“That he was dead?”
She looked surprised, but held her wrists still while I used the knife to saw through the zip tie. I examined her wrists. There was minor abrasion, but they didn’t look too bad, considering.
“Can you walk?”
She rubbed her calf muscles and nodded uncertainly.
“Then let’s get the hell out of here.”
I bent down and put one of her arms around my shoulders and stood up, supporting her as we moved toward the stairs. She was shaking violently, the vibrations conducting their way out of her and through my own muscles like an electric current.
“How did you know—?”
“Just concentrate on walking,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm and soothing. “We can talk about it later, okay?”
She swallowed and focused on one foot after another. She kept talking, probably couldn’t help it. “He killed my dad, years ago. His mother and his sister, too. The cops knew it was him, but . . .”
“It’s okay, Kimberley. We’re getting out of here. It’s over.”
“No. You don’t understand. He’s insane.”
I saved my breath and started to ease Kimberley down the stairs. We’d made it about halfway down when she was seized by a cramp in her leg. She cried out and stumbled to the side, putting all of her weight on a section of the step that had succumbed to dry rot. The wood crumbled beneath her and she slipped out from under my arm, tumbling down the last few stairs. Thankfully, she didn’t have far to fall. She landed on all fours in front of the open door.
Quickly, I descended the rest of the stairs and crouched down to check that she was all right, turning my back to the front door for a second. Her face looked up at me, and I saw her eyes widen even as I became aware of a shadow falling over the two of us.
I spun around and felt something smash across the side of my head. I dropped on my back and caught a glance of a tall figure silhouetted against the evening sky before the black clouds rushed in from the sides of my vision.
As I began to swim out of the haze of unconsciousness, I became dimly aware that the voice I’d been hearing wasn’t part of the scrambled collage of sounds and images scrolling through my subconscious. The voice sounded regretful but philosophical. I was having trouble following what was being said, as though my brain were rebooting, having to work out how to parse English again. And then something clicked into place and I heard three words, spoken quietly from very close.
“Quite a mess.”
I kept my eyes shut and tried to backtrack through my memories to work out what was happening, because I didn’t think it was anything good. The last thing I could remember was helping Kimberley Frank up off the ground, and then . . . it came back to me. The Samaritan filling the doorway and a simultaneous blow to the side of the head.
It was like typing in the correct password. All of a sudden, my senses started to operate again. I felt nausea and a throbbing pain on the left side of my skull. The dull sounds of birds and far-off traffic noise made me think I was somewhere outside, but the dank, mildew smell spoke of an interior. Sensory input from elsewhere: my hands were behind me, the inside of my wrists tight against a wooden post or pillar. I felt my skin contact that of someone else, as though the two of us were tied back to back. The barn. We were in the barn.
I heard someone crouch down beside me and whisper in my ear, “Come on, Blake. A conscious person’s breathing is quite different from someone who’s still out. You know that as well as I do.”
I opened my eyes and saw the Samaritan staring right back at me. He’d changed. He had lost a lot of weight, had more lines around the eyes. He was clean shaven, and his hair was trimmed neatly in a buzz cut. His eyes flicked to the side of my head and he touched a finger to the place where my head hurt. I flinched as a lightning bolt of pain stabbed into me, and then his finger came away bloody.
“It was always your problem, Blake. Always too interested in other people’s business.”
“I guess neither of us has changed much, Crozier.”
He blinked. “Don’t call me that.”
“You prefer the Samaritan now? Is that it?”
“I prefer nothing. I’m nothing and nobody. You should understand that.”
I remembered the hands nestled against mine. I assumed they belonged to Kimberley. They felt warm, which was a good sign. I moved my bound hands upward against them to see if I could get a reaction from the owner and winced as sharp plastic scraped my wrists: I guessed he’d used a zip tie. Better news than wire, but only if I could manage to get some space to work with it. That wasn’t going to happen, not with the position he’d tied us in.
“Kimberley?” I called. “Are you okay?”
The Samaritan’s lips drew back from his teeth in amusement. “That’s not Kimberley,” he said.
It took me a second before I realized who was there. “Allen?”
