I SLIPPED INTO the dark house, ready to die if I had to. There was a knife in my right hand, a flashlight in my left, but both hands were still cuffed together.
Livermore had a gun.
And he had Jeannie.
I paused in his kitchen for a moment, waiting to hear something. The house was quiet. I took a step forward and heard the floor squeak beneath my foot. Old wooden boards, no way to avoid it. He would hear me coming, no matter how carefully I moved.
You need some kind of edge, I told myself. Something to surprise him, to distract him, to get him away from Jeannie.
I took another step and felt my feet slipping from under me. When I caught myself against a table, I had to take a few seconds to stand still and let my head clear.
You’ve lost too much blood. You don’t have much time left before you pass out for good.
I covered most of the flashlight with my hand, turning it on just long enough to see the general outline of the room. I saw blood on the floor. My own, maybe Jeannie’s. Maybe from the man outside. There was a door about twenty feet ahead of me. It had to lead down to the basement. When I opened it, it was too dark to see the stairs, but I could smell the basement’s dampness. And something else . . .
It was a smell I knew, taking me right back to the first time I ever responded to a senior wellness check, in that old house in Detroit. My partner and I had found the woman on her bathroom floor, where she’d been lying for the past four days.
It was the smell of death.
I wanted to call out to Jeannie, to tell her that I was here, that I would make sure she was safe. But that would have been suicide for both of us. Instead, I crouched down at the top of the stairs and I listened. I waited. I gave my own gut instincts a chance to show me my next step.
There was nothing but silence. And darkness. And that sickening smell.
Then I heard a sharp intake of breath from somewhere below me. A muffled cry.
I took one step down the staircase, hearing the wood creaking, actually feeling the whole thing shifting under my foot.
Fuck your instincts. Fuck your training, fuck everything you ever learned about how to approach a possibly armed suspect.
Fuck Martin T. Livermore because I am not going to wait one more second.
I flipped the flashlight on for a fraction of second. Just long enough to see the stairs, to see where they started, to count how many steps I would need to take. I kept myself low and moved as fast as I could. Down the second step, to the third.
Then a flash of light and sound both exploded at once, freezing everything in that one brilliant instant, every last detail, my shoes on the stairs, Livermore with the gun raised and Jeannie standing off to the side, her eyes closed, her body stiffly upright, her arms reaching out into a letter Y.
Another two steps down the stairs, then another flash and another image burned into eternity. I was closer to him, but still too far away.
Two more steps and I felt the concrete beneath my feet. I turned on the flashlight to blind him, but the meager light was consumed by the third flash, and then I felt the sudden jolt in my right shoulder, my own body remembering that night so many years ago, another jolt just like this one, then the same burning sensation that came right after it as I watched my partner dying on the floor next to me. My whole right arm went numb in an instant, and the knife I was holding went sliding across the rough concrete.
A fourth flash lit up the room again, but by that time my momentum had already taken me into his chest and the gun went off right next to my ear. My shoulder was on fire but I had my hands on him, even though they were still cuffed together. After all this time, all those miles chasing him . . .
I will not let go until you’re dead.
He knocked the flashlight from my other hand, but at the same time I was able to grab at the gun, using both hands together, the cold metal twisting away from his fingers and clattering to the floor as we both fell hard against the workbench behind him, tools rattling and the breath coming out of him as I drove his back into the hard wooden edge.
The flashlight was on the floor somewhere, giving the room just enough light to make out the dark outline of his body. He tried to push me away, but I redoubled my grip on his shirt. Then he sucker-punched me right in the gut and folded me in half. I felt him slipping away from me, and then he stepped aside and tried to drive my head into the workbench. I ducked down just in time to avoid the blow, came up looking for him, but he was gone.
“Jeannie,” I said. “Are you all right?”
I couldn’t see her now. But I remembered the image that had burned into my mind. The unnatural way she had been standing, her arms spread out wide.
“Jeannie!”
