“Hold it there,” Landry says. I stop walking and study the landscape. Black trees, black ground, black water, black sky. This is what color the end must be. “Turn around slowly.”
I turn. The rain lands on his Kiss the Cook cap and runs off the brim. Does he have the apron to match? I can’t stop shaking. Water runs down my face. I don’t bother wiping it from my eyes. “Nice place,” I say, quietly. Too cold to be loud. Too scared to be funny.
He comes forward. “We’re nearly there, you know?”
“Where?”
“The end of the line. You want to know how I know about this place? Not about the cabin, you already know that, but about this place right here.”
“You walked the crime scene?”
“Yeah, but we wouldn’t have come this far. Only we had to. Because the girl in the bathtub wasn’t our man’s first victim. She was his second. He’d killed his first years ago. This land had been in his family for generations. He led us here. We found his first in the caves behind you.”
I don’t like the idea of taking my eyes off the weapon, but I follow his gaze and aim the flashlight where he’s pointing. The beam is swallowed up by the mouth of a cave that’s been there forever.
“Holes in there are so deep you can drop a stone and never hear it land.”
“And a body?” I ask.
“It took us two days to find her and that was only because we were looking. Nobody will ever look for you. Not out here. Right now you have a choice. Do you want to meet your maker with a clear conscience or a guilty one?”
He takes aim. I can hear my heart beating, my stomach rumbling. My jaw throbs. My neck aches. I can hear the river and the rain. My bowels are clenching. My bladder is trying to let itself go. I feel like I want to yawn, scream, run, do a thousand push-ups. I suddenly have all this energy that deserves to have a chance of release. I deserve the chance to be a better person, to be somebody who will be missed.
And even though I knew he was bringing me out here to die, I never knew it, not really, I always thought something would happen. Some kind of intervention, divine or otherwise. I picture my cold, dead body lying on this cold, dead ground, and that’s exactly what’s going to happen in five or ten seconds. Jo will go to the police and maybe they’ll figure out what happened to me, or maybe they won’t. In which case I’ll have a funeral with an empty coffin. I want people to say they miss me. I want a community in shock. I want the kids I teach to be disappointed I can teach them no more.
I think about my parents. About my friends. This is going to be hard on them.
I think of Jo and wish I could tell her how I feel about her. I wish I could say I regret what happened last night, that I regret what happened six months ago.
I’m standing in the rain beneath a storm-clouded sky, among the trees and the mud and the rocks, and this is no place to die.
I point the flashlight at his face, but the bright light doesn’t blind him.
“Goddamn you, Feldman. And God forgive me.”
I close my eyes. “Go to hell,” I tell him. I can feel my legs giving way. It’ll be a race between me collapsing and him shooting me.
He pulls the trigger and the gunshot is like thunder and I start to scream.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The wet ground vibrates waves of cold into my spine as I lie on my back, looking up at the dark clouds as water flicks into my eyes. Death has chilled me. I can hear myself screaming. I clutch my hands to my chest and can feel the blood soaking upward, warm blood. It oozes between my fingers like water and slips down the sides of my chest like water, and several seconds later I realize it actually is water, and at the same moment I realize it isn’t me screaming. I sit up and point the flashlight ahead of me. Landry is swaying back and forth, trying to keep his balance. The shotgun is in his right hand, the barrel pointing to the ground. His left hand is reaching around to the back of his head. Something moves behind him.
Or someone.
I dig my feet and hands into the slippery ground and push upward. I stand and run as hard as I can at Landry. He sees me, raises the gun, and pulls the trigger. My eyes flare red as the blood I’m about to lose surges past my brain, but the gun only clicks because it hasn’t followed the sound of a double crunch. That means even though there’s still ammo in the shotgun there’s no shell in the chamber-I’ve seen enough movies to know this. So nothing happens except this small clicking noise, which is the sweetest sound in the whole world. I hit him at full speed, first lowering my head and shoulder to make the most of the impact. I connect with his chest; the flashlight pops from my hands as the gun pops from his. My momentum drives him into a tree. His head snaps back into it.
I push myself away. The flashlight shines in my eyes for a few seconds before moving over to Landry. He looks totally out of it. If he’s really lucky I won’t turn the shotgun on him. If he’s really lucky we won’t leave him out here to freeze to death.
“I’ve never been so happy to see you,” I say, turning toward Jo.
“Don’t get happy yet,” she says, crunching the shotgun and pointing it at me. It wobbles in the air as she tries to control it. She’s never held a shotgun before, but the mechanics are simple enough to figure out-pump, point, and shoot. She bends down and picks up the flashlight, which was sitting next to the rock she hit Landry with. She moves the beam onto my face, making it difficult for me to see her. I want to hug her, but I can’t because of the handcuffs. And she’d probably shoot me.
She turns the flashlight back to Landry. Blood is running down the side of his neck and down the left side of his forehead. He’s trying to lift a hand up to his head, but it keeps flopping back down to his side.
“We need to help him,” she says.
“Do we?”
“Who is he?” she asks.
“His name is Detective Inspector Landry,” I say, “and Detective Inspector is a man who has finally seen too much in this world and wanted to put it right. Except in this case he got it all wrong.”
Landry sags a little more, tips onto his side, and ends up with his face in the dirt. I don’t know how calm I’m sounding, but Jo is looking at me as if I’m the one who’s got it all wrong. Perhaps I sound flippant, even dismissive. Yeah, just another trip into the woods. Yeah, just another psycho.
“He must have been really sure you did it to have brought you out here,” she says.
“Is there something you want to ask me?”
“Tell me again that you’re innocent.”
“I’m innocent.”
“Tell me why Detective Inspector Landry didn’t think so.”
“Because he’s a madman,” I say. I look down at him. He looks blankly back at me, still trying to hold on to consciousness. Water and mud are splashing over his cheeks.
“Thanks for following,” I say, looking back to Jo. “And thanks for saving my life. How did you get free?”
“Does it matter? You’re just lucky I decided to follow you to the police station.”
“Some police station,” I say, looking around.
“Lucky I followed anyway, huh? You’d be dead right now if I hadn’t. It was pretty obvious what was going on. Problem is I didn’t have my phone. I had no choice but to follow.”
“You had a choice,” I tell her.
“Don’t make me regret it. Come on, let’s get him onto his feet before he ends up dying out here and then I’m in the same situation you thought you were in.”
The gun moves around in her hands; she’s either shaking from the cold or from the shock of saving my life. I check Landry’s pocket where I saw him put the keys. So far he’s had nothing to say since being struck twice in the head. I like him this way.
The lock seems smaller than the key as I try to work the handcuffs. My hands are shaking so much that the tip of the key keeps chattering against the bracelet. Jo isn’t offering to help. I slide the key around until finally it fits into place. Then I go through the same drama with the second bracelet. When I’m free I snap them onto Landry’s wrists. He doesn’t complain. He’s starting to groan. He folds his hands over the top of his head. He seems to have forgotten where he is, either that or he doesn’t care anymore. He stares past me at the cave where it took a team of people two days to find a dead girl. I put the keys into my pocket.