Darkness, Take My Hand (32 page)

Danielle shrieked against the tape and banged her head into the shotgun.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

The baby’s head was plummeting toward the ice when Gerry closed his hand over the ankles.

I tossed my gun into the slushy sand pit under the jungle gym.

“Now your backup,” Gerry said and swung the baby like a pendulum in his hands.

“Fuck you,” I said and watched his perilous grip on the small ankles.

“Patrick,” he said and raised his eyebrows, “it sounds like you’re coming out of your stupor. The backup.”

I pulled the gun Phil had been grasping when Gerry slashed his throat, tossed it beside my own.

Oscar must have noticed his shadow, because it began to recede back behind the car and his legs appeared between the front and rear tires again.

“When my son died,” Gerry said and pulled Campbell Rawson in against his cheek, nuzzled his soft face, “there was no warning. He was out in the yard, four years old, making noise, and then…he wasn’t. A valve in his brain slipped.” He shrugged. “Just slipped. And his head filled with blood. And he died.”

“Tough way to go.”

He gave me his soft, kind smile. “Patronize me again,
Patrick, and I smash the child’s skull.” He tilted his head and kissed Campbell’s cheek. “So, my son’s dead. And I find out there’s no way what happened to him could have been predicted or prevented. God decided Brendan Glynn dies today. And so it was.”

“And your wife?”

He smoothed Campbell’s hair against his head and the baby’s eyes remained shut.

“My wife,” he said. “Hmm. I killed her, yeah. Not God. Me. I don’t know what sort of plan God had for the woman, but I definitely fucked them up. I had plans for Brendan’s life, He fucked them up. He probably had plans for Kara Rider’s life, but He’s had to change them, hasn’t He?”

“And Hardiman,” I said, “how did he come into this?”

“Did he tell you about his childhood encounter with bees?”

“Yes.”

“Mmm. It wasn’t bees. Alec likes to embellish. I was there and it was mosquitos. He disappeared in a cloud of them, and when he came out, I could see the mark of conscience had been removed from him.” He smiled, and I could see the cloud of bugs and the dark lake in his eyes. “So, after that, Alec and I established a mentor-student relationship which later blossomed into so much more.”

“And he—what?—went to jail willingly to protect you?”

Gerry shrugged. “Jail meant nothing to someone like Alec. His freedom is total, Patrick. It’s in his mind. Bars can’t hold it. He’s more free in jail than most people are on the outside.”

“So why punish Diandra Warren for sending him there?”

He frowned. “She reduced Alec. On the stand. She presumed to
explain
him to a jury of dunces. It was fucking insulting.”

“So, all this”—my arm swept the playground—“is about you and Alec getting back at who exactly?”

“Whom,” he corrected me and his smile returned.

“God?” I said.

“That’s a bit reductive, but if that’s the sort of glib shit you have to feed the media after I’m dead, be my guest, Patrick.”

“You’re going to die, Gerry? When?”

“As soon as you make your move, Patrick. You’ll kill me.” He tilted his head in the direction of the police. “Or they will.”

“What about the hostages, Gerry?”

“One of them dies. Minimum. You can’t save them both, Patrick. There’s no way. Accept that.”

“I have.”

Danielle Rawson searched my face to see if I was joking and I met her eyes long enough for her to see I wasn’t.

“One of them dies,” Gerry said. “We’re agreed on that?”

“Yup.”

I pivoted my left foot to the right and then back and then to the right again. To Gerry, hopefully, it seemed an absent-minded gesture. To Oscar, again hopefully, it was more than that. I couldn’t risk looking at the car again. I’d just have to assume he was there.

“A month ago,” Gerry said, “you would’ve done anything to save both of them. You’d be racking your brain. But not now.”

“Nope. You’ve taught me well, Gerry.”

“How many lives did you shatter to get to me?” he asked.

I thought of Jack and Kevin. Then of Grace and Mae. Phil, of course.

“Enough,” I said.

