I moved in a crouch, soft-footed, trying not to make too much noise on the dirt drive. Even in his dark clothing, the watchman was plenty visible in the clearing moonlight. He was tall, broad-shouldered, strong-looking. He didn’t go beyond the edge of the house, but stood where he was, his back to me. He panned the flashlight right to left slowly, making a thorough exploration of the forest that edged the backyard.
I reached the grass of the front lawn without alerting him. The watchman went on searching the woods. But I could already sense that he was about to finish—that he was going to turn around before I reached him. I moved quicker, closing the gap as he brought the flashlight back along the forest, completing his search.
I was still maybe fifteen yards away from him when he started to swing around to face me. I went faster, coming off the grass, stepping onto the dirt drive, passing behind the big black sedan. I drew my gun back, ready to hammer him into the ground with the butt of it.
Then the dirt crunched under my sneakers.
The watchman heard it. In an instant, he drew his weapon and spun around toward me.
I leveled my gun at his face. He leveled his gun at mine. The light from the swinging flashlight danced around us, making his eyes gleam and go dark, gleam and go dark again.
We stood still, pointing our guns at one another. I saw him grin in the dancing light.
“Stand off,” he said.
I pulled the trigger and killed him.
As the blast echoed to the sky, he tumbled backward, his gun falling, his arms flailing, the flashlight swinging and the beam going violently—crazily—this way and that so that the bloody horror where his face had been shone in the night and then vanished as he fell. The sound of the gunshot faded just before he hit the ground.
I dropped down to one knee beside him. I put my hand on his chest. I heard him give a whistling groan out of his ruined mouth. I felt his heart stop beating.
After that, silence. Even the noises of the surrounding forest had stopped cold.
I stood up slowly. I was behind the big sedan. The smell of gun smoke was drifting up around me. I watched the house over the top of the car. Still dark. Still only the one light in the upstairs window.
The shadow passed through the glow again.
I knew whoever was up there must have heard the gunshot—knew I was coming, for sure.
I started moving. The pistol blast had blown every thought away. There was only the grief in me now—only the rage in me—pushing me forward.
I came around the car, keeping low. I went quickly to the side of the house and pressed against the wall so no one could take a shot at me from the windows. Bent forward, I raced through the house shadow, along the border of the moonlight. I made it to the front door.
No point in stealth. It was time to move fast. I leveled the pistol. Blew off the doorknob. Kicked the door in and pulled back quickly, waiting for the answering gunfire from inside.
Nothing. Only more silence, the house hunkering over me.
The door swung in on the darkness inside. I crouched low and took a look. An open living room, sofa, chairs, tables, shapes in shadow. I went in fast and rolled, once again expecting the blast. Once again, nothing. Silence. And I was in, crouched down behind a chair, the moonlight at the windows, the darkness thick around me.
I was breathing hard. I was sweating hard. My heart was pounding. I stayed where I was and listened—for a movement, a whisper, a breath, anything at all. But no—still—the silence was profound. The house sort of ticked and settled around me—that was the only noise. And yet I felt there had to be someone, Stark or one of his men, someone somewhere in the darkness—waiting to take his shot and bring me down.
I stayed where I was till my eyes adjusted. Then I could make out the stairs, across the room. A flight with a railing rising out of sight. There was a soft glow above—that upstairs light—bleeding onto the landing from the room up there. I took a breath and moved out from behind my cover, traveling quickly toward that light, toward the foot of the stairs.
I held my gun tight, the grain of the grip digging into my wet palm. My eyes were scanning the dark but there was just too much of it, too many shapes and forms I couldn’t make sense of, too many places for a killer to hide. I couldn’t fight blind. My best bet was to keep moving, get upstairs, get to the light.
I reached the stairs. I started up, traveling fast, staying low. I came onto the landing. I looked for the source of the light and saw a door standing open at the end of the hall—just standing open on a lighted room. The light spilled out over the landing’s shiny wooden floor, the glow of it fading as it spread from the source, dying away completely a foot or two from where I stood at the top of the stairs.
My eyes moved over the corridor. Door after open door into other rooms, dark rooms. A killer could come out of any one of them, shoot from any one of them as I went past. I could feel the adrenaline flowing through me like an electric current. I felt as if every nerve was alive and crackling.
I heard something. A sound from that final room, the lit room at the end of the hall. A piece of furniture shifting.
Someone was in there. Waiting for me.
I leveled the gun and started down the corridor. I went quickly, still bent low. I pulled up before I reached each of the dark, open rooms. Each time, I waited, listening. Each time, I heard nothing. I moved on.
The light at the end of the hall grew brighter, the doorway closer. I could feel my pulse in my neck like a bird beating its wings against a window. Somehow, even before I stepped to the threshold, I knew what I was going to see.
Then I did step to the threshold—and I saw what I was expecting. What I had been expecting, I think, since I was a kid.
I saw the Fat Woman.
What a strange, nightmare moment that was. I was so wired that every detail seemed written in my brain with electric fire.
I recognized the room. I had glimpsed it only for a second on the computer screen in Stark’s cabin, but I knew it was the same place. There were dark windows on the wall across from me. There were books and ledgers piled up against the walls to either side—no shelves, just the piles of ledgers. There was a large oak desk that seemed to take up most of the floor. A laptop open on the desk, plugged into an extension cord. A phone. A cup full of pens. Every detail of it hit me . . .
And there sat the Fat Woman, behind the desk. An immense seething mass of living meat, heaving with every breath. Her hair was blonde—a wig, I think; a cheap one—stiff as straw and poorly combed. The features of her face, obliterated by the flames I’d started so long ago, were barely visible in the mottled brown and white scar tissue. But her eyes were still alive in there, alive and gleaming, and her mouth was twisted in a strange, distant smile . . .
