Chapter 41

1

Everything happened simultaneously after lunch.

            At the school. In a basement. In a house under the gaze of pin-ups. And where a boy thought his Bampa was in the closet.

            Magic often relies on connectivity. So does chaos.

2

Andy had gotten to the school at ten to twelve. He was driving his cruiser and parked it along the curb on Main where a sign was posted explicitly stating the area was for bus drop offs and idlers with a limit of ten minutes. He didn’t think he would be long.

            He walked into the school’s lobby in uniform, his belt snug over his hips, the click of his bracelets and swish of the gun hitting his shirt the sounds so common to him. There were a few kids at the front, some starting to open their lunch bags while sitting on the planter by the corn stalks.

            “Yo sheriff,” one of them said over a PB and J, the raspberry jelly smearing the crust and dripping down the kid’s fingers. “Any more news on the Boogeyman?” The other kids snickered and Andy only nodded his head.

            “Stay indoors and obey the curfew,” he said, his voice timid. Anything but commanding. Another boy looked at him cautiously. His face was bruised, his nose sort of swollen. He wore a hoodie. Kind of like Henry’s. The boy only watched him, gauged him. Andy didn’t like it.

             He went to the admin pool and opened the glass door. The head sec, Mrs Lemkin, only perfunctorily smiled when he approached her. Mary had always told her the secretaries were like Reedy Creek’s little birds, with something to squawk about every rumor in this town. He supposed plenty of the rumors started in here. Mrs Rhinestaff took care of the rest in the streets. He could hear the radio in the background, could hear the click of keyboards and the even stiffer impression of typewriter keys, operated by an older lady near the back, her white hair in a bun and her reading glasses perched on the tip of her nose. “Good day, Mrs Lemkin,” Andy said, nodding his head. Trying to ignore the pall of his heart and the indecent thoughts in his head. Henry said he sent a bomb to the school. He wasn’t sure if the dealer was being serious. He wasn’t sure what to believe anymore. If he’d had too much Jack to drink, then he could pass off what he did not see in the room and the memories of what he thought he witnessed as a result of the sauce. But even that seemed wrong to him. “You know where Mary might be around this time?”

            Lemkin set her hands on the counter, her nails painted red and mostly chipped, the corners of her eyes yellowing and the tip of her nose flushed. “Probably helping to wrangle some assistance to clean up the mess in the women’s room. Couple of kids have the bug and our fine janitor decided to skip out on work today without calling in.” She smiled now. “And you. Any word yet on the case? Anything the sheriff can offer a bunch of curious ladies?”

           He looked at the cluster of them, most having stopped what they were doing to gawk at him. “I’d say, just obey the curfew and stay indoors. Don’t open the door to strangers.”

           Her face dropped into a sullen pucker and her brow scowled. “Rather boring. If we’re done here, I’d assume your wife’s finished teaching Language Arts. Room 128.” She turned back to her computer monitor and with a quick thanks, Andy exited the pool and roamed the hallways. Aware the kids were staring, aware they were looking at his gun. Aware Lemkin wasn’t the only curious cat in this place.

           He saw the mayor’s grandson milling about with his pals, his leg kicked up against the wall behind him. The kid’s friends seemed pale, and the conversation they were having seemed serious. He thought about waving to the kid, giving him a slight nod of the head, but figured he’d rather remain invisible. He thought Brad Jenkins was a little crazy. He’d met him a few times as a result of the earliest ass kissing sessions he and the council were reduced to when they were first looking for favors in Reedy Creek. And ol’ Harold Jenkins loved his grandson, he did. He had the boy in his office at city hall all the time, to show him procedurals and to likely allow the kid to examine the municipal process in order to keep politics in the Creek hereditary. Brad hadn’t shown any of them much respect. It was his name, Andy supposed. A kid with a powerful last name acts according to the benefits it accrues.

            Andy found room 128 and knocked on the door. The students were already gone and Mary was standing at her desk, shuffling some papers.

           "Mar…”

           “Jesus. You scared me.” She turned around. Her face was pallid. Her eyes drawn in something like uncertainty.

           “Sorry. You okay?”

           “Jittery. What are you doing here?”

           “We have to go, Mar.”

           “What do you mean?”

           “Trevor’s going to the press. This whole thing…the council, it’s going to explode.” He didn’t quite like his choice of words in light of what Henry told him before he…disappeared? He wasn’t sure. Christ, he wasn’t sure about anything.

           “I’ve heard just as much. Let him have his holy crusade. Paul won’t let it happen, Andy. We’ve put our trust in Paul long enough now not to desert him. Haven’t we?”

            "Mary, shit, it’s not just that. I have…I have credible intel—”

            “Credible intel? Are you a spook now, too? Because…because I’m not so sure anymore…”

            “Something’s going to happen today. At the school, Mary. And this uniform is about as real as the—” Andy looked up at the camera mounted in the ceiling, just by the chalkboard. “—the fucking privacy rights in this town. We have to go.”

            “What’s going to happen? Shit, Andy, you’re scaring me.”

            And now Andy could tell Mary’s uncertainty was directed at him. That when she heard his voice as her back was turned, a burst of fear transpired like a breath of air. He looked at her fingers. They were tapping her thumbs, her arms tremulous, her breathing labored. Her eyes darted to his gun. From his eyes to his holster. Back and forth. “Mary, what’s going on?”

            “I thought, I…” She topped, tried to plan, to calculate what she might say. “We have to speak to Hector.”

            “Hector? Why?”

            “If it’s a council matter…a threat to the school…I want him to know.”

            “Jesus, Mary. Where’s your head at? We need to get out of here now.”

            Mary rushed by Andy, nearly shoving him against the door. It surprised him. “After what you did, Andy, how can you expect me to trust you?”

            “What I did?” He rushed after her. Some of the kids watched him chase her. Wondered what the sheriff would want from a lowly teacher, and likely hoped that the cuffs were for her so period after lunch would be cancelled. When he finally reached her, a part of him wanted to shove her against the locker the same way he’d been so many times in his youth. He only took her arm. “Mary,” he whispered, judging her eyes, how afraid they were. “What the hell are you talking about?”

            “The pictures, you sonofabitch,” she said, tears now perched on her bottom eyelids, meshing her lashes. Her nostrils flared. “You’ve been…been drinking…and you’re open carrying a…a gun in front of children…What’s happened to you?”

            “I’ve been coping. Dulling the edge. What pictures? What…what are you talking about?”

3

Allen knew Norris Serkis had nearly killed Wendy Golding’s husband to punish him for following the doctor to the house. And he could think of nothing else but the man waiting in the backyard to be noticed. To prove his awareness.

            Allen had parked far enough down the street so that nobody ahead would really notice his cruiser. There was a row of hedges on the corner, pruned tightly away from the bend in the walk, but thick enough to mask the perpendicular street. A lady walking her dog only nodded to him as she passed, and he did the same. His intent coming here was to get a jumpstart; if Norris knew about him, knew he had a tail, and one who insisted on getting in the way, then he figured a man who was framing another as some atrocious serial killer would do anything to remove his obstacles. Allen understood this. And it frightened him. But it lit a fire under his ass as well. He’d made sure his service Glock was loaded, and he held it in his hand for a long time, just to feel its weight, to accommodate himself to it. Having the license to carry a firearm didn’t automatically acclimate one to its favor; he was never particularly good at the range, and always supposed police work in a town like the Creek involved nothing more than a little respect, free coffee at the Diner, and the freedom to hand out tickets to out-of-towners pulling off the 34 for a bite to eat in his neck of the woods.

            Allen climbed out of the cruiser at around the same time Adam Kramer and his father were climbing into an Acura at an old farmhouse while Cole asked the two what the Low Breed was. He traipsed along the sidewalk, keeping a leisurely pace, spotting the cameras in some of the trees, mounted on the light posts, wondering just who might be watching all of this and why. That was the big question. The why. The yards along this street were immaculate and well kept, constant reminders about the classicism of start-ups like the one creating this expansionary boom, and a part of him wished he’d never sat down across from Lewis. Because if that hadn’t happened, he would never have been pulled into the shit. And that’s what this was. Cole Moore had his own little operation, and the webs of secrecy undergirding Reedy Creek were probably more circuitous than the new sewage system the feds had installed. Norris’s Porsche was on his driveway. It was when he drove by the intersection to have a quick look. He never drove by the doctor’s house because he didn’t want to tip off the man. He figured a man like Norris would have eyes like hawks. Then what the hell are you doing this for? He didn’t know how to answer. But his gut instinct told him one thing: if Norris was the serial killer in Reedy Creek, working under order of the town’s weird council of academics nobody in their right minds understood, then he’d likely be holding the man he and the council were framing as a form of leverage. And if Norris was the sort of man who craved control, and Allen believed he was, then he would have likely taken the duty to befriend Cole’s lost officer spy.

