Obsession (A Murderous Mind Book 2), page 16
John offered no argument. “It’s safe for us?”
“Not as safe as your dorm, but yes, I think so.”
“How did you know about this place?”
Harry didn’t turn his head but kept it slightly raised and facing the building. “We have enough to think about right now. Come on.”
Harry made his way to the building’s front door, then veered to the right, heading to the corner of what once was probably a gorgeous stone entryway.
John watched from a dozen feet back.
“I know it’s here somewhere,” Harry muttered, bent over and rummaging in the dark. John couldn’t see what he was doing, but it sounded like stones were being moved. Harry lifted them gently so the scraping sounds weren’t too loud. “Where the hell is it?” he said, head down, clouded by the building’s looming shadow.
“What are you—”
“Got it!” Harry whisper-shouted. He walked back to John, holding something in his hand.
“What’s that?” John tried peering through the night.
“Grabbed it from the Old Hall.”
John squinted, wondering what the hell he had grabbed from that place. The Old Hall was the first building built on the campus, but people rarely went into it. The thing was more or less a museum to brag about what the school had done in the past.
“This,” Harry said, lifting his arm at the elbow. John saw a long metal pole with a point on the end.
“A fire poker? You grabbed it from the fireplace?”
Harry smiled. “Come on.”
John watched as Harry walked away, not waiting for him like he hadn’t waited when they left the dorm. John wasn’t questioning himself or fearful. Just...
This is it, he thought.
Things had gone too far to turn back now, so John followed his dead friend into an abandoned building—abandoned by all except those society cast off.
He walked inside and immediately smelled the musk of stagnant air. The place reeked of sweat and, somehow, pain.
“Come on,” Harry whispered. He turned the corner with John right behind him. No lights, only the moon’s inconsistent rays shining through broken windows. John followed, wondering if his footsteps sounded as loud to anyone else as they did to him.
Harry took a right, and before them was why they had come.
A man lay on the floor, his brown skin touching the linoleum. No pillow, no sheet, just the clothes on his back.
“He’ll work,” Harry said.
John looked at Harry, understanding what he meant.
He’ll work meant they had reached their destination.
Harry lifted the metal pole and handed it to John. He didn’t take it. Instead, he looked at the sleeping man, who hadn’t woken up when someone spoke next to him.
“No one will know,” Harry said.
John knew that to be true. This guy had no family. Probably hadn’t paid taxes in two decades, if ever. No one was looking for him. If he died tonight, the world would spin on undisturbed.
“Take it,” Harry urged. “Give it one good swing, and if you don’t immediately feel better, we’ll leave.”
John felt a cold focus fall over him. He had felt it before with the squirrel. With Harry.
He took the metal stick and rested it on its point.
“You do this, and it’ll be over, John. You won’t need to stress anymore. You won’t need to keep thinking about how good it’ll feel.”
John raised the poker above his head as if it were an ax and the man’s head was a block of wood.
John swung until he couldn’t raise his arms anymore. The man had stopped screaming ten minutes earlier.
John blinked, seeing the hallway around him as if for the first time.
That wasn’t true. He remembered what happened in detail, but then he hadn’t seen anything except the rise and fall of the poker and the flesh ripping apart, one whack at a time. The blood—normally red but now a dark maroon—spattering out as the man’s meat gave way to bone, then bone to brain.
The man lay on the floor in nearly the same position, except his brown skin was now in tatters, and his chest no longer filled with air.
John looked around, wondering why he didn’t hear Harry’s voice. Harry, who hadn’t stopped speaking for almost a goddamn month, should be talking now. Rambling about how much fun they had and how great it was until John could puke.
As his eyes flashed around the dark hallway, he knew he wouldn’t find his dead friend. Even in the shadows, Harry couldn’t hide from John. Harry wasn’t there. He’d left, leaving John and the body to reminisce about their fun times by themselves.
“What the fuck?”
The eagerness, the cold focus, and the goddamn desire were gone.
John recognized what he’d done. For the first time, he saw the effects of his daydreaming and wishing. It lay before him, a broken and bloody mess with brains oozing from its head.
Harry had said John wouldn’t get caught. He’d said no one would find out about this man, but Harry was gone, and what evidence had John left? Had cameras seen him walking across the quad? Had anyone been up late and looking out their window despite Harry’s attempts to keep them hidden?
