What Doesn’t Kill Her (34 page)

Then she was straddling him and her hands were on his throat and she was choking and choking and choking and his face was turning red, redder, reddest, and she was grinning, drinking in his pain, but somehow he brought his legs up and caught her head between his knees and yanked her back, tore her grip free. He was damn near double-jointed! And then she remembered, how fucking stupid of her—
he’d been a gymnast.

He was on his side, with her neck between his knees, not squeezing, just holding her there, and she flailed with small sharp fists, kicking with the soles of her bare feet, landing blows anywhere she could, until their force and frequency caused him to use his legs to fling her away. She lay in a pile of discarded limbs as he strode over and picked her up and threw her against the wall, like a piece of furniture he was trying to break. She felt a rib snap, and slid to the floor, the pain sharpening with her every breath.

She lay against the wall, trying to decide her next move. He was standing there looking down at her, like a confused traffic cop, not close enough for her to kick out at—she would have to rally for another attack. Her breath was ragged. So was his, even more so than normal.

“Foreplay has its place,” he said. “So often, because of the solitary nature of my mission, I must pay for sex. And it is a perfunctory thing. A biological thing. Not beautiful. Not sacred. Like the act of communion we experienced those ten long years ago.”

She knew that she could not defeat him, not physically. She had trained, but he was bigger and better trained. Still, he seemed to have no gun.
How had he killed those cops?

In a soft, even gentle voice, she said, “I know what you were doing. What your purpose was. Is.”

“You do?”

“You were teaching. That’s what you do. You showed families the way of their transgressions. You… fixed them. If they intermarried. If one of them was gay. Kay works at an abortion clinic. Many reasons.”

“Sinful. Sinful.”

“But where do I come in? Phillip… should I still call you Phillip?”

“It will suffice.”

“What makes me special? I am a sort of… half-breed. The result of a mixed-race union.”

He waved that off. “Not your fault, my dear one. Not your fault. God made you perfect. He made you for me.”

“Really?”

“You’re my
reward
. So much hard work. So much planning. So much teaching. And I grew lonely. Terribly lonely. Then you came out of that asylum and back into my life. I sent you a message—but you didn’t respond!”

He meant the dead waitress. He seemed suddenly worked up.

“I didn’t know
how
to respond,” she said. “But thank you for the gesture. Was she a sinner?”

The question calmed him, but anger remained under there, spiking up and showing itself in his eyes. “Oh yes. My dearest… have you… forgive me, but I must ask… have you lain with Mark Pryor?”

“No! Oh no. I’ve lain only with you. I have waited.”

His face contorted as if tears were near. “But why didn’t you tell my story? Why didn’t you tell the world? Perhaps I would not have had to teach so many
lessons
, had you told my
story
!”

“I didn’t understand,” she said. “Please forgive me.”

She rose. She held out her hand to him.

“Come,” she said. “Come to bed with me, my love.”

He swallowed. His eyes brimmed with tears. His chin quivered with emotion. His pants bulged with an erection.

He held his hand out to her. She thought of a very old movie that her father liked—the one where the Frankenstein monster held his hand out to his bride.

Unlike that bride, Jordan took this monster’s hand. She walked him to the end of the mattress. She stood before him, perhaps three feet between them, and tugged off her sweatshirt. She put her shoulders back and thrust her smallish boobs out, hoping they would do.

He gasped and blurted, “ ‘Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins!’ ”

“You’re so… poetic.”

He trembled. “It’s the Song of Solomon. There is nothing sinful in the union of two who love as we do!”

She stepped out of the sweatpants.

“Thank you, God!”

She lay on the mattress, on top of the sheets and blankets, and spread herself open to him. Agape, he fumbled with the police officer’s bloodstained shirt, and unbuckled the belt, and pulled down the pants. He stepped out of them and dropped them, and there was a clunk—some weapon, a folded hunter’s knife, perhaps.

Skinny but muscular, with very little hair on him, he was tugging at his tented boxer shorts when she raised a hand. “Not so quickly. Come to my embrace. Let’s savor these moments, shall we?”

He gulped, nodded, and dropped to his knees on the mattress as if praying between her spread legs, and then fell on her like a tree, which fucking hurt because of her broken rib, and then he was hugging her, lost in the moment, not noticing her reaching for her wadded jeans, sliding them over, her hand slipping in the pocket, finding the switchblade, and when she clicked it open, he backed away a little, curiously, as if to say,
What’s that?

Then she showed him what it was by plunging the knife’s blade into his back, with great force, force that straightened him in pain and surprise. She plunged it in again, and again, each time to the hilt, releasing between blows little plumes of blood trying for the ceiling but failing miserably.

“Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you!”
someone was saying. Her, apparently.

“Oh! Oh! Oh!”
someone was saying. Him, apparently.

