THE forest is silent in the peculiar way nature seems to go mute when a living creature is killed. I hesitate to say “innocent” creature, because if she hadn’t been so stupid, if she hadn’t been so goddamn reckless, she’d still be alive and we’d be chatting on our way to Philadelphia, making a connection, talking about the normal things normal people talk about and her mouth would be smiling and sipping on a beer rather than silent and gaping and half-filled with muck, and leaves, and decay.
Or maybe the woods aren’t silent at all. Maybe my ears are ringing so loudly all other sounds are drowned out. I am breathing hard and a bead of sweat has rolled from my eyebrows to the tip of my nose, but the silence is implacable, as thick as cream. Underneath my boot, the girl remains still, her energy as used up and wasted as her life.
I will need a little luck. I prop the girl on my shoulders as though I’m carrying a wounded soldier, and hurry back through the woods toward the convenience store. A little luck, a little luck. That’s all I’m asking. My footsteps are firm, finding solid ground again and again, weaving in and out of the trees, the back of the store looming larger and larger through the brush. Her weight is slight, and her body bobs up and down on my shoulders, light as a backpack. Thirty feet, twenty, and no sign of the clerk. Just stay at your counter, friend. Keep marking in your binder, counting up that inventory, and you’ll soon forget about us, just another couple of customers amidst a constant string of travelers.
I break through the tree line and I’m back at the store, the block of wood still dangling from the doorknob like a pendulum. In a quick step, I’m in the room with the body on my back and the block of wood in my hand and the door shut tight. Almost there. Stay with me, luck.
The smell in the bathroom is horrible, and stains splotch the walls like a foul mosaic. It doesn’t take me long to work myself up. The stench, the agitation, the degradation of killing in this animalistic manner, her body propped across the sink, her head facing me, her lips curling back away from her teeth in a sneer that is accusatory and mocking and hopeless. I double over and retch until I can feel the pulse thick in my ears.
He knocks as I finish my second heave.
“Are you okay in there?”
Luck is a funny thing. I open the door, carrying the girl in my arms, quickly, out into the open. “Do you have a hose?” I say, and his eyes immediately go over my shoulder to the bathroom, his nose curling.
“Awww, shit.”
“Sorry, man. She got sick.” I smooth the girl’s hair with my supporting hand.
He doesn’t even look at us, shaking his head. “Don’t worry about it,” he says, resigned, and passes me to survey the mess in the stall.
I don’t wait for him to give us a second look. I am around the building and into the car before he can even hook up the hose, my bag and the whore’s body laid to rest in the wide backseat.
CHAPTER 4
I wash myself the best I can at a highway rest stop. I buried the body a hundred yards inside a thick growth of trees off of a deserted farm-to-market road with nothing but a tire iron and my bare hands. It was a messy operation. Messy because I didn’t know the land, didn’t have time to do it the right way, didn’t have time to plant the body deep enough so it won’t be found for decades. And yet I am not worried. If a hiker or the landowner stumbles upon her corpse, I did take the few minutes necessary to make it difficult to identify.
I am still blanketed in dirt when I enter the brick courtyard of the Rittenhouse Hotel. I pass through the lounge, only slowing for a hasty check-in, and then up to my room, fending off assistance with my bags from dueling bellboys. Just get me to my room, get me to a shower, let me wash off the grime and the smell of this day gone sour.
The room is enormous, with a large window overlooking Rittenhouse Square and the city. More furniture stands in this room than I’ve owned in my entire life. I would not choose to live this way, but this is where Abe Mann will be staying in a few weeks, and I need to forget who I am and get my mind right. For the first time on this job, I will get my mind right.
To hunt a human being, it is not enough to plot from afar, externally. An assassin must understand his prey by storming the target’s mind the way an army storms enemy territory. He must live, sleep, eat, breathe as the target does, until he has merged with the target, until they are one. To kill a man, he must become the man, so that he can live as himself beyond the man.
The water is a blessing, as purifying as a baptism. Just relax, relax, re-lax, and this day, and everything in it, will be just like the soap washing down the drain. Gone and forgotten.
But no. The girl hides right behind my eyes, popping out like a child playing peekaboo whenever I close the lids. I’ve killed people without blinking, without feeling a twinge of remorse, and yet this girl continues to haunt me like an itch under a plaster cast.
“That’s right,” she says. “You and me. We’re stuck together. Scratch-scratch.”
I shake my head, and the water in my hair sprays the shower curtain. But I do not open my eyes. I like the way she looks. I actually like looking at her, I giggle to myself. And then for the first time, I think my past has finally caught me, my defenses are being stormed by a battering ram of life I’ve tried so desperately to shake. I thought if I ran fast enough, if I shirked the past off my back the way I bucked that bookcase in Mr. Cox’s living room, it would be too heavy and slow to catch me. But it’s here, in this shower, in full force, pissed off and angry and bringing madness along for the ride.
“Tell me about your mother,” the girl says, so close to my face I can smell the dirt in her breath.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I mumble, although I can’t be sure if it’s aloud or in my head.
“I want to understand,” she says, floating, swimming, just on the other side of my eyes. “Tell me about your girl. Tell me about Jake.”
Then the water runs hot, a surge of searing heat, and the spell is broken. I jump back from the stream and wait for it to cool a little. Finally, it tapers back to a nice tepid temperature, and I rinse quickly, towel off, and collapse on top of the bed. I feel my eyes close, searching for the dead girl.
I did have a girl once. For just a few months, a long time ago. She had honey-blond, shoulder-length hair and a chocolate Lab named Bandit. She had bright, cheerful eyes that were amplified behind thick black glasses and a single-bedroom apartment above a bookstore in Cam-bridge. She was smart, engaging, lithe, and alive. Her name was Jake.
We met after my release from Waxham Juvenile Corrections and right before my new term started, the bondage that began when I shook hands with a fat man named Vespucci. The handshake with that dark Italian ended things forever, but before that, right before that, was the only period in my life where I felt normal. The only period where I believed, if only for a few fleeting months, I could make it, could whip life, could become a “new” man, like the priest, Father Steve, always repeated at Waxham.
“You came in here dirty, debased boys, but you can leave here as new men. The blessed waters of forgiveness will cleanse you, make you new men, but only if you bathe in a pool of repentance.” And I wanted to believe it, every word. For someone who had been a dirty, debased boy all his life, who didn’t know his mother or father, I thirsted to be a new man the way a desert traveler thirsts for just one drink of water. For once, just one time, I wanted to be a new man drinking a clean glass of water.
When I was released, I hurried to Boston, where Father Steve secured me a job loading cases of beer into trucks. Apparently, Father Steve’s brother hadn’t received the same telegram from God that had found Steve, and he had prospered as a beer distributor. The siblings were cut from the same cloth, though, and Father Steve’s brother helped “new men” get on their feet, get closer to that cool glass of water, even if lugging stacks of beer was the only way he knew to get them there.
A couple of weeks after taking the job, I received the first paycheck of my life. Me, orphan, foster child, ex- convict, me, with a check for four hundred and seventy-two dollars made out in my name. I wrote to Pooley as soon as I got home. We were sentenced to serve until we were eighteen, and since I was older, I had gotten out a