John looked at his hands for the first time, and a bone-deep horror took hold.
Blood splattered his hands, no longer warm. Soon it would cake.
“Oh, no,” he moaned. “Oh, no.”
He couldn’t go into the dorm like this. What time was it, three? Where could he shower? Just let the blood run off him into the communal bathroom, hoping the thin plastic curtain would keep anyone from seeing what he washed off?
“Where the fuck are you, Harry?” John asked, hoping, almost praying, that Harry would come back. Just joshing around, John! I’m still here.
No one answered.
John lifted the bottom of his shirt, smearing more of the dead man’s blood on it, and wiped off the poker. He went up and down it multiple times to make sure no fingerprints remained.
He didn’t have time to focus on Harry or what he’d done right now. He needed to make sure he left nothing here for anyone to find. He leaned against the wall and looked at the bottoms of his shoes. No blood. That was good.
What else was there? He hadn’t thought about this part. His mind had only focused on getting here and doing what Harry told him. He mentally backtracked, thinking about everything he’d touched on his way in, but he couldn’t remember anything. He had simply followed, right?
“Oh, shit! You killed him!”
The words were flung across the hallway, hitting John’s ears like a bucket of ice water in a hot tub. His eyes jumped from the body to the end of the hall, where he saw a skinny white woman staring at him. Her hair was a bird’s nest of twisting clumps, and her mouth hung open in disbelief.
“You gonna be in some trouble.”
John didn’t try to make sense of her words. All he saw—all he cared about—was that she had seen him. With the poker. Standing over the dead man.
John didn’t think. He simply moved, stepping over the body as if it were a discarded t-shirt on the floor. The woman didn’t quit staring at the dead man, not until John ran toward her. Then she looked up, her open mouth gaping wider when she understood what was about to happen. Despite whatever problems lived in her mind, she clearly knew when her survival was at stake.
She turned to run, one hand reaching to the wall for support.
Too late.
John attacked as if her head were a ball and her body a stand. He reared back for a powerful swing as if he were playing t-ball and connected in a bone-shaking hit, smacking the woman’s temple with the point of the poker. She collapsed in a heap as if her body's thinness belied its weight.
Her eyes were closed, but it was too late to take chances.
John brought the poker down on her skull with a wet thwap. Then again. And again.
He stood above the dead woman, breathing heavily.
As he walked back to the first body, he looked at the floor to see if he had stepped in blood and tracked it. He didn’t see anything, but how could he be sure?
Sureties don’t exist in murder, part of him said.
25
A PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG MAN
Depression followed.
It came on slowly like winter, and day after day, it grew progressively worse.
John spoke to no one. He kept everything inside because there was no one he could share with. He read the papers, but nothing showed up about the bodies. Two weeks later, he checked the police blotter and saw that they had been found, but no one had bothered to try to identify them.
Cindy didn’t call, and neither did he. John wanted to. God, did he ever. If he could only talk to her and apologize, have someone just a bit closer to his world… It felt like he was underwater in a frozen lake, pounding on the ice above him. If he could just crack through, air awaited. Cindy was that air and the ice was the debacle he had caused in the cafeteria.
He ate little.
He slept less.
When he did close his eyes, he saw the woman, her hair pulled back from her face. He heard that thwap when he brought the pole down on her head. He saw her blood leaking all over that horrible, dirty hallway.
Perhaps things would have turned out differently if Cindy hadn’t come back. Because he didn’t just want to talk to her. No, the depression compounded that to a degree that John almost couldn’t handle. Perhaps he would have sunk until he ended his own life instead of others’.
Instead, she showed up at eight at night on a Thursday. John hadn’t so much as glanced her way in the past month, not in class, the hallways, or the cafeteria. She treated him the same way: as if he didn’t exist.
Then she knocked as John lay on top of the covers in his bed, lights still on, ready for another mostly sleepless night.
He thought about not answering and wasn’t going to until she spoke.
“It’s me.”
John was sure he had never heard such sweet words.
He sat up, swung his feet off the bed, and looked at the door. She wasn’t allowed inside the dorm, let alone his room, but she was only a few feet away.
John stood and went to the door, then turned the lock. He opened it slowly, revealing Cindy, and tears came to his eyes when he saw her.
