I say yes and he seems happy.
“Who has the gun?” he asks.
“You do.” It’s a big gun. No missing it.
“Who here is the officer of the law?”
“You are,” I say, though at the moment that’s a rather fine distinction to make.
“Who’s wearing the handcuffs?”
“I am.”
“Who’s on trial?”
“I am.”
“So who’s asking the questions?” he asks.
“You are.”
“So you would be?”
I shrug. “Answering,” I say.
“Are things clear enough?”
“They’re way too clear,” I tell him.
“Good, so you’ll shut up unless I’ve asked you something.”
He lifts the shotgun, crosses his legs, then replaces it. The barrel points at the wall. His hands are shaking slightly. We both notice this at the same time. I want to tell him he’s not only drawn the wrong conclusions, but also painted an entirely wrong picture. I want to tell him he’s a lunatic. I raise my left hand to my jaw-my right follows because of the handcuffs. I move slowly because I don’t want Landry misinterpreting any movement as an attempt to attack him. My jaw is throbbing. I’m lucky he didn’t dislocate it.
“I’ve brought a Bible along, Feldman. It’s in my bag. I’d offer it to you to swear upon, but I think it would be pointless.” His eyes narrow and he sweeps his hand through his gray hair. “I know what it’s like to no longer believe in God and I can’t imagine you ever did.”
I’m thinking the same thing. My life seems to have gone back to that game show, only now up for grabs is the opportunity to kill me, and it seems everybody is banging on their buzzer to have a turn. I wonder who the game-show host is then realize it’s my new friend Evil.
Landry crouches forward in his chair. “What do you believe in, Feldman?”
“A fair trial.”
He gives what sounds like a nervous laugh, then starts picking at a stain on his right knee, but only smudges it wider. He keeps itching at it then looks up at me, expressionless.
“You’re nothing more than a stain, Feldman.”
He reaches into the duffel bag and rummages around beneath his clothes and pulls out a wooden stake. I recognize the craftsmanship. He must have picked it up when he went back into my bedroom. He waves it back and forth, his eyes following it as if out of all the wooden stakes he’s seen this one has to be the nicest. Eventually his gaze moves back to me. There is no doubt in them. I can’t imagine anything I say will make him think I’m innocent.
“Which one did you murder first?” he asks.
“Why? It doesn’t matter what I say. I keep offering to tell you what happened, but the only thing you want to hear is the version you’ve come up with.” He doesn’t answer. I listen to the rain. It’s still heavy. I wonder if I’ll be dead before sunrise. “There’s nothing I can say that doesn’t make you angry.”
He keeps staring at me. Then he just nods. “Okay, Feldman, you make a good point. I said you’d have a fair trial, and that’s what I’m going to give you. So think of me as the prosecuting lawyer with a whole bunch of questions. So let’s start with the question I asked you, and we’ll see where that goes. And then we’ll see what the judge has to say.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The rain is pouring heavily on the tin roof. The inside of the cabin is damp, his skin feels clammy, his feet cold, and he feels sick at being in a place where such depravity took place. He feels sick too sitting opposite this piece of human trash.
He is starting to feel a little nauseous. When was the last time he ate? It takes him a few seconds to figure it out, which is a few seconds longer than it should have taken. It was the fries from before. He should have eaten the damn burger too. He’ll pick one up on the way home later. Maybe two or three of them.
The cabin felt just as damp last time he came out here, even though that was in the middle of summer. It’s amazing that after all these years his memory of the scene is so intense that he could almost close his eyes and use muscle memory to get around, his limbs knowing where to go. It just proves the worst thing you ever see will stay with you the longest. That girl in the bathtub died hard. Harder than anybody else he can think of.
Now that he’s here, he has to admit to himself that there are doubts starting to creep in. He’s never killed anybody before. He’s wanted to. Who hasn’t? As a cop, he’s wanted to do it more than most people. He’s had chances. There have been people he’s chased down that he could have put a bullet into, but chose not to. He’s annoyed that the anger that fueled him all the way out here seems to be disappearing. He needs to get it back. He thinks of the way Kathy and Luciana were cut open.
It helps.
It makes him feel once again he’s on the right path. Only problem is this path is pretty close to another path, one in which he thinks he should have just taken Feldman in to the station.
All he can do now is move forward. If he shows up at the station with Feldman now he’ll have to explain this little outing, and it’s going to look as though he withheld evidence just in case he felt like killing the suspect. Which is exactly what happened. And exactly what he’s going to have to do. Now. He could blame the pills and the cancer, but he’ll still be disgraced. He’ll lose his job. They’ll send him home and they’ll wonder how many other people he brought out here, or took to similar places. He’ll pass from this world to the next under a cloud of suspicion.
He pictures the two dead women. He pictures the contents of the cardboard box. He pictures the other cases he’s never been able to let go even long after they were solved. The fuel is coming back. He remembers the young woman floating facedown in the bathtub in this very cabin, her gray, wrinkled skin, her milky eyes. He thinks of other young women face down in alleyways and hallways and ditches and other bathtubs. Feldman’s as guilty as they come-he’s doing the world a favor by taking him out of it.
He hates Feldman. Hates his sarcasm. In the end it’ll be the smugness that’ll make his transition from judge to executioner easier to bear. As soon as Feldman admits what he did then he can happily. .
Happily?
That’s the wrong word. There’s nothing happy about this. This is the last place he wants to be. In six months when his sins are weighed up in whatever magical afterlife landscape he goes to, a large piece of him will still be back here.
He needs Feldman to confess, then he can get this over with. He needs that confession because it will come with a feeling of justice. With it, dying from the cancer will be easier to do.
Without it, he’s just one more bad man doing bad deeds.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“I didn’t kill anybody,” I reply, choosing to answer his question about who I killed first with the honest truth. I don’t know what it is, but nobody these days is prepared to believe anything I say, and I haven’t lied yet.
I try to think about things logically. Like a mathematician. Or one of those thinking-outside-of-the-box riddles: two people are in a room, one has a gun, the other is handcuffed. No wonder I never liked riddles.
“Kathy and Luciana were staked through the heart,” he says.
“I didn’t do it.”
“I saw the bodies. And I found a stake on your bedroom floor.”
“I can explain that.”
“Okay. Go ahead and explain.”
So I do. I go ahead and tell him how my Sunday night to Monday morning unfolded. I tell him about driving home. About Luciana stepping out in front of the car. My trip through the woods. Finding Kathy tied up. Killing Cyris. I tell him we didn’t go to the police because of what happened to Benjamin Hyatt, and how we wanted to get a lawyer first. The ghosts stay away as I tell him, but as I get closer to the end of the story, I can feel them nearby, and eventually they appear as I’m telling him about my conversation with Kathy in the lounge while Luciana was in the shower.