            Allen crossed Norris’s neighbor’s yard and trudged through a patch of junipers toward the back gate; he wouldn’t use the front windows because neighbors were nosy and they would likely pick up the horn to call the cops. You are a cop. He didn’t think it mattered. The way things were going in Reedy Creek, people don’t trust anything or anyone anymore. Plus, you idiot, Ned Stevenson is a cop. His name’s already public, so people are probably looking at your uniform with the uneasiness of a camper spotting a guy in a hockey mask. He opened the gate into Norris’s backyard and sidled to the eavestrough, hugging tight to the house, his breathing frantic. The gate didn’t close behind him.

            He guided it with his hand to ensure the lock caught, but something must have wedged it. And when he heard the man’s voice he understood he was spotted.

            “Everything okay, officer? Saw you tramplin’ ‘cross my lawn.”

            “Go home Marvin. I’m here on police business,” Allen whispered.

            “Jesus, Allen. Just curious is all. Not angry you might’ve trampled my roses either. Had a snooper around here the other day. I’m keeping my eyes open for it, ya know. We’ve both been in the Creek long enough to know, right? Something’s happening here, and it ain’t good. Those goddamn Corners, bringing their murders with them. They expect us not to put up a fight?”

            I bet every Creeker has the same assumption. That the shit is hitting the fan. He figured it was a form of group intuition inherent to the veterans here. “I guess so, Marvin. Here, do me a huge favor, will ya?”

            The old man, still standing propped between the gate and fence post, only nodded his head, his eyebrows bushy and his eyes skeptical.

            “Keep your eyes on the front yard, okay. You got it? If you don’t see me in, I don’t know, thirty minutes. Yes, thirty, call dispatch and have them send over a coupla cars to this address. You got that?”

            “Shit, Allen. Is the doc in any sort of trouble?”

            “Please, Marvin. Now.” He watched the old man nod once more and close the gate, hopefully disappearing into his own home to look out the window. The way old people sometimes did when nothing was on the tube. His first worry was that Marv would likely get on the phone and call the other coots, most of them Korea vets, to guess what might be happening on this affluent street in a town so rocked by killings, prompting an assembly of them to show up on the lawn; his second was that his instinct had the man calling the cops if he didn’t leave the house in thirty minutes, because he was preparing for the worst-case scenario. Events transpired in his mind’s eye in the flash of gruesome images and he could only shudder. Because Norris had nearly killed a man to punish Allen for intervening.

            There was a window ahead and Allen slowly went to it. He could see the front room, how organized it was, how incredibly pretentious it appeared in its assumption that anyone would pick up the books and read what he had left on the coffee table: Edward Said? Howard Zinn? Paul Ehrlich? He could see the stairwell leading to the upper floor, could sense an ominous silence coming from that direction, and to his right he could see the corridor leading from the dining room near the back patio to the kitchen, where there was smoke billowing and what looked like flames flicking up from the gas stove; he thought he could hear whatever was sizzling on the pan, could smell the searing meat, and he saw Norris Serkis standing within the engulfed smoke sucking up into the hood’s chase, pulling the pan out of the flames and flipping whatever might be inside. You would have to be insane to be able to carve a man open and then return home to cook. You would have to be insane to likely confuse the human body with a chicken’s or pig’s, to slice into each without regard or regret. He saw a carving knife on the countertop. Allen wondered if it was the same one the doctor used to open Mr Golding’s sternum, to leave his floor a mess of his richly scarlet blood. Next to the knife he saw a crystal vase, its ornamentation impressive and expensive, containing a single stemmed rose similar to the ones he presumably trampled in Marv’s garden, and next to it a serving glass with what looked like orange juice. Norris reached over for a plate next to him and set it beside the stove as he turned down the gas and the flames died; he spooned out whatever might have been cooking and then slowly, precisely drizzled the hot oils from the pan onto the plate with signatory flourishes, proving his expertise and meticulousness, his eyes narrowing as he watched and perfected the presentation. I bet he’ll cook you a great meal before he murders you. He will sit you down at that table and tell you exactly what he’s cooking and how, because a man like that would delight in a conversation just to hear his own voice.

            Allen watched the man take the white plate, pristine in its crispness and polished glare, the food he’d served still smoking, and he set it next to the glass of juice and the flower. There was a tufted serving napkin as well, bundled to the side and neatly folded. He arranged the dish and glass in relation to the vase, measuring the angles with his eyes. And he will just sit alone and eat. He will bite into that meat with the memory of blood so fresh in his mind, and he will delight in the luxury of preparing something so fancy as his reward.

            But Norris did not bring the silver platter to the table. He carried it with him to a doorway in the corridor, balancing the tray on his hand like a waiter while he opened the door with his other. Norris disappeared down the stairs into the basement.

            Allen scurried toward the basement window in the foundation by the patio. Something had been stuffed against the glass. He couldn’t see anything.

            He looked at his Timex watch. It had been five minutes. If Marv was any good at following orders, he’d be calling the cops in twenty-five if Allen didn’t make it out onto the front yard in one piece.

4

He pedalled harder and faster than he ever had.

            It was the intuition. The Shining or Force. Whatever power had become a part of this place. His mom had come home with a variety of medicines. None of the holistic crap, she’d said, because she only trusted the tried, tested, and true FDA approved pharmaceuticals an old fashioned meritorious medical doctor would prescribe; Danny had already forgotten about his lie at that point, because the feeling was unmistakable. Pug had proved it. His coming to Danny’s place, his coming looking for a fight, an argument, it proved everything was breaking down. The way it was supposed to. Because fate wanted this place in shambles. That’s what Danny believed. And fate worked in a tapestry of what often appeared to be coincidence, and that was always its disguise.

            “Do you know when dad’ll be home?” Danny had asked as his mom fished through the paperbag for her assortment of pills and syrups. She would likely try each of them to combat whatever bug had stricken her son, because she wouldn’t have him away from school for more than a day. Not if she could help it.

            “Oh, he didn’t mention anything to you?”

            “Mention what?”

            “He left early. Before you woke up. To hit the road. Apparently, there’s an accounting conference in Yorkton. Said it would be a day trip, unless it ran long. Then he’d book a motel for the night.”

            He thought about his conversation with Grimwood; he thought about the binders in the closet, the photos, the baseball cards. He thought about the lies. Your dad isn’t an accountant here, Danny Boy. He barters cards with Buddy. And maybe soon he will have to relent and give up his Mantles when he can no longer keep up the charade. But you won’t be here much longer because today is the day. Today is when everything will happen. When the sickness breaks and this place finally dies. Don’t you get it? Everything is supposed to happen today because coincidence and fate are the same thing. It isn’t a coincidence your dad found his tormentor in the same Podunk town where the devil’s taken residence. It isn’t a coincidence you met the devil and did his bidding. You were supposed to. The two worked in tandem. His mom wasn’t in on the ruse. She spoke with passive certainty while Danny’s heart leapt. Because he knew where his dad was. He did. No more hiding in the bushes. No more photographs. No more excuses. There’s a reason why the gun wasn’t in the box with the pictures, with the bullets.

            When Danny’s mom brought a plate of assorted vitamins, a glass of ginger ale with a wedge of lemon, and a mug of peppermint tea all balanced on a platter she’d inherited from her mother, she found the family room empty.

            Danny had ridden beyond the newer developments toward the older tracts with the garage ports, where signs of Reedy Creek’s sickness had left the fringes lapsing on frailty. He reached the last street, one of the oldest streets, by quarter to noon; he was sweating and panting, and the cool breeze coming in off the field wasn’t enough to comfort him. There was an idleness to this place, the bustle so familiar to the expansion having forgotten this part of the world.

            And that same man, the neighbor, was out on his front lawn again, sitting in the ratty chair with a cigarette between his fingers lacing up a ribbon of smoke. Because every part of this has to be connected, Danny thought, pulling the brakes on his handles and hopping off his bike. He saw the old blue pick-up parked in the gravel way ahead where the stoop sagged on a makeshift branch and the yard was as patchy and ugly as its owner.

            “You’re back.”

            Danny only nodded as he pushed his bike toward the tree, whose canopy provided the perfect shade in the yard, blanketing the man in a morose gloom.

            “Missing school again, I see. And so is he.” He gestured toward Eddie’s house. Toward the blue pick-up. “Ya know, I see the same car nearly every day. Comes and goes. Road doesn’t go far from here, as you can see, but that car drives by and I never see it again till later…I always wondered who might be driving the gold Buick, ya know. Seems like a Jew ride, if ya don’t mind my saying so.” He flicked the ashes and took another deep drag, staring at Danny with an intensity that bordered on crazy. “Saw it early this morning. I don’ sleep much. My wife says it’s insomnia, but I don’ think so. I think it’s this place. Ya know, the feeling. I can see in your eyes you feel it too. Like something’s breaking. If I could gamble on a place dying, I’d put down my pension that the Creek ain’t got long, and I believed that ever since they put up the fuckin’ plant. An eyesore. Big thick pillars o’ smoke. And the people it brought. Those killings. They say it’s a cop. I know Ned, the guy they’re blaming. I do. Suspect he might be a fairy, and maybe that’s why they think they can use him as the serial killer. But my guess is it’s the people in that plant making up a story an’ murderer so they can control it. So they can control the PR here. Mayor’s in on it, and those weird fuckin’…um, council members. Big city elitists. Stay on the coast, is what I think. But today’s the day, ain’t it?”

