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She sits inside a concrete room with no windows. Only a big rectangular window that takes up much of the wall to her left. She’s dressed in a pair of gym shorts and a gray sweatshirt that one of the smaller cops pulled out of his locker. The shorts and the sweatshirt bear the APD logo in big black letters. She also wears flip-flops on her feet, the tattoo of a red bleeding heart recently acquired at a downtown tattoo parlor plainly visible on her left ankle.
After a time that seems forever, a man walks in. It’s young Detective Miller. He’s carrying a cup of tea in his left hand, the Lipton Tea tag hanging off the rim of the paper cup by its white string. He sets the cup down in front of her.
“How you feeling?” says Miller.
She stares down at her tea, feels the steam rising up from it clouding her view, coating the skin on her face. After a reflective time, she raises up her head, takes a good look at the tall, thin young man, at his full head of short cropped sandy blond hair and boyish face. She would never say anything about it, but she’s pretty sure he doesn’t have to shave more than twice a week, if that. A part of her is attracted to him, and another part... a more powerful part... wishes he’d answered one of her personals ads. How nice it would be to have him fall under her spell, then make love to him, and achieve climax by cutting him up. She would like to see that confused look in his eyes that always accompanies the first cut from the cleaver. The cut that doesn’t cause pain so much as surprise and misunderstanding. Of course, the cleaver is gone now and so are her days of avenging her step-monster’s atrocities.
“Think you can give me a description of the man who abducted you?” Miller says, his tone gentle and nonthreatening. Not the tone of a cop, like on TV. But of a man who really cares.
She steals a sip of tea. Then, “I told you, it’s hard to say. It all happened so quickly. I was out for a walk and suddenly this man pulls me into the woods.”
He looks at her forearms.
“Which arm?”
“What?”
“Which arm did he grab hold of? I’m assuming he grabbed you by the arm.”
She doesn’t anticipate this question.
“The left,” she lies.
“Funny he didn’t leave a mark on your arm. A bruise. You ladies bruise easier than us men. Thinner skin.”
“I think he was wearing gloves,” she says. “He was all covered up.”
“Maybe that explains it,” he says. “But it’s awfully hot out to be all covered up like that. Continue.”
“Well,” she says, “that dead guy was already there, down on his back.” She takes a minute to work up some tears. Something she’s not half bad at. “His throat was cut and there was blood all over. I tried to scream but the man’s hand was wrapped around my mouth. Then you guys showed up. He let go of me, and I ran the opposite way. He must have run off too.”
Miller sits back, digests her words. She’s already described the man who abducted her as over six feet tall, heavy set, all dressed in black...“covered up.” Amazing that a guy of that size didn’t leave any marks on her, and what’s more amazing, is that he was able to slip away undetected. Perhaps he’s militarily trained. But even if he is, it all doesn’t add up. If Miller’s scientific profiling serves him right, the perp responsible for the killings... the beheadings... is almost certainly slight and quick and young. Someone who can get the jump on his victims, slash their throats. Someone who would more than likely dress and uncannily present himself as a woman in order to fool his heterosexual victims into trusting him. If he did attack this young lady, she is almost certainly his first female victim, signifying a modification or mutation in his MO.
...It just doesn’t add up...
Still, he has no reason not to believe this girl. No reason to hold her. It’s precisely what he relays to her in that same soft, gentle voice.
She takes another sip of her tea, works up a smile as she stands.
“Say, where’d you get that tattoo?” he asks.
She tells him.
“What’s it mean?” he says. “Droplets of blood from a heart.”
She reaches out, sets her hand on his hand.
“For me to know, Detective,” she says. “And for you to find out.”
52.
The sound of sirens, the roar of engines, and the screech of tires as their brakes lock up outside my front door... It shattered the silence of my safe house.
I crutched my way back to the window, peeked out.
Three state trooper cruisers were parked diagonally in the dusty lot. A second unmarked cruiser was parked beside that one. The side passenger door on the unmarked car opened and out stepped Detective Nick Miller. He was holding his service weapon in his right hand, his left hand gripping the right wrist, combat position.
The troopers emerged from their cruisers, some of them holding automatics, a few others, short-barreled shotguns. One of them, a stocky woman, stood behind the open door of her blue and yellow cruiser, held a microphone up to her mouth. A black accordion style wire hung from the mic and extended into the open door of the cruiser.
“Ethan Forrester,” she said, her deep unfeminine voice tinny and loud through the speaker. “You are under arrest. You must come out with your hands in the air.”
