Killer

chapter 30

present

Sophie had an ancient-looking Volvo parked outside the coffee shop Saturday morning. I threw an overnight bag into the back seat, then joined her up front. She handed me a large coffee and a muffin that she had bought earlier at the shop, which I gladly took from her. The weather had turned colder – the type of cold where you can see your breath – and I held the coffee with both hands to warm them.

“Thanks for this,” I said, acknowledging the food and coffee. I looked hesitantly at the interior of the car, adding, “You sure this tin can can drive? This car has got to be at least thirty years old.”

Sophie smiled at that. It was a nice smile. With no makeup on, her thick hair pulled back into a pony tail, and wearing a ratty sweatshirt and a torn pair of jeans, she still looked more gorgeous than most women would look dolled-up and dressed to the nines.

“Not to worry,” she said. “My friend promised me it will get us there and back. I also rented us a laptop computer. As long as we can figure out how to use it we’ll be playing writer this weekend. Excited?”

“Sure.”

She put her hand on my arm and gave me a slight squeeze. “You don’t look too excited. Come on, Leonard, cheer up, this is going to be fun. An adventure.”

“I am glad we’re doing this,” I said.

“So am I,” she said. She handed me a piece of paper with hand-written directions scrawled on it. “The first few hours we’re just going straight up Route 93, then the directions get a little complicated and I’ll need your help… Leonard, darling, what’s so amusing?”

I waved it off. “Nothing,” I said. “Just some random thought.”

She gave me a funny look. “Save those for the book,” she said. “A little humor won’t hurt.”

She had a small stack of cassette tapes, and smiled as she told me they came with the car. She asked me what I wanted to listen to and I told her to choose, and she plugged in The Grateful Dead. For most of the trip I sat back deep in thought over what had happened during the past few days and what was going to be happening in the near future, and was barely aware of the music Sophie was playing or the scenery we were passing. Every once in a while I’d look over at Sophie. The excitement burning on her was palpable, and I don’t think she had ever looked more beautiful.

After we got off Route 93, the directions did get a little tricky, but we were able to navigate to the cabin, which really was in the middle of nowhere. I ignored Sophie’s protests, and loaded myself up with the laptop and all the other baggage and food that she had brought, leaving her to carry only her handbag.

“This is ridiculous, Leonard,” she told me. “I’m not some weakling. I can carry some of that.”

“I wouldn’t think of it,” I said, puffing only slightly from my exertion.

After she unlocked the cabin door, I went in first, telling her I’d find the kitchen and put the stuff in there. Instead, though, I put it all down quietly and stood just inside the door so I was behind her when she walked in, taking a canister out of her handbag. She never even knew I was there until I had her arm twisted behind her back and forced the silver canister out of her hand.

“Leonard, please-” she started to say.

The canister had no markings or labels printed on it. I sprayed it in her eyes. A small stream came out of it, and Sophie immediately went into convulsions. I let her drop to the old-fashioned pine-board floor. I could smell immediately that she had emptied her bowels.

Her handbag was one of those large affairs, almost like a small duffel bag. I went through it and found other items of interest. Scalpels, things that looked like dental instruments, and other tools that looked like they could induce great pain. Sure enough I found what I was searching for: a roll of masking tape. Sophie was still going through convulsions when I taped her wrists behind her back and her ankles together. I noticed her nose had started bleeding and a thin stream of blood leaked out of one of her ears. I pulled up a rocking chair and sat and waited until her convulsions stopped. It took a while, but eventually she settled down.

“A nerve agent?” I asked her.

She nodded. “A mild one,” she said in a hoarse, weak voice. She was obviously drained from what she had just gone through, and her skin color was awful, but she looked like an entirely different person. She was still beautiful, but there was an iciness about her, almost like she was made from metal. Whatever warmth and vulnerability she had displayed before had been stripped away. I know this must sound funny since she was probably never more vulnerable in her life, but what I saw lying there was more machine-like than human. Beautiful, even still.

