Max took the tape, the plastic cool and flimsy in his fingers. He didn’t want to think what the video contained.
HE IGNORED the tape for two hours. It sat on his kitchen table, black and ugly, and inviting him to see its secrets.
Finally, he shoved it into his VCR and rewound the tape to the beginning.
He pushed play. It started taping at midnight on the day Kim died. He fast-forwarded until seven a.m. when he saw cars pull into the parking lot at the vet clinic. He watched Kim climb out of Linda’s car. The woman picked her up at Ellie’s House every morning for work. They held cups of Styrofoam coffees in their hands. Kim laughed at something Linda said as they disappeared into the building.
He fast forwarded again, stopping each time a car pulled into the lot, but he didn’t catch another glimpse of Kim until ten-thirty.
She walked away from the building, her purse clutched in her right hand. He watched her hurry to the curb and out of sight of the camera.
“Damn,” he muttered, hitting pause.
She appeared to be walking in a straight line, which would take her across Sycamore Road. Max imagined the stores that lay directly across the street from Safe Haven Vet Clinic.
He hit play and watched the screen. After nearly twenty minutes, he saw Kim jog across the parking lot back toward the clinic. The image was too grainy to make out her face, and yet he saw the bounce in her step. She had learned something and wanted to tell him. She must have made the urgent call to his school just after that encounter.
He let the tape play and ignored the twisting in his stomach. What if he had called her back? Would it have changed everything? Would she still be alive?
“What did you find out, Kim?” he asked the empty room.
He watched the minutes tick by on the screen. The lot emptied and filled again. People hauled their pets from backseats on leashes or in cages. He saw a man with a cat, whose claws were sunk firmly into his shoulder, climb from the backseat of a station wagon.
Kim stepped from the building, and Max held his breath as she gently drew the cat away from the man, running her hands along its bristly back as she carried it inside.
If he’d never gone to her apartment that day, she’d still be alive. If he’d never busted in the door, insisted she get on his bike, and acted like some knight in shining armor jackass, she’d still be alive.
He wanted to argue with himself and insist that no, she wouldn’t. Denny would have killed her that day or maybe the next day, but he didn’t think Denny would have.
Denny wasn’t the type of man that killed the person he had in his control. He killed when he lost her.
He killed her when he realized she wouldn’t be coming back.
“How did he find you?” he asked, watching the screen.
The clock on the screen blinked six-fifteen when the rusted pickup truck pulled into the parking lot.
It wasn’t a truck Max had seen, and yet his heart plummeted into his stomach the moment it pulled into the lot.
Denny sat behind the wheel. Max couldn’t see him. The sun cast a glare across the windshield, but he felt him there, rage bubbling up as he watched the clinic. He had parked lopsided, one wheel on the curb. The engine idling.
Had Kim sensed him too?
Denny stepped from the truck. His arms were large at his sides. They didn’t hang limp, but appeared taut, as if he’d flexed every muscle in his large body as he strode across the parking lot. He marched with purpose, like a military tank, impenetrable, as it lumbered toward enemy territory.
Several minutes lapsed, and Max realized he’d been holding his breath. He let it out in a rush of agony just as Kim fled from the building. The spring in her step had vanished. She looked shrunken, her shoulders bowed forward, her hands in front of her as if she were blindly searching for something to grab or somewhere to hide.
Denny followed on her heels. His mouth opened wide, and Max knew he’d yelled her name, screamed it maybe. His tone must have alarmed her.
She’d stopped and turned. Denny’s arm lifted from his body, something dark clutched in his outstretched hand.
Seconds, no, not even seconds, passed.
Max grabbed a pillow from the couch and squeezed, his knuckles turning white as the blast of the bullet knocked her backward off her feet.
Behind Denny, a man in a white coat burst from the vet clinic, Dr. Patterson, two seconds too late. He barreled into Denny who outweighed him by a hundred pounds, at least. Denny went down.
The dark thing in Denny’s hand skidded across the pavement, and another person from the clinic, Linda, ran into the parking lot. She picked up the gun and held it, pointing it at Denny, who lay on the pavement with his hands in the air.
Dr. Patterson stood and ran to Kim. He knelt beside her, hands fumbling to her neck, and then her wrists.
There was no sound on the videotape, so Max couldn’t hear the sirens, but the first patrol car arrived within minutes.
Lights flashing, it jumped the curb, coming to rest in the grassy median between the road and the parking lot.
An officer stepped out with his gun drawn.
Max watched his head rotate from side to side as he took in the horrific scene.
More police cars arrived, and onlookers started to edge into the parking lot.
Max couldn’t draw his eyes away from Kim.
On the pavement beneath her, he saw the expanding darkness as her blood, her life, flowed into the cracked cement.
No one had attempted first aid.
She’d died instantly.
That was something, at least, he thought, though it brought him no comfort as he watched the men in uniform slowly flood the scene. Two officers draped a sheet over her body.
They dragged Denny, the fight back in him, to a squad car. He looked like a wild ape thrashing and kicking at them. It took four men to haul him to the patrol car and force him inside.
Max dropped the pillow and slid off the couch onto his knees.
He didn’t know when he’d begun to cry, but he felt the rawness of his cheeks as the tears, warm and salty, poured into the creases of his mouth. Tears dripped onto the carpet. They soaked the collar of his shirt.
He fell forward onto his hands and knees and allowed a desperate groan to rip free of his body. The groan faded to a whimper, and the energy drained down, dissipating into the fibers of carpet as he pressed his forehead into the floor.
35
The strip mall across the street from Safe Haven contained four businesses, and Max studied each from his car: Roscommon Bank and Loan; a women’s clothing store called Katie’s; Furry Friends Pet Food and Supply, which had litters of kittens for sale in metal pens along the front window once a month; and finally, Paulie Goldman’s arcade, aptly named Quarters, which everyone referred to simply as Paulie’s.
Max had lost more than a few allowances at Paulie’s, whiling away hours in the summer much to his parents’ distaste. Max and his friends often wandered out at dusk, bleary-eyed and with the green glow of the arcade screens showing behind their eyes.
Max’s mother had insisted he looked a shade paler every time he stumbled out of the dark interior. It seemed as if he and his friends had paid more than just quarters when they slipped into the arcade, their pockets full and jangling, only to emerge hours later broke and withered.
Max didn’t have a clue where Kim had gone that final day, but he had to find out. The need burned in him as if he were an addict and the only drug that would satisfy his unquenchable compulsion was that bit of information.