Urge to Kill (47 page)

She waited a few minutes until she’d caught her breath, then reached out and gripped a chair leg and dragged the chair closer to her and to the bed.

Using the shotgun and chair for support, Lavern made it to her knees. When she thought she was steady enough, she leaned the shotgun against the mattress. It wouldn’t do to pull herself up onto the chair and then not be able to reach the shotgun where it lay on the floor.

It took her about five minutes, but she did manage to reach an awkward sitting position on the chair. She stretched out her right arm and pulled the shotgun to her. She sat very still because even the slightest movement of her body brought pain.

Lavern was proud of herself. She’d made it here, to her chair by the bed, with the shotgun. She was well on the way to what she’d decided to do. Hobbs continued snoring lightly, unaware of the monumental struggle so near him. One that would change his and Lavern’s world forever.

Lavern moved the shotgun’s safety to the off position. It was ready to fire. This close to her target, she wouldn’t even have to aim it.

But she would aim the gun. She wanted to be responsible for her decision and what would happen in the future. In the meantime, she’d endure the present with at least a modicum of comfort and a certain nostalgia. A sad glance over her shoulder before turning a corner. She knew she was second by second living out what remained of her old life.

The room seemed to block all sound from outside and become very small. Automatically, her breathing found the tempo of her husband’s as she sat and watched him sleep. They were both on the edge of an abyss. One difference between them was that she knew it. Another was that he had put them there.

It would be easy for Hobbs,
Lavern thought. She’d squeeze the trigger and he’d simply slip from one dream to another. She’d be the one left with the blood and the mess and every kind of horror.

The reality.

It wasn’t fair, but it never had been.

Quinn nodded to the uniformed cop in the lobby, who tried to look blankly at him, then gave it up and nodded back, wishing him luck. He was still watching as the elevator door closed, and then Quinn was on the way up.

He drew his old .38 revolver and held it tight against his thigh as he stepped from the quiet elevator into the silent hall. The building even
felt
empty.

Quinn advanced along the carpeted hall that smelled of time and dust and saw that the door to Pearl’s apartment was standing open.

Feeling fear that was on the edge of nausea, he moved closer to the doorway so he had a narrow view of the apartment’s interior. He saw a corner of the sofa, part of a lamp table, half of Pearl’s framed museum print of Munch’s
The Scream.

He swallowed to make sure his throat wasn’t dry. “Dwayne Avis?”

“I’m here with your lady love,” Avis said in a calm voice. “I ain’t so sure she’s a lady, though. Why don’t you come on into the apartment, Captain Quinn, so we can see each other?”

Quinn took a deep breath and willed his legs to move. He tasted bile at the back of his throat.

There was Avis, standing near the opposite end of the sofa, holding Pearl in front of him with one arm tight around her neck. The other arm was crooked so the .25-caliber Springbok revolver in his right hand pointed straight into Pearl’s right ear. Pearl’s eyes met Quinn’s. She looked afraid but calculating. She hadn’t given up and was trusting him to figure out something. To try, anyway. They both knew that the only way Dwayne Avis was going to leave the building was dead or in custody.

Avis seemed almost unconcerned by his predicament. He was simply using what leverage he had and was prepared to cope with whatever came of it.

Quinn moved away from the doorway, closer to them. Avis watched him, his hooded dark eyes unblinking, the gun steady against Pearl’s ear.

“That’d be near enough,” Avis said.

Quinn stopped and stood still.

“He’s gonna shoot you,” Pearl said. “Then me.”

“Or you and then him,” Avis said.

“What are your demands?” Quinn asked. But he knew Avis didn’t have demands. Pearl had it right. Avis simply wanted Quinn and Pearl, in whatever order, to leave this world before he did. Even if Avis by some wild chance was able to kill Quinn and make his escape, he’d still shoot Pearl.

