Memory Man (35 page)

T
HE BUS TOOK
him to Crewe, three towns over from Burlington. The snow was picking up and the lights on the interstate illuminated a fat, wet precipitation that would add tonnage to this part of the country until it finally stopped falling. And then the highway department would spend days cleaning it up, only to see Mother Nature do it all over again.

He looked out the window of the bus, his phone in his hand. They hadn’t told him how the next communication would come, but he wanted to be ready.

He alighted at Crewe along with only three others. Their possessions were nearly as meager as his, although one woman had a full suitcase and a pillow, and a small, sleepy child in tow.

He looked up and down the snowy underhang of the bus station platform. There were few people out and about, and all of them clearly of limited resources.

A man approached him. He was black, in his sixties, with a big belly, snow-caked boots, and a coat with rips down both sides. A flapped hat hung low over his head. His glasses were fogged. He stopped in front of Decker and said, “Amos?”

Decker looked at him and nodded. “Who are you?”

“I’m nobody. But
somebody
gave me a hundred dollars to give you this, and so I am.” He handed Decker a slip of paper.

“Who was it?”

“Didn’t see ’em.”

“How’d you know to look for me?”

“They said a really tall, fat, scary-lookin’ white dude with a beard. You it.”

The man lumbered off and Decker looked down at the instructions on the note.

He went in and bought another bus ticket. He had two hours to kill. He bought a coffee from the machine in the station. It was more warm than hot, but he didn’t care. He spent his time looking at everyone in the waiting room. It was more crowded than he would have thought. Then he realized something.

Thanksgiving was nearly here. These folks were probably heading out to see family and carve up a big turkey.

He and Cassie had never celebrated Thanksgiving together, chiefly because one or the other had always been working the holiday shift. Decker had spent more than one turkey day chowing down at a diner or a fast-food place. Cassie had spent her share in the hospital dining hall. Whoever had Molly in a given year would eat out. They had enjoyed it and had never felt like they were missing much.

But looking around at these folks, Decker concluded that he had missed more than he had thought.

The next bus dropped him off at the Indiana border.

There was a compact car waiting in the station parking lot, its engine running. The note had said to walk toward it and tap on the driver’s window. He knew this was also a test.

He went to the car and rapped on the window.

The woman inside rolled down the window and said, “Get in the back.”

He did so. If the FBI had been tailing him, now would be the time to surround the vehicle. They didn’t. Because they weren’t tailing him.

He got in the back. The car was small so his knees were wedged behind the seat.

“You know my friends?” he asked.

“I don’t have friends,” she replied. Her hair was stringy and gray, her body odor strong and unpleasant, especially in the hot car—she had the heater on max and her craggy voice and the hazy cigarette smoke that hung in the air foretold a painful death from lung cancer.

“That’s too bad,” he said.

“Not from where I’m sitting.”

“How much did they pay you to do this?”

“Enough.”

“You meet them?”

“Nope.”

“You know what this is about?”

“This is about six hundred bucks to yours truly. That’s all I need to know.”

She put the stick in gear and they sped off. They drove for so long that Decker found himself dozing off. That was remarkable when he woke and thought about it, since he was traveling to his death.

Or, more accurately, my murder
.

They crossed over Interstate 74, reached nearly to Seymour, and then got onto Interstate 65 heading north toward Indianapolis. But they exited well before then. They sped west, passing Nashville, Indiana. Decker saw a sign for Bloomington to the south, but they didn’t take it. He was thinking they might be driving all the way to Terre Haute near the Illinois border when the woman pulled off onto the shoulder at an exit a few miles before Interstate 70, running east to west, could be picked up.

She said, “Walk up this exit ramp. There’s a rest stop. There’ll be somebody there.”

As Decker exited the car he thought again that all of this had been arranged well before he had contacted them through the website. They had clearly expected him to do this. Or at least hoped that he would.

And he had. Which meant they had read him right.

He hoped to have done the same for them.