“Hey,” he said, not reaching up to wipe them away. His voice shook, and he was certain the breakdown would come soon, the one in which all this ended. The depression, the self-hate, all ending when he threw himself from his dorm room window.
“You’re going to need to get a restraining order if you don’t want to see me,” Cindy said. No tears in her eyes, only a hard clarity. “I’m not going anywhere. I don’t care what you say in lunch rooms or if you ignore me. I like you, John. Hell, I might even love you, and I’m not running just because you’re scared of something. So watch out.”
She walked toward him, using her left arm to move him out of the way. He didn’t resist. She stepped past him and sat on the chair at his small desk. She didn’t say anything, just crossed one leg and stared at him as he stood by the door, dumbfounded.
Finally, John closed it and sat on his bed, facing her.
“I’m sorry,” he said and sobbed.
26
PRESENT DAY
John parked his car but didn’t get out.
He rolled the windows down and turned the air conditioning off. He was in a dark motel parking lot, and he didn’t know what to do. This wasn’t an American motel but a Mexican one, and the clock on his dashboard read eleven.
He had driven for the past twelve hours, crossing the border but not stopping there. He didn’t know where he was going, only that he wanted to be far from Dallas, Texas.
Harry hadn’t shown up during the drive. John had done it alone, as he did all the hard shit Harry put him through.
“Fuck,” he said and grabbed the cell phone on the passenger seat. He didn’t want to look at it, but he had few choices. He knew what he would see, but knowing and seeing were very different things.
Twenty-five missed calls, all from Diane.
He had to call her, but what would he say?
“Buck up, champ!”
John looked in his rearview mirror. Even in the weak light of the moon, John could see Harry’s expanded pupil staring at him.
“Where the fuck have you been?” John growled.
“I needed a little vacation, that’s all. I’m back. No worries.”
John shook his head, his eyes narrowing to slits. “What the hell am I going to do, Harry? I don’t even know how to go in there and ask for a room. I don’t speak Spanish!”
Harry looked out his window at the little motel. “Dingy thing, isn’t it?”
“You were expecting the Four Seasons? I’m serious. I can’t go back. I can’t live down here. THERE’S NOTHING I CAN DO, GODDAMNIT!” His voice boomed inside the car.
Harry didn’t look at John. He just gazed at the motel. The dim lights around the outside cast yellow rays on the concrete lot.
“John,” he said after a few moments, “we’re fine. We’re actually more than fine. Don’t you see that?”
“Clearly not.”
“Dickface is going to think you ran. So you stay down here for a month. Tell Diane whatever you want, but stay here. Then, after that month, slide back over the border and kill them all. He will have moved on to the next case. His boss will force that. The Starbucks girl won’t be suspicious anymore. All of them will have gone back to their regular lives, and you can slip in and end their little lives.” Harry looked at John. “This is temporary, my man.”
“Tell Diane whatever I want? What about work, Harry? What do I tell them? They’re not going to like that I took a month’s vacation with no notice.”
“You can work from down here. Tell them you’re having personal issues, and put in hours anywhere that has Wi-Fi.”
John looked out the windshield, wondering if that was possible. Or was it just another brick falling off Harry’s crumbling building? That was the problem. John couldn’t tell since when Harry spoke, what he said made sense. What about the aftermath? Well, he sat alone in a motel parking lot, talking to someone his imagination had created.
“John, if you can think of anything else that will work, I’m all ears.”
“If I go back and kill them, then what? You think the death of two people attached to my case will go unnoticed, Harry? Or do you think it might focus a bit more scrutiny on me?”
“For someone with as many degrees as you have, you don’t possess any imagination.”
“Then you tell me, Steve Jobs. What do we do?”
“The same thing we did when you were eighteen.”
John spun in his seat and glared at Harry. “You can’t be serious.”
Harry smiled. “Oh, yeah. It’ll be fucking perfect.”
“You’re where?” Diane asked.
“In Mexico.”
“And just what are you doing there, John? Did you finally take your little vacation? Having a good time soaking up some rays?” she asked. Her voice was calm as she moved across the kitchen as if she were speaking to a small dog that couldn’t figure out how to get at a bone hidden under the table.
He paused, then said, “I don’t know what you want from me.”
“Have I not been clear about that?”
