I turn around. My view shifts from the shotgun and the man behind it back to the car and the cabin beyond. Though calling it a cabin is a fairly generous term. It has the minimum number of walls required to hold up a ceiling and be labeled a building. It looks to be the size of a small one-bedroom house. The walls are warped and knotted, made from a mixture of woods. The side wall I can see is made from weatherboards, while the wall closest with the glass sliding door is constructed from plywood and fence pales and plenty of sealant. The roof is made from aluminum sheeting. Without any guttering to catch and drain the rain, a small moat has formed around the cabin. A wooden porch extends a few feet from the sliding door and the roof extends above it. The glass part of the door is covered in grime, but isn’t broken or cracked. Pine needles stick to the glass all along the bottom. The metal runners have darkened with mud and rust. It’s hard to imagine anybody dragging these pieces out here in their car and constructing this small home away from home. Hard to imagine some do-it-yourselfer walking through a scrap heap and coming across these bits of wood and tin and getting the final image of this cabin in his mind.
Hard to imagine anybody would go to this effort.
Yet somebody has. Perhaps the same somebody standing behind me.
I walk past the car and climb up onto the porch. It creaks beneath my weight, but I don’t fall through. Inside the air is just as cold. The rain yells on the roof, but I can’t see any signs of leakage. There are two rooms. We’re standing in the main one. Surprisingly, the inside of the cabin has been lined, so instead of seeing the same weatherboards and the same fence pales along with some framing, it’s been lined with plywood. There’s a fireplace, a bench, and a couple of soft chairs that look like they may have swallowed a few animals over the years. Landry closes the sliding door, locking out the rain and any hope I have of getting out of this place alive.
“Sit down,” he says, pointing me to the larger of the two chairs. Its fading pattern of yellow flowers doesn’t make it look even remotely comfortable. Nor do the worn gashes with escaping foam and protruding springs. I fall into it. The broken framework pulls my body right to the back so my feet come off the ground. I rest my handcuffed hands in my lap. I can smell pine and mildew. Landry lights a match, and then in turn lights a lantern. It has a glass shell dotted with mold, but lights up the cabin a hell of a lot better than his flashlight does. Then he lights another one and puts it in the opposite corner of the cabin. Then he sits in the opposite chair. His is a checkered, brown-and-black pattern that somebody could play chess on. Next to him on the floor is a duffel bag. It’s unzipped, and I can see the clothes he was wearing earlier are folded up inside it.
An oval rug in the center of the floor is stained with mud and animal hair. The open fireplace is made from brick and cinder block with a chimney that is a long metal tube not much wider than my leg. At the moment it’s set with blocks of wood and yellow newspaper, but hasn’t been lit. Landry either likes the cold or doesn’t plan on being here long.
He rests the shotgun across his legs then sighs. No possible way can I get to him before he gets to his gun, not the way the chair is trying to eat me. I figure that’s the whole point. He looks tired.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he says.
“I’m not so sure you do.”
His hands clutch the Mossberg tightly. “Jesus, why in the hell do you have to keep on being so smart? Can’t you take anything seriously?”
I shake my head. “I wasn’t being smart. I’m taking this seriously. I’m just saying you don’t know what I’m thinking.” It’s hard not to stumble over my sentences, but I manage it. I’m scared. I know it and he knows it. So far it’s all we have in common. He lets go of the shotgun, leans back into his chair, and starts nodding.
“You’re wondering if this is my place. You’re wondering if I’ve brought people out here before. I’m right, aren’t I?”
I nod. He’s right.
“It belonged to a guy just like you. I caught him. It’s a while back now.”
“Did you give him a trial too?”
“Jesus, Feldman.”
“You’re making a big mistake. I didn’t kill anybody, and if you give me the chance to-”
“Shut up, okay? Do you know how many times I’ve heard guys like you tell me they’re innocent? I don’t need to hear it from you. All I want to hear from you is a confession.”
“Look, I know how you feel, I can understand-”
“You can’t understand anything, Feldman, you really can’t. I’m sick,” he says, and slowly he shakes his head. “I’m sick of dealing with all of this. Sick of people who kill for the hell of it, just for fun. I see these people go to jail, I see them released, and then I see them reoffend. They’re predators, and that will never change. They’ll always be among us. Their faces change, but their thoughts never do. They live among us doing what evil men do. I thought I’d seen everything. But there will always be worse.”
“Let me explain.”
“This is an awful place to die,” he says, and he looks around it as if he’s seeing it for the first time. “This useless shack in the middle of nowhere. You want to know what it was built for?”
I don’t answer him. I don’t need to.
“The guy’s name was Martin Rhodes. He was a pretty normal guy to everybody who knew him. Had a girlfriend he was engaged to. They owned a house together. They knew their neighbors, they had lots of friends. He was an artist. A sculptor. Used to make swans and shit out of blocks of ice for weddings. He was a pretty talented guy.”
“I remember,” I tell him.
“Yeah, I thought you would. He was all over the news. It’s the ice sculpting thing that people remember about him more than what he actually did. They remember that before they even remember his name. It was six or seven years ago now. So this is his cabin. This is where he brought his girlfriend when she no longer wanted to be his girlfriend.”
“There’s another guy, his name is Cyris,” I start, and he holds up his hand to stop me.
“Her name was Vicky. He tied her up and put her in the trunk of his car. That’s a long drive in that condition. A real long drive. That alone could have killed her. There used to be a bath right there,” he says, pointing to the far corner behind me. “No plumbing, just an old tub that suited the décor of this place. He kept her in the trunk while he carried buckets from the river that runs about a minute west of here. It had to be close enough so he wouldn’t have to walk far. He filled the bathtub with freezing cold water and he held her down in it. You want to know why?”
“This is a mistake,” I say, but he’s off somewhere, living in the past.
“He didn’t like the fact she was moving on without him. So he drowned her. And then he revived her. And drowned her again. He had her up here for six days, drowning or coming close to drowning her, and reviving her until she couldn’t be revived anymore. We found him when he came back into the city. He led us here. He’d put her back in the bath. He said he was cleaning her. We took the bath away as evidence and left this cabin standing. You want to know why?”
“I understand why you think-”
“It wasn’t cost-effective. That’s what they said. Didn’t want to pay anybody to drive up here with a sledgehammer and knock this shithole down. I haven’t been here since then. And I haven’t seen anything as sick until now. So when you say you understand, that’s bullshit. You don’t understand anything other than how it feels to cause pain.”
“I get it,” I say. “I get your world-has-gone-to-shit story, and maybe you’re right. Everybody hates somebody, nobody likes anybody, people fight for no reason or for every reason. It’s front-page news every day. I get it. But you’re making a mistake here. I haven’t killed anybody.”
“Q and A, Feldman. You get that? I ask, you answer. So let’s start with a fairly simple one. You think you can handle that?”