He trudged through the snow to the rest stop with his bag slung over his shoulder. The snowfall had slowed but his feet were soaked through. His belly was rumbling and his nose was running.

The white panel van was backed into the first parking space. The headlights blinked twice as Decker approached. The driver’s window came down. It was another woman, with hollowed-out cheekbones. She looked like a druggie slipping in and out of withdrawal.

“You want me to drive?” said Decker, running his gaze up and down her skinny frame. “I want to get there in one piece.”

She shook her head and jerked her thumb toward the back of the van.

“You sure you’re good to go?”

In answer she put the van in drive and stared out the windshield.

Decker clambered into the back and slid the side door closed.

The woman drove off as Decker settled into the seat.

The gun placed against his right temple didn’t unduly surprise him. After all, how many people could they engage to get him to this point? He had figured two max, and he’d been right.

His bag was taken from him and thrown out the back door. He was searched and he could tell the searcher was surprised that Decker was not armed. His phone was taken from him and hurled out the back as well.

The man tugged on his sleeve and tossed an orange jumper over the seat and into Decker’s lap. He held it up. “It looks a little small.”

Neither of them spoke.

“Do you go by Billy now, Belinda?” Decker said to the driver. “Or was that just for the 7-Eleven gig?”

He watched as the wig came off. The eyes that flashed at him in the rearview were the same ones he’d seen at the convenience store. But they were very different from the eyes that he had remembered seeing at the institute, the pair that had belonged to the devastated teenage girl named Belinda Wyatt. She apparently was gone for good.

He said, “The disguise was good, but I have your hands memorized. Hard to change them unless you wear gloves.”

She just kept staring at him, and in those eyes Decker could see the cumulative hatred of twenty years that was about to be unleashed.

On me.

Decker held up the jumper. “A little privacy, please?”

The eyes looked away.

He started undressing, which was difficult in the confined space for someone so large. The person with the gun took his clothes and shoes and threw them out the back. Decker struggled into the jumper but could not zip it up in front because of his large gut.

He slumped back in the seat and turned to the man holding the gun and squatting in the back of the van.

“Hello, Sebastian.”

He eyed the gun. It was an S&W .45 caliber.
The
.45. The weapon used to kill his wife and half the people at Mansfield. This gun had been the last thing his wife had seen before her life ended. Maybe it had been used to kill Giles Evers too, he didn’t know for sure. Maybe a quick bullet wasn’t in the cards for the cop turned rapist. But then again, he didn’t give a damn about Giles Evers.

Leopold pressed the barrel tighter against Decker’s cheekbone.

“I didn’t know your situation, Belinda,” said Decker. “When I stood up in the group session and said I wanted to go into law enforcement, that I wanted to be a cop. I didn’t know that a bad cop had lured you into a gang rape and almost killed you.”

The eyes flashed once more at him, but the driver said nothing.

Decker’s mind whirred back to that day at the institute. His twenty-years-younger self stood in the middle of the group and proclaimed that his ambition now was to go into law enforcement, to be a good cop. That he wanted to protect others, keep them from harm. He had looked around at all the people, folks like him, with new and sometimes scary minds and personalities. His words had been met with admiring smiles by some and indifference by others. But one pair of eyes had been staring at him with something more than all the others combined. He could see that clearly now. Apparently his perfect mind had flaws, because this memory, while always there, had not made an impression on him. He had glossed right over it until he
hadn’t
glossed right over it. It had struck him while he’d been rubbing his old badge through the plastic back at the Burlington police station.

My genie. My wish come true. Death.

Plastic badge
, he had thought right before the epiphany had struck him.
A plastic cop. Not a real cop. A cop who hurt you. Giles Evers.

And from my words, you lumped me right in with him. And maybe I can understand that, because right at that moment you probably were the most vulnerable you would ever be.

He recalled those eyes as the deepest, most shocked pair he had ever seen. But he hadn’t registered it, because he had been very nervous standing up in front of strangers to talk about his future.