There must have been a half dozen weapons aimed for my motel room. Some people began to gather behind the cops and troopers. I saw the old woman who owned the hotel. She was dressed in tan shorts, a black tank top befitting of a much younger woman. Her gray hair was no longer put up in curlers, but instead planted on her head like a dry, silvery bush. Out the corner of my right eye, I made out a tow truck that was only now coming into view. My Porsche was being pulled behind it. Now I had no way out of this place other than on foot.
One good foot... one foot not far from amputation...
I closed the blind, sat with my back against the narrow piece of wall between the window and the door, my shoulder pressed up against the easy chair. Was this it? The end of the road? Did the hooker give me away? The pizza boy? In answer to my own question, I shook my head no.
Those kids didn’t give me away at all.
I gave myself away by not running away. Instead, I gave in to my obsession. My need to be with Lana. The law was standing outside my door, prepared to blow me away if need be simply because I left a trail too obvious to ignore. My blood and my prints would be all over that convenient store. So would an electronic record of my having used its ATM minutes before the established Estimated Time of Death for that old angry clerk.
In all my exhaustion and shock, I’d mistakenly attempted to use my Amex to pay for the motel room. By using a false name, I must have raised one hell of a red flag to the owner when, after all, she could plainly see that the name on the Amex, and the receipt for the failed transaction sported an entirely different name. A name that, sooner or later, she would connect with the man who was suspected of killing a cop in Albany and a convenience store clerk in Nassau.
You just couldn’t avoid the news these days. If you didn’t get it on your TV you got it on your smartphone. If you didn’t get it there, then you got it on Redditt, Facebook, and Twitter. Drones filled the air, phones were tapped, security cameras were mounted everywhere. No one was safe anymore because there was nowhere to hide. The whole wide world could see up your ass and you had nowhere to hide.
I’d been screwed from the start. And I’d been avoiding the news... avoiding the reality of what was happening on Orchard Grove and inside my brain. I guess I just wanted to escape, even if escape meant hiring a hooker to play the part of Lana... Good Lana. I just wanted out. To be free. To wake up in my bed and breathe easy, because this whole thing from start to finish had all been a silly nightmare.
“Ethan Forrester,” the voice blared once more. “Come out with your hands up or we will remove you by force.”
I knew what force meant. It meant they would come after me with smoke grenades, tear gas, and bullets. I turned around onto my knees. An electric pain shot into my right foot. Slipping the shotgun off the chair, I reached into my jeans pocket for the shells I’d lifted from the convenience store. I shoved the four shells into the shotgun and cocked a round into the chamber. Raising up the stock, I smashed a small hole in the bottom of the window pane.
The noise got the attention of the jumpy troopers.
The one on the far left triggered his automatic. There was the explosion followed by a wallop in the wood door and a hole the size of my fist blown out of it. He missed by a mile.
Miller waved his arms in the air.
“Hold your fucking fire!” he screamed. “Forrester just wants to communicate with us!”
I liked Miller. He was a good cop. Under different circumstances, we might have been buds. Best buds.
I brought my face to the opening in the window, careful not to cut my lips on the jagged glass.
“I didn’t kill that old man in the convenience store,” I barked. “He tried to kill me. It was self-defense.”
“Listen Mister Forrester,” Miller said, taking a few steps forward on the gravel lot so that the space separating him from my room couldn’t have been more than twenty feet, “...Ethan... just come on out and we can sort things out up in Albany.”
“John’s suicide... Lana planned the whole thing. She hated him. Despised him. He abused her and she couldn’t take it anymore. He was going to kill her if she didn’t get to him first. Do you understand me? She asked me to get him to eat his piece. But she put the bullet in the gun, not me. She must have covered her hands in Latex gloves. You have to believe me.”
“I do believe you, Ethan,” he said. “I want to believe you. But this isn’t the place to be hashing out truth from fiction. This isn’t one of your movies. But you know how it all works. Come out with your hands up and we’ll leave this place peacefully.” He took on a smile. “Hell, I’ll even spring for some coffee and hard-rolls on the ride back to the city. Whaddya say?”
I rolled back over onto my ass, foot stinging, back once more pressed up against the wall. I felt the sweat dripping into my eyes, burning them. Making a fist with my right hand, I raised it up and swung it into the air conditioning unit, sending a stream of sparks flying out onto the table and the floor.
The idea came to me then, like a light bulb that illuminated brightly over my head.
“Ah ha!” came the voice of John Cattivo. “I know what you’re up to, Hollywood. Leave it to the crafty mind of a writer. You’re gonna blow the joint sky high. That’ll serve Miller, right, the pencil neck geek.”