            Danny somehow knew he would see this man. Because he thought this man represented Reedy Creek. An older version of it. If it was a war of Corners versus Creekers, he figured this man would likely be the first to call the battle cry and take a carving knife to the mayor’s jugular for opening the doors to the very possibility of the community changing the way it had. And if the man had seen his dad’s car come by this morning, then Danny’s suspicions were correct. It was just another form of this place’s Force. The magic.

            “The day?”

            “When the system breaks. I figure that’s why you’re here, right? Following the Buick that’s following Hilton.” He took another drag and let the smoke sit in his mouth. It drifted out of his nostrils and he rubbed his forehead under his Hornets ballcap. “Folks are getting their comeuppance today. Airing out grievances. It’ll just take a simple push, ya know. An act. And then the cavalry will take up arms. Take back this fuckin’ town. Suspect that’s what’s going on with Eddie over there. Man like that, man with a past, has got to have enemies.” He tossed the remainder of his smoldering cig and watched it as the end died.

            “You can feel it too, can’t you? The strings breaking. The…the strings holding this place together.”

            The man stood up and dusted off his thighs. His jeans were old and dirty. “I’m perceptive, kid. And I’ve been here a long time.” He gestured toward the janitor’s house. “You be careful. Whatever reasons ya got, they’re yours. Today we course correct. I ain’t seen nothing, ya know.” He tapped his nose. “Remember what I said when those stacks ain’t the only things smoking. Cause this place will burn.” The man turned around and went into his house. Danny watched him. Wondered what he might do. Wondered what he meant.

            But most of all, wondered what his father might have done.

5

“You fuck. You…you traitor.”

            Andy had marched into Hector’s office with Mary tagging long. The sec pool only craned their necks as he ripped open the door, Lemkin only standing and leaning over the counter to get a look before the door slammed shut again. Because boredom could only be subdued by drama. And holy hell would these ladies get their fill.

            Hector had been sitting behind his desk, thinking. Mostly about what Trevor had said. And about the pictures the prick who’d just bounded in was blackmailing him with; they were sitting to the side, visible, shots from the vent above him where someone had crawled through the ducts to spy on him. He’d since stuck construction paper against the grille.

            Hector stood up so fast that his chair clattered to the floor behind him and crashed against the bookshelf. It was his instinct, and in the past it had served him well. He’d anticipated this, hadn’t he? He out weighed the sheriff by over a hundred pounds. And he was around the desk so fast Andy hadn’t time to say anything else before the photographs, those sly candid shots, were flung against his face with all the impassioned fervor of the man who opened the envelope from his slot to see his private life splashed across some color Polaroids.

            “You’re going to blackmail me, you prick! You plagiarist! Hack!”

            Andy stopped and looked at the photos. They were sitting, image up, on the floor; he saw his wife and Hector in an embrace that made sense of the late nights, of the early mornings. How he could not have seen it before, or even made the crass assumption Mary would betray him, he was not sure. Maybe the badge and the project here had turned his focus and his mind into mush. Or maybe that was Henry. But plagiarist. That word. Even if, for some reason, Bethany’s name was no longer on the manuscript, it had been. When he took it out of his mailbox, her name was there. Trevor had even seen it, had mentioned it when he stopped by to confess he was pulling the plug. And fuck if the plug hadn’t been pulled.

            “Plagiarist?” Andy said, and for that one moment his fingers found his gun. They did. He didn’t even anticipate it. Mary had already walked around the conference table to the window, the blinds open at a slant to let in some light, the window slightly ajar for the cool fall air. “Mary…you…you both did it! You did it together! Got me fired so you could come here and screw!”

            “The fuck we did,” Hector roared. His face was red with fury, his brow sheened with sweat.

            “You screwed my wife and then you shit on my past. That it? You just come here to ruin me? To finish the job? Cause as far as I can tell, Perez, you haven’t done a fuckin’ thing of…of academic worth. Why Paul would bring you here—”

            “I did, though, Andy. I did. I fucked your wife. Over and over. I…I plagiarized your marriage, so take that for what it’s worth. But it sounds pretty goddamn academic to me.” There was a smile on the fat man’s face, one Andy wanted to wipe off with the back of his hand. But he was not unaware of their size difference either.

            “Enough,” Mary squealed as she watched Hector get even closer. His chest heaving. His arms frozen in a bear hug as his breathing crescendoed. “Andy, Hector, you’re not barbarians.”

            “He’s blackmailing us,” Hector said through gritted teeth.

            “I didn’t take those fucking pictures. You…you thief!”

            “That’s rich. So rich. The guy who stole his students’ words cause he didn’t have any of his own.”

            The gun was out of Andy’s holster. How everything had accelerated so fast he would simply leave to fate. But the animosity in the room was palpable, the tension so thick it could be confused for tropical humidity. He imagined Hector’s fat fingers not just on his wife’s bare flesh, no, but on that incredibly thick sheaf of papers he’d stuffed into the mailbox understanding Andy would find it and sink to the very lows that reminded him he was a fraud. That he’d come here because he was a fraud. And that Mary very likely tagged along not because she respected what Paul Holdren was up to, or respected that her husband would be invited to join the operation, but because she wanted to hurt him the best way she knew how: by firming and confirming her feminist bullshit about the absurdities of marriage, the backwardness of its traditions. And a part of him wanted to press the gun first against Hector’s forehead, pull the trigger, then turn it on her and watch the fear in her eyes overshadow any impulse for matriarchal dominance as she realized how fragile she was. His intention today had always been to kill somebody. It was an irrational thought, but it was real. He could see it, like a film over his eyes. And if it wasn’t Henry he would turn the gun on—because by some weird cosmic accident, the kid was already…dead—then he didn’t mind whetting his appetite in here. With this fat prick.

            But Hector saw that gun come out of its holster. He saw Andy’s fingers dancing above the handle. He saw the flick of the sheriff’s eyes. It wasn’t as if he didn’t anticipate that the man might use the gun. It was one of his first thoughts when he realized Andy knew about him and his wife. He wouldn’t have the thought that any of this seemed strange: the accusations about Hector and Mary getting him fired, the candid shots from the vent above his shelf. He wouldn’t piece together that maybe there was something strange happening on this day, this day that would see Trevor going to the press, to cease and desist this entire experiment that had given them all virtually omnipotent power in Reedy Creek; he would have been crazy to give that up, wouldn’t be? To go with Trevor and admit to the coarsest actions the council had orchestrated? No, he didn’t have that thought because he dove forward, into Andy. The small sheriff buckled under the principal and they both fell into the conference table that had been witness to so many clandestine meetings. That had been witness to so many deaths. The front legs splintered outward beneath their combined weight and the table’s oak surface tilted with a clap onto the carpet. Mary let out a shriek and Andy’s gun clambered away on the floor. Hector punched Andy in the face. Once. Twice. His fist was large enough to shatter the sheriff’s nose and cheekbone, and he knew it was a success when Andy bit down in a clamp while he muffled a scream, and blood exploded from his nostrils in an eerie splash that left his tan collar stained.

            “You pull your gun on me, you little prick?”

            Andy only mumbled something. His lips quivered beneath the fresh gleam of blood and snot already pooling in the inflammatory bowl between his cheeks and like marshy weeds in his mustache. His eyes were terrified. Maybe even ashamed.

            “Enough,” Mary called, and they heard knocking on the office door. Heard that bitch Lemkin putting her nose in business she shouldn’t have.

            Hector thought about getting off the man. About going over to retrieve his gun and just ending this. He didn’t feel guilty for what he’d done with Andy’s wife. Those morals were voluntarily stupid if one subscribed to them, because sex, that instinct, it was primal, the mover of one’s genes, the generational strategy to ensure one’s persistence and legacy. It was biology. But Andy reached up and clawed at him, leaving four fresh marks across his forehead. His thumb hooked into Hector’s eye as his hand arced, and the principal felt a sharp, instant pain followed by a white flash of blindness.

            “You…fuckin’…weasel…” Andy managed through tight lips. He’d hooked his thumbnail across the fat bastard’s eyeball, and when he did finally see the result of what he’d done, he swallowed a mouthful of air and hoped he didn’t retch. Andy pulled Hector’s eye from its socket like a worm from a burrow; the sound was like a wet rag hitting a sink. The man clutched his face and fell back. He could see the floor and Andy at the same time. He skittered along the carpet, no longer caring about the gun, but about what the sheriff had done and how he might fix it.

            His eye felt like a fish against his palm, squiggly and viscous, and the sensation of holding it, of creating a half-shadow in his field of vision as the world in front of him swam in and out of focus, was as sick as he imagined it would feel to hold in your own guts while you watched the blood turn black. “My eye,” Hector squealed. “You pulled out my eye!”

