Mr. Murder Page 5

  “Madonna with a snake in your teeth. I know, baby. What I’m saying is, you’re more stressed about the magazine than you realize.”

  “Stressed enough to black out for seven minutes?”

  “Sure. Why not? I’ll bet that’s what the doctor will say.”

  Marty looked skeptical.

  Paige moved into his arms again. “Everything’s been going so well for us lately, almost too well. There’s a tendency to get a little superstitious about it. But we worked hard, we earned all of this. Nothing’s going to go wrong. You hear me?”

  “I hear you,” he said, holding her close.

  “Nothing’s going to go wrong,” she repeated. “Nothing. ”

  10

  After midnight.

  The neighborhood boasts big lots, and the large houses are set far back from the front property lines. Huge trees, so ancient they seem almost to have acquired nascent intelligence, stand sentinel along the streets, watching over the prosperous residents, autumn-stripped black limbs bristling like high-tech antennae, gathering information about potential threats to the well-being of those who sleep beyond the brick and stone walls.

  The killer parks around the corner from the house in which his work awaits. He walks the rest of the way, softly humming a cheery tune of his own creation, acting as if he has trod these sidewalks ten thousand times before.

  Furtive behavior is always noticed and, when noticed, inevitably raises an alarm. On the other hand, a man acting boldly and directly is viewed as honest and harmless, is not remarked upon, and is later forgotten altogether.

  A cold northwest breeze.

  A moonless sky.

  A suspicious owl monotonously repeats his single question.

  The house is Georgian, brick with white columns. The property is encircled by a spear-point iron fence.

  The driveway gate stands open and appears to have been left in that position for many years. The pace and peaceful quality of life in Kansas City cannot long sustain paranoia.

  As if he owns the place, he follows the circular driveway to the portico at the main entrance, climbs the steps, and pauses at the front door to unzip a small breast pocket in his leather jacket. From the pocket he extracts a key.

  Until this moment, he was not aware that he was carrying it. He doesn’t know who gave it to him, but at once he knows its purpose. This has happened to him before.

  The key fits the dead-bolt lock.

  He opens the door on a dark foyer, steps across the threshold into the warm house, and withdraws the key from the lock. He closes the door softly behind him.

  After putting the key away, he turns to a lighted alarm-system programming board next to the door. He has sixty seconds from the moment he opened the door to punch in the correct code to disarm the system; otherwise, police will be summoned. He remembers the six-digit disarming sequence just when it’s required, punches it in.

  He withdraws another item from his jacket, this time from a deep inside pocket: a pair of extremely compact night-vision goggles of a type manufactured for the military and unavailable for purchase by private citizens. They amplify even the meager available light so efficiently, by a factor of ten thousand, that he is able to move through dark rooms as confidently as if all of the lamps were lit.

  Ascending the stairs, he removes the Heckler & Koch P7 from the oversize shoulder holster under his jacket. The extended magazine contains eighteen cartridges.

  A silencer is tucked into a smaller sleeve of the holster. He frees it, and then quietly screws it onto the muzzle of the pistol. It will guarantee eight to twelve relatively quiet shots, but it will deteriorate too fast to allow him to expend the entire magazine without waking others in the house and neighborhood.

  Eight shots should be more than he needs.

  The house is large, and ten rooms open off the T-shaped second-floor hall, but he does not have to search for his targets. He is as familiar with this floor plan as with the street layout of the city.

  Through the goggles, everything has a greenish cast, and white objects seem to glow with a ghostly inner light. He feels as if he is in a science-fiction movie, an intrepid hero exploring another dimension or an alternate earth that is identical to ours in all but a few crucial respects.

  He eases open the master-bedroom door, enters. He approaches the king-size bed with its elaborate Georgian headboard.

  Two people are asleep under the glowing greenish blankets, a man and woman in their forties. The husband lies on his back, snoring. His face is easily identifiable as that of the primary target. The wife is on her side, face half buried in her pillow, but the killer can see enough to ascertain that she is the secondary target.