Silence from behind me. The Samaritan smiled in acknowledgment.
“She’s still unconscious. Genuinely unconscious, that is. We’ll need to wake her up soon, though.”
“Where’s Kimberley?”
My question was met with a strange laugh from the Samaritan. He gave no other response. I decided to keep him talking, since conversation was currently the only tool I had at my disposal. “Why are you doing this?”
The Samaritan’s features creased in a look of disappointment. “Blake.” The word was an admonishment.
“Yeah, I know—you live to kill. Very impressive. But why her? What did your sister ever do to you?”
Now a look of confusion crossed his face, as though the answer was plainly obvious. “She made me the man I am today.”
I heard movement behind me. Not Allen, who was still unconscious, but someone else. Footsteps. A second before the slight, graceful figure passed into my field of vision, I felt a cold shiver as I realized just how wrong we’d all been.
“You,” I said simply.
Kimberley Frank’s face stayed impassive, but her eyes smiled. “My hero,” she said.
1996
Dean Crozier made no attempt to chase after the fleeing boy as he stalled in his rush to the staircase. Robbie’s voice was panicked as he pushed against Kimberley, trying to get past her, not understanding yet why she was still blocking his way.
“What’s going on?” he repeated. “What’s going
on
? You’re brother’s a fuckin’ psycho. That’s what’s going on.”
“Oh,” Kimberley said, her brown eyes looking from Robbie to her newfound brother, the brother she’d discovered she had only a couple of weeks before. “Is that all?”
Robbie looked back at him, then at Kimberley, and then made a bolt for the stairs again. Kimberley was too fast for him. She brought the makeshift hiking stick down hard on the back of his neck.
Robbie cried out and staggered forward. Crozier moved quickly, getting on top of him with his knee between the boy’s shoulder blades. He put the knife down, yanked Robbie’s hands behind his body, and started wrapping the clothesline tightly around his wrists. Robbie struggled, but though the two boys were only months apart in age, he was no match for Crozier’s strength.
When he’d finished, he let him drop to the floor again. Kimberley’s eyes were bright, excited. It would be her first time, too, after all. Talking about it, planning it, had been exhilarating, but now it was actually happening.
Kimberley stepped around Robbie and picked up the Buck knife from the floor. She put her left hand on Crozier’s cheeks and kissed him softly on the lips.
“Are you ready, brother?”
I heard the noise of steel singing as it was pulled from a leather sheath, and the blade was in the Samaritan’s hand. The Kris. The wicked, curving blade gleamed in the moonlight through the door like an oversized piece of jewelry.
Kimberley held her hand out, and the Samaritan gave her the knife, a soft smile on his lips. She crouched down in front of me and stared into my eyes. She touched the point of it to my throat and pressed gently. I felt a sharp prick as it punctured the top layer of my skin. I didn’t give her the satisfaction of wincing, just kept my eyes on hers.
“Listen to me, Kimberley. You don’t need to do what he says. We can . . .”
She smiled and shook her head, and I realized I’d gotten this back to front. I replayed the last couple of minutes. The submissiveness in the Samaritan’s body language as he’d handed the knife over. The beatific look in his eyes as he watched his sister holding the blade to my throat.
She made me the man I am today
.
“It’s you,” I said. “You’re the Samaritan.”
“I wouldn’t go that far, Blake,” she said. “It’s both of us. You could call it a family business.”
My eyes flicked over to Crozier. His gaze was fixed on the knife against my throat. I wondered if he was eager to see blood spilled, or worried that he wouldn’t get me to himself.
I looked back at Kimberley. “The other killings across the country . . .”
“Can’t take the credit for those. Those were all down to this brother of mine. Quite an endeavor, wasn’t it? And quite a compliment.”
I looked from Kimberley to her half brother. I’d noticed that Crozier hadn’t uttered a word since Kimberley had begun speaking. An interesting family dynamic.
She continued. “I had gone a long time without . . . indulging, Blake. More than ten years. And then I received a letter from him. It told me what he’d been doing. How he thought often about when we were kids. He told me to look out for his work, that he’d leave little messages for me that only I could see. He told me one day he’d come back for me. And he kept his promise.”