            “With him?” Andy said, turning to Mary as he stood up against the table, swiping aside awry papers and books. He watched Hector kick back on the floor toward the credenza, his large paw concealing the damage as blood trickled off his chin and onto his pleated Dockers. “You cheated on me with that fat piece of shit?”

            That’s when the man came in through the window. The man with the knife.

6

It wasn’t like the cars he was used to. A leased American. He’d always liked German. But it would have to do.

            He drove into the Secondary’s parking lot, found an empty, and pulled in. There were kids outside, the younger ones playing in the field, some of the older ones hiding cigarettes in the lot, wondering if he was a teacher coming to chastise them. He climbed out of the car and the kids looked at him with wary apprehension. He was used to the looks. Especially from American brats. Because he looked foreign, and because he was large. He tugged down his silk shirt over the beltline of his pants where he’d stowed two accessories in their clutches.

            He went toward the front of the school on Main, his dark hair greased back in an ebony lick, his jaw clenching like pincers in his olive cheeks. He wasn’t going to waste any time. The school was large enough to keep him looking for more than he was willing to give. He went to the head office behind the glazed panels on the far end of the lobby. The women in the back were all standing, leaning toward the sidewall where administration schedules were tacked, and laminated Feel-Good posters hanging. Another woman, likely the owner of the counter and empty chair up front, was standing at the closed office door, her face nearly pressed into its heft to listen.

            “Excuse me, ma’am,” he said, with as much refined politeness as he could muster. He usually reserved his good will for the Diplomat and the Ambassador. The woman turned to look at him with clear frustration. But when her eyes met his the annoyance shed like old hair and her cheeks blushed. The man was attractive. So different than what the Creek usually sent through those doors. “I am looking for Mary Napolitano.” He thought he might have trouble pronouncing the name, but it sounded seamless when it left his lips.

            “Luck of the draw on your part, mister. She just high-tailed it into Mr Perez’s office with the sheriff.” Her lips leered into an ugly smile. “We’ve got a pool guessing just when Andy would have figured out Mary and Mr Perez were screwing. Looks like Sandra was closest.”

            The women in the back of the room chuckled. The man looked at them and noticed a window in the cubby at the back behind the mail slots; he looked at the closed office door beyond the bored secretary creating gossip where she could. He calculated distance and stared at the ceiling line above the wall.

            He turned around and left the office. When Ellie Lemkin turned to look at the handsome man, his eyes brooding and his hair dark like some princely Arabian stranger seeking an American woman to help him spend his riches, he was gone. Like he’d never even been there.

7

He watched Norris leave through the front door ten minutes later. He did not bring the platter back up to the kitchen. Which meant he left it in the basement. You crafty sonofabitch. Are you feeding somebody else down there? He didn’t think the question was insane. He didn’t. He figured a man like Norris Serkis often felt alone. And because he craved control, there were ways to ascertain friendship beyond the courtship of mutual admiration.

            He knew Marv was probably watching out his front window, wearing that crusty old denim shirt tucked partly into the waist of his underwear, and he was likely following Norris’s gait to his Porsche wondering if he should pick up the horn to call the police.

            Allen listened to the turbo engine fire up. He listened to the throttle, to the power, and he watched through the slatted fence boards the doctor reverse onto the quiet street and disappear with a squeal.

            This is it.

            Allen went toward the back door on the patio; the man had French atriums, and without regard to caution or hesitation, Allen withdrew his Glock and used the handle to smash the glass nearest the lever. He covered his hand in his sleeve and unbolted the door, avoiding shards of glass like hungry teeth, casually opening it and stepping foot into the house. His heels left an eerie click on the floor, and the quietude of the place reminded him of those rare burglary calls when he reached the scene only to find the homeowner on the front lawn in tears scared the robber was still inside. Walking through a house expecting the perp to jump out at you trying to escape exacted a strenuous expectation that every noise belonged to the assailant, that every creak and shadow, that every sliver of darkness was the purveyor of eyes watching your every move. Allen ignored the kitchen. He could smell what the doctor had cooked. He could smell the meat, could smell the richness of oils and spices. The kitchen itself was immaculate in its maintenance, and whatever grease might have popped off the pan had been quickly wiped up and discarded.

            He went to the door ahead that Norris had closed behind him. Allen thought it might have been locked. That the dirty secret the doctor was feeding had to remain his dirty secret, and every act of privacy required a key. But the knob turned in his hand. A distant part of his mind thought it might be triggered to explode or rigged to electrical currents. But that was paranoia. Because he didn’t know what he was walking into. He was taking a chance. When have you ever taken a chance? You keep most of your cash in a pillowcase stuffed under your mattress.

            He went down the stairs, the smell of that meat, chicken or something gamey, far stronger here; it reminded him of a trail he was supposed to follow. Something out of a fairy tale like Hansel and Gretel. Isn’t that the one where the witch eats kids? Gets them fat and eats their plump flesh. The idea that Norris was trying to do the same terrified Allen, because he’d seen the crime scenes and he wouldn’t put it past that sick fuck.

            The stairs led toward an insulated wall ahead, mostly in the gloom, and there was a forked hallway in either direction with some stacked boxes to his right. Allen could smell the meat, yes, but underneath that was another aroma, something far more natural and shameful. He wasn’t sure why that word popped in, but it did. Because it smelled of shame, of regret, of self-pity, of embarrassment, of inhumanity. Allen turned the corner and saw more stacked boxes, some of them labelled, likely from the move to Reedy Creek, and near the top of the insulated wall he saw a window. Maybe even the one he tried peering into. Pillows and bags looked stuffed into the alcove, eliminating any sign of an outside world, of light, of time, of measurement. And he heard the clink of something metal, the shuffle of something dragging. The chink of something on glass.

            He nearly screamed. Allen wasn’t sure what he expected to find. He saw Norris bring down a meal he never brought back up. His first inclination was that he was bringing that meal to a guest, but the level of hospitality it would take somebody to cook a gourmet spiced meat and present it in the manner Norris had would suggest the requisite adornments might follow into his guest’s lodging. But that wasn’t the case. Not here.

            “Jesus Christ. Ned.” Allen whispered. It was all he could muster.

            “Allen? Allen?” He said it twice. The officer was holding a fork indifferently and his face was smeared some by globs of reddish oil or sauce; his hair was dirty and mostly pulled up in rows, his eyes sunken and terrified, rimmed with the wells of solace that had proved his exhaustion; his legs were splayed out in front of him in a gesture of acceptance, of weakness, and his one hand was cuffed to the gas line to his side, his wrist so raw Allen thought he could smell the wound, could smell the infected skin over even the stench of Ned’s piss and sodden pants, and the pleasant aroma of the meal that now just seemed spoiled.

            “Oh my God, what has he done to you?”

            “Allen…where is he? Where is he?”

            “I watched him leave, Ned. My God, Ned. My God. What has he done to you?”

            Ned dropped the fork between his legs. “How…how did you find me?”

            “I’ve been working with your friend. With Cole. Ever since, well…ever since you went missing. Fuck, Ned, Norris…he’s…”

            “I know,” Ned whispered. He gestured toward a copy of the Post on the floor and Allen understood. Norris had been showing his prisoner the news. He’d been sharing his pet’s humiliation with him in articles written by Cole Moore as he fed him Michelin-grade meals. The psycho turned Ned into a serial killer and showed him the stories. To gloat. This is the madman you’re trying to stop. The madman that knows who you are and what you know. “It won’t stop, Allen. It won’t…ever…stop. He’s told me their names. Told me who’s next. He won’t stop until everybody’s dead…He…likes it. My God, Allen, he likes keeping me here…he likes talking about it…”

            Allen got down on his knees. The food was set out on the floor. Ned hadn’t eaten much. He probably didn’t have an appetite. How could he? The man stunk. What Allen smelt over even the fresh food, the stink of shame, it was Ned. His pores were excreting the musk. “Your hand.”

            “It doesn’t even hurt. Not anymore.”

            “We have to get you out of here. Now, Ned.”

            “Is there an out?”

            “I don’t understand…”

            “He controls everything, Allen. Everything. They see everything. Cole…he must have told you. Did he? About the…about the cameras, about…about everything…”

            “He’s told me enough,” Allen said.

            “There’s only one way to stop them. To stop Norris and the…the council. It isn’t brute force. No, because…because they’d see that coming.”

            “We have to go, Ned. I have my key here, and if God is just, it will open your bracelet and get you the fuck out of here.”

            “Allen. Please. Listen to me. Take that…that serviette. I think that’s what Norris called it. His…his fucking words. Hand it to me.”

            Allen did as he was told. Norris had only given Ned a fork. There was no knife on the platter. Ned took the cloth napkin, something Allen figured was only used in a fancy restaurant. Certainly not the Diner or Burger King.

            “Norris loves his words, Allen. And he has a lot of them. He’s smart. I think he’d…he’d like to say cultured. Refined. Doesn’t matter. Because it’s his fucking words I have against him. It’s what can…what can stop him. What can bring him down. What can save me. My name. Because he kills for ideas. That’s what his game is.”