  He puts the muzzle of the P7 against the husband’s throat.

  The cold steel wakes the man, and his eyes pop open as if they have the counterbalanced lids of a doll’s eyes.

  The killer pulls the trigger, blowing out the man’s throat, raises the muzzle, and fires two rounds point-blank in his face. The gunfire sounds like the soft spitting of a cobra.

  He walks around the bed, making no sound on the plush carpet.

  Two bullets in the wife’s exposed left temple complete his assignment, and she never wakes at all.

  For a while he stands by the bed, enjoying the incomparable tenderness of the moment. Being present at a death is to share one of the most intimate experiences anyone will ever know in this world. After all, no one except treasured family members and beloved friends are welcome at a deathbed, to witness a dying person’s final breath. Therefore, the killer is able to rise above his gray and miserable existence only in the act of execution, for then he has the honor of sharing that most profound of all experiences, more solemn and significant than birth. In those precious magic moments when his targets perish, he establishes relationships, meaningful bonds with other human beings, connections that briefly banish his alienation and make him feel included, needed, loved.

  Although these victims are always strangers to him—and in this case, he does not even know their names—the experience can be so poignant that tears fill his eyes. Tonight he manages to remain in complete control of himself.

  Reluctant to let the brief connection end, he places one hand tenderly against the woman’s left cheek, which is unsoiled by blood and still pleasantly warm. He walks around the bed again and gives the dead man’s shoulder a gentle squeeze, as if to say, Goodbye, old friend, goodbye.

  He wonders who they were. And why they had to die.

  Goodbye.

  Down he goes through the ghostly green house full of green shadows and radiant green forms. In the foyer he pauses to unscrew the silencer from the weapon and to holster both pieces.

  He removes the goggles with dismay. Without the lenses, he is transported from that magical alternate earth, where for a brief while he felt a kinship with other human beings, to this world in which he strives so hard to belong but remains forever a man apart.

  Exiting the house, he closes the door but doesn’t bother locking it. He doesn’t wipe off the brass knob, for he isn’t concerned about leaving fingerprints.

  The cold breeze soughs and whistles through the portico.

  With ratlike scraping and rustling, crisp dead leaves scurry in packs along the driveway.

  The sentinel trees now seem to be asleep at their posts. The killer senses that no one watches him from any of the blank black windows along the street. And even the interrogatory voice of the owl is silenced.

  Still moved by what he has shared, he does not hum his little nonsense tune on the return trip to the car.

  By the time he drives to the motor hotel where he is staying, he feels once more the weight of the oppressive apartheid in which he exists. Separate. Shunned. A solitary man.

  In his room he slips off the shoulder holster and puts it on the nightstand. The pistol is still in the clasp of that nylon-lined leather sleeve. He stares at the weapon for a while.

  In the bathroom he takes a pair of scisso
rs from his shaving kit, closes the lid on the toilet, sits in the harsh fluorescent glare, and meticulously destroys the two bogus credit cards that he has used thus far on the assignment. He will fly out of Kansas City in the morning, employing yet another name, and on the drive to the airport he will scatter the tiny fragments of the cards along a few miles of highway.

  He returns to the nightstand.

  Stares at the pistol.

  After leaving the dead bodies at the job site, he should have broken the weapon down into as many pieces as possible. He should have disposed of its parts in widely separated locations: the barrel in a storm drain perhaps, half the frame in a creek, the other half in a Dumpster ... until nothing was left. That is standard procedure, and he is at a loss to understand why he disregarded it this time.

  A low-grade guilt attends this deviation from routine, but he is not going to go out again and dispose of the weapon. In addition to the guilt, he feels . . . rebellious.

  He undresses and lies down. He turns off the bedside lamp and stares at the layered shadows on the ceiling.

