“And that forces my hand, because this is the last stop. There are no other doctors to stymie, no other mindbender tricks to pull. It’s just The Brink… and me. And you did it. You’ve broken me.”
Drake shook his head.
“No.”
“Yes,” I said. “There’s no other conclusion I can make.”
Fire glimmered in his eyes. His lean jaw tensed.
“No.”
I placed my hands on my knees. My voice was sympathetic. I was sympathetic. It tore at me to say this, to admit this. He’s cruel, Annie Jackson had said, and he was… but he had a reason to be, he was tormented by a life-changing error, a thing my heart knew I couldn’t live with were I in his shoes, and he deserved a fate better than the one he’d now endure. The one my signature would help sentence him to.
“Richard, the endgame isn’t next Monday. It’s now. Your view of the past is so resolute, so brazen, so inflexible, that there’s no reason to waste our time anymore.”
“I said no, damn you.” There was a tremor now, on the edge of his icy voice. “I’m sane. I know what I’ve seen, and it’s real. You know it’s—”
I spoke over him, insistent, my voice still low and sincere.
“Have you ever considered, just for a moment, that the past didn’t happen the way you think it did—or prayed it did” I asked. “I’m not talking about rewriting history. What’s dead’s buried; that’s what your son said. But what if there was never a burial… because there was nothing to bury”
Drake’s head cocked to one side in an agonizingly slow arc. His ear nearly kissed his shoulder now. He shook his head, as if trying to shake away a dream.
“I… don’t…”
“No, I don’t think you ever have,” I said, “and I don’t know if it’s true, but can you loosen your grip on the past to consider—for only a moment—that Alexandrov is still alive”
His green eyes were the size of half-dollars now. His voice was a whispered hiss.
“What? How did—”
“They never found a body, Richard.”
“How could you possibly know that?”
I leaned forward now, leaned in close. “This is it. The end of the line, the bottom of the ninth. If you’re going to convince me that you’re the crosshairs for Death—that you’re really the cause of all this misery despite your alibis—then you’d better do it now. So here’s the pitch. What happened in Russia? What is the Dark Man? Why ‘Night On Bald Mountain?’”
Richard Drake’s voice pitched low as he spoke. It was unsettling, unbalanced, like a warped LP record. This side of my patient was new. I watched him closely.
“In all my years—all those jobs—I never spilled a drop, never bruised a knuckle,” he said. “It’s classless, inhuman. No way to treat a living thing.” He sighed. “Until…”
“Until ‘the cowboys,’ the gun runners,” I said.
“Until him. Every game, every trick, every con, every incentive, even drugs. Nothing. The Ivan was bedrock, unflappable.”
He looked up at me now, and for a heartbeat, I thought he could see again. But his pine-green eyes still stared past me, vacant.
“We needed to know who ran the operation,” he said. “We needed it. I had to, you understand. I had to. Desperate measures.”
“You beat him,” I said.
Drake shook his head quickly, squinting, terrified by whatever he was seeing inside his mind.
“No, no, so much worse than that,” he said. “The things… Jesus… that was me… his face, his thumbs, his teeth, the saw, oh Christ, the saw and the blood and the sutures and the screams and laughing, always laughing at me, ‘pig-fuck-American,’ ‘fuck-your-mother-American.’ Trained. Better. Better than me. And through it all, I played that fucking song on the boombox, over and over and over again. Was it the music? Was it the broken bones and blood he’d lost? Seeing what was left of his face in that mirror? I don’t know… but I broke him.”
He dragged the back of his hand against his lips.
“He gave me an address, said it was the boss’ safe house. It was my job, my call. I didn’t order recon, didn’t think there was time. The house was a heap of ash when the goons were done. But.”
“Was it a double cross” I asked. “Did he…”
“Did he willfully sentence his wife and daughter to death? I doubt it,” Drake said. “He’d been in Red Show custody for four days by then. That’s enough time for a paranoid mob boss to split and whip up a double cross of his own, should the right hand try to stab him. These people trust no one. Evil. There’s a special place in Hell for people like them. People like me.”
Drake leaned back, the wood settling around him.
“He was the one who told me, you know. Alexandrov. I don’t know how he found out—either he had a mole, or one of us had gone hostile. Doesn’t matter. My career was finished, fucked. He told me that I’d killed his family. He sat there, chained to that chair, bleeding out of every hole God gave him, and he laughed and spat and cursed me. ‘Eye for eye, pig-fuck-American.’ Payment in blood. Spoke in a language I didn’t understand. Then told me that I’d be haunted for the rest of my days. I’d be the eyes of death, ‘the black harpoon.’”
His voice was flat now, businesslike.
“And so I hit him until he stopped laughing. Damned-near all of his teeth were gone already, so that part was easy. I took his tags and dumped him in the Volga.”
I stared at him, silent. His face was slack and expressionless.
“Eye for eye,” I said.
He nodded. A tear slid down his cheek.
“Your orders killed his wife and daughter—and a month later, you lose your wife and daughter. That’s not the work of a demon, Richard. That could be the bloodlust of a man you tried to kill. And perhaps the debt hasn’t been paid in full, not in Alexandrov’s mind. Perhaps he watched from afar, followed, preyed upon your friends, creating the illusion of the Dark Man… and you, so damaged from Russia, driven so desperate by the blood on your hands, made the illusion a delusion. The sinner needed punishment. What better punisher than Chernobog, Servant of the Black”
Drake began to moan as he wept freely now. His chest heaved, wracked by his sobs. He wasn’t a killer now, wasn’t a cruel man. For this moment, this heartbeat, he was a child, lost in the dark.
“I don’t know if he’s out there,” I said quietly. “But I think he could be. You didn’t physically kill these people; you’ve admitted that. If Alexandrov is out there, pursuing a vendetta, then that could help prove your innocence. You could even help me, feed me enough information that the cops—the feds, the CIA, whoever—might find this guy. If he’s still alive, he’s a ghost now. That means he’s safe. You could give him bones and blood again, make him catchable… again.”
I couldn’t tell if Drake was listening anymore. He covered his face, shuddering and weeping. He gave a low wail inside his hands, and now my vision was blurring, moved by the movement of his soul.
“Richard,” I said, “I can’t… Jesus… I can’t begin to imagine the fear you’ve felt, the terror of feeling watched, or hunted. I don’t know what it’s like to flee a new home, a new life. I’ve never lost friend after friend, town after town. What happened in Russia, I can’t fathom the pain… the ache… of that mistake—and I’m sorry that I can’t reach that, imagine it.”