Panting and wheezing, Arthur made it through the clearing. Just when he thought he was exhausted, he gained a second wind, and it thrust him farther into the trees, where his legs finally gave in and he collapsed to the ground. Immobilized, he lay in the soft mud, waiting for his pursuers to catch up to him.
But they weren’t coming.
With each passing moment, he told himself he was free—that he’d escaped the police who’d dared to come to his home away from home. He’d gotten lucky too, and he’d never forget how close a shave that really was. It was only dumb luck that he’d used the bathroom closest to the front door. That one had been concealed for so long that even he’d forgotten it was there until he’d desperately needed to empty his bladder and couldn’t make it back up the stairs. Even then he hadn’t had much time to finish before the door burst open, and a handful of cops stormed through the building. He’d then made it out of there with his life, which would’ve been the perfect getaway had that black guy not chased him down.
Who was he, anyway?
Arthur had seen him at Teresa’s crime scene, and something about the way he held himself didn’t exactly scream “cop.” Was he a private investigator, perhaps? He imagined the guy as a killer, working his way onto the scene while posing as somebody else. Wouldn’t that have been an amazing twist—to know he wasn’t the only one screwing with people?
But he wasn’t here to screw around.
He was here to kill and then to call it a day.
And how close had he come to murdering Tom Walker? Way too close by any measure. It was only an hour before the raid that he’d learned the truth about his latest victim, and his hesitation to believe it was the only reason he hadn’t killed him yet. Not that it stopped him from hovering that car over the bastard’s face. It was the least he deserved.
Only now he was in a new predicament. If what he’d learned that morning was true, he had a whole new project to set about working on. The steps he needed to take would set him back at least a couple of days, and that was if he found everything immediately when he started looking for it. Killing was tricky business, and Arthur was coming to learn that pretty fast.
As he lay there covered in mud, his breath easing into a steady rhythm, Arthur decided to give himself one more minute before he made a break for it. Carefully, making no sudden gestures for fear of being seen, he dragged his watch arm in front of him and kept his eye on the second hand. It felt like an eternity to rotate around the face of his Rolex—a gift given to him by his wife on their tenth wedding anniversary. To see it now, speckled in mud with a surface scratch etched deep into the front, broke his heart into tiny pieces. Everything that’d come from her was something he treasured: every gift, memory, and lesson. She’d been everything to him, as had his daughter, whom he’d planned on passing those same lessons down to in due course, thus maintaining the circle of life.
But he hadn’t been given the chance.
Arthur scrunched up his face at the reminder of what he’d lost. Glancing once more at the time, he gave it a few extra seconds, then pushed himself up to his feet and turned back in the direction he’d been running. Now that he had no home and no garage, there was nowhere left to go. But that was okay—he didn’t need a residence. That was a material thing that would soon be gone. All he needed was the tools to complete his next job and claim his next victim.
After all, what he’d learned today was shocking, but it wasn’t enough to steer him off course; there was still one victim left, and it wasn’t Tom. The true driver of that car had been someone else entirely, and that meant someone else had to die.