He laughed. “Good. Good. It’s fun, isn’t it? I mean, okay, you’ve never killed anyone intentionally. Have you? But I’ll tell you, I didn’t exactly plan for it to be my life’s work. After I killed my wife, in pure fury, not premeditated at all, really…after I killed her, I felt awful. I threw up. I had the cold sweats for two weeks. And then one night, I’m driving out on an old stretch of road near Mansfield, no other car for miles. And I pass this guy riding his bike, and I got this impulse—strongest impulse I’d ever had in my life. I’m passing him on the right, I can see the reflec
tors on his bike, see his face all serious and full of concentration and this voice says to me, ‘Flick the wheel, Gerry. Flick the wheel.’ So I did. I just turned my hand a quarter inch to the left and he went vaulting off into a tree. And I went back to him, he was still barely alive, and I watched him die. And I felt fine. And it just kept getting better. The nigger kid who knew I’d gotten someone else to take the fall for my wife, all the ones after him, Cal Morrison. It just kept feeling better and better. I have no regrets. Sorry, but I don’t. So when you kill me—”

“I’m not going to kill you, Gerry.”

“What?” His head reared back.

“You heard me. Let someone else send you to your blaze of glory. You’re a speck, man. You’re nothing. You’re not worth the bullet or the mark on my soul for taking you out.”

“You trying to piss me off again, Patrick?” He removed Campbell Rawson from his shoulder and held him aloft.

I tilted my wrist so the cylinder dropped into my palm, shrugged. “You’re a joke, Gerry. I’m just calling it like I see it.”

“That so?”

“Absolutely.” I met his hard eyes with my own. “And you’ll be replaced, just like everything else, in maybe a week, tops. Some other dumb, sick shit will come along and kill some people and he’ll be all over the papers, and all over
Hard Copy
and you’ll be yesterday’s news. Your fifteen minutes are up, Gerry. And they’ve passed without impact.”

He flipped Campbell Rawson upside down in his hand, grasped his ankles again, and his finger depressed the shotgun trigger an eighth of an inch and Danielle closed one eye against the blast she was sure was coming, but kept the other eye on her baby.

“They’ll remember this,” Gerry said. “Believe me.”

He swung his arm back in a softball pitcher’s windup and Campbell slid back into the darkness behind him, the small white body disappearing as if it had gone back to the womb.

But when Gerry swung his arm forward to release the
baby into the air, Campbell was no longer in his hand.

He looked down, confused, and I jumped forward, hit the ice on my knees and slid the index finger of my left hand in between the shotgun trigger and the guard.

Gerry clamped back on the trigger. When he met my finger, he looked at me and then clamped down so hard that my finger broke.

The straight razor appeared in his left hand and I shoved the one-shot into his right palm.

He shrieked even before I pulled the trigger. It was a high-pitched sound, the yip-and-bark of a kennel’s worth of hyenas, and the razor felt like the tip of a lover’s tongue as it sank into my neck, then snagged against my jawbone.

I depressed the trigger on the one-shot and nothing happened.

Gerry shrieked louder, and the razor came out of my flesh, then swung back in immediately, and I clenched my eyes shut and depressed the trigger frantically three times.

And Gerry’s hand exploded.

And so did mine.

The razor hit the ice by my knee as I dropped the one-shot and fire roared up the electrical tape and gasoline on Gerry’s arm and caught the wisps of Danielle’s hair.

Gerry threw his head back and opened his mouth wide and bellowed in ecstasy.

I grabbed the razor, could barely feel it because the nerves in my hand seemed to have stopped working.

I slashed into the electric tape at the end of the shotgun barrel, and Danielle dropped away toward the ice and rolled her head into the frozen sand.

My broken finger came back out of the shotgun and Gerry swung the barrels toward my head.

The twin shotgun bores arced through the darkness like eyes without mercy or soul, and I raised my head to meet them, and Gerry’s wail filled my ears as the fire licked at his neck.

Good-bye, I thought. Everyone. It’s been nice.

Oscar’s first two shots entered the back of Gerry’s head and exited through the center of his forehead and a third punched into his back.

The shotgun jerked upward in Gerry’s flaming arm and then the shots came from the front, several at once, and Gerry spun like a marionette and pitched toward the ground. The shotgun boomed twice and punched holes through the ice in front of him as he fell.

