“Very close.”
He grabbed the sleeve of my jacket. “We’ve got to stop him.”
“I know. And I plan to.”
He looked longingly at the birth certificate, the way a man would look at a baby picture of his son. “I’ve read a lot about genetics these past few years. I suppose he was always a monster — just born that way, you know? But I don’t want to absolve myself of the part I played in it. I should have stopped him a long time ago.” He made no effort to hide his tears. “He really is a monster, isn’t he?”
“I’m afraid he is.”
I glanced around the room. What a perfect night for a place such as this, and all the better if you had Jane Avery for company, make her some hot cocoa and put on one of the old Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies, foggy and mysterious London, but the fog and mystery of fiction, not the gore and grief of real murder.
“I’ll keep you posted,” I said.
The last thing he said was, “Do what you need to, Mr. Hokanson. Anything at all you need to.”
I nodded and went back out into the night.
In my room, I grabbed a box of ammunition, a flashlight and my small leather bag of burglary tools. I sensed it was going to be a long night.
In my car, I laid my Ruger on the passenger seat, put the ammunition neatly next to it, and backed out of the parking lot.
I needed to go back to the church. It was time to confront the good reverend and tell him everything I knew. Then it would be time to have him give Melissa McNally back to her mother.
Steam covered the windows. The defroster didn’t seem to help much. By the time I had rubbed the window clean, I was pulling up next to Jane Avery’s patrol car in the parking lot of her apartment complex.
She answered on the first knock. Whatever it was she really wanted to say, she restrained herself and said simply, “Oh.”
“I figured you’d be happy to see me.”
“I’ve got a headache, Robert, and I’m really not up for this.”
I sighed. “Look, I know you’re taking all this very personally, but you shouldn’t.”
“That’s what you drove out here to say?”
“I drove out here to say that I like you. A lot.”
“I wish you’d leave.”
“Goddammit—” I shook my head. “Sorry. I’m a little strung out at the moment.” I looked inside her decidedly untidy apartment. “You’re getting better. I don’t see any panties hanging on any doorknobs.”
She didn’t laugh. She didn’t even smile.
“Are you going to invite me in?”
“No.”
“Just like that? ‘No.’ You didn’t even have to think it over.”
“You’re obstructing justice, for one thing. You could be arrested.”
I reached out and touched her shoulder. At least she didn’t wince or pull away. “When it’s all over, you’ll understand why I couldn’t tell you anything.”
She turned her fetching head sideways, looking over her shoulder. “I’ve got some vegetable soup on. I’d better go eat it.”
“You make it yourself?”
“Right.”
“I forgot. That you’re a lousy cook, I mean.”
She looked at me a long time and said in a voice husky with pain, “Robert, just get out of here, will you? I really don’t appreciate this.”
There wasn’t much I could say to that.
I leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek and said, “I meant what I said. About liking you a lot.”
“Good-bye, Robert,” she said, and quietly closed the door, leaving me, in more ways than one, in the darkness.
I felt banished, cast out. I’d started thinking about Jane more seriously than I’d ever intended. Maybe it was her freckles or that stupid little nose of hers; more likely it was her wonderful combination of competence and tenderness I found so alluring.
A faint mist was in the air. The night smelled of the rain that had just quit falling. The parking lot was half-full and lonely-looking in the mercury vapor lights.
I was thinking about Jane and about how I might square things, so I didn’t see him until I was a few feet away. In his cheap brown leatherette jacket and dirty jeans, I didn’t recognize him at first.
He leaned against the trunk of my car, smoking a cigarette, watching me walk toward him.
He was a lone figure in the rolling midwestern night, just like the apartment house itself, which was surrounded by woods on three sides.
“I need to talk to you.”
“You should talk to your wife first, McNally. Give her a little peace of mind. She’s a good woman.”
“You don’t need to tell me that.”
“You ever lay a hand on her again, I’ll break your arms, and that’s a promise.”
“You supposed to be a tough guy?”
“No. Just a guy who doesn’t think men should beat up women.”
His eyes were animal bright and animal quick.
“I want to get my daughter back,” he said, anger gone suddenly. He sounded weary, scared. “Me and Sam Lodge — we got in way over our heads.”
“Tell me everything. Maybe I can help you figure something out.”
“I’m scared for her — for Melissa, I mean.”
He brought his cigarette to his mouth. His entire hand was shaking. “I really went and messed things up this time.”
“Just tell me what you know, McNally. You can beat up on yourself later.”
He pushed away from the car, and was just starting to stand up straight as he flipped his cigarette somewhere on the lawn, when I heard the report of a rifle — then two, three reports.
The odd thing was, McNally didn’t jerk when the bullets hit him, not at first. He only slumped back against the trunk as if he were weary beyond measure.
Then he crumpled, and it was quick and bloody and there was the frantic cry of a man who learns in a single instant that life is leaving him, that cold rushing eternal darkness is about to take him forever.
I caught him just as his cap was tumbling from his head, just before his head cracked the pavement.
As I laid him out on the cold driveway, he fouled himself, the stench hot and sour.
And then the apartment house door was bursting open. And Jane was coming quickly down the stairs, having obviously heard the rifle shots, and she was saying, “Are you hurt, Payne? Are you hurt?”
“Over here!”
By the time she reached me, McNally was gripping my hand and sobbing. He was saying things but they were the incoherent rush and jumble of last words.
When she knelt down next to me, she shook her head sadly, seeing at once that McNally would soon be dead.
And before she could object, I slipped my hand from McNally’s, got quickly to my feet and started running in the direction from where the rifle shots had come.
By the time I was twenty feet on the wet grass, I had my Ruger in my hand.
On the far side of the woods, I could see headlights from the two-lane highway leading out of town. The woods were no more than a quarter-mile deep and maybe the same across. But they gave a person plenty of places to hide.
The trail through the woods was all slippery mud and splashing puddle. I slipped and fell several times, skinning my knee once, cracking my head against a rather unyielding birch tree another time. The soggy brown leaves of autumns past covered trail and forest like a grimy parasite with a shiny wet shell.
I heard him ahead of me. He had deserted the trail and was crashing through the undergrowth that lay westward. He was the same man who’d shot at me earlier, I knew. And I also knew who he was.
I plunged into the undergrowth, keeping my Ruger held high above the brambles that snapped at my hand like an angry serpent, and the rocks that seemed to jump at my feet in order to trip me.