I turned away from her, being careful not to move too fast with the point of the knife against my Adam’s apple. I addressed Crozier directly. “I guess she wears the pants in this relationship. It’s encouraging to see, actually. It’s about time the homicidal maniac community embraced gender equality.”
She looked irritated, but more by the fact that I’d addressed Crozier rather than what I’d said, and opened her mouth to say something. I kept talking to Crozier.
“So why are you picking victims that look like her here in LA? Maybe some repressed sibling resentment?”
Crozier smiled and shook his head. “It won’t work, Blake. You can’t make me angry.” He approached and crouched down beside his sister before me. He put a hand on her shoulder and moved his head forward, closing his eyes and smelling her hair. “Those others, they didn’t belong here.”
Kimberley smiled modestly at him as he said this, as though receiving a romantic compliment from a lover. She looked back at me, her eyes suddenly all business again. “Cut the cop down,” she said, speaking to her brother but still looking at me. “We can take her up to the house first.”
Crozier took another blade out, a smaller one this time, and put a hand on my back, pushing me carefully forward. Kimberley moved the blade back a couple of inches so it didn’t puncture my throat all the way. That would spoil the fun.
I felt Allen’s body shift as Crozier worked on the zip tie. The knife cut through and she slumped off of me. The weight of her body on top of my bound hands had been cutting off some of the circulation, and now the feeling started to ebb back into my wrists and hands. I winced as I started to feel the plastic edges cutting into me. But now that the weight on my hands was gone, I had an opportunity.
Allen mumbled, beginning to come to as Crozier scooped her up and swung her body across his shoulders, carrying her in a fireman’s hold. He waved his free hand at the open doorway. “You can listen while we attend to her. Unfortunately, time is of the essence, but I’ll make sure it’s a memorable experience. Perhaps you can use the time to picture yourself in her place.”
There was no point arguing with insanity. I decided to appeal to whatever vestiges might remain of the logical, practical soldier I’d known. “You don’t have time for this. Allen and Mazzucco will be missed immediately. The cops will track them down soon.”
“Your point is?”
“Let Allen go. Do what you want with me.”
The Samaritan’s mouth twitched in amusement. “Do you honestly think that you matter,
Blake
?” This time, he said my name with mocking emphasis, as though to remind me of how transient all of this was. Names, faces, lives.
Kimberley pressed the point of the Kris a little farther into my neck, as though considering my suggestion. I held still and felt a drop of blood slide down toward my collar.
“Don’t worry. We’ll be back in a little while,” she said.
And then the blade was gone, and so was Kimberley, and so was the Samaritan.
I waited until I had heard the sound of their steps retreat far enough outside that I could be sure they were gone. Crozier had clearly been in a hurry, because he’d chosen the quickest and most efficient way of restraining Allen and me. Binding us to a fixed object rather than spending time hog-tying us. I guessed he’d chosen not to bind my hands in front of me because he knew that would leave a lot of ways I could be dangerous. So under the circumstances, he’d picked the best way to do it.
But now that they’d removed Allen and her body weight was no longer bearing down on my wrists, I wasn’t quite as securely tied as I had been a few minutes before. I now had a small amount of space for movement. I pulled my knees up toward my chest and dug my heels into the floor. At first there was no movement, and the ties just dug deeper into my wrists. I adjusted the angle slightly and managed to slide my back up the post. A minute later, I’d manage to push myself up so that I was standing with my back to the post. I braced myself against the imminent pain and closed my eyes.
Then I started to move my wrists up and down against one of the corners of the post. The sharp plastic rubbed and cut and tore at the flesh on my wrists, but I kept the rhythm going, feeling the plastic start to warm as it rubbed against the edge of the old wood. Blood ran from the abrasions and mingled with the sweat on my hands, making them hot and slippery. Splinters from the post joined in the agony, stabbing into my flesh as I rubbed the plastic up and down. Just at the moment I thought I was going to give up, the plastic snapped and I fell forward, just breaking my fall with my forearms. I stood up and glanced at my wrists. They were torn and bloody.