He landed on his knees and, for a moment, I wasn’t sure if he was dead or not. His rusty hair was afire and his head lolled to the left as one eye disappeared in flames but the other shimmered at me through waves of heat, and an amused derision shone in the pupil.

Patrick, the eye said through the gathering smoke, you still know nothing
.

Oscar rose up on the other side of Gerry’s corpse, Campbell Rawson clutched tight to his massive chest as it rose and fell with great heaving breaths. The sight of it—something so soft and gentle in the arms of something so thick and mountainous—made me laugh.

Oscar came out of the darkness toward me, stepped around Gerry’s burning body, and I felt the waves of heat rise toward me as the circle of gasoline around Gerry caught fire.

Burn, I thought. Burn. God help me, but burn.

Just after Oscar stepped over the outer edge of the circle, it erupted in yellow flame, and I found myself laughing harder as he looked at it, not remotely impressed.

I felt cool lips smack against my ear, and by the time I looked her way, Danielle was already past me, rushing to take her child from Oscar.

His huge shadow loomed over me as he approached, and I looked up at him and he held the look for a long moment.

“How you doing, Patrick?” he said and smiled broadly.

And, behind him, Gerry burned on the ice.

And everything was so goddamned funny for some reason, even though I knew it wasn’t. I knew it wasn’t. I did. But I was still laughing when they put me in the ambulance.

A month after
Gerry Glynn’s death, his killing ground was discovered in what had been the cafeteria of the long-closed Dedham House of Correction. Along with several of his victims’ body parts stored in a half dozen coolers, police also found a list Gerry’d compiled of all the people he’d killed since 1965. Gerry was twenty-seven when he murdered his wife, fifty-eight when he died. In those thirty-one years, he killed—either by himself or with the aid of Charles Rugglestone, Alec Hardiman, or Evandro Arujo—thirty-four people. According to the list.

A police psychologist speculated that the number could actually be higher. Someone of Gerry’s ego, he argued, could easily have differentiated between “worthy” victims and “lesser” ones.

Of the thirty-four, sixteen were runaways, one in Lubbock, Texas, and another in unincorporated Dade County, Florida, just as Bolton had suspected.

Three and a half weeks after his death, Cox Publishers published the true-crime book,
The Boston Manglers
, by a staff reporter with the
News
. The book sold fast for two days, and then the discovery was made in Dedham, and people lost interest because even a book produced in twenty-four days wasn’t able to keep up with the times.

An internal police investigation into Gerry Glynn’s death concluded that officers and federal agents had used “necessary, extreme force” when sharpshooters fired fourteen bullets into his body after Oscar’s first three had effectively killed him.

Stanley Timpson was arrested on charges of conspiracy to commit murder in the Rugglestone case and obstruction of a federal investigation upon arriving at Logan Airport from Mexico.

The state, upon reviewing the Rugglestone case, decided that since the only witnesses to Rugglestone’s murder were a catatonic mental patient, an unhinged alcoholic, and an AIDS victim who wouldn’t live to see a trial and because there was no longer any physical evidence left, that they’d leave prosecution of Timpson to federal authorities.

Last I heard, Timpson was planning to enter a plea on the obstruction charge in exchange for dismissal of the conspiracy.

Alec Hardiman’s attorney petitioned the State Supreme Court for immediate reversal of his client’s conviction and immediate commutation of his prison term due to allegations surfacing against Timpson and EEPA in relation to the Rugglestone murder. The attorney then filed a second suit in civil court against the State of Massachusetts, the current governor and chief of police as well as the men who’d held those positions in 1974. For wrongful imprisonment, the attorney argued, Alec Hardiman was entitled to sixty million dollars—or three million dollars for every year he spent behind bars. His client, the attorney argued, was further victimized by the state when he contracted AIDS due to inferior policing fellow inmates, and should be released immediately while he still had some life left.

A reversal of Hardiman’s decision is currently pending.

Jack Rouse and Kevin Hurlihy were rumored to be hiding out in the Cayman Islands.