“Does it have any long-term side effects?”

“I don’t know.”

“Was there ever any attraction between us?” I asked.

“None. I never found you anything but repulsive. It was all an act.”

She didn’t say this to be mean or hurtful, nothing more really than giving me the facts. Besides, she wasn’t telling me anything that I hadn’t known all along, at least on some deep subconscious level.

“Let me guess, you were never sexually abused as a child, nor did you ever serve time in prison,” I said.

“I had a happy childhood. And no, I never did time.”

“You put on a damned good act,” I said.

“Thanks, but obviously not good enough. What gave me away?”

I shrugged. “I never told you I was working as a janitor, yet you made a comment about me cleaning toilets for a living.”

Her eyes dulled as she digested that. Of course I could’ve told her I’d researched her name at the library and all I could find was an obituary for a girl in Minnesota who had been killed three years earlier in a hit-and-run. I could have also told her how at some gut level I knew the instant I saw her what she was. I might’ve been in denial about it, but I must’ve known then. I saw no reason to make her feel any worse than she did so I didn’t tell her any of that.

“Why’d you go through this whole elaborate set-up?” I asked her. “You had so many opportunities to kill me before this.”

“I’m not sure that’s true,” she said. “I had researched you enough to know how difficult it would’ve been if I didn’t gain your trust first. Even if I were camped out on a rooftop with a high-powered rifle, from what I know about you, you probably would’ve sensed it. Besides, I wasn’t hired just to kill you. My job was more complicated than that.”

“What were you hired for?”

“To find out what you did to my client’s sister. Then to make you suffer pretty badly before killing you.”

“What do you mean client’s sister?”

She winced as blood from her ear dripped into her eye. “Does the name Sally Hughes ring a bell?”

I thought back on the girl in the bulky green parka. Back then I didn’t want to know her name, so I never looked inside her pocketbook. “No,” I said.

“It should. You murdered her in 1992 and made sure her body was never found.”

“I never killed a woman before,” I said.

She smiled weakly at that. “Leonard, I’m being straightforward with everything I’m telling you, you can show me the same professional courtesy. Seven months ago, when my client found out that you had murdered Fred Marzone, she knew that you had murdered her sister also. Sally was working at a hospital nearby where you had left Marzone’s body. Judging from where she lived, she would’ve been cutting through that same parking lot if she was walking home after work.”

She broke into a coughing fit. It didn’t sound too good, and after it stopped, she smiled weakly at me again. “My client tried to get the police to reopen their investigation into Sally’s disappearance, but they refused to. Their reason was that you would’ve added Sally’s murder to your confession if you had actually done it. Leonard, I’ve been curious about this. Why didn’t you admit to killing her? With the deal you had worked out there would’ve been no consequences for it.”

“I didn’t kill her,” I said.

Sophie’s eyes went blank. “Okay,” she said, flatly.

“A few weeks ago you searched my apartment, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I did. I was looking for any trophies you might’ve taken off of Sally. I didn’t find any. I did find the money you taped inside your radiator, but I left that alone. I also saw all your little matchsticks and other safeguards, but I figured you would come to the conclusion that Lombard searched your place, so I didn’t bother replacing any of it.”

“Is the sister coming here?”

Sophie hesitated for only a second before nodding. “She’ll be here in an hour,” she said. “She wanted to watch while I inflicted pain.”

“My own curiosity – how much is she paying you?”

“A lot.”

“How much is a lot?”

She gave me another weak smile. “A quarter of a million dollars. Leonard, I’d like to make another request for professional courtesy. I’ve soiled myself and I’m bleeding from my ear and nose and I’m nauseous like you wouldn’t believe. Can you make this quick, and end this already?”

“Sophie, I don’t want to kill you,” I told her. “I want to somehow get through this without having to do that. What I’m going to do is move you to one of the bedrooms, then wait for your client to show up. I didn’t kill her sister, and I’ll find a way to convince her of that, and…”

And fuck it.