Quinn tried to figure what he had to work with. Avis was skilled at using Pearl’s body as a shield. He was crouched with his head behind and slightly to the side of Pearl’s so that he was peering over her left shoulder. Only his left eye and the left side of his forehead were exposed. Quinn hadn’t actually shown his revolver to Avis, but he was sure Avis knew it was there in Quinn’s right hand, alongside and slightly behind his right thigh where it couldn’t be seen. If Quinn’s right arm began to rise to point his weapon, the bloodbath would begin.

Then Quinn saw the one possibility Avis had left him. Quinn was more familiar than Avis with the old Springbok revolvers, which had been used probably exclusively by Avis’s son Martin and the Quest and Quarry clients. Most likely the ones at Avis’s farm were simply stored there. The revolver in Avis’s hand wasn’t cocked. The hammer was still forward and would have to be thumbed back before the gun would fire.

The amount of time it would take Avis’s thumb to cock the revolver and for Avis to squeeze the trigger was the amount of time Quinn had to act and make whatever he did work. Seconds.

And the slight exposure of Avis’s eye and tanned forehead was a difficult target, even in these close quarters.

Seconds.

Seconds that might save Pearl’s life or end it. That might be ticking away now in Avis’s head.

Quinn knew that if he did chance it and take the shot, he’d have to move first in order to have time.

He did move first. Instantly and decisively.

As his hand came up with the bulky old .38, Quinn saw Avis’s stubby thumb moving toward the Springbok’s hammer.

Seconds.

Quinn turned off every other part of his mind, took aim, and squeezed the trigger.

The room rocked with the deafening blast of gunfire.

One shot. Before either Avis or Pearl could react.

Quinn saw a red mist appear like a halo around Avis’s head, saw a fragment of skull and hair spin back and away. Avis’s arm fell away from Pearl. They both toppled backward.

Avis lay still on his back. Pearl rolled to the side and scrambled to her feet. She was trembling, and there were flecks of blood and what looked like gray brain matter on her left cheek.

Quinn had moved forward after the shot without realizing it. He and Pearl stared down at Avis’s motionless figure. A large piece of Avis’s skull was missing above his left eye. Without the vitality of life he looked diminutive and harmless.

Quinn and Pearl noticed at the same time how close it had been. Avis had managed to cock the pistol in the second before he’d died.

Instinctively, Quinn kicked the gun away from the dead hand, halfway across the room.

The bullet that had taken off part of Avis’s skull had also broken a window, allowing the breeze to enter through the shattered pane. A curtain blown in the wind momentarily created a shadow on the wall that looked like a huge feathered wing.

For the first time in her life, Pearl fainted.

Perhaps it had been the pain that made her lose consciousness. Or maybe Lavern had simply fallen asleep.

It was the pain that had awakened her. With each breath, the ribs on her left side seemed to catch fire. She was still holding on to the shotgun barrel, the butt of its wooden stock resting on the bedroom floor.

She had no idea how long she’d slept or been unconscious. From where she sat she couldn’t see the clock.

Hobbs was still snoring, but not loudly. The TV was still on beyond the foot of the bed, tuned to the news, still muted. Yellow closed-caption letters crawled past at the bottom of the screen while an impossibly beautiful blond anchorwoman mouthed each syllable with red, red lips.

Lavern looked beyond the TV, saw light edging the drawn shades, and knew it was morning. Early morning.

Hobbs suddenly snorted and coughed, then resumed snoring. He was sleeping more lightly now. He might wake up soon.

Something on TV caught Lavern’s attention. The closed-caption lettering indicated that the anchorwoman was talking about the Slicer being shot to death in some woman’s apartment. It had turned out that he wasn’t also the .25-Caliber Killer—but the man gunned down earlier by the police was his son, who’d procured the victims for his father. The son, who’d arranged urban ‘hunts,’ had apparently killed no one directly, but had seduced and prepared women for his father to murder and butcher.

Suddenly the screen was split, and another woman appeared, a lanky redhead. The blond anchorwoman was on the other half of the screen, interviewing her. They were discussing the reasons why the father-son team of killers acted as they had. Lavern would have turned up the sound so she could hear their voices, but she was afraid to risk waking Hobbs.