Despite the calm in her voice—the almost antagonistic patronization—Diane felt completely lost. It was two in the morning, and she sat at her kitchen table with the lights off throughout the house with her phone to her ear, talking to a husband who’d decided he was going to reside in another country. None of it made sense, and Diane really didn’t know what to say. She was only talking to John because she feared that if she got off, she would never hear from him again.
“Why won’t you tell me what’s happening?” she asked, but nothing came back. “Did you kill anyone, John? Are you running because you did? God, just tell me if so. We can get through it. We’ll get a lawyer and we’ll figure it out, but don’t keep me in the dark like this. I can’t handle it, John. I can’t fucking handle it.”
Her voice cracked, and emotion welled from her heart to her eyes. “Why won’t you let me in? What’s happening?”
Silence, both in the house and on the phone, then, “I didn’t kill anyone, Diane. That’s insane.”
“THEN WHY DID YOU LEAVE?” she screamed, forgetting about the boys sleeping in their beds. She brought her voice under control and spat the next words like bullets from a silenced pistol. “If you didn’t do anything wrong, why the fuck did you leave the country, John? Tell me that. A vacation? When was the last vacation you took without us?”
“I’m still working. My boss approved it.”
“Oh, that’s great, John. Really great. You can still get your job finished even if you’re neglecting being a father and husband. At least you can still contribute to the bottom line. Stop ignoring the question. Why did you leave? Just tell me that. Why?”
“I can’t tell you, Diane.”
She heard the first crack in his voice, a sound that made her think of a levee breaking. “You can. You can tell me anything. I’m your wife.”
“I’ll be back soon,” he promised.
“That’s not good enough, John. If you don’t tell me what’s going on, then don’t come back. Just stay down there.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“I do,” she said. “If you won’t let me in, then I’m forcing you out.”
“I love you,” John said. “I’ll call soon.”
Diane hung up and dropped the phone on the table, hand shaking.
Did he murder that person? Was that why he left? She hadn’t asked about the lawyer because she couldn’t keep anything in her head for longer than five seconds.
Oh, God, what do I do? What in the hell do I do?
The police? She could go to them, but what if John did it? She didn’t care about the repercussions. Diane wouldn’t report him until she had to choose between him or her kids. If she was forced to choose John or herself, she would side with John every time.
“Not as safe as your dorm, but yes, I think so.”
“How did you know about this place?”
Harry didn’t turn his head but kept it slightly raised and facing the building. “We have enough to think about right now. Come on.”
Harry made his way to the building’s front door, then veered to the right, heading to the corner of what once was probably a gorgeous stone entryway.
John watched from a dozen feet back.
“I know it’s here somewhere,” Harry muttered, bent over and rummaging in the dark. John couldn’t see what he was doing, but it sounded like stones were being moved. Harry lifted them gently so the scraping sounds weren’t too loud. “Where the hell is it?” he said, head down, clouded by the building’s looming shadow.
“What are you—”
“Got it!” Harry whisper-shouted. He walked back to John, holding something in his hand.
“What’s that?” John tried peering through the night.
“Grabbed it from the Old Hall.”
John squinted, wondering what the hell he had grabbed from that place. The Old Hall was the first building built on the campus, but people rarely went into it. The thing was more or less a museum to brag about what the school had done in the past.
“This,” Harry said, lifting his arm at the elbow. John saw a long metal pole with a point on the end.
“A fire poker? You grabbed it from the fireplace?”
Harry smiled. “Come on.”
John watched as Harry walked away, not waiting for him like he hadn’t waited when they left the dorm. John wasn’t questioning himself or fearful. Just...
This is it, he thought.
Things had gone too far to turn back now, so John followed his dead friend into an abandoned building—abandoned by all except those society cast off.
He walked inside and immediately smelled the musk of stagnant air. The place reeked of sweat and, somehow, pain.
“Come on,” Harry whispered. He turned the corner with John right behind him. No lights, only the moon’s inconsistent rays shining through broken windows. John followed, wondering if his footsteps sounded as loud to anyone else as they did to him.
Harry took a right, and before them was why they had come.
A man lay on the floor, his brown skin touching the linoleum. No pillow, no sheet, just the clothes on his back.
“He’ll work,” Harry said.
John looked at Harry, understanding what he meant.
He’ll work meant they had reached their destination.