Another rumor, rarely reported in the papers, suggested they’d been murdered on the orders of Fat Freddy Constantine. Lieutenant John Kevosky of the Major Crime Unit said, “Negative. Both Kevin and Jack have a history of disappearing when the heat gets turned up. Besides,
Freddy had no reason to kill them. They made him money. They’re hiding out in the Carribean.”

Or not.

Diandra Warren quit her consulting position at Bryce and put her private practice on hiatus.

Eric Gault continues to teach at Bryce, his secret safe for now.

Evandro Arujo’s parents sold a diary their son had written as a teenager to a TV tabloid for $20,000. Producers later sued for return of the money on the basis that the diary revealed the musings of what was, back then, a perfectly healthy mind.

The parents of Peter Stimovich and Pamela Stokes joined together in a class action suit against the state, the governor (again), and Walpole Penitentiary for releasing Evandro Arujo.

Campbell Rawson was, quite miraculously, according to doctors, unaffected by the overdose of hydroclorophyl administered by Gerry Glynn. He should have had permanent brain damage, but instead he woke with a headache and nothing more.

His mother, Danielle, sent me a Christmas card with a rambling thank-you note inside and an assurance that any time I passed through Reading I was welcome to a hot meal and friendship at the Rawson household.

Grace and Mae returned from a safe house in Upstate New York two days after Gerry’s death. Grace resecured her position at Beth Israel and called me the day I was released from the hospital.

It was one of those uncomfortable conversations in which polite reserve replaces intimacy and as it stumbled toward a close, I asked her if she’d like to meet for a drink sometime.

“I don’t think that would be a good idea, Patrick.”

“Ever?” I asked.

A long, unpopped bubble of a pause followed and was
an answer in and of itself, and then she said:

“I’ll always care for you.”

“But.”

“But my daughter comes first, and I can’t risk exposing her to your life again.”

A pit opened and yawned and extended from my throat to my stomach.

“Can I talk to her? Say ’bye?”

“I don’t think that would be a healthy thing. For either of you.” Her voice cracked and her quick inhalation was a wet hiss. “Sometimes it’s better to let things fade.”

I closed my eyes and placed my head against the phone for a moment.

“Grace, I—”

“I have to go, Patrick. Take care of yourself. I mean that. Don’t let that job destroy you. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Promise?”

“I promise, Grace. I—”

“’Bye, Patrick.”

“’Bye.”

Angie left the day after Phil’s funeral.

“He died,” she said, “because he loved us too much and we didn’t love him enough.”

“How do you figure?” I stared into an open grave cut through hard, frozen earth.

“It wasn’t his fight, but he fought it anyway. For us, And we didn’t love him enough to keep him out of it.”

“I don’t know if it’s that simple.”

“It is,” she assured me and dropped flowers in the grave onto his coffin.

Mail has piled up in my apartment—bills, solicitations from supermarket tabloids and local TV and radio talk shows. Talk, talk, talk, I find myself thinking, talk all you want and it won’t change the fact that Glynn existed. And so many others like him still do.

The only thing I’ve pulled from the pile is a postcard from Angie.

It arrived two weeks ago from Rome. Birds flap their wings over the Vatican.

Miss you.

On the advice of friends, I consulted a psychiatrist during the first week in December.

After an hour, he told me I was suffering from clinical depression.

“I know that,” I said.

He leaned forward. “And how are we going to help you with that?”

I glanced at the door behind him, a closet, I assumed.

“You got Grace or Mae Cole back there?” I said.

He actually turned his head to check. “No, but—”

“How about Angie?”

“Patrick—”

“Can you resurrect Phil or make the last few months not have happened?”

“No.”

“Then you can’t help me, Doctor.”

I wrote him a check.

“But, Patrick, you’re deeply depressed and you need—”

“I need my friends, Doctor. I’m sorry, but you’re a stranger. Your advice may be great, but it’s still a stranger’s advice, and I don’t take advice from strangers. Something my mother taught me.”

“Still, you need—”

“I
need
Angie, Doctor. That simple. I know I’m depressed, but I can’t change it right now, and I don’t want to.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s natural. Like autumn. You go through what I went through, and you’d be nuts not to be depressed. Right?”

He nodded.

“Thank you for your time, Doctor.”

Christmas Eve

7:30 p.m.

