Quinn saw a red mist appear like a halo around Avis’s head, saw a fragment of skull and hair spin back and away. Avis’s arm fell away from Pearl. They both toppled backward.
Avis lay still on his back. Pearl rolled to the side and scrambled to her feet. She was trembling, and there were flecks of blood and what looked like gray brain matter on her left cheek.
Quinn had moved forward after the shot without realizing it. He and Pearl stared down at Avis’s motionless figure. A large piece of Avis’s skull was missing above his left eye. Without the vitality of life he looked diminutive and harmless.
Quinn and Pearl noticed at the same time how close it had been. Avis had managed to cock the pistol in the second before he’d died.
Instinctively, Quinn kicked the gun away from the dead hand, halfway across the room.
The bullet that had taken off part of Avis’s skull had also broken a window, allowing the breeze to enter through the shattered pane. A curtain blown in the wind momentarily created a shadow on the wall that looked like a huge feathered wing.
For the first time in her life, Pearl fainted.
82
Perhaps it had been the pain that made her lose consciousness. Or maybe Lavern had simply fallen asleep.
It was the pain that had awakened her. With each breath, the ribs on her left side seemed to catch fire. She was still holding on to the shotgun barrel, the butt of its wooden stock resting on the bedroom floor.
She had no idea how long she’d slept or been unconscious. From where she sat she couldn’t see the clock.
Hobbs was still snoring, but not loudly. The TV was still on beyond the foot of the bed, tuned to the news, still muted. Yellow closed-caption letters crawled past at the bottom of the screen while an impossibly beautiful blond anchorwoman mouthed each syllable with red, red lips.
Lavern looked beyond the TV, saw light edging the drawn shades, and knew it was morning. Early morning.
Hobbs suddenly snorted and coughed, then resumed snoring. He was sleeping more lightly now. He might wake up soon.
Something on TV caught Lavern’s attention. The closed-caption lettering indicated that the anchorwoman was talking about the Slicer being shot to death in some woman’s apartment. It had turned out that he wasn’t also the .25-Caliber Killer—but the man gunned down earlier by the police was his son, who’d procured the victims for his father. The son, who’d arranged urban ‘hunts,’ had apparently killed no one directly, but had seduced and prepared women for his father to murder and butcher.
Suddenly the screen was split, and another woman appeared, a lanky redhead. The blond anchorwoman was on the other half of the screen, interviewing her. They were discussing the reasons why the father-son team of killers acted as they had. Lavern would have turned up the sound so she could hear their voices, but she was afraid to risk waking Hobbs.
The redheaded woman, Helen something, was explaining the emotional trap the son had been in, and the societal, sometimes-ancient forces that had acted upon both father and son. Reasons and motivations stemmed from all of this. Motivations to kill. Excuses for killing.
None of it sounded like justification to Lavern.
Yet here she was with a shotgun beside her, waiting for her husband to wake up so she could kill him, so she could do to him what he would otherwise eventually do to her.
I have the courage to kill him, but not to leave him.
But did she really believe that? And wasn’t there more to it?
She understood for the first time that she might leave Hobbs and learn how to live without him, but if she killed him he’d be with her always.
Always.
She made sure the shotgun’s wooden stock was firmly planted on the floor, then used the gun as a cane to help her stand up from her chair.
Lavern took a few careful steps. It hurt, but she could walk.
She leaned the shotgun against the bed, where Hobbs would see it when he woke up and think about what might have happened.
Then she limped from the bedroom and went outside. Lavern was still wearing yesterday’s clothes, carrying yesterday’s pain, but right now she didn’t care.
It took her twenty minutes to hail a cab and tell the driver to take her to the Broken Wing Women’s Shelter.
83
Quinn would have smoked one of the Cuban cigars he’d recently bought from Iggy, his supplier, but he knew it wasn’t worth the disapproval and barrage of air-freshener bombs hissing their incense all over his apartment. As if it weren’t his apartment.
He stared at the ceiling and considered how things had worked out.
The case had become clearer in the light of further research, as they all did in the post-arrest phase. The evidence was being added to, reexamined, reclassified, and analyzed. There would of course be no trial, with Martin Hawk and his father both dead.
This one had what the pop psychologists called closure.
Fedderman had returned to Florida, where he thought he could live cheaper and there were a few places that served what tasted like New York deli food. He’d said he might take another fling at golf.
Renz’s reputation was at its high point. A mayoral bid didn’t seem so far fetched at the moment. He and Quinn talked frequently, still arranging and organizing material to develop the full story of what had happened, how this familial team of killer and enabler had evolved. But much of the story was lost in the past and the wooded hills around Black Lake, Missouri, and would never be known. From time to time Renz would mention that someday he might write a book about the case. Being a published author was important in politics, locally or nationally.
Berty Wrenner, as well as most of the surviving Quest and Quarry clients, had been tried and convicted, and the rash of modern-day duels in the city had soon abated.
Quinn’s reverie suddenly ended with the grating ring of the intercom. He glanced at his watch and climbed out of bed.
Pearl identified herself, and he buzzed her in, then unlocked the apartment door and returned to the bedroom to pull on some pants.
He was sitting on the bed working socks on his feet when Pearl walked into the room. She was wearing jeans, black boots, and a black leather jacket. She had a folded Post tucked under one arm.
She said, “You’re running late, Quinn.”
“I took a shower last night,” he said. “I’ll get dressed, and we can get right outta here.” He’d promised Pearl he’d go with her to visit her mother at the Sunset Assisted Living home in New Jersey. She had to appear there at least every month or so to keep the staff on their toes. She felt it was her duty. She hated to go alone. Quinn understood why, but on another level he kind of liked Pearl’s mother.
Pearl sniffed the air. “You been smoking, Quinn?”
“Not in months,” he lied.
“Smells like smoke.”
“It lingers.” He nodded toward the folded newspaper as he struggled to put on his shoes. “Anything going on?”
“Nothing unusual. A guy on the Lower East Side killed himself with a shotgun outside a women’s shelter. Put the barrel in his mouth and used a bent wire hanger to push the trigger. Made a big mess in the street.”
“You’re right,” Quinn said. “Nothing unusual.”
He went into the bathroom and peed, washed his hands, used deodorant, splashed cold water on his face, then combed his hair. It stuck up kind of funny on one side, but what the hell. He went back to the bedroom and found a clean shirt. Added a conservative blue tie. Pearl’s mother would like that.
Within a few minutes they were in the Lincoln and on their way, driving through a light snow that the weather forecasters swore wouldn’t amount to any measurable accumulation.