  He is not sleepy. His mind is restless, and his thoughts jump from subject to subject with such unnerving rapidity that his hyperactive mental state soon translates into physical agitation. He fidgets, pulling at the sheets, readjusting blankets, pillows.

  Out on the interstate highway, large trucks roll ceaselessly toward far destinations. The singing of their tires, the grumble of their engines, and the whoosh of the air displaced by their passage form a background white noise that is usually soothing. He has often been lulled to sleep by this Gypsy music of the open road.

  Tonight, however, a strange thing happens. For reasons he can’t understand, this familiar mosaic of sound isn’t a lullaby but a siren song. He cannot resist it.

  He gets out of bed and crosses the dark room to the only window. He has an obscure night view of a weedy hillside and above it a slab of sky—like the halves of an abstract painting. Atop the slope, separating sky and hill, the sturdy pickets of a highway guardrail are flickeringly illuminated by passing headlights.

  He stares up, half in a trance, straining for glimpses of the westbound vehicles.

  Usually melancholy, the highway cantata is now enticing, calling him, making a mysterious promise which he does not understand but which he feels compelled to explore.

  He dresses, and packs his clothes.

  Outside, the motor courtyard and walkways are deserted. Faced toward the rooms, cars wait for morning travel. In a nearby vending-machine alcove, a soft-drink dispenser clicks-clinks as if conducting repairs upon itself. The killer feels as if he is the only living creature in a world now run by—and for the benefit of—machines.

  Moments later, he is on Interstate 70, heading toward Topeka, the pistol on the seat beside him but covered with a motel towel.

  Something west of Kansas City calls him. He doesn’t know what it is, but he feels inexorably drawn westward in the way that iron is pulled toward a magnet.

  Strange as it might be, none of this alarms him, and he accedes to this compulsion to drive west. After all, for as long as he can remember, he has gone places without knowing the purpose of his trip until he has reached his destination, and he has killed people with no clue as to why they have to die or for whom the killing is done.

  He is certain, however, that this sudden departure from Kansas City is not expected of him. He is supposed to stay at the motel until morning and catch an early flight out to ... Seattle.

  Perhaps in Seattle he would have received instructions from the bosses he cannot recall. But he will never know what might have happened because Seattle is now stricken from his itinerary.

  He wonders how much time will pass before his superiors—whatever their names and identities—will realize that he has gone renegade. When will they start looking for him, and how will they ever find him if he is no longer operating within his program?

  At two o’clock in the morning, traffic is light on Interstate 70, mostly trucks, and he speeds across Kansas in advance of some of the big rigs and in the blustery wakes of others, remembering a movie about Dorothy and her dog Toto and a tornado that plucked them out of that flat farmland and dropped them in a far stranger place.

  With both Kansas City, Missouri, and Kansas City, Kansas, behind him, the killer realizes he’s muttering to himself: “I need, I need.”

  This time he feels close to a revelation that will identify the precise nature of his longing.

  “I need . . . to be . . . I need to be . . . I need to be . . .”

  As the suburbs and finally the dark prairie flash past on both sides, excitement builds steadily in him. He trembles on the brink of an insight that, he senses, will change his life.

  “I need to be . . . to be . . . I need to be someone.”

  At once, he understands the meaning of what he has said. By “to be someone,” he does not mean what another man might intend to say with those same three words; he does not mean that he needs to be someone famous or rich or important. Just someone. Someone with a real name. Just an ordinary Joe, as they used to say in the movies of the forties. Someone who has more substance than a ghost.

  The pull of the unknown lodestar in the west grows stronger by the mile. He leans forward slightly, hunching over the steering wheel, peering intently into the night.

  Beyond the horizon, in a town he can’t yet envision, a life awaits him, a place to call home. Family, friends. Somewhere there are shoes into which he can step, a past he can wear comfortably, purpose. And a future in which he can be like other people—accepted.

  The car speeds westward, cleaving the night.

