This Is How You Die Page 26

  “Is everything okay, sir?”

  I looked up to see a pretty waitress standing over me. She looked a little tired and more than a little dumb, but she had striking blue eyes and a comforting smile. She was like a lot of attractive young women around Whitegate in that with a bit of poise, makeup, and attention, they could make it to the front pages of many magazines. But instead they were resigned to a life of customer service in some greasy diner while their drug-addled boyfriend waited to steal their meager earnings, force them into depraved sex acts, and then threaten to leave them or kill them if they refused.

  I returned her question with a tired smile, still feeling the effects of my battle with Lester. Two days had passed, but I had avoided hospitals and doctors and had been forced to see to my own wounds. It didn’t require a lot of stitches, but I needed a great deal of whiskey and morphine to get me through and it was that combination of drugs that had left me worse for wear. I had been staying in a bed and breakfast at the time and only when I heard the sound of a police officer knocking at my door did I wake from my sedated slumber.

  They were local officers, thick as shit. They were there to do what amounted to the most serious thing they had ever done, and they did it with all the style and competency of a drunk at a poker game. They didn’t ask me who I was or why I was there, nothing that could have raised suspicions. They were just doing the rounds, knocking on doors, asking questions, going through the motions so they could finish sooner and leave earlier. It didn’t matter that there was major manhunt on, it didn’t matter that there was, potentially, a serial killer staying somewhere in town, what mattered was that they could go home early.

  Ironically, one of those officers was in the café with me, sitting on the other side with a bright and cocky expression on his young face. He had evidently been given his wish and was on his break, but his partner wasn’t with him. I didn’t worry when I saw him; I had already met him and I had met his type many times before. It would take more than a feckless idiot to stop me, even though I had been incredibly feckless myself.

  The officer looked over at me, but he seemed more interested in the waitress. He had been watching her the entire time. She seemed to be the reason he was there, the one thing that occupied his mind when he should have been thinking of protecting the public and doing his job. That’s the weird thing about love and lust: it gets in the way of everything else. On the promise of sex, human society can collapse in the blink of an eye. I am not bound by the laws of attraction, certainly not in the same way. I have no room for love and lust, but I am still drawn to beauty and I do still desire to take attractive young girls home. It is what I do with them when I get them there that differs from the rest of society.

  “What’s your name?” I asked her.

  She seemed shy, but then again they all are. It’s the country life, the seclusion, the ignorance; true confidence is rare in these parts. “Cassie,” she said, pointing to a name plate that sat perched upon her perky bosom.

  I tried to catch the eye of the young officer in the corner, but he seemed too concerned with staring at the back of Cassie’s head, as if willing her to turn around, to pay attention to him.

  In another town, somewhere less deprived and less washed-up, she could have had an army of suitors, from businessmen to professional sports stars. But in this town, where few people of merit ever venture, her choices were limited to the same brainless simpletons who had hit on her in high school and tried to coax her into the library so they could finger her behind the reference section. A talentless local cop was probably the best that she could do for herself. In another place, she could have maintained her looks into middle age, using them to climb the career ladder one way or another, but in this town, they would be gone before she hit thirty, dried up thanks to poor nutrition, poor living standards, and one too many beatings.

  “That’s a beautiful name, it suits you well.”

  “Thank you,” she beamed. “What about you, what’s your name?”

  “Lester,” I said without hesitation.

  “Oh, like the man who was murdered?”

  We both looked toward the television, sitting on a grime and dust–encrusted stand behind the counter—too high up to clean and too far away to care. Atwood looked tired as the questions continued; he was also getting incredibly annoyed and looked like he was ready to blow. I didn’t want to miss that.

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  “Terrible news, isn’t it. You know, I went to the same school as this Herman fellow.” She seemed proud of the fact. That was her claim to fame.

  “Really?” I feigned surprise and intrigue, which I knew is what she expected.

  She nodded slowly and sternly, her hands on her hips in a ponderous manner. “You would have never have guessed it by looking at him.”

  I barely managed to suppress a smile. This girl might have gone to the same school—she worked in the area so it wouldn’t have surprised me—but she was also a good few years younger than me and probably only had fleeting glances at best. I was nothing to her and wouldn’t have warranted a second thought, let alone a second glance.

  “Did you ever talk to him?” I asked her.

  She shook her head. “But my cousin’s friend once sat next to him in the lunchroom. She said she could sense the evil, she said that she knew he was planning something like that.”

  Again, I had to stop myself from laughing. It was intriguing to know these conversations were going on, that I’d had such an impact on the lives of those I had hated so much, but the idea that any of these idiots had an idea of what I was going to do was pathetic.

  “She should have said something then,” I told her. “Could have saved a few people.”

  She shrugged. “I think she was talking out of her ass.”

  This time I did laugh. I was beginning to like this girl.

  She smiled and I saw her eyes flicker as she checked me out. It was brief, but it was enough to show me her intentions. “So, you’re not from around here?” she asked.