Harry lifted the metal pole and handed it to John. He didn’t take it. Instead, he looked at the sleeping man, who hadn’t woken up when someone spoke next to him.
“No one will know,” Harry said.
John knew that to be true. This guy had no family. Probably hadn’t paid taxes in two decades, if ever. No one was looking for him. If he died tonight, the world would spin on undisturbed.
“Take it,” Harry urged. “Give it one good swing, and if you don’t immediately feel better, we’ll leave.”
John felt a cold focus fall over him. He had felt it before with the squirrel. With Harry.
He took the metal stick and rested it on its point.
“You do this, and it’ll be over, John. You won’t need to stress anymore. You won’t need to keep thinking about how good it’ll feel.”
John raised the poker above his head as if it were an ax and the man’s head was a block of wood.
John swung until he couldn’t raise his arms anymore. The man had stopped screaming ten minutes earlier.
John blinked, seeing the hallway around him as if for the first time.
That wasn’t true. He remembered what happened in detail, but then he hadn’t seen anything except the rise and fall of the poker and the flesh ripping apart, one whack at a time. The blood—normally red but now a dark maroon—spattering out as the man’s meat gave way to bone, then bone to brain.
The man lay on the floor in nearly the same position, except his brown skin was now in tatters, and his chest no longer filled with air.
John looked around, wondering why he didn’t hear Harry’s voice. Harry, who hadn’t stopped speaking for almost a goddamn month, should be talking now. Rambling about how much fun they had and how great it was until John could puke.
As his eyes flashed around the dark hallway, he knew he wouldn’t find his dead friend. Even in the shadows, Harry couldn’t hide from John. Harry wasn’t there. He’d left, leaving John and the body to reminisce about their fun times by themselves.
“What the fuck?”
The eagerness, the cold focus, and the goddamn desire were gone.
John recognized what he’d done. For the first time, he saw the effects of his daydreaming and wishing. It lay before him, a broken and bloody mess with brains oozing from its head.
Harry had said John wouldn’t get caught. He’d said no one would find out about this man, but Harry was gone, and what evidence had John left? Had cameras seen him walking across the quad? Had anyone been up late and looking out their window despite Harry’s attempts to keep them hidden?
John looked at his hands for the first time, and a bone-deep horror took hold.
Blood splattered his hands, no longer warm. Soon it would cake.
“Oh, no,” he moaned. “Oh, no.”
He couldn’t go into the dorm like this. What time was it, three? Where could he shower? Just let the blood run off him into the communal bathroom, hoping the thin plastic curtain would keep anyone from seeing what he washed off?
“Where the fuck are you, Harry?” John asked, hoping, almost praying, that Harry would come back. Just joshing around, John! I’m still here.
No one answered.
John lifted the bottom of his shirt, smearing more of the dead man’s blood on it, and wiped off the poker. He went up and down it multiple times to make sure no fingerprints remained.
He didn’t have time to focus on Harry or what he’d done right now. He needed to make sure he left nothing here for anyone to find. He leaned against the wall and looked at the bottoms of his shoes. No blood. That was good.
What else was there? He hadn’t thought about this part. His mind had only focused on getting here and doing what Harry told him. He mentally backtracked, thinking about everything he’d touched on his way in, but he couldn’t remember anything. He had simply followed, right?
“Oh, shit! You killed him!”
The words were flung across the hallway, hitting John’s ears like a bucket of ice water in a hot tub. His eyes jumped from the body to the end of the hall, where he saw a skinny white woman staring at him. Her hair was a bird’s nest of twisting clumps, and her mouth hung open in disbelief.
“You gonna be in some trouble.”
John didn’t try to make sense of her words. All he saw—all he cared about—was that she had seen him. With the poker. Standing over the dead man.
John didn’t think. He simply moved, stepping over the body as if it were a discarded t-shirt on the floor. The woman didn’t quit staring at the dead man, not until John ran toward her. Then she looked up, her open mouth gaping wider when she understood what was about to happen. Despite whatever problems lived in her mind, she clearly knew when her survival was at stake.
She turned to run, one hand reaching to the wall for support.
Too late.
John attacked as if her head were a ball and her body a stand. He reared back for a powerful swing as if he were playing t-ball and connected in a bone-shaking hit, smacking the woman’s temple with the point of the poker. She collapsed in a heap as if her body's thinness belied its weight.
