Hendricks’s pulse raced. He was horrified at the prospect of confronting Evie-of confessing everything to her. Of allowing her to see the monster he’d become.
And still, he pounded on that door.
“Evie!” he shouted, his voice oddly tinny and distant to his own ears. “Goddamn it, Evie-open up!”
It was almost three a.m.-plenty late for most decent folks to be asleep.
If I were Evie, Hendricks thought, and some nutjob was banging on my door shouting my name, I might be reluctant to answer, too. Which is to say, he should’ve figured on what happened next.
The inside light came on, spilling yellow through the decorative glass panel in the door. Then the door flew open. As Hendricks squinted against the sudden light, a hand grabbed a fistful of his shirt. Next thing he knew, he was up against the doorjamb, the business end of a baseball bat in his face.
Fucking Stuart.
It was all Hendricks could do not to end his ass right then and there.
Instead, Hendricks tried to talk to Stuart-to calm him down. It didn’t take.
Stuart was riled up-anger masking fear. A king defending his castle. Lots of “Who the fuck are you?” and “The fuck you think you’re doing, pounding on our goddamn door in the dead of fucking night?” The whole time, Hendricks was a little bummed Stuart didn’t recognize him. Guess Evie doesn’t keep too many pictures of me around, he thought.
Then again, even if she did, you couldn’t blame the guy for not putting two and two together. No one expects his wife’s dead fiancé to come knocking in the middle of the night. But Stuart kept getting angrier and angrier-spit flying, veins pulsing, nose almost touching Hendricks’s-and the whole time, all Hendricks could think was This is the guy who gets to lie down next to Evie.
So Hendricks took the bat. Pushed Stuart back into the house-harder than was strictly necessary-and closed the door. Stuart toppled backward into the hallway, crashing ass-over-teakettle through the console table along the wall and coming to rest amid a hail of keys and cell phones and spare change.
Of course, that’s when Evie showed up.
When Stuart took the table out, Evie half-ran, half-stumbled down the stairs calling his name, as though she’d been listening from just out of sight the whole time. Then she spotted Hendricks standing over Stuart with the bat, and the air around Hendricks seemed to gel. He couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe-he just stood there staring as Evie’s fear turned to confusion, as recognition turned to shock.
“Michael?” she said, her voice tremulous.
Hearing her say his name tore at Hendricks’s insides worse than any bullet could. It hurt like love. Like dying.
Her hand to her mouth, she sank to her knees. Slowly, as if through water. Seeing her like that-mouth open, chest hitching beneath her husband’s borrowed undershirt, no noise coming out-reduced Hendricks. Broke him. All he could think was: I did this. I made her feel this way.
The bat clattered to the floor, forgotten. The distance between her and Hendricks melted away. And for a few blissful moments, he held her-her swollen belly warm against his own, her face buried in the crook of his neck as she cried.
“So let me get this straight,” she said, gripping her coffee mug in both hands, her bare legs curled under her on the couch. “This man is coming. Coming for you. And you don’t know when he’ll get here. But you mean to kill him when he does.”
“Coming for you,” Hendricks corrected. Abigail, a smooshy little bulldog puppy when Hendricks had seen her last, was now full-grown, and shaking her tiny butt in sheer delight at his return. Stuart looked less pleased.
“But to get to you.”
“Yes,” he said. “But that distinction doesn’t make you any safer.”
“No, I imagine it doesn’t.”
“But I can protect you both. Protect all of you,” he amended, scratching Abigail behind her ear while his eyes settled on Evie’s swollen belly. “You just have to trust me and do exactly as I say.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” This from Stuart. “I don’t know why we’re even listening to this bullshit! You let her think you fucking died-why in God’s name should we trust you now?”
“Because I have no reason to lie about this. I let Evie think I was dead to protect her. From this life. From this job. Why would I show up and ruin that now, if it wasn’t to keep her safe?”
Stuart snorted, rolled his eyes. “You’re a psychopath who kills for a living-who lives his life to kill. And now you’ve brought another killer to our door. Give me one good reason to do anything you say.”
So Hendricks told Stuart the bit that he’d left out. The bit he didn’t want to say aloud. The bit that, once he’d heard it, Stuart couldn’t dare ignore.
