every car heading out of Barron toward the drop site.’
‘I got it, man, it’s not the first time.’
‘All it takes is one mistake, Leno. You tell me when he’s getting close, you tell me when he heads back to town. He does anything funny, you shout. You smell a cop, you give me the emergency signal, and then you keep your head down and stay put.’
‘I won’t let you down, man.’
Chris heard the eagerness in Lenny’s voice. Brothers picked older brothers for heroes, even when they didn’t deserve it. He didn’t know what scam they were planning, but sooner or later, he was certain that Kirk’s manipulation would lead Lenny in only one direction. Jail or worse.
Kirk stretched his arms over his head and yawned. He climbed out of the recliner. ‘I could use some pussy.’
‘Who?’ Lenny asked.
‘I don’t know. Who do you think?’
‘What about that freshman, Sammi?’
‘The punk one with the nose ring? Yeah, why not? Toss me the phone.’
Lenny tossed a cell phone to his brother, and Kirk dialed.
‘Sammi? It’s Kirk Watson. Hey, gorgeous, I’m having a party. Booze included. You want to come? Yeah, bring a friend, fukyeah. Absolutely. I’ll have Leno come get you in my truck. Twenty minutes, and dress like you want it.’
Kirk switched off the phone. It was that easy, like ordering a pizza. Chris was horrified.
He also realized he was running out of time to kill.
‘Take the pick-up, Leno,’ Kirk told his brother, ‘and don’t get pulled over, doofus.’
‘I have to take a dump first.’
‘What, girls give you diarrhea, Leno? Sammi’s going to have another girl with her, so don’t go squirting inside your pants, okay? You want seconds when I’m done?’
Lenny shrugged. ‘Nah.’
‘Shit, Leno, you’re not queer, are you?’
‘No!’
‘So why are you always saying no when I get you pussy? Oh, I forgot, the only girl you want is Olivia Hawk.’
Chris’s whole body went rigid. He waited, like stone, for what happened next. All he wanted was hard proof. Some kind of admission, some kind of confession. He wanted to hear from Kirk’s lips what he had done. He wanted no doubt whatsoever that it meant justice to pull the trigger.
The words flowed out of Kirk as easily as river water. The meaning was unmistakable. ‘Well, you had your chance, Leno, and you blew it.’
Chris wanted to scream. This man had just told him what he’d done to his daughter. He didn’t want to use a gun; he wanted to wrap his fingers around this beast’s throat. He wanted to watch his eyes bulge and his blood vessels burst and the oxygen drain from his skin.
Lenny Watson said nothing in response to Kirk’s taunting, but the boy’s face screwed up in what looked like impotent frustration. Then his legs squirmed, and he held his breath as he let out a monster fart. He swore loudly, and he turned and ran for the bathroom.
Kirk grabbed his knees, because he was laughing so hard. His laughter followed Lenny down the hallway, and Chris heard the bathroom door slam. This was his one chance. Kirk was alone. It was just the two of them. He could pull the trigger and be gone, and no one would know. They would all suspect, but they would never know.
Silently, he eased the hammer back on the revolver. He slid his finger onto the trigger.
Kirk turned on the television and rolled onto the bed. He launched a DVD and groaned with satisfaction. It was girl-on-girl porn. A blond with dangling, inflated breasts hiked her ass in the air and buried her mouth between the legs of a brunette who moaned in exaggerated pleasure.
‘Shit, yeah,’ Kirk murmured. His hand slipped inside his boxers. A tent developed in the cotton.
Chris took a step closer to the window. It was the perfect opportunity, a frozen moment in time. Lenny was occupied. Kirk was distracted. The back of the monster’s head was only inches away. All he had to do was fire one shot and watch Kirk’s skull explode in a sticky mass of bone, blood, and brain. He raised the gun. Kirk had no idea what was happening behind him, no sixth sense that death was so close.
He thought about Olivia. Images of her prone body in the train car, battered and abused, popped in his head like flash bulbs. He breathed faster, so loudly and raggedly that he feared Kirk would hear him, but Kirk’s mind was focused on the naked bodies intertwined in high definition on the big screen. In Chris’s head, Olivia cried. She begged for help.
The gun was steady in his hand, and his arm didn’t tremble. It would take almost no pressure on the trigger at all. He thought to himself:
One.
Two.
Thr—.
He tried to fire, but he couldn’t. He thought about Olivia and Ashlynn in the park. Olivia holding the gun. Olivia, desperate for revenge, angry, upset, confused, hurt, alone. His daughter, on the verge of taking an innocent life.
Kirk Watson wasn’t innocent. It wasn’t the same, and yet it was.
Chris wanted nothing more than to kill him, but with each second, the opportunity slipped away, and he knew it was irreversible. Tick tock, tick tock. Lenny would be done soon. Time was running out. It didn’t matter. It could be a second or an hour, and he would still be standing here, unable to fire.
His arm buckled.
He removed his finger from the trigger. He disabled the revolver.
He did just what Olivia had done. He walked away, recoiling in horror at how close he’d come to joining the ranks of the evil.
27
Chris didn’t go back to the motel right away, because he didn’t want to spend time with his conscience. He told himself that someone else had stood in the dark, holding a gun to a man’s head. Not him. He wasn’t ready to be alone with a lie. Instead, where the northbound highway split near Barron, he followed the steep bluff toward the hilltop. Maxine Valma lived within a few blocks of the high school.
The tall black principal answered the door herself. She was still dressed for work, and her needle-thin eyebrows arched in surprise when she saw him. ‘Mr. Hawk.’
‘Ms. Valma, I’m sorry to bother you. I hope I’m not interrupting.’
Her face had the awkward look of someone who was too polite to admit that his arrival was an unwanted intrusion. ‘George and I just got back from dinner in town. He’s putting the kids to bed.’
‘I have a couple questions for you. It won’t take long.’
She shrugged. ‘Come in.’
Valma led him inside her house. The living room was furnished with antique furniture that had been painstakingly refinished. He saw framed concert posters on the wall from the jazz era heyday in Harlem in the 1920s. The posters looked original. Saxophone music played loudly on the stereo, and Valma lowered the volume as he sat down in an armchair.
‘What can I do for you, Mr. Hawk?’
‘Well, you can call me Chris, for starters.’
‘All right. Chris. I stopped by to see Olivia at the hospital. I hope you don’t mind.’
‘Not at all. I’m glad you did.’
‘I don’t know if she was pleased to see me. She still associates me with Mondamin because of George’s work. However, I wanted to make sure she knew that all of us at the school were thinking of her.’