How familiar she was. How well I knew the sight of her. The image had been inside me all these years—secretly for a long time, but always there. Not one day of my adult life, not one hour had passed without her presence. Now I saw the great wicked breathing mass of her, and she seemed almost hyperreal, the stuff of imagination sprung to life. I stared at her, fascinated.
She was wearing a shapeless brown jersey dress. It had a scooped neck. That’s where my gun was trained: on the point where her pendulous breasts met in a deep cleavage. I battled an urge to pull the trigger and destroy whatever it was she used for a heart.
Staring at her—I couldn’t stop staring at her—I moved into the room. I pushed the door shut behind me. I didn’t want anyone creeping out of one of those rooms in the corridor and taking a shot at my back.
I moved to where I had a clear view of her burned, bloated hands. I glanced at them quickly to make sure she wasn’t armed. She wasn’t. One hand rested on the desktop, like a cut of some putrid beef. The other hand held what at first I thought was a mirror, its surface pointed at me, the reflection on it so dim it was barely distinguishable.
That made no sense—a mirror—but I couldn’t pay attention to that now. My eyes kept going back to what was left of her face, the mottled mass of it. She went on sitting there, following my movements with those beady, soulless eyes, smiling her eerie smile. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the sheer fact of her.
“Do you know who I am?” I heard myself say. I barely recognized my own voice, it was so strangled in my throat, so furious, so sad.
The woman didn’t answer. She didn’t move. Her lips didn’t move. And yet a noise came back to me from across the room—a noise that made something shrivel at the core of me, a harsh rattling disturbance of the atmosphere like a snake makes when it coils up suddenly out of the grass.
I knew that sound. It was Stark. It was Stark, laughing.
And in his harsh rasp of a whisper, he said, “Champion.”
I blinked, stunned, confused. Then I shifted my eyes and saw him.
That thing the Fat Woman was holding in her hand—it wasn’t a mirror. It was a computer tablet—an iPad or something like it. The face I had seen there dimly was not my reflection. It was clearer now and I could see it was Stark. That bizarre face so much like a death’s head—the gray-white skin, the hollow cheeks, the huge, staring eyes . . . It was grinning out at me from the screen.
My glance shifted quickly, briefly, from his image to the Fat Woman at the desk. I thought I saw some light of triumph in her eyes, some satisfaction in the twist of the hole that had once been her mouth. What did she look so damned happy about? But a wisp of dread curled through me like a wisp of smoke, and I began to understand.
I looked back at the screen in her hand. At the skull on the screen.
“Stark,” I said. “I expected to find you here in person.”
“I’m on my way, Champion,” the skull rasped.
He was too. I noticed the background of the scene as he spoke. Darkness but with a sense of motion, occasional glimpses of passing light. He was in the rear seat of a moving car, filming himself with a mounted camera.
“You’re a little late,” I said.
“Sorry. I had some business to take care of.”
“Well, too bad. I killed your guy. And now I’m taking your client in. You and I will have to settle our little feud another time.”
Stark smiled—a chilling grin. “I knew a man once in another country,” he said quietly. “He had trained himself not to feel pain. Physical pain, I mean. Can you imagine that? It was an amazing act of mental discipline. I never saw anything like it.”
He pressed a button on the arm of his seat. The camera shifted and I saw Samantha.
She was sitting next to him in the backseat. Duct tape over her mouth, her shoulders wrenched back so I knew her hands were bound behind her. The green camera light on the computer tablet was lit so I knew that she could see me too. She gazed at me, sadly. Her eyes were far away, as if she were hiding in the mazes of her own mind, unable to face the world outside her. I’d seen that look before. It was the look of an abused child. I had let her down again. I had not protected her from this.
“Being able to transcend pain—it gave this man a false sense of security, you know,” Stark went on. “It made him fearless and he mistook that for courage. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
My throat closed as I watched his bony fingers twine around Samantha’s hair, slide past her hair to stroke her cheek, to cup her chin. He traced a slow curving pattern down the front of Samantha’s sweatshirt. All the while, Samantha stared at me from those faraway inner places. Dull, dead, not even reacting. I knew that, for her, it wasn’t just Stark molesting her, it was all the men, a childhood full of them. All the men who’d hurt her while she’d prayed that I would come to her rescue.
“He thought he could defy me, this man,” Stark went on. “He thought he was exempt because I couldn’t hurt him. It was . . . a limited view of human life, don’t you think?”
I swallowed my helplessness, my helpless rage. Like swallowing a rock made of fire. “It was,” I said hoarsely. “It was a limited view.”
“Do you know what I did?” Stark said. His hand trailed down Samantha’s front. It went out of the camera shot, but I knew what he was doing by the way she jerked behind her gag. “Do you know what I did, Champion?”
“Yes, I know what you did.”
“I took his children, one by one . . .”
“I know what you did, Stark.”
“He broke right away, but I didn’t stop.” He pressed the button on the seat arm again. The camera panned away from Samantha. The skull face came back into view. “I wanted him to understand before I killed him. I wanted everyone who knew him to understand: There are all kinds of pain; there’s no end to the varieties. And no one is exempt. No one. You’re hard-core, Champion, I admit that. But even you, in the end, are not exempt.”
I glanced at the Fat Woman. She went on sitting there, an enormous, motionless mass, her eyes gleaming with triumph.
“What do you expect me to do, Stark?” I said.
Stark leaned forward. His skull face filled the screen, grinning out at me. “You’re going to hand your gun over to dear Aunt Jane. You’re going to give her the gun and she’s going to hold you there until I arrive.”
“Right,” I said. “And if I don’t?”
“I’m going to spend the brief little rest of this car journey butchering your woman in amusing but not entirely fatal ways.”