Here. Someone. Inside.
He steps in, pulling the door shut behind him, sealing the world out and the darkness in. Stacie, back at home, safe and unknowing, flies from his mind as his fingers find the lock on the knob and make sure it is secure. His feet move silently across the concrete. He heads right for the pegboard full of his equipment, his weapons. His hand finds the cool steel shaft of his entrenching tool. Not just familiar, but hard, strong, and sharp, it is ideal. He begins on a silent loop around the pitch-black space, past the edge of the couch, prodding at the blanket with the pointed end of the shovel blade to make sure no one is beneath it. He methodically eliminates potential hiding places one by one. Then, as he nears the back corner by the sink, he finds him.
He slams the entrenching tool into the floating ribs of the shadowy figure that is hunched by the slop sink. He hears a gasp and senses the man rolling along the floor in pain. He pulls the entrenching tool away and clangs it off the back of the man’s head. It should’ve stilled him, but instead he feels a searing stab of pain in his own knee, seeing that the man has shot out a kick only once it is on the way back.
Recovering, he leaps onto the figure, which is large and strong. His eyes are like those of a nocturnal animal’s now, and he sees who it is: the big man who had been in the parking lot, in the church basement, on his trail. His next target has come to him. He pounds away with fury at the body and head with one fist curled tight, and the other wrapped around the E-tool’s handle. He hears blasts of breath and grunts of pain. Any one of his blows can be the last one, stunning the man. Then he will own him and go to town. He is going to open this son of a bitch up.
Somehow the man disappears from beneath him. He feels the thud of the man’s feet kicking him in the gut, slamming out and thrusting him back and away. Then his own ankles are grabbed and yanked and he’s completely free of gravity. He’s falling. His head whips in a downward arc through the blackness. It bounces off the floor. Jagged sights float like carousel horses in front of his eyes. A punch to the head. The big man, face in front of his. Metal rapping him in the skull—
Behr had him down. In the midst of a barrage of thunderous blows he’d somehow managed a double ankle sweep in the desperation and darkness. He heard the man’s head hit the ground, but the man hadn’t gone limp, as nearly anyone would have. Even now Behr heard him hissing and cursing, and sensed him whipping his head from side to side to clear the cobwebs. Behr rolled up, put a knee into the man’s chest, and punched him in the face several times. The back of the man’s skull bounced off the floor once, then twice, and Behr fumbled for his ankle, hoping to draw the Mag Pug. The man was monstrously strong, though, and caught Behr’s arm with a viselike grip he couldn’t break. He felt him buck wildly, threatening to dislodge Behr and flip him.
With a grunt, Behr pulled up and back and thrust his weight down, dropping an elbow across the man’s brow. He did it again, able to move more freely and land the elbow more cleanly the second time. And then once more. His arm finally came free, and Behr got the pistol out and brought the frame of it down onto the man’s face and skull over and over, feeling the bones start to give and hearing a liquid sucking noise. At last there was no more resistance, and the rag-doll quality to the man’s body told Behr it was done.
Behr fought for breath and forced his way through the ringing tones and dizziness in his head and balanced on one hand to press himself up to standing. He stumbled forward, clutching for his flashlight, clicking it on left-handed, and with the gore-covered revolver crossed over his wrist, shined it down onto the man’s face.
It was the man he knew to be Abler, floating in and out of consciousness, his face battered and torn, strange hairpiece askew and matted with blood, and still more blood spilling out of ripped and broken flesh. The man’s mouth moved in dumb gasps. Behr considered the mangled thing at his feet, the garage full of evidence now useless and tainted, and the lost reward. Maybe there was a way to get Abler up, to restrain him and put him back together, and for Breslau to help engineer some legitimate-sounding circumstances for all of it. He pulled Abler to a sitting position by the collar and considered the script he could give him, the threats he could make to force him to follow it. Maybe Behr could claim he was invited in and then attacked. He needed that money for his son.
But then Abler spoke, in what couldn’t have been his normal voice, through cracked teeth and a sideways jaw.
“It’s you,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“I was coming for you.”
“Here I am.”
“Help me …” he said. “Help me …”
Behr wondered how many similar pleas had been made of Abler, and how he must have reveled in it before denying them.
“Kendra Gibbons,” Behr said.
“Who?”
“Up on East Washington, a little over a year and a half ago. A pretty young blond girl.”
“They all are,” the killer said, memories flickering behind his eyes, animating them.
Then Mistretta’s words about a man like this in prison flashed through Behr’s mind, how he’d luxuriate in his deeds and be treated like a celebrity in safety and relative comfort if he even ended up behind bars at all, and it caused a boiling rage to wash away everything coherent and decent in Behr’s being. He stepped down hard on Abler’s right shoulder and raised the Mag Pug.
“Don’t … I … want to … live,” Abler said.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“I am death,” Behr said, quoting Abler’s own words back to him. He felt the valve close inside him. Then he fired two rounds dead center into the man’s sternum before he adjusted and put a last one straight into his eye, the left socket disappearing from recognition as it became a punched-in, gore-filled crater.
The rage left Behr along with the final bullet, and he staggered back, murder and failure all over him. Adrenaline shakes hit him hard, along with the pain. He sat down on the floor, away from the pooling blood, hoping it would all subside. The first strike had come out of nowhere. He hadn’t heard or sensed Abler was that close. It had cracked some ribs, and Behr felt his breath come now with sharp stabs. He clicked his flashlight on and off twice and then a third time, checking that Abler wasn’t rising like some unkillable ghoul. But he was dead, now and forever, his blood running down the channel he’d so carefully designed, and spilling into the well-placed drain that had been used for the blood of so many others.
It was mere luck that found Behr the one sitting where he was and Abler splayed out; luck that the shovel blows to the body hadn’t caught him in the liver and incapacitated him, that the strikes to his hard head hadn’t knocked him out, as close as they had come, and that he had managed to roll and land that first kick.
Behr waited five, then twenty, then thirty minutes, for someone to respond to the shots, as his pain settled to a dull ache. He spent the time trying to decide what he would say or what he should do. His options ran from fleeing to calling a lawyer, but in the end he did neither. The truth seemed like his only option when they arrived, especially considering what Breslau already knew. Behr would likely be charged with murder. It’d be easy to prove premeditation. He’d broken in armed after all. But there was no response. No one came.
He thought back to Abler’s arrival. Behr hadn’t heard it, he’d felt it. It was a vibration, an awareness, more than any sound. He got up and shined his flashlight about the garage. That’s when he saw the egg crate foam and heavy baffling lining the walls. Abler had soundproofed his personal torture chamber, and he’d done it well. Behr remembered the blacked-out window from his surveillance, and found the light switch and clicked it on. Stark overhead bulbs shined down on the reality of the situation. He’d made a hell of a mess.
He holstered his gun and approached the body. He located the man’s wallet and flipped it open to the driver’s license. Abler, Reinhard Peter. There was no doubt. Nor was there doubt in Behr’s mind at what was going to happen next. He steeled himself for what lay ahead and drew in a breath, then put the wallet in a drawer filled with screws and fuses. He had to be careful now. He couldn’t afford any mistakes. There’d be no commemorative photos of what he was about to do. The fact was, he needed to get Abler’s body out of the garage, and there was no doing it in one piece.