            “Ned, you’re talking too fast and you’re stuttering. I don’t know what you’re talking about. We have to get you out of here. Now.” Allen thought he might have been stuttering as well as he wrestled through his belt for his key. He was looking at the handcuff. Most, he figured, could open with a peg; the Reedy Creek PD used slot locks, where the peg is inserted sideways into the slot to engage the detent, or reverse the ratchet around the vic’s wrist.

            “He’s smart, Allen, but he’s not perfect. He knows he’s smart. And he likes to hear his own voice. He left me…a…a recorder. When I first woke up down here. He did. With a new fucking tape inside.”

            Allen fished out the peg. It was on a silver ring.

            “He left me a message. I listened to that message a hundred times. I bet I memorized it. But he…he didn’t fucking ask for the recorder. It was like…like he forgot. And he talks, Allen. He talks so much. Like a villain in a…in a James Bond movie. You know. The grand master plan. When I started noticing how much, I knew it was worth the risk.” Ned started chuckling, clutching to the cloth napkin, his eyes so tired but jovial too. Strangely so.

            Allen leaned across Ned. He could smell the old urine in his pants. He wondered how Ned must have felt the first time he’d pissed himself. How it must have felt to sink that low, to sit in his own filth wondering if this was it. If his casket was his effuse. He put the peg in the slot, trying not to chafe Ned’s wrist anymore; the silver just dangled off what looked like bone, the man’s skin nearly charred in its abuse.

            And the cuff fell open and clattered against the furnace with a loud bang.

            Ned was still looking at him. He didn’t even notice the cuff had fallen away; he’d kept his hand rigid against the line to which he’d been tethered. “Allen, I have the evidence that will bring the council down. That will expose Norris. I do. Please, I need you to give it to Cole. For me.”

            “You can give it to Cole, Ned. We’re getting the fuck out of here.” Allen stood up and nearly stepped into the plate of food. He might have even slipped on the silver platter and fallen back. That’s all he needed now. To break his neck.

            “I needed somewhere to hide it. Somewhere I knew he wouldn’t look. Cause he’s…he’s proper. Cultured.” Ned put the cloth around his hand like a mitten, his no-longer-cuffed hand still frozen in its perch against the gas line. He swivelled toward a pail that was just far enough away to make it a struggle to drag over. Allen watched this with fascination. He watched what Ned was able to cope with, to the ardors of captivity that would have reduced most to flailing defeat. He pried the lid and spoke as he did so: “I apologize about this. I wouldn’t let him see me shit myself. Fuck him, Allen. I wouldn’t.”

            It’s his toilet. A part of the smell. Jesus Christ, Allen, the guy somehow shit in a pail with one hand while the other dangled. He watched Ned with a level of pity, reaching into that open bucket with his “gloved” hand; he could see the shadowed outline of what was inside, could imagine the shame that went with having to resort to this. He heard the scrape of something plastic against the inside of the pail and Allen saw it. The recorder. It wasn’t very dirty. Or as dirty as he thought it would be. Ned quickly wrapped the Sony inside the cloth, still only using one hand, and then he carefully pleated the fold under the recorder. He worked with a precision and patience Allen didn’t have. He thought it was because time to Ned had ceased to matter or function. He could not see the sun down here.
            “Alright, Ned. Alright. We have to go. Let me…let me help you up.”

            He reached down to take the crook of Ned’s arm as he slowly pulled in his formerly cuffed hand, the rigidity to his movements proof of his stiffness. “My legs…shit…they’re asleep. I can’t move ‘em.” Ned’s feet scuffed the concrete and slid, as if against ice. The range of motion in them centered mostly on a slight hinge of his knee, and Allen felt the man’s weight, all of it, and combined with his weakness from his immobile stay down here, Allen figured he would have had an easier go at hoisting the furnace over his shoulder.

            Allen listened to the house. He expected Norris. Because every horror movie worked that way. Every one of them. They came down to timing. He heard the squalls and creaks of the floors, of the ducts; he heard the groans of the point loads, and in those bouts of silence his mind always heard the sound of that Porsche’s engine revving up the driveway. He looked at his Timex. It had been twenty-seven minutes and change. Marv would be on the horn soon. “Ned. I want you to just heave up as hard as you can, okay? I’m gonna pull you up under the arms. Just hug against me. Shove that cloth into your pocket and use both hands. Okay?”

            Ned only nodded. He looked at the cloth, some of it smudged with shit. He carefully stuffed it into his pocket, feeling the serviette bunch up against the hem. He didn’t want to accidentally press the rewind button. And God forbid the record button after. Allen bent down and took Ned under the arms as if he was an infant. Allen was a strong man, but there was a difference between a live and dead load. He’d been to the gym, and lifting a couple hundred pounds off the floor secured to a barbell required only the vertical plane of movement in his legs; with Ned, Allen’s lower back was rounded forward, and so far in front of his knees he didn’t think he could stabilize. Especially with Ned’s breathing, with the tremors through his limbs, the rapid pall of his heart, the twitch of muscles that hadn’t atrophied but hadn’t worked for days either.

            “Ready. Up.” Allen stood and Ned came with him, his legs wobbly and nearly buckling beneath him. Allen felt the man’s weight collapse into him and he braced his hips and thanked God he’d put on a couple pounds coupling his double cream coffee with helpings of apple or rhubarb pie at the Diner. Especially after a hearty meal of bacon and eggs.

            He looked at Ned and smiled, because the man was standing. He was. He wasn’t a quitter. No sir.

            And then Allen Webster saw blood on Ned’s face. Streaked across it like war paint, only the whites of the man’s eyes disparate from the clotted pallet.

            He didn’t feel it at first. Because it happened so fast. He saw the cuffs dangling against the furnace, the lid partially clasped against Ned’s shit pail, and the platter below where he would eventually fall to bleed out.

            Norris Serkis had come behind Allen and taken his hair with one hand, and carved his throat with the other. It was the same knife he’d used to chop vegetables in the kitchen. Allen thought he smelled onions when the blade slid beneath his nose and opened his jugular like a hose bib.

8
Danny walked alongside the worn clapboard siding, by the window to the bathroom where he’d already listened to Eddie Hilton piss like a workhorse when he last came. The sheets were drawn over the windows, concealing the pitiful world inside. The lonely world. Danny went to the back of the house, toward the decrepit patio with paving stones and the old fire pit, the rusted lawn chairs and recliners, and the old tattered shed at the edge of the property. He saw the tangled bushes beyond the fence line, that same gnarled knot of branches through which he’d seen his father’s car when he was last here; it was there now. Parked, indiscriminate.

            Danny went to the sliding patio door. There were sheets tacked up now where they hadn’t been before, and he wondered if that was his dad’s doing. If his dad was trying to enclose himself and his tormentor from the prejudices of Reedy Creek. Oh dad, don’t you know? In all your research, your hunting, your surveillance, didn’t you ever notice? It doesn’t matter where you go. You’re always being watched. There was a slight part in the sheet as it pulled away from the glass, giving Danny a partial view of the kitchen, of the cluttered dishes and cups, the beer cans, the pin-up posters of scantily clad women tacked into the plaster.

            And Danny could hear the television set. Its volume was turned up high and almost echoed inside the house. He couldn’t see Eddie’s chair, the one the guy sat back in to watch the game while he let his pants hang open and left his gut on prominent display. He wondered in that instant if the Creek’s Force would be working against him. If it would try with all its power to keep him out. Because he thought whatever his father was doing in there, it was a part of what he and his friends had been watching happen. Feeling happen. Danny tried the patio door. It wouldn’t budge. He figured his father had likely locked it, or the magic of this day had. To make sure things went as they were supposed to.

            He looked back at the shed and decided it was his best chance. The paving stones were tamped pretty deep into the ground, tied by lacing weeds and brambles between each, and the chairs would likely turn to dust in his hands. He trotted out to the shed, wondering if that strange neighbor was watching from his window. The boarded exterior of the old utility house was mostly peeled away, leaving only the sodden plywood and a door hanging on rusty hinges with a padlock that had already been opened by time, by entropy, by whatever opposing force was in this town trying to help him stop the sickness from spreading. He pulled open the door and felt the reluctance of its edge against the sagging header; he felt the thick impact of spiders fall from above and he wildly ruffled them out of his hair, off his shoulders, peeling away awry webbing from his face. The door didn’t swing open, but with what little give he could achieve, he found enough natural light to provide a splinter of accessibility into the shed. He saw broken shelves, mostly empty; he could hear something skittering in the shadows, likely rats, and he could see more spiders, these ones fat and obsidian, clutched to the far wall in the darkness having grown old and plump with the endless lines of gnats and flies that had worked their way into this crypt. Danny stepped inside and thought it felt like a mausoleum, like one of those above ground tombs he saw on TV in New Orleans. He thought they must have smelled the same, the musty prevalence like a punch in the face. He saw things that must have been a hundred years old. An ancient bike frame, an old manual air pump that looked as if it was cast in bronze, but whose surface was so dusty it could have been mistaken as worn pine; and leaning there, next to a rake with a nest of spider eggs dangling in dewy solemnity, was a sledge hammer. Old but sturdy. His dad always said old tools were better than new. Because they were built to last. Built for generations, to be passed on as heirlooms before the idea of consumerism would turn their practicality to affordability and mass production. He quickly snatched the hammer, feeling its weight drag on the floor, listening to the squeal of rodents somewhere in the back, and he thought he could feel them on him, crawling up his legs, the spiders nesting and eating into his hair and scalp, feeding on him—

            And then he was in the sunlight again, having fallen back into the dirt with the hammer’s handle against his chest. He looked at the shed one last time. That oh-so-unassuming shed, the harbinger of every conceivable terror. He exhaled and stood, dusting off his ass, and bringing the hammer with him to the patio door. It would only take one swing. One. And his father would know he was here.