  11

  Half past midnight, on his way to bed, Marty Stillwater stopped by the girls’ room, eased open the door, and stepped silently across the threshold. In the butterscotch-yellow glow of the Mickey Mouse nightlight, he could see both of his daughters sleeping peacefully.

  Now and then he liked to watch them for a few minutes while they slept, just to convince himself that they were real. He’d had more than his share of happiness and prosperity and love, so it followed that some of his blessings might prove transitory or even illusory; fate might intervene to balance the scales.

  To the ancient Greeks, Fate was personified in the form of three sisters: Clotho, who spun the thread of life; Lachesis, who measured the length of the thread; and Atropos, smallest of the three but the most powerful, who snipped the thread at her whim.

  Sometimes, to Marty, that seemed a logical way to look at things. He could imagine the faces of those white-robed women in more detail than he could recall his own Mission Viejo neighbors. Clotho had a kind face with merry eyes, reminiscent of the actress Angela Lansbury, and Lachesis was as cute as Goldie Hawn but with a saintly aura. Ridiculous, but that’s how he saw them. Atropos was a bitch, beautiful but cold—pinched mouth, anthracite-black eyes.

  The trick was to remain in the good graces of the first two sisters without drawing the attention of the third.

  Five years ago, in the guise of a blood disorder, Atropos had descended from her celestial home to take a whack at the thread of Charlotte’s life and, thankfully, had failed to cut it all the way through. But this goddess answered to many names besides Atropos: cancer, cerebral hemorrhage, coronary thrombosis, fire, earthquake, poison, homicide, and countless others. Now perhaps she was paying them a return visit under one of her many pseudonyms, with Marty as her target instead of Charlotte.

  Frequently, the vivid imagination of a novelist was a curse.

  A whirring-clicking noise suddenly arose from the shadows on Charlotte’s side of the room, startling Marty. As low and menacing as a rattlesnake’s warning. Then he realized what it was: one half of the gerbil’s big cage was occupied by an exercise wheel, and the restless rodent was running furiously in place.

  “Go to sleep, Wayne,” he said softly.

  He took one more look at his girls, then stepped out of the room and pulled the door shut quietly behind hi
m.

  12

  He reaches Topeka at three o’clock in the morning.

  He is still drawn toward the western horizon as a migrating creature might be pulled relentlessly southward with the approach of winter, answering a call that is soundless, a beacon that can’t be seen, as though it is the trace of iron in his very blood that responds to the unknown magnet.

  Exiting the freeway on the outskirts of the city, he scouts for another car.

  Somewhere there are people who know the name John Larrington, the identity under which he rented the Ford. When he does not show up in Seattle for whatever job awaits him, his strange and faceless superiors will no doubt come looking for him. He suspects they have substantial resources and influence; he must shed every connection with his past and leave the hunters with no means of tracking him.

  He parks the rental Ford in a residential neighborhood and walks three blocks, trying the doors of the cars at the curb. Only half are locked. He is prepared to hot-wire a car if it comes to that, but in a blue Honda he finds the keys tucked behind the sun visor.

  After driving back to the Ford and transferring his suitcases and the pistol to the Honda, he cruises in ever-widening circles, searching for a twenty-four-hour-a-day convenience store.

  He has no map of Topeka in his head because no one expected him to go there. Unnerved to see street signs on which all of the names are unfamiliar, he has no knowledge of where any route will lead.

  He feels more of an outcast than ever.

  Within fifteen minutes he locates a convenience store and nearly empties the shelves of Slim Jims, cheese crackers, peanuts, miniature doughnuts, and other food that will be easy to eat while driving. He is already starved. If he is going to be on the road for as much as another two days—assuming he might be drawn all the way to the coast—he will need considerable supplies. He does not want to waste time in restaurants, yet his accelerated metabolism requires him to eat larger meals and more frequently than other people eat.

  After adding three six-packs of Pepsi to his purchase, he goes to the checkout counter, where the sole clerk says, “You must be having an all-night party or something.”