“Look, Stuart, you want the truth? Fine, here it is. Engelmann needs Evie. He needs her alive, because he thinks he can use her to get to me. Now that doesn’t mean he needs her in good condition-and this guy is not a nice man. In all likelihood, he’ll torture her, just for the pleasure of hearing her scream. And you won’t be able to do a thing about it, because you’ll be dead. See, he needs Evie, but you? You he doesn’t give a shit about. He doesn’t give a shit about you because as far as he’s concerned, you’re not worth a thing to me.”
Stuart made like he was going to object, but Hendricks raised a hand to silence him. “I know, I know, that’s not how it really is. Any claim I had on Evie died a long time ago. But you’ve got to understand just what we’re up against.”
Evie’s face darkened in thought. “Say you kill this man,” she said. “His employers will only send more, won’t they? And they’ll keep sending more until they finish the job. We’ll never be safe.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. This guy’s got all the earmarks of a freelancer. That means he only gets paid if he’s the one to kill me. Guys like him, they tend to keep their information close to the vest, because they don’t want anybody scooping their hit and making off with their fee. I know this better than just about anyone. That means there’s a good chance we can end all this tonight.” It was, Hendricks knew, an oversimplification-if not an outright lie-but it was one he needed her to believe to get her through this.
“And then what?” This from Evie. “Say you save the day. Kill the bad guy. What happens afterward?”
Hendricks shrugged, his nonchalance forced. He struggled to keep his tone even, uninflected by the tumult within. “I disappear. Leave the two of you in peace. There’s nothing for me here-no reason for me to stay.”
“You’re goddamn right there isn’t,” said Stuart, once more the king in his castle, bristling at this pretender to his throne. But Evie said nothing-her face twisted in the pain inflicted by Hendricks’s words, tears brimming in her eyes.
That was good. That was what he wanted. He needed her to hate him every bit as much as he hated himself for the plan coalescing in his mind to work.
He needed her to hate him so he could find the strength to walk away.
When she finally did speak, her tone was calm, her face impassive.
“Once you’re gone, what do we tell the police?”
“Tell them the truth,” Hendricks said. “Tell them whatever you like.”
“You wanna tell me why we’re doing all this?” Stuart’s voice strained from exertion as he and Hendricks wrestled the queen-sized mattress from the master bedroom down the stairs.
The breaking dawn was rendered barely perceptible by the dark of the coming storm. The house shook with the bass rumble of rolling thunder, and the first fat drops of what looked to be a deluge smacked like finger-taps against the windowpanes. The sound brought Hendricks back to his childhood-to a Richmond group home he lived in when he was ten. A converted church-thirty kids to a bunk room- with a roof that leaked like a faucet every time it rained and stained-glass windows that projected distorted tableaux of suffering against the walls with every lightning strike.
“No,” Hendricks replied. He had no interest in talking strategy with fucking Stuart, of all people; the only man he ever shared such thoughts with was by now on a coroner’s slab in Maine. “Do you two own a grill?”
Stuart nodded. That was something, at least: Hendricks had already discovered Stuart had never owned a firearm of any kind-not even a childhood BB gun.
“Gas or charcoal?”
“Why, you gonna criticize my goddamn grilling?”
“No. I’m going to try and save your life, and the life of the woman you love.”
“It’s gas,” said Stuart. “That help or hurt?”
“Too soon to tell if it does either,” Hendricks replied, though secretly he was pleased.
Evie, too pregnant to haul anything larger than a gallon of milk, came back wet-haired and breathless from the garage, a box of supplies propped up on the crest of her belly. Two boxes of nails. Three cans of spray paint. Some bug spray. A jug of spent motor oil. “I got some of the supplies you asked for. Looks like there’s some plywood and two-by-fours and ten gallons of gas out there besides. You want me to bring them in?”
“No!” said Stu and Hendricks in unison, neither wanting her to tax herself. “I’ll go get it,” Stuart added, abandoning his end of the mattress and disappearing out the French doors off the dining room-Abigail waddling along behind, whining with every distant rumble of thunder that announced the coming storm-leaving Hendricks to drag the mattress into position atop the other two he’d gathered alone.
“This place got a basement?” Hendricks asked Evie. “A root cellar?”
“Both,” she replied.
“Show me.”
