Night Kills

33

It took Foster an hour to find Greg Wagner's place. Not that it was hidden or anything, just that the roads were getting that bad.

He parked across the street and sat there for a time thinking about winter, how it howled, how it raged, how it made almost anything going on seem insignificant. You could lose yourself in winter and its furies, and that's just what he did for a time. Shut off the engine. Listened to the trees above creaking with ice. Listened to wind rattle shutters. Watched a city snowplough moving down the street like a giant yellow electric monster. Thought of his mother and father. His father, especially. Sometimes he imagined himself reaching out across die black gorge separating life from death. Touching his father's hand. Comforting his father. As his father had comforted him. Somewhere his mother was still alive. He hadn't talked to her in fifteen years and didn't plan to; he had not even gone to her when that heart condition showed up, and she pleaded with him to come to Rochester and see her there in the hospital. No fucking way, bitch. Why don't you count on your football player now? The man who'd been such a cutie and such a celebrity and such a hunk was now a lard-ass alcoholic who spent his time talking about what pussies the new generation of ballplayers were. Yeah. Hope you're enjoying yourself, Mom. Nobody deserves it more than you.

Then he didn't think of anything at all. Just sat there with the wind rocking the car and cold air seeping in through the doors, and the windows fogging up a ghostly grey.

Finally it was time. Go across the street and push the gun in the door and demand that the cripple tell him where the tape was.

On the seat was the. 38 he sometimes took out to the gun club when he wanted to relax and zone out. There was something about the feel of a weapon clutched in your hand-you could easily imagine that the targets were really people. Starting with Mother. Dear, fucking Mother. Blam, blam, blam, Ma. Blam, blam, blam.

Five minutes later he stood on the doorstep, hunched over because the wind was like a thousand tiny razors cutting his face and neck. The way the wind whined, he wondered if they could even hear his knock. Faintly he could hear a TV set going. He knocked again, let his eyes rest on Emma's part of the duplex. In a peculiar way he'd liked Emma. She was like a kitten. So gentle, even when you were pushing her around. He knew she hadn't liked him, not ever. She was one of those women who'd sensed instinctively who he really was and what he was really about. So, he'd been forced to pay her very well indeed for his various favours over the past couple years. Because otherwise she wouldn't have worked with him.

The door was opened by the young girl he'd tried to kill Wednesday night. "Yes?" she said, making it sound as if he were trying to sell them unwanted Boy Scout cookies or something. She didn't recognize him. He saw that instantly. No recognition whatsoever.

"My car," he said. "It stalled across the street. I wondered if I could come in and use your phone so I could call a service station."

"Oh, sure," she said. She smiled then. It was a very healthy, clean-cut smile. She was very good at hiding the fact that she was a little whore. "We'll even give you some hot cocoa."

"Gee, I really appreciate this," he said, standing back so she could push the front storm door open and let him come inside.

He took two steps across the threshold, glancing over at the man in the wheelchair; then he jerked the. 38 from his overcoat pocket and put it dead against the girl's temple.

"You're Foster," the man in the wheelchair said. "You're the killer."

Foster saw recognition in the girl's eyes.

"Do I look a little different from Wednesday night, Denise?" he asked, smiling.

Before she got a chance to respond, he cracked her hard across the mouth, knocking her backward to the couch.

He pointed the gun at the man. "I want the tape, pally. I don't want any lies, any excuses, any stalling. Either I get the tape right now, or I kill her. Do we understand each other?"

Wagner said, "I don't have the tape anymore."

Foster leaned down and grabbed the girl by the hair and jerked her to her feet. She cried out from the pain and tried to kick out at him. He just yanked on her hair all the harder.

Finally he yanked the girl close to him-so close he could smell the sudden sweat on her body and feel the slight clamminess on her skin-and put the gun once more to her head.

"You know how it's going to be, pally?" Foster said. He nodded to the east wall where framed photographs of long-dead movie stars were neatly and reverently arranged. "You're going to lose two ways. Because her brains are going to spray all over that wall and spoil your nice fancy photographs. Now, no more bullshit. I want the tape."

"It's in my room."

"Get it and bring it to me."

Wagner glanced anxiously at the girl. "Don't pull her hair anymore."

Foster smiled. "Kind of sweet on her, huh?" He laughed, thinking of his father. "Bet she's safe with you, isn't she? All these other guys sniffing around her little teenage pussy, but not you, Wagner. Not you. You couldn't do anything if you wanted to." He gave the girl's hair a final twist and then shoved her back on the couch. Her knee struck the coffee table as she fell forward. Once again she cried out. He waved the gun at Wagner. "Now, go get the tape."