She didn’t answer me. Her body was nothing but a dark shadow against the wall.
No, she’s not dead. She can’t be.
“JEANNIE!”
“It’s too late,” Livermore said, his voice strangely detached in the darkness. “For both of you.”
My right arm was dead. I knew I was running out of time. As I took a step toward his voice, he picked up something from the top of a pile of plastic storage boxes that were stacked against the wall. I saw the glint of metal, but otherwise had no idea what he had just armed himself with. Something hard and heavy, something that would put me down for good if he caught me with it.
I took another step and he was gone again. He had moved deeper into the darkness of the room, choosing another corner to wait for me. I tried to quiet down my own breathing, my own mind, but as I took a step sideways he came out at me and swung the metal object right at my head. I ducked just in time, trying to move inside to tie him up, but he slipped away.
“Give up,” he said. “Give up and die.”
I shook the blood from my eyes, got myself low, ready to try again, ready to take my one last chance if it came.
“Come on,” I said to him, wherever he was, trying to draw him out. “Don’t be a fucking coward. Fight me like a man.”
I heard a sound to my left, took a step, and ducked again as he swung at me.
You have to time this just right. He swings, you drive before he can slip away. You bury your head right in his chest.
I waited and listened. I heard him breathing, heard him moving from one corner of the room to another, like an animal hunting its prey. I took another step as he somehow came up from behind me, and I felt the hard metal glancing off my temple. I had no chance to go after him. He was too fast, and everything was starting to fade.
Come on, put me away. Step out and take a big swing at me.
“The minutes are working against you,” he said. “You don’t have many left.”
I turned and moved toward the sound of his voice again, walking right into him and feeling another glancing blow against my forehead. I went down and rolled away from him. When I got back to my feet the room was spinning, and it took a long moment to determine up from down.
I took one more step backward, then another, until I sensed the stairwell right behind me, giving him his opportunity, hoping for one last chance to draw him out of the shadows.
Come on, you’ve got me cornered here. Finish me off.
He stepped forward, a dark silhouette against the dim glow from the flashlight.
That’s right. Give me one more shot. Just one more.
He took a swing, and I felt one more blow across the top of my head. I went down to one knee again, and I knew he had me on the next swing. But then he paused. To line me up better, or to say one last thing, I didn’t even know or care because it was an opening, and as I came up and put my good shoulder into his stomach, I drove him across the room until both of our bodies crashed into the stack of plastic boxes. There was a sound like many brittle sticks all breaking at once as I clasped both hands into a double fist and hit him in the face, putting everything I had left into it. He let out a cry of pain as I hit him again, then again, until he grabbed for my right shoulder and it lit me up like a fifty-thousand-volt shot from a Taser.
I felt his fingers grabbing at my face, until I tore them away with both hands and bent them back, trying to break as many as I could. He let out another cry of pain and swung with his other arm, so hard I heard it before I felt it, just under my left eye, making everything go white.
A moment later, I was on my back, looking up at the rough wooden ceiling and the cobwebs that shone in the dim light. Then I saw Livermore’s face, looking down at me. He came closer, and I felt his weight on my chest.
I tried to reach for him, but he had my arms pinned down, making my right shoulder burn with a white-hot pain. He leaned more weight into it, and I felt myself losing consciousness. Then he eased back.
I spit blood in his face, tried to get free again until he put his weight back on my shoulder. As he bent down closer to my face, I could feel his breath on me, see his eyes and that little half smile that I hated so much.
He picked up the flashlight and shined it in my face. Then he raised the weapon above his head. I still couldn’t see what he was holding.
He raised his hand higher. I could see it in his eyes. This was it.
“This is how it ends, Alex.”
After everything I’ve been through. Every mile I’ve chased him.
This is how it ends.
But then his body stiffened. The expression on his face went from smug satisfaction to surprise, and a thin trickle of blood leaked from his mouth. Jeannie’s face appeared over his shoulder, pale and streaked with tears.