Her eyes were closed, but it was too late to take chances.
John brought the poker down on her skull with a wet thwap. Then again. And again.
He stood above the dead woman, breathing heavily.
As he walked back to the first body, he looked at the floor to see if he had stepped in blood and tracked it. He didn’t see anything, but how could he be sure?
Sureties don’t exist in murder, part of him said.
25
A PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG MAN
Depression followed.
It came on slowly like winter, and day after day, it grew progressively worse.
John spoke to no one. He kept everything inside because there was no one he could share with. He read the papers, but nothing showed up about the bodies. Two weeks later, he checked the police blotter and saw that they had been found, but no one had bothered to try to identify them.
Cindy didn’t call, and neither did he. John wanted to. God, did he ever. If he could only talk to her and apologize, have someone just a bit closer to his world… It felt like he was underwater in a frozen lake, pounding on the ice above him. If he could just crack through, air awaited. Cindy was that air and the ice was the debacle he had caused in the cafeteria.
He ate little.
He slept less.
When he did close his eyes, he saw the woman, her hair pulled back from her face. He heard that thwap when he brought the pole down on her head. He saw her blood leaking all over that horrible, dirty hallway.
Perhaps things would have turned out differently if Cindy hadn’t come back. Because he didn’t just want to talk to her. No, the depression compounded that to a degree that John almost couldn’t handle. Perhaps he would have sunk until he ended his own life instead of others’.
Instead, she showed up at eight at night on a Thursday. John hadn’t so much as glanced her way in the past month, not in class, the hallways, or the cafeteria. She treated him the same way: as if he didn’t exist.
Then she knocked as John lay on top of the covers in his bed, lights still on, ready for another mostly sleepless night.
He thought about not answering and wasn’t going to until she spoke.
“It’s me.”
John was sure he had never heard such sweet words.
He sat up, swung his feet off the bed, and looked at the door. She wasn’t allowed inside the dorm, let alone his room, but she was only a few feet away.
John stood and went to the door, then turned the lock. He opened it slowly, revealing Cindy, and tears came to his eyes when he saw her.
“Hey,” he said, not reaching up to wipe them away. His voice shook, and he was certain the breakdown would come soon, the one in which all this ended. The depression, the self-hate, all ending when he threw himself from his dorm room window.
“You’re going to need to get a restraining order if you don’t want to see me,” Cindy said. No tears in her eyes, only a hard clarity. “I’m not going anywhere. I don’t care what you say in lunch rooms or if you ignore me. I like you, John. Hell, I might even love you, and I’m not running just because you’re scared of something. So watch out.”
She walked toward him, using her left arm to move him out of the way. He didn’t resist. She stepped past him and sat on the chair at his small desk. She didn’t say anything, just crossed one leg and stared at him as he stood by the door, dumbfounded.
Finally, John closed it and sat on his bed, facing her.
“I’m sorry,” he said and sobbed.
26
PRESENT DAY
John parked his car but didn’t get out.
He rolled the windows down and turned the air conditioning off. He was in a dark motel parking lot, and he didn’t know what to do. This wasn’t an American motel but a Mexican one, and the clock on his dashboard read eleven.
He had driven for the past twelve hours, crossing the border but not stopping there. He didn’t know where he was going, only that he wanted to be far from Dallas, Texas.
Harry hadn’t shown up during the drive. John had done it alone, as he did all the hard shit Harry put him through.
“Fuck,” he said and grabbed the cell phone on the passenger seat. He didn’t want to look at it, but he had few choices. He knew what he would see, but knowing and seeing were very different things.
Twenty-five missed calls, all from Diane.
He had to call her, but what would he say?
“Buck up, champ!”
John looked in his rearview mirror. Even in the weak light of the moon, John could see Harry’s expanded pupil staring at him.
“Where the fuck have you been?” John growled.
“I needed a little vacation, that’s all. I’m back. No worries.”
John shook his head, his eyes narrowing to slits. “What the hell am I going to do, Harry? I don’t even know how to go in there and ask for a room. I don’t speak Spanish!”
Harry looked out his window at the little motel. “Dingy thing, isn’t it?”
“You were expecting the Four Seasons? I’m serious. I can’t go back. I can’t live down here. THERE’S NOTHING I CAN DO, GODDAMNIT!” His voice boomed inside the car.