The dead cop was sitting on the bed, his head half blown away, chunks of flesh and brain hanging down off the sides, blood dripping out his nose, his eyeballs, and the corners of his mouth. For the first time, I got a real good look at his front teeth. Sure enough, the top two teeth were broken in half. Just looking at them made my own teeth feel strange and painful.
“Let me guess, John,” I said. “You’re too rotten even for hell.”
“Hey Hollywood,” he giggled. “Guess what? Hell can wait. I’m having a good time here just watching you panic. Why don’t you just give up now? You can’t outrun the cops. Even you, as stupid as you are, should know that. I mean, who kills a cop and a convenience store clerk, then stops at a motel for pizza and the company of a cheap whore? Where’s the logic in that? My guess is you’re already dead, pal, and you just don’t know it. More dead than me even.”
“Maybe I’m just in over my head.”
“Call it what you will, Hollywood. But you’re done. D-U-N, done.”
I shook my head, tried to shrug the vision of John away as easily as I would shake away a black and white image on an Etch A Sketch pad. But it was no use. He was sticking around for a while. Using the shotgun for support, I lifted myself up off the floor, hobbled to the stove. I opened the valves on all the burners without lighting the flame. The gas began to pour into the room.
Next, I went into the bathroom, grabbed a couple of towels. First I stuffed the end of one towel into the bullet hole in the wood door, sealing it up. Then second towel I stuffed into the jagged hole I made in the picture window, making that as air tight as possible. About-facing, I grabbed hold of the bedspread, yanked it off the mattress, and carried it to the bathroom door. Closing the door, I spread the blanket on the floor so that it completely covered over the narrow horizontal space between the bottom of the wood door and the plastic saddle. The room was now sealed off and filling with gas, fast.
“You’ve got a pair of steel ones after all, Hollywood,” Cattivo said, from where he sat on the bed, sipping from my pint of whiskey. “But you’re still a fuck up. You know, none of this had to happen. All you had to do once my head was blown to smithereens was call 911, and confess the whole thing. No one saw you pull the trigger. You could have laid the blame squarely on my wife, and that alone would have got the gears turning in the mind of Detective Miller. Especially now that Miller knows she’s been shacking up with my partner, Carl. Trust me, Hollywood, the woman is poison. Looks what she’s done to you? You looked in a mirror lately? You look like forty miles of chewed up roadbed. And jeeze, that foot? It’s really starting to smell bad. My guess is that before this thing is over, you’re gonna lose the mofo.”
Dead Cattivo stole another sip of the whiskey, then made with his two hands like he was starting a chainsaw. He made a blade buzzing sound with his tongue pressed up against what was left of his mouth.
Once more, I tried to shake the asshole off. He was wrong of course. Maybe I killed the convenience store clerk in self-defense, but there was no way Miller or the Albany DA or God himself was going to see me as anything less than guilty in John’s death. Not only was my DNA all over everything, I had motive and opportunity. All wicked characters in my scripts... characters who kill... require motive and opportunity or else they’re just cartoon caricatures. Miller might be good to his word. He might actually stop for hard-rolls and coffee on the way back to Albany, but the only thing about to get chewed up and crapped out was my future.
Sitting back down on the bed, I slipped into my one boot, and put on my jean jacket. It surprised me how fast the small room was quickly filling with gas. But then why the hell should I have been surprised? The smell was intense and my eyes were beginning to water, my head growing light, a slight nausea settling in my belly. I nearly jumped a mile, bad foot and all, when the gas detector went off. The round plastic device was mounted to the popcorn-textured ceiling directly above the bed.
Grabbing hold of the shotgun, I slapped the alarm off the ceiling with the metal barrel. It landed on the bed, still blaring its ear-piercing squeak. I reached out for it, dropped it onto the floor, and crushed it with the shotgun stock. Still it squeaked. Bending at the knees, I grabbed hold of the now broken, disk-like unit, pulled out the battery, tossed it across the room.
“Ethan,” I heard Miller bark through bullhorn speaker. “You okay in there? Something wrong? I hear an alarm?”
I eyed the air conditioner. I knew that at any second, its unit would start back up and at the same time, throw off some sparks that would ignite the gas and light this place up along with me inside it. I needed to get the hell out now. But I was also aware of this: once I opened the door and slammed it closed behind me, the vibrations from the wood slab connecting with the wood frame would also send a stream of sparks shooting out of the unit.