As he turned to look at her, I saw the knife sticking out of his back.
“What did you do?” he said to her, and then everything froze. Jeannie stood there with her hands over her mouth. There was a rope around her neck.
“You bitch!” he said as he reached out for her, the blood running down his back. “You stupid whore!”
He grabbed the rope and pulled her toward him. She screamed, and as he lifted his weight from my body I rose and brought my hands up together, looping them around his head and bringing the chain between the handcuffs against his throat. I pulled back and felt him falling against me, my head hitting the concrete again, but I kept the chain against his neck, pulling as hard as I could and working the knife deeper into his back.
A strangling sound came from his open mouth as I kept pulling the chain against his throat, feeling the handcuffs shredding through the last of the skin on my wrists, but it didn’t matter anymore because everything I had was focused on those few links of chain that were stretched across his throat, as he flailed his arms back at me and caught me in the face with one fist after another, but I didn’t let up.
I held on as he threw his body from one side of me to the other, one last desperate chance to break free, to breathe.
I held on as he tried to hit me in the face again. The punches getting weaker and weaker.
I held on for Jeannie, for the woman hanging in the hotel room, for the woman tied up and burned alive. For the woman in the refrigerator and the woman he violated in that bedroom while a video camera recorded every second. For all of the other women he’d killed. For Agent Halliday and the other men in the canyon. For Agent Larkin. I thought about each one of them as I held on tight, feeling the convulsions rippling through Livermore’s body. Even as he stopped breathing, I held on.
I’m not letting go, Livermore. Not until I can see you burning in hell.
I would have held on for another hour, just to make sure he was dead, that he was really gone, but my arms finally gave out, and my whole body went limp.
I couldn’t move for a while, until I finally heard Jeannie crying softly. I looped my arms back from Livermore’s head and pushed him off me. He rolled onto his back, his eyes still open. Staring back at me.
I crawled over to Jeannie, found her sitting on the blanket. I pulled the rope from her neck, saw more ropes around each wrist, took those off and let them drop to the floor. She was shivering so hard now. I tried to wrap myself around her, but I couldn’t make the convulsions stop. I sat there with her, catching my breath, until the shaking in her body finally eased and I was able to stand up and pull her to her feet. I wrapped the blanket around her, and as I grabbed the flashlight from the floor, the beam settled on the contents of the box we had fallen into.
Bones.
When I moved the beam, I saw another box that had been knocked over. Another skeleton. Then another and another until I finally came to the half-decomposed body in the fifth box. I took the light away from it and had to bend over and hold my knees.
“Get me out of here,” Jeannie said, the words barely audible through her trembling lips. “Please, Alex . . .”
“I got you,” I said, putting my left arm around her. “Let’s go. Right now.”
We went up the stairs, taking each one carefully. I could feel fresh blood coming from my right shoulder. More blood was running from my forehead into my eyes.
When we got upstairs, I did a quick scan of the kitchen with the flashlight, saw Livermore’s coat draped over one of the chairs. I checked the pockets and found my phone.
Jeannie sat down on the floor. I didn’t want to stay in this house anymore, but we didn’t have a choice. I wasn’t going to make her walk through the snow, and I didn’t think I could carry her, not all the way back to her house.
I sat down next to her and dialed 911. When the operator answered, I gave her every piece of information I could. Robinson Lake, west of White Cloud. Then I told her to have the responders work their way around from Jeannie’s house, the only house with lights on. I knew they would find us eventually.
When I put the phone down, Jeannie looked at me. Really looked at me for the first time since I’d gotten there, and as I looked back I finally got the chance to see that she was still the same person I had married all those years ago. Those same eyes, the same mouth. Everything I had fallen in love with, just a few years older.
“He shot you,” she said, looking down at my shoulder. “You’re bleeding bad.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “We’ll both be fine.”
I turned off the flashlight and pulled her closer. We sat there together in the darkness, leaning against each other, waiting for the rest of the world to find us.