  I shook my head and saw her intrigue increase. It wasn’t like I was from another country, but to a small-town girl in a small town such as Whitegate, anyone of the same age who didn’t go to her school, and anyone older who didn’t know her parents by name and couldn’t remember her when she was “just this tall,” was exotic.

  She lost my attention as I concentrated on the television above the bar; Atwood was about to snap and although he was far less attractive, he had many things that this silly little girl didn’t have.

  She said something else but I ignored her, and a few seconds later, her disappointed voice chirped up again. “So, is everything okay with your coffee and sandwich?”

  I diverted my attention from the television long enough to give her a smile—committed enough to tell her that she should leave me alone, warm enough to keep her hanging on.

  “Should the people of Whitegate be fearing more murders?”

  “No, I—”

  “How can you be so sure? How do you know he—”

  It finally happened. Atwood snapped. The little vein that had been throbbing in his temple for the entirety of the interview finally popped. His face, which had been growing redder and redder by the second, turned a vicious shade of crimson as he rose to his feet and slammed his fists down angrily on the table. Several people in the room gasped, several of them jumped, but all of them continued to train their cameras and recorders on him. This was journalistic gold and they didn’t want to miss a second of it.

  “Will you fucking let me speak!?” he barked. “I am a busy man, a grieving man, I came here to give you some answers but if you don’t let me speak then I can’t fucking give you those answers, can I?”

  His heavy breathing was the only sound heard over the click and flash of cameras and the murmurings of hushed phone calls.

  “Herman is not an idiot,” Atwood continued, putting a smile on my face. “The people of Whitegate are safe! Right now it happens to be one o
f the most heavily guarded towns in the country, with what amounts to half of the county’s police force in and around it. If he was lingering around, I’m sure we would catch him.”

  That seemed to settle a few of the murmurings, and it also went some way to settling Atwood. “Lester Keats was a good man and a great detective, one that was killed by a very evil and corrupt mind, but you have my word that we are working night and day to stop the man that did this.”

  “And what about—”

  “Yes!” Atwood snapped, playing them at their own game. “I am not forgetting the young men and women in the theater. We have lost one of our own, but we are not taking sides. Many lives were lost and we will do our best to ensure that justice is served.”

  He settled down after that, releasing a long and tired sigh that seemed to expel some of the fatigue emanating from his very soul. The questions started again and Atwood sat back down, the life and the anger drained out of him.

  Atwood was probably right; Lester Keats was a good man. An intelligent man, as well, much more than I gave him credit for. His words had been playing over and over in my head. His accusations. His theories. Not to mention the calm, sadistic way he had delivered them. He had surprised me, but I had surprised myself, too.

  I took out my wallet. It was brand new, leather, barely creased. There was a smiling, square-faced man in a Polo shirt grinning at me through the little transparent sleeve. It was a placeholder, a stock image of a man who was probably unbearable to be around. I kept it there to remind me why I hated people so much.

  In one of the other compartments, hidden away, was a crumpled photograph. I took it out, opened it, and Irene Henderson stared up at me. This was one of the few possessions that had survived the fire, one of the ones I had purposefully taken with me. It was technically one of my first souvenirs, but as Lester had suggested, it was much more than that.

  She didn’t really look like my mother. She wasn’t as beautiful, as elegant. But there was something in her smile that reminded me of her, something that activated a deep, internal part of me that was usually silent, a part I didn’t understand and didn’t like.

  I had spared her life all those years ago and, truth be told, I had no idea why. She was the only one to have gotten away. If Lester was right and Irene Henderson was some representation of my mother, someone I had spared out of love, out of humanity, then I had made a mistake. This was about me—not my father, not my mother. It was my legend, my legacy, my fucking life.

  I felt the anger rise inside me as I recalled Lester’s words and when I turned back to the photograph, that feeling, that humanity, was gone. Replaced by bitterness, hatred. I had thought about revisiting Irene in the past. I had no idea where she lived, but I knew that her family—who still lived nearby—would, and with the right persuasion, I was sure they would tell me.

  I jammed the image back in my wallet.

  I looked around the café and noted that everyone else had already stopped paying attention, even the two officers in the back. The one who had been staring at me earlier had now moved his focus entirely to Cassie and was trying his best to win her affections. He called her over and fed her his best chat-up lines, seemingly derived from an anthology on how to be a dickhead. He was the same age as me and he was also probably better looking, but he was an idiot with all the maturity of a ten-year-old and even Cassie could see that. It pained me to realize these were the people who were supposed to be catching me; Atwood had just reassured the country they were safe because people like this were protecting them. It was laughable—if Lester hadn’t stood a chance, then what hope did these idiots have? What hope did anyone have?

  I caught the look of distaste on Cassie’s face when she stopped flirting, gave the copper his tea, and headed back to the kitchen. He stared at me, a long and lingering stare. He was weighing me up and I realized that I might have underestimated him, that he had been watching me and was onto me.