Wagner looked at the girl. You could see he was sharing her pain. Afraid for her.

"Don't touch her," Wagner said.

"Anything you say, pally," Foster said.

Wagner rolled his wheelchair out of the living room and down the corridor to a darkened doorway. He turned to look back at ' Foster. "Don't hurt her anymore. I mean it"

"You're a real tough bastard."

"You heard what I said."

Then he was gone. Inside. A light came on and made a yellow oblong of the doorway. After a moment or two Foster heard the wheelchair move across some more of the room. Then he heard a squeaky bureau drawer opening and closing. There. At last. The tape.

Foster looked at the girl and said, "Come here."

"Are you going to hurt me again?"

"I didn't ask you to talk. I told you to come here."

"No."

He pointed the gun directly at her face. "I want you in front of me when he comes back here."

"Why?"

"Because I don't trust him."

"There's nothing he can do to you."

"Oh, yeah? Well, maybe not But I'm not going to take the chance. Now get your ass over here."

He leaned down and took her wrist and snapped her to her feet. Then he pulled her in front of him just as Wagner was returning in his wheelchair.

As Wagner rolled down the hallway toward the living room, Foster could see in the man's hand the outline of a videotape. There it was. Without the tape Brolan would spend many weeks trying to convince the police that he was not the killer after all. By that time Foster would be in South America with plenty of cash-enough to buy a new identity.

Foster kept the gun at the girl's temple. He said to Wagner, "Put the tape down on the edge of the coffee table."

"Let the girl go first"

"You're a real macho little bastard, aren't you?"

"The girl. Or I don't set the tape down," Wagner said. Foster laughed at the absurdity of the little man's being so tough. But he was. He really was.

To the girl Foster said, "Now, when I let you go, you walk over to the couch and sit right on the end of it and keep your hands in plain sight Do you understand me?"

"Yes."

"Good. Then you're going to do what I say?"

"Yes."

Foster kept looking to see if Wagner and the girl were exchanging any messages through their eye contact. He was getting increasingly paranoid, and he knew it

He let the girl go, shoving her toward the couch.

She did as he'd told her. Sat right on the edge. Almost primly. Watching. Waiting.

"The tape," Foster said, snapping his fingers and pointing to the coffee table.

Wagner held up the videotape. "This isn't going to help you now. I hope you know that The police will no longer believe that Brolan is their man."

"Oh, no, pally? Well, I guess we'll see, won't we?" He snapped his fingers again. "Put it down on the table and push it over to me."

"And if I don't?"

"Then I'll blow your fucking brains out right on the spot." The girl sounded as if she were going to cry. "Please, Greg. Please do what he says."

"You better listen to her, Wagner. She's got the right idea." Wagner said, "All right"

The way he laid the tape down on the table, you might have mistaken him for a poker player about to play his trump card. He set it slowly, carefully, down.

"Now push it over here," Foster said from the other end of the long glass table. "Now."

Wagner pushed the tape toward Foster.

"Good little boy," Foster said.

When the tape reached his end, he started to lean over and pick it up, and that's when the gun appeared at the side of the wheelchair.

The little bastard wasted no time in firing.

Foster dove for cover behind a leather recliner. A bullet had nearly caught him in the shoulder just as he was jumping.

The first thing Foster did, once he got his bearings, was say, "You fucked up, little man. You really fucked up bad. I'm going to make you pay for what you just did."

With that he raised his head slightly behind the arm of the recliner and shot the girl once, twice, three times, in the chest. She had still been on the couch; she rolled off, in a mixture of cries and blood, to the floor.

Wagner cried out, too, and started blindly firing toward the recliner. He needed to use both hands, and he wasn't much of a shot-he was better at hitting the wall decorations than anything else-and about all Foster had to do was wait till the little pecker ran out of bullets.

Which came soon enough.

Knowing he was safe, Foster stood up in the echoes of gunfire and Wagner's sobs and went over to the man and slapped him hard across the face.

"I told you I'd kill her, you little prick," Foster said. "If you'd done what I said, she'd still be alive." He wasn't excited. His voice was flat and matter-of-fact, and his breathing was quiet and regular.

He had never heard a man sob the way Wagner was sobbing as he wheeled his chair over to Denise, who lay sprawled and unmoving on the floor. Blood was everywhere in small and large pools, in flecks that had spattered the furnishings.

Foster wasn't unsympathetic. He felt sorry for the little prick. "You should have listened to me," he said again. "I wouldn't have had to kill her if you'd just listened to me. Don't you understand that?"

Foster snapped up the tape, dropped it in the pocket of his overcoat.

And then he was gone, the door banging behind him, Wagner's sobs raging against the vast, empty night.