So here I sit.

On my porch, three days after someone shot a priest in a convenience store, waiting for my life to begin again.

My crazy landlord, Stanis, actually invited me in for Christmas dinner tomorrow, but I declined, said I’d made other plans.

I might go to Richie and Sherilynn’s. Or Devin’s. He and Oscar invited me to join their bachelor’s Christmas. Microwaved turkey dinners and generous portions of Jack Daniel’s. Sure sounds tempting, but…

I’ve been alone on Christmas before. Several times. But never like this. I never felt it before, this dire loneliness, the hollowing despair of it.

“You can love more than one person at the same time,” Phil said once. “Humans are messy.”

I definitely was.

Alone on the porch, I loved Angie and Grace and Mae and Phil and Kara Rider and Jason and Diandra Warren, Danielle and Campbell Rawson. I loved them all and missed them all.

And felt all the more lonely.

Phil was dead. I knew that, but I couldn’t accept it enough not to want—desperately—that he wasn’t.

I could see us climbing out windows in our respective homes as children and meeting on the avenue, running up it together as we laughed at the ease of our escapes and
headed through the bitter night to rap on Angie’s window and pull her into our desperado pack.

And then the three of us took off, lost to the night.

I have no idea what we used to do on half our midnight jaunts, what we used to talk about as we made our way through the dark cement jungle of our neighborhood.

I only know that it was enough.

Miss you, she’d written.

Miss you, too.

Miss you more than the severed nerves in my hand.

“Hi,” she said.

I’d been dozing in the chair on the porch and I opened my eyes to the first snowflakes of this winter. I batted my eyes at them, shook my head against the cruel, sweet sound of her voice, so vivid I’d been ready to believe for a moment, like a fool, that it wasn’t a dream.

“Aren’t you cold?” she said.

I was awake now. And those last words didn’t come from a dream.

I turned in my chair and she stepped onto the porch gingerly, as if worried she’d disturbed the gentle settling of the virgin flakes on the wood.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi.”

I stood and she stopped six inches from me.

“I couldn’t stay away,” she said.

“I’m glad.”

The snow fell in her hair and glistened white for just a moment before it melted and disappeared.

She took a faltering step and I took one to compensate and then I was holding her as the fat white flakes fell on our bodies.

Winter, real winter, was here.

“I missed you,” she said and crushed her body against mine.

“Missed you, too,” I said.

She kissed my cheek, ran her hands into my hair, and
looked at me for a long moment as flakes collected on her eyelashes.

She lowered her head. “And I miss him. Badly.”

“Me too.”

When she raised her head her face was slick, and I couldn’t tell if it was all just melted snow or not.

“Any plans for Christmas?” she said.

“You tell me.”

She wiped her left eye. “I’d kind of like to hang with you, Patrick. That okay?”

“That’s the best thing I’ve heard all year, Ange.”

In the kitchen, we made hot chocolate, stared over the rims of our mugs at each other as the radio in the living room updated us on the weather.

The snow, the announcer told us, was part of the first major storm system to hit Massachusetts this winter. By the time we woke in the morning, he promised, twelve to sixteen inches would have fallen.

“Real snow,” Angie said. “Who would’ve thought?”

“It’s about time.”

The weather report over, the announcer was updating the condition of Reverend Edward Brewer.

“How long you think he can hold on?” Angie said.

I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

We sipped from our mugs as the announcer reported the mayor’s call for more stringent handgun laws, the governor’s call for tougher enforcement of restraining orders. So another Eddie Brewer wouldn’t walk into the wrong convenience store at the wrong time. So another Laura Stiles could break up with her abusive boyfriend without fear of death. So the James Faheys of the world would stop instilling us with terror.

So our city would one day be as safe as Eden before the fall, our lives insulated from the hurtful and the random.

“Let’s go in the living room,” Angie said, “and turn the radio off.”

She reached out and I took her hand in the dark kitchen as the snow painted my window in soft specks of white,
followed her down the hall toward the living room.

Eddie Brewer’s condition hadn’t changed. He was still in a coma.

The city, the announcer said, waited. The city, the announcer assured us, was holding its breath.