There are only so many lies you can stack on top of each other before they come tumbling down on you. Early on most of the lies were to myself. Deep, deep denial, you know. As much as I tried convincing myself otherwise, I knew on some subconscious level why I had to stay in the Boston area after I was released from prison. I had to be there for Lombard and his boys to make a play for me. And if not them, then someone else holding a grudge.

You see, I’m not a madman. I’m not some psychopathic killer who can just grab their victims at random. I don’t get sadistic pleasure from my killings, and I certainly don’t enjoy seeing my victims suffer. But I do need to kill. It’s something ingrained deep in my core. Until recently I’ve been trying to pretend that wasn’t so; I wanted badly to hold on to this idea of me being a different person, but I can’t do that any more. That’s okay. I can deal with what I really am as long as the killings are the result of a job or my acting in self-defense. As long as I’m not just some crazy lunatic running around slaughtering people.

For years I tried to convince myself that I was only doing a job for Lombard, that I could’ve just as easily ended up a bartender or a construction worker, or working any other nine-to-five job. I tried to hide from the knowledge of what was really inside me, and I think all of that denial and self-delusion was what caused my headaches. Even though I didn’t understand it at the time, the need to kill again was the real reason I defended Lucinda inside her diner – I must’ve been hoping that that dirtbag would be waiting outside for me and would give me my excuse. It was the same reason I must’ve also broken up that robbery outside the liquor store. Yeah, those punks attacked me, but they were so feeble at it that I wouldn’t have been able to justify self-defense if I had killed them. Maybe to a court, but not to myself. And I guess that was the same reason I let myself get hooked up with Sophie and build this idyllic fantasy about her.

And now for the lies that I haven’t just been telling myself. The way I had already described it with the two wiseguys was mostly true. But after I had them in the trunk, I didn’t tie them up. I shot them both in the head. And Nick Lombard? After he dug up the money for me, I put two bullets in his chest and left him dead in the cellar. Anything else would’ve been insane.

And Sophie…

She’s in another room now, but that’s only so I don’t have to smell her. I ended it for her right after she asked me to. And I made it quick.

Now I’m sitting here waiting for Sophie’s client. Sally Hughes’s sister. When she gets here I’ll be killing her too, but I’ll make it fast. She’ll be gone before she even knows what happened. I know what some of you are probably thinking, that the decent thing would be for me to tell her about Sally, but I don’t see it that way. It wasn’t pleasant how I disposed of the body, and I don’t see why I should burden her with that knowledge. Why ruin her last few moments like that? Better for her to hold on to the thought that she’s entering the house to see me tortured.

It turns out there was over a hundred and twenty thousand in the valise that Nick Lombard dug up for me. After all my lawsuits are finished with I’ll use that money to change my identity and set up shop where I can continue my profession. Fuck any book deals and fuck any interviews. Eventually I’ll slip back into anonymity. I might look a little familiar to my clients, but not enough where they won’t hire me.

I realize I’m content. My headaches are gone and have been ever since Thursday, and I know they’re not coming back. It’s a relief when you finally admit to yourself what you are, and in my case, that I’m a killer. I wish I had told Sophie what I found so funny earlier when she explained the route to the cabin, since she’s one of the few people who could’ve appreciated the humor – that she was trying to have me give directions to my own execution. In a way it was a shame I had to do to her what I did – we could’ve made a good team. Even if she did find me repulsive.

As I sit back I can smell the scent of death saturating my skin. That’s fine, it doesn’t bother me any more, and nobody else has ever seemed to notice it.

I hear a car pull up and I brace myself. Once I hear the footsteps on the gravel outside, I move over to the doorway and hide in the shadows of the room.

I understand how hard it must’ve been for her over the years, not knowing what had happened to her sister, and how torn up she must’ve been after convincing herself that I was the person responsible. Since she had hired a professional to kill me, I can justify now killing her as self-defense, but I can still appreciate the cruelty of it, and I almost feel sorry for her. Almost.

The door opens.