            Will the Force stop you? Will the hammer break? Will one of those spiders bite you, like Peter Parker, and incapacitate you until Eddie Hilton is dead, and another string finally snaps? He wasn’t sure how it worked but he thought it was possible. Anything seemed possible now.

            Danny inhaled and swung the hammer, bringing the handle up against his shoulder like a baseball bat, feeling the weight of its chipped blue end trying to drag him away, to pull him back to that ungodly shed. But he followed through, bringing the hammer down against the glass in an arc, and the thick pane shattered around its head, billowing out against the sheet and pulling it from the nails or tacks above. He heard Grimwood’s voice, somewhere beneath everything, that cadence so precise and measured: Let your father have this, Danny. You saw what happened to him. He deserves this, or it will eat at him and eat at him until there is nothing left but the scraps for you to pick up and bury. Chaos requires bodies. Let your father add to the pile.

            He ignored that voice, ignored the thought of those eyes beaming like lanterns beneath the brim of an old fedora. Danny listened to the loud crash of the glass, the rip of the linen as shards worked their way through tenser flaps, and he watched the blanket lightly fall to the ground to reveal Eddie Hilton tied to a chair in the front room by the blaring TV, and his father holding a gun aimed at Danny.

            “Daniel?”

            The hammer had clattered to the floor and Danny held up his hands. Eddie tried to turn and look at him. Danny saw that the man’s face was battered, his nose broken and spilling blood in rivulets down his mouth and over the sock plugged between his lips like a thick wick. His hands were tied by rope to the armrests. His fingers were broken. Mangled.

            “Dad…”

            “What are you doing here?” There was shock in his eyes and his tone. Danny had never seen his father like this. He was wearing the same black gloves that he’d worn when he was spying from the bushes, loading and unloading the Beretta. He’d lowered the gun, but it took a moment as disbelief surrendered to the very real possibility that the man’s son had actually broken into the house. That he was actually standing here in the shards of glass with pleading in his eyes.

            “You don’t have to do this…please don’t do this.”

            “What…what are you doing here? How did you find me?”

            “I know. I know everything, dad.”

            “Huh—how? You know what?”

            Eddie was whimpering. The great hulk of man had been reduced to a blubbering child. He wore his janitorial outfit, but it was chaffed by rope as it coursed across his chest, cuffing his heaving belly. His legs were both tied to the chair’s legs. Danny thought one of the man’s ankles was broken because his foot was resting awkwardly, the angle somehow wrong.

            “The cameras, dad. There are cameras everywhere. Everywhere in Reedy Creek. And in here. If you go any farther, if you kill him, they’ll have everything they need to take you away forever. From me. From mom.”

            His father looked around the room. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to find. Danny only looked toward the ceiling near the kitchen. There was a small lens. So miniscule, something somebody who was distracted would likely never find.

            “Daniel. Please. Go home. Forget you ever saw this. I demand—”

            “I know what he did, dad. I know.”

            His dad bit his tongue.

            “I know all about it. This town, it’s rotten. It wants this to happen. What you’re doing here. It needs it to happen. It’s using your past to make it happen…because he’s…Eddie’s just another sick part of Reedy Creek. A reason this place is crumbling. And Balaam, Satan, the devil, whatever you want to call it, him, he’s using you, your anger, to fulfill this…this duty. Your life, dad. Was all of it…was it all a lie? Was it always about this…this moment?”

            The TV was loud behind his father, a commercial on right now, the station from Davenport and the feed almost scrambled.

            “Daniel. I just need…for the sake of my sanity…I need closure.” There were tears in the man’s eyes now. The expression of one who’d finally taken action. Who was sick of hiding. Would Danny really take that away from him? What sort of pieces of the man would it leave? Eddie muttered something through the sock. His broken fingers twitched this way and that. Shock had likely taken a hold of the man. Danny knew he deserved to die. But maybe not by his father’s hands. Because you couldn’t take that back. You couldn’t.

            “Murder is forbidden in the Torah. You told me that, dad. You. You said Moses…Mosaic Law, it was careful to forbid murder, retzach, because it was a crime of passion. You said it was careful to forbid murder and not killing because the two are not the same. Would you break God’s law for revenge? Is it worth it?”

            “This isn’t murder,” his father said, almost in a whisper. “It’s closure, Daniel. It is for my manhood. My character. Because he destroyed who I was and who I was supposed to be.”

            “No, he didn’t. You have mom. You have me. No matter what he did to you, you still made choices in life that went beyond this. You did.”

            “I had to distract from what he’d taken from me.”

            “I am not a distraction,” Danny screamed.

            “No…no, you are not,” David said. He wiped his eye, the gun still dangling by his side. There was blood on the handle, dripping down his father’s glove and onto the floor. “Maybe I convinced myself…at first, because it made sense to find a lie in that life, that life I tried to make to conceal everything this…this monster took from me.” He turned around and struck Eddie in the back of the head with the pistol. The fat janitor bucked forward and blood sprayed outward in a gleaming arc; Danny saw the insanity in his father’s eyes, the insanity that would propel him for so many years to lead a clandestine life. Eddie was silently crying now. Pleading through that sock. Pleading like a child. He was not the same man that had maligned Danny in the boys’ room, the same man he saw in that New York alley forcing his father’s pants down around his thighs. In the end, even the worst people had moments of mortal clarity. Danny figured Hitler was no different.

            “Dad, we can just walk away from this. You and me. Too much will happen today for what you’ve already done to matter. I swear. You, me and mom, we can leave this place. We can leave and find peace. You don’t have to murder this man, because it isn’t even the judgment of the people in this town I even care about. No, it’s your judgment, your conscience. It’s the way I think of you, the way I look up to you. That’s what is at stake. I’m here because I think I’m your reason. I’m…maybe I’m that kernel of doubt in your conscience that has stayed your feet for so long. I’ve seen the photos. I know you did not get transferred here. I know you are not an accountant. I know the life mom and I thought you lived is a lie. I know that. But I also know why. I do. I know what Eddie Hilton did to you. I know he is evil. But he isn’t worth damnation, dad.”

            His dad let the tears fall down his cheek while Eddie sobbed behind him. Danny did not want to know what his father had done to the man before. Or how. He could see the extent of the damage. He could see the man’s pain. And he did not care. Eddie deserved whatever came his way. But perdition was a hell of a bill to pay for revenge. His father could just as easily burn this part of his life in a bonfire; take the photos, the phony ledgers, the life he’d created to sell the lie to his wife, and just pile them in the backyard and light the match. And then just drive away. They didn’t even need their things. Their things were just a reminder of this place, of this life, of this lie.

            “He raped me,” David whispered, looking at his son, ashamed. Embarrassed to say the word out loud. Scared that he’d broken something of a boundary with his boy. When he saw Danny wasn’t surprised or shocked, a level of calm came over him. Maybe he needed to talk. Maybe that’s what it came down to. Danny wasn’t sure if his dad ever saw a therapist. But a confession of the sorts always helped to get the ball rolling. “I’m doing this for you, for us. So we can be free.”

            “I don’t want this, dad. Mom doesn’t want it. I just want you. Need you. I want our family. Reedy Creek can keep this man…this monster. It can keep the past.” Danny smiled, ignoring the man in the chair, the sound of the television, the leering eyes of women tacked to the walls, their alluring gazes the mark of a fantasy world cloaked from reality. “Which Negro League pitcher is the only one in the Baseball Hall of Fame with a losing MLB record?”

            His father held his breath. “What?”

            “You heard me. Losing record in the Hall of Fame. Who was it?”

            “Daniel—” David looked down at his Beretta and noticed his hands were trembling. He looked at the camera in the ceiling indifferently and then stuck the gun in his belt, its handle prodding his thin waist. “Satchel Paige. Twenty-eight wins, thirty-one losses.”

            “Who did the Yanks nearly trade to Milwaukee to get Hank Aaron and Warren Spahn?”

            “Mantle and Ford. And I would have protested in the Bronx had that happened,” David said, reassuringly.

            “Who’s hit into the most double plays in baseball history?”

            “Daniel…”

            “Who?”

            “Hank Aaron. Three hundred and twenty-eight. This has to stop…”

            “No. Because this is real. What you’re doing here, it isn’t. It’s make believe. Something you think you have to do. But this,” he touched his chest, “what we’ve made, what we have, it’s real, dad. It’s fucking real.”