She stopped stabbing long enough to pull herself out from under his wiry frame, and when free of him, she knelt over him, flopped as he was on his stomach, and like Phillip when he’d knelt between her legs, she too might have been praying, but she wasn’t. She was stabbing him, two-handed now, plunging the blade deep, penetrating the intruder until he stopped shuddering from the blows and then she did it some more.

Finally, she drew back, breathing heavy, an artist appraising her work. His back was a welter of punctures and gliding blood streams, an abstract painting no one but a maniac might admire. Satisfied, she let the bloody blade tumble with a clank to the floor.

“
Now
I’ll tell your fucking story,” she said.

She went back into the shower and got his blood off her, and she was trembling, even shaking, when she toweled off. The shower had been fairly hot, so she was a little cold, but not enough to justify this shivering. She did not cry. She would not cry.

The son of a bitch wasn’t worth it.

She sat at the table and drank her apple juice until real cops, among them Captain Kelley, came banging at her door.

In a pink T-shirt and jeans, hair ponytailed back, Jordan sat in Mark’s room, at his bedside, holding his hand, the regular rhythm of the ventilator oddly comforting.

She barely heard Captain Kelley come in.

The African-American detective asked, “How long have you been here?”

“A while. Here to arrest me?”

He grinned at that, though there was embarrassment in it. “No. I told you there’d be no problem. The only thing the district attorney wants from you is to shake your hand.”

“For getting rid of a public nuisance?”

“Maybe. Or maybe he wants to shake the hand of the young woman who stabbed a man nineteen times in self-defense.”

“I just wanted to make sure the prick was dead.”

“Oh, he’s dead all right.” Kelley, looking typically sharp in a tan suit, stepped closer to Mark. “Is his color better? I think his color is better.”

“He’ll be fine.”

Kelley said nothing. Then: “You’re gonna love this. Your pal Traynor owned the house next door to his. That’s where he was hiding out, after things got tense.”

“Set the trap. Watched me go in. I’m lucky he didn’t grab me in there. Don’t know how well I’d have done.”

He grinned again. “My money would still be on you, young lady.”

“How’d you find out he owned
that
house, too?”

“Came up when we canvassed the neighbors. Traynor kept a low profile, but he was seen going in and out of both houses. He didn’t hang on to much in the way of personal possessions, you know. We found some family photos. But the really key thing we found was—”

“On his laptop. More family photos. But not
his
family, right? Photos of the families he butchered. After he butchered them.”

Kelley looked at her as if she had just told his fortune. “How do you know that?”

“I posed for one.”

The detective’s eyebrows raised. “Yeah. I guess you did.” He sighed. “That hard drive is already in FBI hands. I have a good relationship with the head fed, and he says they estimate they’ll clear over fifty unsolved homicides from the evidence on that laptop.”

“Horrible as it is,” she said, with a little shudder, “it’ll bring… closure to a lot of people. That’s what my shrink would say, anyway.”

“I heard a rumor you’ve had some good news.”

She glanced at him brightly. “Yes, my friend Kara’s being released from St. Dimpna’s. I’m picking her up Friday.”
With a handful of Dimpna Dust at the ready.
“We’re going to room together.”

“That place of yours is pretty small for that.”

She shivered. “I haven’t been back there except to pick up my stuff. I don’t need those kind of memories. For now, I’m at Mark’s place. His mom likes the idea of me looking after it, till he’s better.”

Kelley frowned, then plastered on a smile, and looked toward Mark, a man in a coma wearing the earbuds of an iPod. “What’s he listening to?”

“Stuff from when we were in high school.”

He smiled a little. “Including ‘your song’?”

“We don’t have a song yet. Captain, we really
weren’t
an item back in school. That’s something that was stolen from us. But we’re going to get it back.”

Kelley nodded. He looked at her with an expression that was a mix of kind and sad. “Jordan, wherever Mark is, it’s a very dark place. You’ve talked
to the doctors. You do understand that… he might be in that dark place a long time. He might not ever make it back. You need to start dealing with that.”

She shook her head. “He’ll be back.”

“How can you be so sure he’ll find his way?”

She smiled and stroked her boyfriend’s hand. “
I
did, didn’t I?”

Photograph by John Deason

MAX ALLAN COLLINS has earned an unprecedented nineteen Private Eye Writers of America Shamus nominations, winning for his Nathan Heller novels
True Detective
(1983) and
Stolen Away
(1991), receiving the PWA life achievement award, the Eye, in 2006. In 2012, his Nathan Heller saga was honored with the PWA Hammer award for making a major contribution to the private eye genre.

His graphic novel
Road to Perdition
(1998) is the basis of the Academy Award–winning Tom Hanks film, followed by two acclaimed prose sequels and several graphic novels. He has created a number of innovative suspense series, including Mallory, Quarry, Eliot Ness, and the Disaster series. He is completing a number of Mike Hammer novels begun by the late Mickey Spillane; his audio novel,
The New Adventures of Mike Hammer: The Little Death
, won a 2011 Audie.