His mind stopped whirring and he returned to the present. He said to Wyatt, “That’s why you singled me out, right? ‘Bro’? Brotherhood of cops. Brotherhood of football players, because I was one of them too? Everyone at the institute knew about that. But not your bro,
their
bro. Giles Evers and his bunch? But I came here to tell you that I didn’t know what had happened to you. If I had I wouldn’t have said what I did. I’m sorry. I wanted to be a cop because I wanted to help people. Not hurt them like Evers did you.”

They drove on. Neither one of them had spoken and Decker began to wonder why. He figured he would keep going until something he said drew a response. They might be working up the nerve to do what they needed to do to him. But then again, the pair had killed so many people that he doubted they needed much preparation to put a bullet in him.

“I met Clyde Evers. He told me all about what happened at the high school in Utah. So now I know why you did what you did at Mansfield. But maybe you have something you want to add?” He looked at her expectantly.

The eyes flashed once more. But they weren’t looking at him. They were looking at Leopold.

In his peripheral Decker saw the gun muzzle bob up and down ever so slightly. When you nod your head your hand sometimes moved in the same direction. So Leopold
was
calling the shots. That was telling. And maybe helpful for what Decker had come here to do.

Because these two weren’t the only ones on a mission. So was Amos Decker. He hadn’t come here to simply die, although that was a very real possibility.

Wyatt said, “I think it speaks for itself, don’t you?”

Her voice was deeper than when she was a woman, and deeper than when she had spoken to him in the role of Billy the mop boy. It was amazing how she was able to modulate it. But the tone was far less important than the words. She didn’t care. There was no remorse. There was nothing behind the eyes. She was thirty-six now. And he doubted she had had an easy, normal day in the last thirty of them. That couldn’t help but change you. How could you respect or appreciate or care about a world and the people in that world when they loathed the fact that you shared
their
planet?

“Did you kill the people who raped you? I mean other than Giles Evers?”

“Well, that would have been a little obvious,” said Wyatt. “So I chose symbolism over literalness.”

Decker felt his face flush at these cruel words. His wife and daughter had been reduced to symbols of a warped mind seeking revenge?

Decker felt Leopold’s breath on his cheek. He could smell garlic and stomach bile, but no alcohol. That was good. He didn’t want a drunk holding a gun against his head. But the guy took drugs too. And you couldn’t smell drugs on someone’s breath.

He couldn’t see the tattoo of the twin dolphins, because Leopold’s sleeve covered it. But the tat was there; he knew that. It was real. It had all been in Leopold’s file. All of it. Decker had memorized every word of that file. The crime against his family. Every detail. And the file on Evers and Mr. and Mrs. Wyatt. And the payoff from Evers. And the money that was there now. And the “Justice Denied” website. It had been interesting stuff. All very interesting.

“I guess I can see you taking that position. I mean, the victims at Mansfield were innocent, but to you, who is innocent, really, right? Nobody.”

“I know you don’t feel pity or sympathy or empathy anymore,” said Wyatt. “Because I don’t either. So don’t even bother. I’m not stupid. I’m just like you.”

The hell you are
, Decker thought.

He said, “We found your mom and dad. They’ll get a proper burial now. Not sure how you feel about that. But you made your point with them. ME said they’d been there a long time. So they’ll be buried.”

The muzzle pressed harder against Decker’s skin.

Decker continued, “My daughter never lived to your age when you were raped. About six years shy.”

“Six years, one month, and eighteen days,” corrected Wyatt. “She died before her tenth birthday. Or, more accurately, I
killed
her three days before her tenth birthday.”

Decker felt his anger edge up, which was the last thing he needed.

“Actually, three days,
four hours, and eleven minutes
,” he corrected.

He locked gazes with Wyatt in the mirror. Without taking his eyes off her he said, “Are you a hyper too, Sebastian?”

“No, he’s not,” said Wyatt. “Just you and me are the freaks.”