The Laughterhouse

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

“How the hell did they figure it out?” Schroder asks.

We step out of the car. There are media vans behind us. We don’t know if Cole is in there, who’s dead and who’s alive, we don’t know if Cole is going to come quietly. As if on cue the front door to the house opens. Cole comes forward four steps, and then he raises his arms. He stares toward us, but there are lights in his face from the vans and the cameras and I can see he can’t tell us apart from the journalists. People start moving forward. Cole’s shoulders are shrugged up around his neck as if he’s cold or expecting to be shot.

Schroder raises his gun. I move off to the side. Cole doesn’t turn toward me. He doesn’t take another step forward. He keeps his eyes forward, squinting hard to see.

“Don’t move,” Schroder yells at him.

“I’m unarmed,” he shouts back. “I am turning myself in. Don’t shoot.”

“Detective,” one of the reporters yells, “what right do you have to be here?”

I glance back to make sure Schroder isn’t about to open fire on the reporters before running onto the lawn. I reach the front of the house out to the right, out of Cole’s line of vision. I stay against the side and start closing the distance to the front door. Then Dr. Nicholas Stanton comes through it. He’s staggering, taking long strides. He’s wearing pajamas similar to Schroder’s, only his have splotches of blood and vomit down them. His eyes are large and wild and his face is in a tight grimace. He’s holding a very large knife in his hand, which comes into view when he raises his arm to shield his eyes from all the light. The light is helping to spotlight him, making him look like a madman. He flinches a little at all the commotion, at all the people, and he seems unsure of himself. Then he sees Cole, focuses on him, his face gets even tighter, and he moves forward. His feet land heavily on the ground. Cole must be able to hear him, yet Cole doesn’t look back, he doesn’t move, just keeps his shoulders shrugged up around his neck as high as they will go.

Then it hits me. The endgame. Cole wants to be stabbed. He wants Stanton to kill him in front of all these people. He wants Stanton to go to jail for killing an unarmed man.

Schroder is still yelling at Cole not to move. From Schroder’s angle, Cole is blocking his view of Stanton. I keep moving forward. All of us are in the lights of the cameras. We’re all being recorded for history. Schroder has to yell to be heard over the gaggle of reporters. My head is throbbing but I know in another minute this will all be over.

“Don’t do it,” I yell out to Stanton.

“Keep your hands in the air,” Schroder says to Cole, and Schroder is moving forward now. So are the news crews, they’re providing the lights and the cameras and the rest of us are providing the action.

“Your children are alive,” I tell Stanton, and there’s only about ten feet between us now.

Cole throws me a look, frowns at me, then looks back at the cameras.

“I killed them,” Cole says, loud enough for Stanton and me but not for the media, “and one of them I raped.”

“He hisent shirt them,” I say, hearing the wrong words coming out. Fuck.

“You killed my children,” Stanton says, not hearing me, only looking at Cole.

“And I enjoyed it.”

Stanton takes the final step. I try to cover the distance, but I can’t, not in the time it takes for Stanton to bring the knife down. If it’s the middle of Cole’s back he’s aiming for, then it’s almost a bull’s-eye. If he’s trying to put enough force into the blade that it sinks right down to the hilt, then that isn’t quite as good-because it snags on a bone somewhere and only goes halfway. He pulls the knife out as Cole drops to his knees, giving Schroder a clear view of Stanton and of what’s going on.

“Drop the knife,” Schroder shouts, changing his aim from Cole to Stanton, back to Cole, then back to Stanton again.

I get within two steps of Stanton. I shout, really focusing on the words to tell him his children are fine, and I hold my arms out, palms up, and he turns toward me, this wild man with wild hair and eyes bugging out of his skull. “Shure susshen are thine,” I tell him.

He looks at me with absolutely no comprehension of what I’m trying to say.

He raises the blade and this time his aim is the back of Cole’s neck. I cover the final step, I get my left hand around Stanton’s wrist, and I pull him forward and we both crash to the ground. I feel the stitches in my leg popping. I feel the pressure inside my skull building, the doctor’s warning floating around in there on a sea of pain. Stanton pushes me off him and I roll to my side. He half sits up and sees the knife is still in his hand. He looks at Cole, then at me, then crawls toward Cole again. I get onto my feet and try to grab hold of him. He looks at me, then slashes the knife in my direction. I don’t see it in time and there’s no way to avoid it.

Schroder shoots him.

The gunshot sets off a whole lot of chain reactions in my head. The first one is that for a few seconds the nerves between my eyes and my brain stop working. I’m standing in the dark with no idea what’s happening. Then a switch is thrown and my vision comes back, and with it a whole lot of pain. I stumble sideways, clutching my head as if I’m the one who’s been shot. The lights from the news crews all point in different directions as everybody ducks and reacts. I lean against the side of the house.

Cole twists toward us. “No,” he cries out, still on his knees. “No,” he repeats, and this time a blood bubble grows and pops between his lips. He loses balance and falls forward. The back of his shirt is soaking with blood. He tilts down the porch steps and comes to a stop with his face on the path and his legs still on the porch.

Stanton, however, is trying to get to his feet, only he’s not having such a great time of it. The front of his pajamas over his right shoulder have turned red. I’ve got one hand over my eye because somehow it eases the pain from whatever the fuck my brain is doing. He tries to lift the knife again, but his arm won’t work. I can see in his face that he can’t figure out the mechanics of it all. He keeps trying, and then he uses his good arm to take the knife out of the good hand attached to the bad arm. He looks around and starts swinging the knife, pointing it in the direction of the media, at Schroder, and then at me. He can’t seem to spot Cole. He swings it toward me and Schroder takes a second shot. I can’t see where this one hits Stanton, but it stops him in his tracks. He looks down at his body, then at me, and his eyes start to clear.

I try to talk to him, to tell him his children are okay, but the words just don’t come out, they’re all too heavy and the ones that do finally come out just don’t make sense. The lights are getting brighter as the news crews come forward. Schroder reaches us. He kicks the knife further, then helps me out from beneath Stanton.

“You okay?” he asks me.

I nod.

He grabs his cell phone and calls for an ambulance. Two of them. He doesn’t let go of the gun. There are lights on him, lights on me, lights on Cole and Stanton. There is blood everywhere, all of it making for good TV footage.

“He was never going to hurt them,” Schroder says, talking to Stanton once he’s hung up.

“I don’t. . don’t understand,” he says, and he looks like a man waking from a dream.

“They’re fine,” Schroder tells him.

“And Katy?”

“I’m sure Katy is fine too.”

“He. . he cut off her finger.”

“I know, but that’s all he did,” Schroder says, saying it as though cutting her finger off is nothing.

“He. . he didn’t kill them?” Stanton asks.

“No,” I say, and it’s the first word to have come out clear.

“I should have. .” he says, and then he starts to cough. He keeps coughing, and when he finally stops he starts to smile. “Should have known,” he says, and then he doesn’t say anything else, just stares up at us with that smile on his face, and it’s still there when the ambulance arrives five minutes later.