Khan (16 page)

“You can’t think like that. We have
protection on her twenty-four-seven. She’s not stupid and won’t let herself get
in a predicament that will get her caught.”
Walker bumped him with his
shoulder.
“You have to have faith in the fact that she has all her family
around her right now and we won’t let anything happen to her.”

Khan hoped not, but he had a feeling
that they were only living on borrowed time here. The man was insane, and
insane people were hard to reason with and harder to capture. Caitlynne had told
him that yesterday. When they got to the truck, they shifted and dressed.

“If I take you back in a shitty mood and
me in a better one, then my ass is toast. I swear to you, Khan, we won’t let
anything happen to her. And if it does, there won’t be an agent working for my
wife that won’t be out there trying to bring her home. And we will.”

Khan hoped so. He would rather die than
think about Monica being hurt

~~~

Tony had slept in his car for three
nights in a row now, and he wanted a shower. He also wanted food that didn’t
come to him in a bag. Twice yesterday he’d tried to get someone to fix him a
meal, but they had told him to get away. He just wanted somewhere to rest and
to eat.

And then there was the blood.

He’d woken yesterday with blood on his
clothes again. His face was bruised as well, and he couldn’t remember how it
had happened. He was sore too, his ribs and his fist like he’d been in a fight.
His wallet was fuller, but not by much, and there were credit cards with
someone else’s name on them. He knew that Jane Matte hadn’t given them to him
and wondered if he should try to find her to give them back. But he was afraid.

Then there was the added fact that the
nightmares were back. He needed to go and get his medication, the ones that
helped him sleep and kept the horrible dreams away. They were in his apartment,
but whenever he tried to remember where he had lived, his nose would bleed and
he’d get sick. Not even his driver’s license was helpful. He couldn’t read the
address. Just his name and that he lived in Virginia.

He looked at the house he’d noticed last
night. He had a feeling that Monica was in it, and he was going to go in and
ask her why she’d murdered his parents. Tony had been very proud of his
reasonable conversation with himself just the other day. He’d figured out that
she had been playing him all the time, and when he hadn’t been able to find her
quickly enough, she’d killed his father and mother, and now he was an orphan.

Maybe at thirty, he wasn’t a real orphan
and wouldn’t be going to one of those work prisons that his mother had always
threatened him with. Every time he’d been bad, done one of the things that got
him into “deep shit,” as she’d called it, she would tell him how he was going
to end up killing her.

When the woman had come out to get her
paper, he got out of the car. He had to wait another few minutes for the school
bus to stop in front of her house and for the man to leave. It wasn’t the same
as the one that had been in her hotel room, but he knew what kind of woman
Monica was. Slut. Whore. Cunt. Names his mother had used to speak about some of
the women she was on committees with. When the man got into his car, Tony made
his move.

The stop sign was right in front of him,
and when the man stopped at it, pausing just long enough, Tony shot him in the
head. Scrambling over to the driver’s side, he’d had to lift his head off the
horn and put the car in park. He also took the keys. The man wasn’t the same,
but it didn’t matter now.

Moving toward the house, he looked at
the keys in his hand and tried to find the one that would let him in the house
that Monica was in. He had to try twice before he found the one he had wanted.
The door opened quietly and he slipped inside.

The house was messy with kids’ toys and
laundry baskets. She wasn’t in the first room he’d come to, nor the second. He
found her in the kitchen washing the dishes and singing to the radio. He hated
the extra noise and turned it off.

She turned toward him with a smile, and
when she saw him, she opened her mouth to scream. He shoved the gun in her
mouth. That shut her up.

“I want to know who that man was,
Monica. You should know better than to try and see other people when you’ve
said you were going to marry me.” The woman shook her head and cried. “You have
to stop that. I hate crying. I hate it, hate it, hate it.”

He pulled the trigger when she made
noises that made his head hurt. Someone had made noises like that before. All
the time. He had done something to stop it. He had… Tony stepped over her body
to sit at the table.

His nose was bleeding again, and he
found a cloth and put it to his face. When that didn’t help, he went to the
refrigerator and filled the towel with ice and held it on his nose. He laid his
head on the table and tried to think calm words again. But they were gone.

All his words he’d had to remember were
now words like “dead,” “blood,” “bullets,” and “Monica.” Before when he’d
thought of his Monica, he had her in the calm words list. Now she was in a list
that he didn’t like. But he’d done what he’d needed and made her pay. Getting
up, he walked to her again and looked at her eyes.

They were brown. Monica’s were a deep
purple, almost black. He put his finger to her eye and moved it around, hoping
for a contact or some other way to explain why she now had brown eyes. When
nothing helped, he sat back on the floor and leaned against the counter.

“It’s not Monica.” He kicked the woman
in the ribs. “Where is she? What did you do with her? I saw her here yesterday.
Where is she?”

Of course she didn’t answer and Tony
stood up. He started in the basement, went through the house quickly, and was
looking in the bedrooms when the sirens sounded. It took him several minutes to
figure out which side of the house he was on to find a window that worked for
him.

He glanced out the upper pink bedroom
and saw the three cruisers. He noticed right away that they weren’t coming to
the house, but down the street a few feet. When the ambulance pulled up, he
walked to the kitchen to see if fake Monica had called them. She was still
dead.

Tony was starving and went to the
refrigerator again. There were leftovers, which he hated, and some lunch meats.
He made himself five thick sandwiches and stuffed them and all the bottled
water she had into a large grocery bag he found behind the door to the pantry.
Here, he took some pudding snacks, as well as a few cans of pop-off-lidded
