“No one knows it, but he takes crazy pills. He’s a paranoid. I’m not supposed to know that, but I do.”
She jerked forward for a second, then put her hands on her belly. That one crease appeared on her forehead.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes,” she said. “She just kicked.”
I held my breath for a second, and watched her watch herself. I didn’t belong.
“Do you want to feel?” she asked.
For a brief moment, I wasn’t me anymore. I was Danny, seeing her through his eyes. His hands became my hands, and in this memory she was just a little bit lighter around the waist. He reached out to feel his baby.
“Uh, is it safe?” I asked. Danny had said the same thing once.
“Yes.”
I got up and crossed the floor. I bent down and put one hand on her stomach, softly. She grabbed my wrist and pressed my hand more firmly against her. After a few seconds, I felt the baby shift inside her. It was as if the baby was able to recognize me by my aura, and I made it so unhappy with my presence that it tried to swim away. Maybe it knew that I killed its daddy. Or maybe it felt its daddy inside me.
I looked at Martha, and Martha looked at me, and I began to cry. I backed away.
“Thank you for your time, Mrs. Pearce. Thanks for having me.”
I went for the door. I didn’t belong that close. She struggled to get up quickly.
“Wait,” she said.
I stopped. My insides were compelling me to get as far away from the unborn child as I could. I didn’t belong near children.
“There’s something you should have. Hold on one minute, let me find it.”
“Sure,” I said, and I waited there at the door.
After disappearing somewhere in the house for a handful of minutes, she came back with a manila envelope that was sealed with duct tape. It had my initials on it, in marker. She handed it over.
“Van Buren doesn’t know about this,” she said. “Danny told me a long time ago that if anything ever happened to him, I should make sure that you got this. It’s been changed to different envelopes, because he was always messing around with what was in there, and, uh, he even went so far as to put a piece of his hair there, on the edge of the tape, to make sure no one ever opened it. Do you know what it is?”
“No,” I said.
I’d never had a memory of Pearce’s regarding the envelope, but I could feel it hanging there like a thread on the edge of my brain. My heart went crazy in my chest. She looked at me, and that moment seemed to last ten thousand years.
She never liked me. I always had to presume that it was because to most people, I was nothing but a common ruffian, a drunk, and she resented the fact that her man put a great deal of trust in a bum like me. Now he was dead, she was a widow, and she still didn’t know what the hell was going on.
Her baby had no father. She was all alone in that house, and the world that had granted them so much had gone crazy, turned cold, and taken back all that it could. It wasn’t right, and it seemed that there was no one out there who could help her.
Justice was dead. The law had proved to be useless in protecting her man, or the people of Evelyn. The power over life and death had been taken from the hands of the good and put into the hands of a very evil entity. No man had been able to stop him. No one had come close, and it was never going to stop. That only left one option open to put an end to this thing.
Even if Van Buren wasn’t following me, he’d find out sooner or later that I’d paid a visit to Pearce’s wife, but she wouldn’t say anything about the envelope. I knew that much. I swallowed a lump in my throat.
“Mrs. Pearce, it’s time for me to go. Thanks for having me. I know it seems this whole town has gone to hell, and I know that it seems like everything is hopeless, but I just want you to know that it’s not over.”
I went home with the envelope. Once I was in my recliner with a cigarette burning, I opened it up with a pair of scissors. I pulled out over a dozen black-and-white photographs, each of which had a medical report stapled to the back.
Each photo was of a crime scene, the oldest of which was three years old. The most recent photo showed a skull at the base of a tree. The report on the back said it was the remains of one
Bill Parker.
In flipping through the pictures, I found that all the bodies depicted belonged to all the people I’d killed in Evelyn over the years. All of them, except the ones they’d never found, but it was close enough. Detective Danny Pearce had me pegged.
I closed my eyes, and there was Danny …
He was looking in the bathroom mirror at the Pearce house.
He was wearing a pair of blue jeans and a black sweatshirt with a hood. A pair of eyeglasses, though they weren’t prescription. An idiot’s disguise, like mine. He walked out of the bathroom and went to the kitchen, poured himself a Thermos full of coffee. Looked out the window to see a full moon. The clock on the microwave said it was nine o’clock.
Martha padded in, not yet pregnant, and asked him where he was going dressed like that.
“That’s top-secret,” Danny said jokingly, and then he gave her a kiss and went out to the car.
He drove to my place and watched the house. A couple of hours later, he saw the wolf walk out the front door, hunching its shoulders as it did so, so it could fit, and then it sniffed the air and took off like a shot in the night.
Pearce had had his suspicions because of my brilliant insights into the suspicious deaths of several people. He, unlike all the other rubes on the force, happened to realize that most of the town’s disappearances occurred on the night of the full moon. Maybe it was only natural to watch me, to see if the guy he’d taker under his wing was, in fact, a serial killer himself.
What he saw shocked him so badly he pissed in his jeans. He hadn’t been so scared since he saw a bear attack someone when he was a boy. Not even the hostage situation at the jewelry store had scared him that bad. But now he knew. Now he knew why some people got mauled, why some people just simply vanished, why there were some nights I just didn’t feel like talking on the phone. Why I didn’t want anyone in the house. Why I’d never had a tattoo, even though I seemed like the type that would be covered with them—the tattoos would never grow back after the change. He never tried to put me down, and he never tried to stop me. Why? I closed my eyes and rummaged around in my brain to figure that out.
Pearce, upon discovering my true nature, knew that no one would believe him. He knew that what I did, and how, were things that could not be explained by science or legitimately discussed in a court of law. Arresting me for being a supernatural killing machine would have been ridiculous. No one would have believed it, and if so, how would I be prosecuted? Further, the only evidence that I had been the one who had killed all these people would have been the microscopic flecks of blood in and around my house. Everything else would have been circumstantial. Any case against me wouldn’t have held up under close examination.
After having thought about my dilemma in purely legal terms, Pearce began to contemplate this unique issue in another light. He was a man who had never approved of vigilantism because he was a man of law and order through and through, both because of his military service and his career as a cop. However, even he wasn’t immune to a certain duality of character. Knowing I could never be stopped, he didn’t so much see my continued freedom as a way for the town’s trash to be eradicated as it was a way to ensure the fact that the criminals his police force couldn’t catch wouldn’t be able to commit their particular crimes over and over again. That was how he rationalized allowing me to live.
In his darker moments he admitted to himself that he was in a way living vicariously through me. After all, I was wholly capable of crossing those lines that he, as a police officer, had to steer clear of. He sometimes envied me for this, which, when his head would clear, disgusted him.
I wondered if Pearce and I had ever really been friends, but I knew we were. However, the purpose of this friendship was twofold. One, he liked my company, and two, he felt obligated to keep tabs on me. Feeding me information about cases he knew he wouldn’t be able to solve was his way of manipulating me, and I didn’t even know it.