  He then pointed to Cassie and made a sexual gesture with his hands. He wasn’t telling me that he knew who I was, he wasn’t telling me that he knew there was anything suspicious about me, he was telling me that Cassie was his and that he had won.

  It made me laugh, and he took that laugh as a sign that I was admitting defeat.

  Atwood had called me evil, he had said that I would get what was coming to me, but that wasn’t the way the world worked. This guy was clearly terrible at his job; he was clearly a sexist pig with little use to the human race. But who would complain if he didn’t get what was coming to him? Who would complain if he wasn’t murdered, maimed, or at least dragged back to reality with a vicious beating? There is no karma, but there are people like me—people who make their own karma. In a different time and a different place, I would have killed this cocky little prick, doing the female population a favor and creating a job opening that could be taken by someone who was competent. If someone had provided their own form of karmic justice before today, killing this nitwit and thus creating a space for someone else to fill, then my reign might have come to an end. Someone who was good at his job might have sussed me out and made me pay for my own cockiness.

  My time may come, and my end may be unpleasant and karmic, but in the meantime I am a free man; free to murder; free to assault; free to maim; and most importantly, free of any remorse and regret. What I told Lester was right: there is no means or motive to what I do. I do it because I enjoy killing and because it feels right, but that isn’t all strictly true. There is a drive within me that guides me toward these crimes. It is not a voice; I am not insane. In fact, I believe I am saner than many people and may be one of the sanest people alive. No, this drive, this inner guide, is something bigger than even I can comprehend.

  Atwood would have made a nice adversary, but I preferred Lester. If anything, Atwood reminded me of Darren. He had a thuggish and brutish approach, lacking in the subtlety and darkness Lester possessed. As outwardly monstrous as Darren was, and as stern and forceful as Atwood is, the deepest darkness is in those who hide their true selves from the world. External evils like Atwood and Darren Henderson are limited to what they can express, because their minds are too small and their intentions are too meager for them to contemplate hiding those feelings. If they had any true darkness within themselves then they would hide it from the world and from there they would either do as I do, unleashing it in sporadic outbursts, timed for maximum effect and release, or they would hold it back and take the resulting frustration out on themselves, as Lester did.

  Atwood certainly had some anguish inside of him, but the fact that he showed it all to the world, the fact that he unleashed it in such an uncouth manner, told me he wasn’t the right man for me. He would be too easy to defeat and I would gain very little satisfaction from doing so.

  “Can I get you a refill?”

  Cassie was standing above me with a coffee pot. I smiled at her and then directed that to the other side of the café where the cocky copper’s smile had faded, replaced by an irritated grimace.

  “Sure,” I let her bend over and refill my cup and when my face was out of her eye-line I winked at the cop. It didn’t matter what the context was; toying with someone in authority was always fun.

  “He giving you any trouble?” I asked.

  She gave me a half-smile, indicating the answer was most definitely a yes, but that she was too timid and too nice to say anything.

  “Just ignore him. He’s new to the force, probably just got his badge,” I told her. “Give him a couple weeks or so, a grisly murder or two, and he’ll change. Hell, if we’re lucky, then maybe Herman will get him.”

  She giggled and put a hand to her mouth. “That’s horrible,” she said with a smile that said otherwise. She paused for a moment, looking like she wanted to say something but wasn’t sure what.

  Finally she looked down at my feet, at the suitcase that was resting up against them. “Are you going away?” she asked.

  “Holiday,” I said with a nod.

  �
�Oh, really, anywhere nice?”

  Small talk was a baffling beast. After all, few people would go on holiday to the pits of hell, few people would dig out the travel brochures and search for the worst destination they could possible find. “You know what, fuck the beach, I want to go to some hellhole in the middle of the desert where strange men with stranger urges will probe every available orifice while slathering my testicles in honey and pointing me toward a wasps’ nest.”

  “Yes. America.”

  “Ohh.” The sound she made said she had surprised herself by being genuinely interested in what I had to say. “I always wanted to go to America. Which part?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I figured I’d hit the road, try and see as much of it as I can.”

  “Great idea.” She was besotted, lingering a little longer on the stare than she needed to, her interest in me suddenly extending beyond her desire to get a tip that I had no intention of leaving. “I wish I could do that.”

  “You’re welcome to join me.”

  The officer rose to his feet. He hadn’t finished his coffee, but his morning had clearly been ruined. He stormed out of the café, brushing past us as he did so. I could see that he was hoping to catch Cassie’s attention, that a small part of him still hoped he had a chance, but she barely even noticed him. He locked eyes with me on his way out; it was not the first time a police officer had me in their sights and within their grasp, and it wouldn’t be the last.

  When the door swung shut, I turned back to Cassie.

  Her jaw was open in disbelief, but then reality kicked in and she looked coy, almost embarrassed. “We’ve only just met. I couldn’t do that.”

  “Well.” I checked my watch. “I don’t fly for another three hours, so what do you say you join me for a cup of coffee and we can get to know each other. After that you can walk me back to my house and if you think you know me well enough, then you can come along.”