Shotgun in hand, I went to the door, opened it until the chain caught.
“I’m coming out, Miller,” I yelled.
The troopers and cops took aim.
“Hold your fire!” Miller ordered.
I looked at him but remained in the room. Ever so gently I closed the door again.
“So this is it?” the dead cop said from the bed.
I glanced back at him, at his bloody face, and messed up head.
“What’s it?” I said.
“The moment in the movie when the fugitive makes his dramatic escape. When you run your ass out of here and try like hell to get away. You know, like when Harrison Ford jumps off that dam in The Fugitive, or when Butch Cassidy and Sundance try and shoot their way out of that spot where the Bolivian army has them pinned down. Come to think of it, ole’ Butch and Sundance didn’t make out too well. With all them guns pointed at them, they didn’t have a chance.”
“I got a chance,” I said. “I’m gonna live.”
“A nice burst of confidence, Hollywood,” he laughed. “Just remember what I said. You’re already dead.”
“Go to hell,” I said.
“Working on it,” he said. “From what I’m told they’ve got a nice one bedroom, one and a half bath apartment waiting for you there. No air conditioning sadly.”
Fingering the chain, I slid it slowly off its track so that it dangled before my eyes. I opened the door, stepped on out into the heat of the bright summer day, the shotgun gripped in my right hand, the barrel pointed at the cracked concrete. I faced down the barrels on at least half a dozen firearms with rounds loaded into their chambers, every single one of them engraved with my name. Miller had positioned himself only about fifteen feet away from me in the dusty lot. He was standing straight and tall in his gray blazer, white shirt, and tan trousers, that automatic gripped in both his hands.
“You’re making the right decision, Ethan,” he said. “Now please drop the weapon.”
“Butch and Sundance,” I said, shifting myself so that I stood protected by the narrow piece of wall that separated the room’s wood door from the picture window.
“Excuse me?” Miller said, a look of confusion masking his tight face.
“Some people think that Hollywood got it wrong. That Butch and Sundance actually got away in the end.”
“That so, Ethan,” he said. “I did not know that.”
“Now you do,” I said.
And then I slammed the door closed.
53.
The explosion proved more powerful than I anticipated.
It knocked me on my belly to the immediate left of the door while both the door and the picture window on room 30 blew out in the faces of the state troopers and Detective Miller. Out the corner of my eye, I saw Miller go down onto his back, as the troopers dropped for cover behind their cruisers. The woods were barely a dozen feet away from me. Pulling myself back up onto my feet with the shotgun posing as a crutch, I made a painful limping run for them. It was my only chance for escaping the law.
By sheer force of will, I cut across the open lawn, shooting off two rounds at the cops as I hobbled, until I arrived at the woods. By the time Miller and the troopers lifted themselves up from off the gravel lot, I’d already disappeared into the trees.
54.
The woods were thick. But that was a good thing for keeping me hidden from some pretty pissed off troopers. On the other hand, with my injured foot, the going was almost impossible. The pain was intense and shot up and down my leg in bursts of electric jolts as I pushed myself through the brush and briars, the branches on the trees slapping me in the face, making it sting, making eyes tear.
I heard sirens and loud voices over the relentless pounding in my head. I heard tires spinning out on the gravel surface of the motel parking lot. They had to know that I’d taken off for the woods. They must have seen me limping for the trees. I wasn’t sure how much time I had until they snagged me, but it couldn’t be very long. Turning the shotgun around so that I gripped it by the barrel, I used the stock like a machete, barreling through the thick stuff on my way toward the road.
After a minute that seemed like an hour, I caught sight of the road through the branches. Without hesitating, I pushed on through what remained of the brush until I made it to the ditch that ran parallel to the roadside. A car passed by then. And another. Coming from out of the south, sirens. The troopers were coming up on my position, fast. My only choice was to somehow hijack a ride or else make a run for it through the open farm field directly across the road. I climbed up out of the ditch, stepped onto the road and prepared myself to enter into the field on the other side.
But that’s when I saw the dump truck coming toward me from out of the north.
The truck was moving at a good clip. Faster than the speed limit allowed anyway. Without question, that truck was my only hope. The sirens grew louder as I recognized the blue and yellow trooper cruisers speeding toward me along a sub-baked road that was topped with a transparent, liquid-like mirage that hovered over the yellow-striped blacktop.
I had one chance, and I took it.