Harry didn’t look at John. He just gazed at the motel. The dim lights around the outside cast yellow rays on the concrete lot.
“John,” he said after a few moments, “we’re fine. We’re actually more than fine. Don’t you see that?”
“Clearly not.”
“Dickface is going to think you ran. So you stay down here for a month. Tell Diane whatever you want, but stay here. Then, after that month, slide back over the border and kill them all. He will have moved on to the next case. His boss will force that. The Starbucks girl won’t be suspicious anymore. All of them will have gone back to their regular lives, and you can slip in and end their little lives.” Harry looked at John. “This is temporary, my man.”
“Tell Diane whatever I want? What about work, Harry? What do I tell them? They’re not going to like that I took a month’s vacation with no notice.”
“You can work from down here. Tell them you’re having personal issues, and put in hours anywhere that has Wi-Fi.”
John looked out the windshield, wondering if that was possible. Or was it just another brick falling off Harry’s crumbling building? That was the problem. John couldn’t tell since when Harry spoke, what he said made sense. What about the aftermath? Well, he sat alone in a motel parking lot, talking to someone his imagination had created.
“John, if you can think of anything else that will work, I’m all ears.”
“If I go back and kill them, then what? You think the death of two people attached to my case will go unnoticed, Harry? Or do you think it might focus a bit more scrutiny on me?”
“For someone with as many degrees as you have, you don’t possess any imagination.”
“Then you tell me, Steve Jobs. What do we do?”
“The same thing we did when you were eighteen.”
John spun in his seat and glared at Harry. “You can’t be serious.”
Harry smiled. “Oh, yeah. It’ll be fucking perfect.”
“You’re where?” Diane asked.
“In Mexico.”
“And just what are you doing there, John? Did you finally take your little vacation? Having a good time soaking up some rays?” she asked. Her voice was calm as she moved across the kitchen as if she were speaking to a small dog that couldn’t figure out how to get at a bone hidden under the table.
He paused, then said, “I don’t know what you want from me.”
“Have I not been clear about that?”
Despite the calm in her voice—the almost antagonistic patronization—Diane felt completely lost. It was two in the morning, and she sat at her kitchen table with the lights off throughout the house with her phone to her ear, talking to a husband who’d decided he was going to reside in another country. None of it made sense, and Diane really didn’t know what to say. She was only talking to John because she feared that if she got off, she would never hear from him again.
“Why won’t you tell me what’s happening?” she asked, but nothing came back. “Did you kill anyone, John? Are you running because you did? God, just tell me if so. We can get through it. We’ll get a lawyer and we’ll figure it out, but don’t keep me in the dark like this. I can’t handle it, John. I can’t fucking handle it.”
Her voice cracked, and emotion welled from her heart to her eyes. “Why won’t you let me in? What’s happening?”
Silence, both in the house and on the phone, then, “I didn’t kill anyone, Diane. That’s insane.”
“THEN WHY DID YOU LEAVE?” she screamed, forgetting about the boys sleeping in their beds. She brought her voice under control and spat the next words like bullets from a silenced pistol. “If you didn’t do anything wrong, why the fuck did you leave the country, John? Tell me that. A vacation? When was the last vacation you took without us?”
“I’m still working. My boss approved it.”
“Oh, that’s great, John. Really great. You can still get your job finished even if you’re neglecting being a father and husband. At least you can still contribute to the bottom line. Stop ignoring the question. Why did you leave? Just tell me that. Why?”
“I can’t tell you, Diane.”
She heard the first crack in his voice, a sound that made her think of a levee breaking. “You can. You can tell me anything. I’m your wife.”
“I’ll be back soon,” he promised.
“That’s not good enough, John. If you don’t tell me what’s going on, then don’t come back. Just stay down there.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“I do,” she said. “If you won’t let me in, then I’m forcing you out.”
“I love you,” John said. “I’ll call soon.”
Diane hung up and dropped the phone on the table, hand shaking.
Did he murder that person? Was that why he left? She hadn’t asked about the lawyer because she couldn’t keep anything in her head for longer than five seconds.
Oh, God, what do I do? What in the hell do I do?
The police? She could go to them, but what if John did it? She didn’t care about the repercussions. Diane wouldn’t report him until she had to choose between him or her kids. If she was forced to choose John or herself, she would side with John every time.