            “Daniel.” He was stern, but not. Danny thought his father was breaking. That the stoicism that had him following leads and clues for nearly two decades was dissolving to something far more powerful.

            “Whose number was the first ever retired?”

            “Daniel, in the years we’ve been doing this, all of the years, you’ve never been able to stump me. Never. And you’re leading with Yankees trivia. What kind of a tactic is that?”

            “Whose number?”

            “Gehrig’s. Number four.”

            Danny walked toward his father: “And which pitcher struck out ten consecutive batters in one game?”

            He was closer to the man now. So close he could see the blood spray on the man’s dark shirt, could see the gore on his gloves, the hair and blood clinging to the gun’s handle. But the madness was gone from his father’s eyes. The wariness. It was his dad. His daddy. The man beyond the lies. The real man.

            “You won’t trick me with Mets trivia. Tom Seaver. 1970.”

            Danny reached his father and pulled him into his arms. The two held each other, his father sobbing now, burying his face in his son’s hair. Danny had never felt more real, more important. Fuck you, Grimwood, he thought. He looked at the camera and hoped the devil was watching.

            “I love you, dad.”

            His dad looked down at him, at his boy, and he smiled. “This was always the realest part of my life. It’s what counted most.” He took off his gloves and shoved them in his pockets, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. He ruffled Danny’s hair. Like he always had and always would. “I don’t know how you knew to come here. I don’t. But I’m glad you did.”

            He walked to the man in the chair and got down on his haunches in front of him, pulling the sock out of Eddie’s mouth to loud gagging noises.

            “Fuck you, you crazy Jew! Fuck you both!”

            “My son saved your life, Eddie. A Jew. I want you to know that I do not forgive you. I will not forget you. But you don’t matter to me anymore. You don’t have any power over me.”

            Eddie’s eyes narrowed and he spit to the side. It was blood. His nose was knotted and swollen, his lips cracked and black over yellowing teeth; his fingers looked arthritic and incapable, his one foot disjointed and ballooning at the heel. “I don’t even remember you. You Jews are all the same. Look the same. From the front and from behind.” Eddie smiled and licked his terribly split lips with a diseased tongue.

            “You will remember me,” David said, standing up. “Because you will think of me whenever you see a shadow or hear a noise. You are lonely. Aren’t you? And when you’re alone your imagination does crazy things. I am your boogeyman, Eddie Hilton.”

            “Fuck you, Jew. Fuck you all!” He wriggled in his restraints and screamed with pain when his foot moved.

            David walked back to his son. He had shed something, and by the time he reached Danny, that incredible weight was finally gone. It was a relief. “We have a lot to chat about, Daniel. I feel like you have a story to tell me.”

            “I guess I do,” Danny smiled.

            And then they both heard the voice on the television:

            “We have breaking news from Reedy Creek. There have been reports of multiple gun shots at the Secondary school—”

9

The man had come in through the window, pulling one side of the blinds down from their clips, leaving them hanging askew against the wall. The window was open, letting in a nice breeze. The man with the black hair had muscled open the pane, and he’d climbed into the office before Andy even suspected somebody was jerry-rigging the window. Maybe it was because of Hector, this man, this former friend, who’d kicked back against his credenza, only feet from Andy’s discarded gun, holding his eye to his cheek so that the gelatinous red socket above remained exposed and perilously empty. Andy had indifferently wiped his thumb down his slacks, hoping none of that blood and juice had gotten on him. And the only thing he could think was: How did it happen so fast? How did shit go south so fast? You came here to get your wife. You came to the school to grab your wife and finally be rid of this place. He didn’t think the hows or the whys even mattered. Sometimes instinct didn’t work according to the rules, to rationality, and that surely defined what had happened here. His wife was fucking Hector Perez. And a part of Andy, a part that still loosely respected moral certainties and responsibilities, saw that as a slight against him and he wanted to take the animosity he’d expected to use on Henry and turn it on the fat fuck currently squirming like a school girl. Andy had forgotten about his nose, about his broken cheekbone; he’d forgotten or ignored the pain, because in the moment neither of them amounted to much. What mattered now was this new player. This man who’d come in through the window. This man who stood now in the office, his hair still neatly slicked back against his skull, black and gleaming, his shirt bulging around striated biceps, and its flap pulled up over a catch in the man’s belt with an ivory-plated handle.

            “Who are you?”

            It was all Andy would get out before the man drew the knife from his custom leather catch. And he realized then and there who the man could be, and how fate worked in strange ways in this town, this little town of scarred drug dealers with phantom furnishings.

            Everything happened fast. Too fast for Mary to do much. She watched with an eerie fascination this handsome man, this exotic man climb in through the window, and her first inclination was to recall the romantic, quixotic fantasies she used to have about the desert baron stealing her away into the night. It was a thought tucked back so far right now, behind the horror of seeing the man she loved, the man she’d grown to love, struggling to keep his eye from hitting the floor. But then, like Andy, she realized who the man was. She did. Thoughts would form, but nothing fast enough to make its way out of her mouth in the form of a plea. That’s the fucking pedophile, the man you saw with the little boys, the boys that came in the black towncar, the boys who were escorted to the front door, the boys the man hugged and pecked on the cheek, the boys the man fancied, the boys the man took into his house and watched as they danced and danced, and then he held them, like trophies, little fucking playthings—

            “Sharmouta!” the man cried, and he took Mary by the throat. Before Andy could stand, the man with the black hair, the stranger, plunged his ivory-handled knife into Mary’s chest. He heard the sound of the blade scraping against her ribs, sawing her sternum. The sound that came out of Mary’s mouth was something of a whimper; the stranger still had his hand throttled around her throat, pressing her against the wall. “You fucking bitch!” He stabbed her again. And again, each time slinging out Mary’s blood as the knife arced in its deadly pendulum.

            “No!” Andy cried.

            And Hector found his voice. And feet. The big man was up, his hand still holding tight to his face, but his brow furrowed, turning the empty socket into an angry Jackolantern. “You bastard!” His gait was clumsy, his vision likely swimming and blurred, blending the shadowed caverns of his palm with the Pedophile turning Mary’s blouse into a tattered rag of bloody ribbons.

            The Pedophile turned with the knife as Hector lumbered forward, and he flicked his wrist outwards. He moved and threw like somebody with experience. Andy watched that knife glide in a line from the Pedophile’s hand, and then he heard the pop of the blade breaking bone as it stuck like a wavering peg above Hector’s nose. The fat man’s hand fell away from his dangling eyeball and he stumbled back, hitting the edge of his desk and knocking over the computer. His hands smeared blood across the oak and he mumbled something, one eye trying to look up at the white handle jutting from his face, the other like the alien tentacle of some nightmarish monster: “Muh—Mary. Mary.” He fell back and toppled on his side near the bookshelves, bringing a sheaf of papers he’d never look at again with him in a scattered fray on the floor.

            Andy looked at the Pedophile as the man’s dark eyes turned on him; he skidded along the floor toward his gun. The Pedophile let go of Mary and he watched his wife fall in a tatter to the floor, her eyes open and unblinking, a dark viscous staining the carpet. Jesus, Mary. Jesus, why didn’t you just come with me?

            “You fucking people, with your secrets. You think they give you power.”

            “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Andy said. The defiance was gone from his voice. It sounded strangled coming out of a mouth that was swelling beneath the fractured bone in his cheek, under the snotty trail of blood coursing around his mouth. He heard Ellie Lemkin hammering on the door now, calling out Hector’s name. He grabbed his gun and aimed it at the man, his wife’s blood on his arms, on his shirt, on his pants. He pulled the trigger.

            But the safety. Shit. Andy wasn’t a real cop. He wasn’t a gunman.

            “You gonna shoot me, you little fuck.” The man had his second knife out, pulled swiftly from the other catch on his hip. Like a gunslinger Andy used to read about years ago, when he was a boy; he remembered the best parts of his childhood at that moment, remembered his mom singing in the kitchen, his dad out in the yard and the smell of clipped grass. When Andy fumbled off the safety with his thumb, his hand trembling and full of nerves, the Pedophile was a couple steps from him. Andy pulled the trigger and felt the recoil against his palm, felt the muscles in his thumb quivering. The gunshot was loud. And as fate should have it, the shot happened at the same time as another inside the school, masking it. There would be more to come, of course. Andy shuffled back. He hit the big man in his thigh. He watched the hole form and blossom on his leg like a deranged flower; the Pedophile only grunted, and Andy saw Mary between his striding legs, staring back at him and at peace, her face still in the pool of blood that had closed around her mouth. The big man was on top of Andy in the next moment, nearly as heavy as Hector, but stronger. Far stronger.

            He brought his knife down in an arc and Andy watched the blade slice through the air. He brought up his hand and forearm, turning his gun to the side, and he felt the man’s powerful arm press down on him. He could only bite down as that knife came closer. He couldn’t hold back the man’s intent. His name is Salim. Paul told you he was untouchable. What set him off? What set him off to come here and murder Mary and Hector?