Positioning myself in the center of the road on the parallel line-stripes, I turned to face the truck down. The driver slammed on the brakes, the dump truck’s big wide tires screeching, burning rubber, its metal dump fishtailing sideways. I stood my ground knowing I couldn’t move out of the way if I wanted to. I just didn’t have the energy or the strength in my foot, or the rest of my body for that matter, necessary to make the move. The truck skidded maybe twenty feet, horn blaring, metal banging against metal, straining and tearing, exhaust blowing out black smoke, engine revving RPMs, gears crunching. Until finally the truck came to a stop only inches from my face.
The door opened and a tall wiry young man in a white T-shirt and wearing a straw cowboy hat, poked his head out.
“Are you fucking out of your mind?” he said, his eyes hidden behind mirrored aviator sunglasses.
I shoved the shotgun stock against my shoulder, planted a bead.
“Get the hell back behind the wheel,” I snarled, my beating heart jammed inside my throat.
Behind me, the trooper cruisers were closing in, their red and white LED flashers bright even against the brilliant mid-day sun. I hobbled over to the passenger side door and, planting myself on my bad foot, hopped up onto the running board, opened the door, and shoved myself inside with a scream that might have cracked the windshield if it wasn’t made of safety glass.
Up ahead, the troopers made a barricade by having stopped their cruisers in the middle of the road, positioning them perpendicular to the opposing roadsides. They exited the vehicles, weapons in hand, crouching down behind them for protection.
The trucker turned to me.
“That foot looks like shit,” he said.
“So I’m told,” I grunted.
“It’s bleeding bad. Smells too.”
I peered down at it. The Flex Seal hadn’t worked after all. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re the one with the gun. What do you want me to do? Turn around, go the other way?”
I cocked a shell into the shotgun chamber.
“Blow through them,” I demanded.
He just stared at me through those impossibly shiny sunglasses.
“That shit only works in the movies.”
“I’m aware of that. So let’s pretend we’re shooting a movie.”
“You serious?”
“Do it. Do it, please. Pretty please.”
The trucker turned to face the road.
“Lord have mercy on my soul,” he said.
“Action!” I said.
He shoved the floor-mounted stick into gear, then gave it the gas.
55.
The big truck took on speed.
It jerked, bucked, and bounced. When the passenger side windshield exploded, I dropped down onto my left shoulder.
“Holy Christ they’re shooting at us,” he said.
“What’s your name, son?”
“Walt.”
“Walt, just keep on trucking.”
I brushed the pebble-like shards of shattered safety glass off of me.
Sitting up fast, I swung the shotgun around, aimed it not for the troopers but the closest cruiser and triggered off a shell. The shot blew out a tire on the vehicle directly ahead of me as we closed in on it.
The troopers leapt off the side of the road like they were abandoning ship.
“We’re gonna ram them!” the trucker screamed, his voice an octave higher than God intended.
“That would be the point. Don’t stop!”
Grabbing the metal underside of the seat, I held on while we barreled through both cruisers.
56.
I don’t know why I started to laugh, but I couldn’t help myself. Maybe it had something to do with acting out a scene I might have written for an Arnold Schwarzenegger action/thriller and actually succeeding without getting ourselves killed or totaling the truck. Sometimes you gotta go with your gut.
“See, Walt,” I said, raising myself up. “Just like a movie.”
Even he had to laugh.
“Gotta admit,” he said, as he bounced in his seat, “that wasn’t entirely no fun.”
He hadn’t slowed down since we blew through the cruisers. His cowboy booted foot was still firmly planted on the gas, his right hand gripping the ball-head on the stick shift, left hand on the big wheel. As we came upon the motel, I turned to view the parking lot. I saw something very strange. I saw Detective Miller standing all alone in the middle of the lot. He had one hand shoved in his trouser pockets, almost casually. And with the other one, he was holding something up for me to see. It was the security tape cassette from the convenience store. The tape I’d tossed into the dumpster out back. He was wearing this big grin like, “Gotcha asshole!”
As we passed, he pulled his free hand out of his pocket, tossed me a quick wave, then made like a pistol with thumb and index finger, and pointed it at the security tape. The scene was at once odd and somehow frightening. He wasn’t giving chase or taking aim at the truck with his sidearm. He just stood there waving at me like he no longer needed to go after me at all. Like my immediate future was already doomed with or without his efforts. And he had the whole thing on tape to prove it.
I turned toward the open road, and what up until now had been a wide smile on my face disintegrated like a bullet through an apple. Instead, my brain filled with cold realization. Maybe I’d just escaped the state troopers. But as far as Miller was concerned, I was already caught, already sentenced before a jury of my peers.
Like the ghost of John Cattivo said, I was already dead.