soups. He was walking out the back door ten minutes after the first siren
sounded.

He wasn’t happy that Monica had managed
to elude him. And he had a feeling that the woman in the house had been a plant
to throw him off her scent. Tony went to his car and put all his food in the
back seat. He was eating a sandwich when he pulled into the street, and turned
when the policeman there directing traffic told him to. He wondered what had
happened.

By the time he was at the mall, he had a
pounding headache. Tony wasn’t sure why he’d gone there, but he had to crawl
into the back seat to rest again. That’s when he found the food.

He tried to remember where he’d gotten
it and his head started hurting again. They were good; he ate one while he was
lying down, and the water was good and cold. He didn’t have a spoon, so he
drank the pudding out of the cup like a juice and then closed his eyes. He
wondered who was caring for him.

The food notwithstanding, there had been
blankets just the other day. And then there had been a stockpile of small
containers of instant coffee. He wasn’t allowed coffee and had no way of
heating up any water. He’d thrown them out before going to…

The bloodied rag in his hand had made
him think that he’d had another nose bleed, but the ice in the thing made him
scared. Where had the ice come from, and what had happened to make him so upset
that his nose would bleed?

He heard voices and tensed up. He didn’t
want to ever hear voices again, and when someone slammed a car door next to him,
he nearly leapt out of his car at them. Tony laid there for several minutes
waiting for his heart to stop pounding before he sat up. That’s when he saw the
newspaper under his wiper.

Getting out, he looked around. It had
snowed since he’d come here. He couldn’t even tell that he’d been here for only
a short amount of time. But the paper was in a plastic bag and it wasn’t
harmed. When he opened it, a sheet of paper fell out and he read it. The newspaper
wanted him to have this and hoped that he would consider taking a subscription.
Yeah, right.

When he opened it up, there was a huge
headline that read, “Barr Couple Murdered in Their Own Home.” He got back in
the back seat and read the entire article. Then he read it again.

He wasn’t mentioned. Going to the
obituaries page, he found both their names on the full page write-ups. He wasn’t
even a “special friend,” or even a footnote. Scanning the article on the first
page again, he tore the paper into pieces and tossed them out of his car.

“Why does no one care that my parents
are dead to me? Why? Why?” He looked around the empty containers and fast-food
bags in the back seat. “They don’t care. Monica should have told them that I
was their son. She should have made them put me in the paper. Somebody should
have noticed that I was gone.”

Closing his eyes, he tried to sleep. Sometimes
when he was able to do that, his headaches would go away and he’d be fine. He
wanted to be fine. He needed to be fine so he could find Monica and make her
pay. He decided that when he woke, he was going to go and find the cop lady,
Bowding, and make her tell him. He frowned, thinking that the name wasn’t quite
right, but he’d find her anyway.

How hard could it be to find a pretty
cop like her in this town? Women like her had to hang out at the hair dressers
or something. Smiling and feeling in control for the first time in ages, since
he’d decided to marry Monica, he let sleep take him. Soon, he thought lastly,
soon they would all know that you just didn’t hurt Anthony Barr and walk away.

Monica watched the news again. They had
been running the same feed for over three hours, and she wanted to make sure
what she was seeing was actually there. When Caitlynne came home from work, she
had her sit down with her and watch it.

“I’ve heard nothing but this all day. That
poor couple and those children. What will they do now? They had no other
relatives.”

Monica had heard that too. But when the
news team put up the pictures again, she asked Caitlynne to look at them.

“I know, so young. The woman had just
gotten her children off to school. They think that the man had been killed
first and the woman—”

“Look at her,” Monica snapped. “That
woman could be me but for the eyes.” Picking up the remote, Caitlynne rewound
the feed. Monica had tried that earlier and had ended up changing the channels
three times before she set the stupid thing away from her and watched it live.

“I don’t know.” Caitlynne peered closer,
then sat back and looked at her. “You think Barr did this?”

Monica nodded. “The woman has the same
color hair as me and the same…same everything. You said he was in town. Maybe
he thought I was there for whatever reason. Maybe he really is nuts like you
said and he is going to kill more people until—”

“Calm down.” Khan had entered the room
and shook her shoulder. “I need you to calm down and talk to me. I can feel
your fear like it’s my own. You’re safe here. I won’t let anyone hurt you.”

“Khan, I think she might be right.” He
looked over at Caitlynne and asked her about what. “The woman on the news, the
one that was killed in her house and her husband in his car? I think Monica is
right; they do look a great deal alike. I’m going to make a couple of calls. I’ll
be right back.”

When she left the room, Khan sat down in
front of her. She took his warm hands into her cold ones. She was terrified out
of her mind, but took several deep breaths to calm herself. “He thought it was
me. I don’t know why I think that, but the second I saw her picture, I knew it
was him.” He sat on the couch beside her. “That woman died because that man is
a sick son of a bitch and he’s out there.” She heard him laugh and she looked
up at him, ready to tear him apart for laughing at her.

“I was thinking you needed comfort, that
you might be thinking this is your fault, but you’re a hell cat, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She tried to pull away from him and he pulled her back. “If you’re going to make
fun of me, let me go. I can go and find someone else that will appreciate me
and what I’m trying to do.”

“Oh I appreciate you all right. You’re
one hell of a woman and I love you. But if you think I’m letting you go find
someone else, you’re off your rocker. You belong to me to make fun of.”

She slugged him in the arm jokingly and
laid her head on his chest, frowning. “What if I’m right? What if he starts
killing women who look like me? We’re going to have to step this up or we might
be in for a mass murder situation. More than we were before.”