They checked out the root cellar first. Some yards away from the house proper, it was dank and damp, and in no small measure of disrepair. Then they headed to the basement. There, Hendricks spied Evie’s old boom box on a shelf crowded with homeownerly supplies: Christmas lights; an old coffeemaker, sans pot; two pairs of Roller-blades; a box labeled Stemware.That boom box-a squat gray rectangle, too old to play CDs, with a tape deck in the center and round, black owl-eye speakers-and the box of tapes that sat beside it on the shelf were once all they had for music at the cabin. Her father had left it there years before, along with a four-cassette boxed set of Mahler symphonies; the rest of the tapes, Evie’d cultivated one by one from shoe boxes at garage sales, people selling cassettes cheap because their stereos were too new to play them. The result was a collection at once dated and timeless, tiny and all-inclusive: Bowie, the Stones, Blondie, Booker T, the Clash, Aretha, Zeppelin, Benny Goodman, Joan Jett, Prince, Elvis Costello. To this day, Hendricks couldn’t hear a one of them without thinking of her.
“That thing still work?” he asked, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.
“Far as I know,” Evie replied.
He brought it-and the box of tapes-upstairs and plugged it in. Popped in a tape and hit play. “Raspberry Beret” blared briefly from the speakers, incongruous in its cheer. Hendricks shut it off.
“You got any blank tapes?” Evie shot him a look like he’d asked where she kept her horse-drawn carriage. “Right. How about some Scotch tape, then?”
She fetched him some, while in the kitchen, Stuart dropped an armload of two-by-fours, swearing as they cracked a floor tile. If he only knew what Hendricks had in mind, he’d be swearing a whole lot more than that.
Evie returned with the Scotch tape. Hendricks ejected the Prince and put it back into its case. Then he popped one of the Mahlers from the boxed set and taped over the tabs.
Evie, watching him, asked, “Why that one?”
“No reason,” he replied-but in reality, he couldn’t stand the thought of taping over the ones she’d collected.
Hendricks called Stuart into the room. Told them both what he needed them to do. Then he left them to it and set about readying the house. He fetched the box of stemware from the basement and broke the glasses one by one, wrapping them with a tea towel and whacking them with a hammer. Then he scattered the shards inside each window in the house, save one.
He filled a mop bucket with cold water from the tub. Nailed shut all the upstairs doors. Closed blinds and shut off lights. Hung a midnight-blue sheet from the linen closet over the French doors that faced the backyard to prevent prying eyes from peering in. Dragged their china hutch in front of the bay window that faced the front.
That done, Hendricks retired to the kitchen, where he loaded up the microwave with the cans of bug spray and spray paint. Then he threw the contents of their silverware drawer in for good measure and set the timer. A button-push and ten seconds from a very big boom. Might come in handy if this didn’t shake out quite how Hendricks envisioned, provided he had a chance to trigger it. It’d kill him too for sure, but if he wound up needing it, then so be it. Dying didn’t seem so scary provided he took that bastard Engelmann with him.
Hendricks, without a word of explanation, collected bottles from Stuart and Evie’s liquor cabinet and walked the house, dumping their contents. Stuart and Evie watched in domestic horror as he ruined rugs and furniture at every turn. It was a little trick he’d picked up stalking a hitter for the Genovese crime family a few months back. Hendricks didn’t let the guy live long enough to find out if it actually worked, but in theory, it was sound-and if the fight the dude put up before Hendricks finally killed him was any indication, the guy knew what he was doing.
Booze gone, Hendricks raided their fridge and cupboards, enlisting their help in dumping mustard and eggs and peperoncinis and vinegar-even a tin of pickled her-ring-into every corner of the house now that his prior circuit with their booze rendered any objection moot. He emptied the contents of their bathroom’s spray air freshener into the air and dumped their trash onto the kitchen floor. Stuart looked as though he thought this was perhaps some kind of spiteful joke, but to his credit, he said nothing.
Then, the house marinating in rot and filth, it was time to hide the lovebirds. He told them where to go, and what to do. He watched them stroll arm-in-arm away from him, Abigail toddling between them, until they vanished from sight.
His preparations done, Hendricks wandered Evie’s house to ensure there wasn’t anything he’d missed. His plan didn’t allow for any error-not with an adversary as formidable as Engelmann. He had precisely one shot at pulling this off, and it was a long one at that.
When he finished his patrol, he made a quick trip to the kitchen to fetch a chef’s knife and one of Stuart’s longneck PBRs. Hendricks tested the heft and balance of the knife in his hand and decided it’d do. Then he cracked the beer and retired to the couch, to sit and listen in the darkness.
He wondered if Engelmann was minutes away, or hours, or perhaps already here-watching, waiting for the opportunity to strike.
It didn’t matter. Eventually, Hendricks knew, he’d come. All Hendricks had to do was wait.
And he was very good at waiting.