The redheaded woman, Helen something, was explaining the emotional trap the son had been in, and the societal, sometimes-ancient forces that had acted upon both father and son. Reasons and motivations stemmed from all of this. Motivations to kill. Excuses for killing.

None of it sounded like justification to Lavern.

Yet here she was with a shotgun beside her, waiting for her husband to wake up so she could kill him, so she could do to him what he would otherwise eventually do to her.

I have the courage to kill him, but not to leave him.

But did she really believe that? And wasn’t there more to it?

She understood for the first time that she might leave Hobbs and learn how to live without him, but if she killed him he’d be with her always.

Always.

She made sure the shotgun’s wooden stock was firmly planted on the floor, then used the gun as a cane to help her stand up from her chair.

Lavern took a few careful steps. It hurt, but she could walk.

She leaned the shotgun against the bed, where Hobbs would see it when he woke up and think about what might have happened.

Then she limped from the bedroom and went outside. Lavern was still wearing yesterday’s clothes, carrying yesterday’s pain, but right now she didn’t care.

It took her twenty minutes to hail a cab and tell the driver to take her to the Broken Wing Women’s Shelter.

Quinn would have smoked one of the Cuban cigars he’d recently bought from Iggy, his supplier, but he knew it wasn’t worth the disapproval and barrage of air-freshener bombs hissing their incense all over his apartment. As if it weren’t
his
apartment.

He stared at the ceiling and considered how things had worked out.

The case had become clearer in the light of further research, as they all did in the post-arrest phase. The evidence was being added to, reexamined, reclassified, and analyzed. There would of course be no trial, with Martin Hawk and his father both dead.

This one had what the pop psychologists called closure.

Fedderman had returned to Florida, where he thought he could live cheaper and there were a few places that served what tasted like New York deli food. He’d said he might take another fling at golf.

Renz’s reputation was at its high point. A mayoral bid didn’t seem so far fetched at the moment. He and Quinn talked frequently, still arranging and organizing material to develop the full story of what had happened, how this familial team of killer and enabler had evolved. But much of the story was lost in the past and the wooded hills around Black Lake, Missouri, and would never be known. From time to time Renz would mention that someday he might write a book about the case. Being a published author was important in politics, locally or nationally.

Berty Wrenner, as well as most of the surviving Quest and Quarry clients, had been tried and convicted, and the rash of modern-day duels in the city had soon abated.

Quinn’s reverie suddenly ended with the grating ring of the intercom. He glanced at his watch and climbed out of bed.

Pearl identified herself, and he buzzed her in, then unlocked the apartment door and returned to the bedroom to pull on some pants.

He was sitting on the bed working socks on his feet when Pearl walked into the room. She was wearing jeans, black boots, and a black leather jacket. She had a folded
Post
tucked under one arm.

She said, “You’re running late, Quinn.”

“I took a shower last night,” he said. “I’ll get dressed, and we can get right outta here.” He’d promised Pearl he’d go with her to visit her mother at the Sunset Assisted Living home in New Jersey. She had to appear there at least every month or so to keep the staff on their toes. She felt it was her duty. She hated to go alone. Quinn understood why, but on another level he kind of liked Pearl’s mother.

Pearl sniffed the air. “You been smoking, Quinn?”

“Not in months,” he lied.

“Smells like smoke.”

“It lingers.” He nodded toward the folded newspaper as he struggled to put on his shoes. “Anything going on?”

“Nothing unusual. A guy on the Lower East Side killed himself with a shotgun outside a women’s shelter. Put the barrel in his mouth and used a bent wire hanger to push the trigger. Made a big mess in the street.”

“You’re right,” Quinn said. “Nothing unusual.”

He went into the bathroom and peed, washed his hands, used deodorant, splashed cold water on his face, then combed his hair. It stuck up kind of funny on one side, but what the hell. He went back to the bedroom and found a clean shirt. Added a conservative blue tie. Pearl’s mother would like that.

Within a few minutes they were in the Lincoln and on their way, driving through a light snow that the weather forecasters swore wouldn’t amount to any measurable accumulation.

“We can stop at that place across the bridge and get some doughnuts and coffee,” Pearl said.