room, he pushed around some open boxes until he came to the one with pictures of apples on it. He dug down past phone books and porn magazines until he found the bundle of envelopes-letters from Gillian.
He took them into the kitchen. He pulled out a plastic lighter.
One by one, he held up the envelopes and let the fire lick one corner until' the paper burst into flame. He dropped them in the sink where they curled and burned, continuing until there was nothing left but a pile of ashes.
Love, Gillian.
Gillian. She was the perfect woman. He was afraid he'd never find anyone as perfect as her again.
Chapter 6
Gillian stood in the observation room of the Minneapolis Police Station. Beside her was a student intern named Ben Collins. From the second Ben had stepped into the BCA building for his first day on the job, the poor kid had been labeled a lost cause.
His hair was dyed jet black and combed down over his forehead. His fingernails were usually painted purple. If he'd gone to see a band the night before, he could almost always be counted on to have remnants of eyeliner lingering between his lashes. But it wasn't his unconventional looks that made people reluctant to work with him. He talked. All the time. And not about anything remotely related to what was going on. Three people had taken him for a test drive, and none of them had been able to stand him for more than a day. They were getting ready to kick him out of the intern program when Gillian stepped in and offered to be his mentor. She thought he was a nice kid. He just needed to learn to curb his impulsiveness and stay focused.
Less than twenty-four hours after the third victim had been found near Lake Harriet, Gillian and Ben were sent out to interview suspects. The most recent victim had been identified, and when they flashed her photo, a housemate of one of the suspects recalled seeing her at their place a couple of times.
The suspect's name was Sebastian Tate, and his rap sheet was two pages long. At twenty-eight, he had a record of assault and battery, plus two rape charges. Somehow he'd never served time.
So now she and Ben stood in front of one-way glass as Tate was led into the interview room by Detective Wakefield. The door clicked closed, and Tate glanced around, then immediately walked to the window. He rapped his knuckles against it. "Anybody in there?" He put his face two inches from the surface.
"This is so cool," Ben whispered. "Just like The Long Goodbye with Elliot Gould playing Philip Marlowe. Ever see that movie?"
Actually she had, but didn't want to encourage Ben's chatty conversation. Once he got going on a movie, he didn't stop. "I'm not sure."
Tate began making faces.
Ben let out a loud snort. "If you saw it, you'd remember. Elliot Gould is the coolest. He gets called in, and he's fingerprinted; then he starts wiping the ink on his face while he's lookin' through the one-way glass. It's so cool. You should rent it. They have it at Intercontinental Video. They have everything at Intercontinental.'' "I'll have to look for it sometime," Gillian said dryly. There were only two years between them, but sometimes she felt like his mother.
Detective Wakefield finally got Tate corralled so they were sitting across from each other at the long, narrow table.