Ghost Dancer aka Dance of Death

CHAPTER 41

Wilson took a long shower, shaved carefully, then dressed with the care that people reserved for important occasions. It was part of the process of readying himself, a way to bring focus and gravity to what he was about to do.

His clothes were an exercise in misdirection: a cheap pair of athletic shoes and a dark blue jumpsuit with an oval patch containing the name “Jim.” He had a clipboard as well, and a plastic pocket protector with a couple of ballpoint pens. The K-Bar knife from the army-navy store fit comfortably into the large pocket of his jumpsuit. Unlike the rest of his outfit, the knife had nothing to do with misdirection.

He smiled at the workman in the mirror.

Then he put on his watch – not the Garmin, but the watch they’d returned to him the day he’d left Allenwood. It had been taken from him in San Francisco nearly a decade earlier. The feds had put it in a box, and the box had followed him on his long journey through the prison system.

And while he was doing his time, and the watch was running down in the company of his “personal effects,” what had Robbie Maddox – the sleazeball who’d set him up – been doing? While Wilson had nothing to look at but a slice of sky, where had Maddox been and what had he seen? How many meals had he eaten with friends, while Wilson had his food shoved at him through a wicket in his cell door? How many women had Maddox known while Wilson sat by himself, talking to the wall? How much music had Maddox listened to while Wilson tried, and failed, to shut his ears to the constant slam of sliding cell-block doors and the incessant patter and shouts and cries of men without hope?

These were rhetorical questions with a single answer, and Wilson knew what it was. Most of the time, Robbie had been in the joint himself. Two years here and there, a year somewhere else. It was all in the report he’d commissioned from a P.I. named Charley Fremaux, in Chicago.

It took Fremaux less than a week to find the snitch. He was living in Waverly, Nebraska, a suburb of Lincoln, where he had been for more than a year. Injured in a car crash that the police thought was part of an insurance scam gone bad, Maddox had moved in with his older sister, Lynn, a librarian who lived alone. Long since recovered from his injuries, Maddox continued to enjoy his sister’s room and board.

Wilson studied himself in the mirror. He knew that what he was about to do was self-indulgent. It wasn’t part of his larger plan. If anything, it put the plan at risk.

But Robbie Maddox had buried him alive. He’d lied and cheated, bartering Wilson’s life for a few weeks on the outside. There was no way for Maddox to repay the time he’d stolen.

Wilson worked to quiet his mind. He held the image of a leaf in his mind’s eye: a green leaf, caught in a spider’s thread, the leaf spinning and fluttering in the invisible wind.

And then he headed for the door. For Robbie Maddox, time had run out.

Broad daylight. Not just any daylight, but broad daylight, the kind of daylight in which banks get robbed and people get gunned down.

The phrase interested Wilson. Included in the account of a crime, it always carried a note of outrage. It suggested a state of illumination so thoroughly bright and all-encompassing that wrongdoing should be inconceivable. A light that cast no shadows and left no place to hide. Any crime committed under its auspices was all the more horrific.

At one o’clock in the afternoon, Wilson stopped at a pay phone outside a convenience store to call the library where Maddox’s sister worked. He asked to speak with her, and when she came on the line, he hung up.

At one fifteen, he parked the Ford Escort he’d rented around the corner from the little rancher at the address Fremaux had given him. Clipboard in hand, he walked to the front door. A motorcycle sat in the driveway, which suggested to Wilson that he was in the right place at the right time.

He knocked.

When the door swung open, Maddox had about half a second to get away. But it took him a full second to recognize the man in front of him. By then, it was too late. Wilson threw an overhand right that shattered the bones around Maddox’s left eye, and sent him reeling into the living room. Wilson followed him into the house as Maddox, stooped in pain, screamed, “What the fuck?!”

There was a poker standing beside the fireplace with some other tools, and without thinking, Wilson grabbed it. Maddox staggered backwards in a panic, stumbling against a coffee table, hands in front of his face.

“Hey-” he said.

Wilson drove the poker into the side of Maddox’s knee, dropping him to the ground with a scream that kept on giving. He looked around. The door was still open, but it didn’t matter. This wasn’t going to take long. He slammed the poker into Maddox’s shoulder. Then the other shoulder. And again.

Tossing the poker aside, he got down on his haunches beside the man who’d set him up. “Jesus, Robbie, it’s been a long time! How you been?”

“Ohhh, man…” Maddox’s voice was a low quaver, a mixture of terror, pain, and recognition. His speech came breathlessly, in gasps. “I didn’t know! I mean, what I was doing, I – I’m sorry, man! I’m really-”

Wilson reached into his jumpsuit, withdrew the K-bar knife.

Maddox saw it, and sunk deeper into the shag rug. “Please…”

Wilson buried the knife to its hilt in Maddox’s chest, then pulled it out and made sure of things. Grabbing him by the ponytail, he jerked the snitch’s head to the side, and back, and slashed his throat.

Then he got to his feet, surprised to find himself out of breath, watching the dark blood pool around his shoes. As he started to leave, a thought occurred to him, and he turned back. I really ought to take his scalp, Wilson thought. It would be, like, an homage. He considered the idea for a long ten seconds, standing in the doorway with the knife, dripping in his hand.

But in the end, he decided against it. He wasn’t a savage, after all, and besides – where would he put it?