            Trevor was right, he finally thought, watching the crazed malice in Salim’s eyes. The psychopathy. Paul’s shuttling the council now that he knows the operation’s blown. The motherfucker. He blackmailed Salim with his evidence, just like he probably took those photos of your wife and Hector, or stuffed his evidence of plagiarism in your mailbox.

            He turned you all against each other. Like Prospero with his damn sorcery.

            Salim the Pedophile grabbed Andy’s hand and pulled it away from his knife, wrenching so hard he heard the snap immediately; Andy’s bone broke at the elbow like brittle glass, and before he could utter a cry, he watched that knife finish its descent and felt something both hot and cold in his belly. He looked down and saw half the blade wedged into his uniform, saw the blackish ichor in its curdling current reaching upward in a sickly splash. Ellie was screaming at the door. “Call the cops! Call the cops!”

            He muffled a noisy grunt as Salim laced his hands around his throat, staring at him, into him, biting his lower lip and showing the strain of one in deep thought, in deep exertion. His wife’s blood was all over the man’s hands. He knew this was Paul Holdren’s doing. He did. He blackmailed all of you, and rotten luck, jealousy, put you all in the same room. No. It was fate. He could feel the pressure in his stomach, that biting, sharp and singing pain of nerves drowning; he could feel the reactions in his legs, the tingle and radiating numbness. And he could feel the gun at his side, his finger still near enough to the trigger that if he was quick, he might be able to take this fuck to hell with him.

            “You have no power over me,” Salim said again. “That dumb bitch had no power over me.”

            “Paul Holdren killed us all. You sick fuck.”

            Andy pressed his gun to the underside of the Pedophile’s chin and closed his eyes, pulling the trigger one last time. He did not see Salim’s brain and bone shoot up in a liquid, fragmented spray through his greasy head; he did not see the man’s dark eyes roll up to the whites, as if in the end they followed the course of the bullet as it tore through his skull like oil through a derrick. No, Andy just felt the weight of the man fall back on him and push the knife deeper into his gut, likely piercing his spleen or liver.

            He turned his head to look at Mary. In the end they’d be discovered staring at each other, and the cops on the scene would remark on the romanticism of the symbol; that despite, and in spite, of what happened that day in the school, there was one sign of hope to cull from it.

            That was how the E10 council ended.

10

Ned Stevenson fell to his knees in front of Allen Webster’s body as the blood pumped gleaming spurts onto the platter of food he hadn’t finished. The man was dying and he looked at Ned with a pleading sorrow that he could only turn his head away from. Because that hopelessness trapped him now. Again.

            Norris stood looking down at the bodies, wiping the blood off his knife with a measured precision, using the tail of his shirt so that Webster would forever stain that particular Polo. “I see you were having some play time. Did you do this every day when I left? Have a friend over?”

            Ned whimpered. He was so angry. So insanely furious, because that chance, that opportunity for or glimpse of freedom was quickly snatched away like a sick joke. And he wondered if that was Norris’s plan all along. To give Allen the confidence that he had time.

            “I’m sorry, Ned. I am. We can’t have people like this spoiling our fun.” The doctor smiled. His handsomeness was a counterpoint to his eyes. His empty eyes. He patted Webster’s side as the man gulped those last few breaths before dying. Ned felt himself starting to cry. He could not stop himself. “What sin took him to his death, Ned?”

            “Please,” Ned whispered. He made sure the cloth in his pocket was covered. If Norris was going to kill him today, finally, he wanted to ensure his body was found with the tape in tact. With Norris’s confessions. “He was a good man.”

            “Nobody is without sin.” Norris’s voice was suddenly stern. “Look at this mess. I’m going to have to move his body. If your next victim is a cop, a co-worker, I will have to stage the murder as one of passion. Maybe you were lovers. This guy doesn’t look like one the ladies would fawn over, and he isn’t wearing a ring. He seemed lonely. Maybe the two of you were fucking. You lost interest. And he stalked you. Spied on you. Like he did on me. Because he did spy on me. I think that’s the perfect crime, Ned. Don’t you? Spy. Yes. I can write it across his forehead and leave him outside the station. A nice little message to your fellow officers.”

            Ned looked at Allen’s body, looked at those poor eyes as they stared back at him. So scared in the end. And he felt something under his leg. Something he’d dropped while Allen was helping him.

            “I know you aren’t going to like this request, Ned, I know, but I am going to have to put you back in your restraint. One cannot trust a dog to wander freely.” He licked his lips. Ned wondered if Norris had an erection. If the act of murder was like sex for him. Norris stepped over Allen’s body, staring down at Ned as he scurried back against the furnace, his arm jingling the handcuffs as they dangled from the gas line, his blood and skin on their razor edge.

            “No,” Ned said. “I…I promise, I won’t move a muscle, I won’t leave…I can hardly walk, but don’t put that fucking thing back on me…”

            “Ned, look at what I found you doing down here. I never said you could have any friends over. Did I? You already broke a rule.”

            “I…I didn’t invite him…” Ned clenched his fist and waited. Waited for that one golden opportunity.

            “No. Of course not. I haven’t ever met a host who invited his guests over to die. And so needlessly.” Norris’s smile reached either ear, leering and toothy, the handsomeness erased in the utter madness of his comic proportions. “I will have to punish you. Like any dog that gets into the garbage, you have to rub its nose in it to make sure it gets the point.” Norris reached across Ned for the handcuffs, that one end still hanging loose. Ned could smell his cologne, his aftershave; he remembered those fantasies, those lurid thoughts he’d had when they first even drove to this place from the bar. And now those memories didn’t matter. He heard Norris clutch the bracelet and he brought his arm from around his back and stabbed it down, plunging the fork he’d grabbed from the concrete into Norris’s freshly shaved neck. The tines broke the skin with an irregular ease and the doctor flung back, swiping Ned across the face with his groping fingers as his instincts forced him to reach up for the utensil.

            “You…you fuck!” Norris screamed. He was hunched over awkwardly, and when he did swivel to grab the fork, his momentum shifted his balance and he fell back over Allen’s body, kicking up as he smashed into the floor with a dull tap that was the back of his head. Ned shuffled up to Allen and reached into his belt, tugging at the man’s gun, trying to pull it out of the holster. Hoping the stars had aligned, hoping the deputy hadn’t snapped it shut, hoping he’d left it accessible and open for the taking because of his paranoia.

            Hallelujah!

            Ned sat back against the furnace and slowly stood up, holding Webster’s Glock, watching the resolute certainty as his nerves flared, as his pulse raced. Norris pulled the fork out of his neck, and with it a sizable chunk of flesh that left something of a divot in the side of his neck that was starting to piss blood. He looked at Ned, aiming the gun, cursing himself for not grabbing it. But Ned understood Norris Serkis, with all his brilliance, with all his words, was still not above a simple oversight.

            “Ned…you don’t understand. What we’re doing, it’s important. It will change the world.” There was pleading in the doctor’s voice. Something Ned had never heard. Or never expected to hear. “You can be a part of it. I can convince them…the council…I can convince them of your utility. And we can find a new killer. It’s that…that simple.” He smiled, but it was insecure. Like something Ned imagined Norris offering or feigning when he was a little boy; he couldn’t imagine what sort of child Norris might have been, and he realized he simply didn’t care. Ned only staggered forward, still aiming the gun at Norris, desperate to leave. Desperate to live again.

            “You…you kept me as your pet?”

            He asked it as a question. And he thought then and there how silly he must have been not to see it before. Because he always thought he was a prisoner-of-convenience. But maybe the council didn’t even know about him. Maybe they thought he was dead. And he was just down here, chained up with a litter box because Norris wanted a fucking dog he could talk to.

            “Ned…” Norris said when he saw the decision ferment in the man’s eyes.

            Ned Stevenson pulled the trigger six times. The first three bullets struck the doctor in the chest, in a fairly decent straight line starting from the striated crevice between his pecs and up to his sternum; the fourth put a hole in his throat to match the gouge in the side of his neck; the fifth separated his filtrum from his upper lip and left it mostly ragged and peeled to the side like a rotten orange, shattering the teeth in his upper jaw with a noise like rocks tumbling; and the sixth left the motherfucker a Cyclops as his body heaved back and flung up his legs in a splayed jig.

            Ned only touched his pocket where he stowed his recorder and watched Norris Serkis die.

11

Ned left Norris’s house a new man. The police had already come. Two cruisers had their lights flashing, upon the proper warning of a man named Marv, who watched from his window and suspected, as the filthy stranger with bare feet got down on his knees and held his hands above his head, that Allen Webster had gotten tangled in the shit. Those goddamn Corners. He watched the police officers push the stranger to the grass and cuff his hands behind his back. This man in the grass was crying. But he was smiling.

            Marv would tell the guys that he thought the sonofabitch had won the lottery or something. “He’s got four cops bum rushing him, and the crazy bastard’s laughing like George Carlin’s doing a show. It’s like he knew something they didn’t. I don’t know. But I felt like laughing with him. And I think I did, I think I did start as they were walking him to the back of the cruiser. It was contagious.”