Before he Kills (A Mackenzie White Mystery—Book 1) (19 page)

Mackenzie stepped into the kitchen and
could tell right away that this man did not care much for the way he lived. She
smelled spoiled food coming from somewhere, mingled with the smells of dust and
old body odor. She felt her palms sweating on her gun as her heart slammed,
knowing she could full well die in this house, and she tried to steady them.

Mackenzie crept across the kitchen
floor, listening for movement elsewhere in the house. Now that they were
inside, she knew that there was no telling what the killer might have access
to. At this very instant, he could be getting his own gun.

Mackenzie reached the edge of the kitchen
where a dark hallway waited. Halfway down the small hallway, a flight of wooden
stairs led to a second floor. The killer had the advantage here and she knew
it. It would be foolish to go venturing down that hall. She looked to the right
and saw a living room, illuminated by a small lamp on an end table. Another
Bible sat on the end table. A bookmark stuck out of it and a pen and pad of
paper sat beside it.

From upstairs, the slightest creak of a
floorboard sounded out, giving away the killer’s position. Mackenzie acted
quickly, wanting to get the jump on him.

Now or never
, she thought.

She ran down the hallway and halfway up
the stairs in less than three seconds. She paused there, staring into the
darkness above her. Her eyes were beginning to adjust and when she thought it
was safe to do so, she started up the stairs.

She was in mid-step when she heard
footsteps in the kitchen. Confused, Mackenzie looked back down the stairs just
in time to see the would-be victim coming toward the stairs. Her eyes looked
half-tinged with lunacy and something about seeing such an attractive woman in
her underwear in the midst of such a tense scene was abstract in a way that
befuddled Mackenzie just enough.

“Please,” the woman said. “You have to
call the police. I can’t—”

But she didn’t get a chance to finish.
She screamed, her eyes now trailing just above Mackenzie. Mackenzie turned just
in time to see the killer’s shape coming at her, racing down the stairs so
quickly that Mackenzie barely had time to raise her gun.

C
rack!

He whipped her, and a fierce stinging
sensation erupted on her right hand right across the knuckles—followed by a
blinding pain that raced along her left cheek as he whipped again.

She felt blood flowing instantly, racing
down her fingers and face. She saw him coming at her, diving from the top step.
She fired blindly, knowing that the pain in her hand affected her shot.

Still, she heard him cry out in pain, as
the shot took him low in the stomach.

Amazingly, the shot only slowed his
progress. Once again, his full weight slammed into her and she went falling
backwards down the stairs.

She grabbed for the wall, again dropping
her gun, but it did no good. They both went falling down the stairs and when Mackenzie’s
back hit, it exploded in pain and the wind went rushing out of her.

They tumbled down the remainder of the
stairs in a bundle of arms and legs. When they finally hit the floor, Mackenzie’s
back was a spasm of pain and the blood from her face was coating her neck and
soaking into her shirt.

The killer was getting to his knees now,
drawing back the same whip he had attacked her with on the stairs. He turned
and whipped the original object of his madness, the woman in the pink bra, who
was standing and gaping, frozen in fear. It slapped her across the shoulder,
bringing up a red whelp right away, her blood splashing against the hallway
wall.

With the woman falling to the ground and
wailing, Mackenzie tried to launch her own attack but her back didn’t seem to
want to work for a moment. She felt paralyzed and wondered if she had snapped
her spine on the way down the stairs.

The killer turned his attention to her
and drew back the whip. The smile on his face was a thing of madness, a smile
that belonged in asylums and nightmares.

“I will raise a city in your name,” he
said as he readied himself to bring the whip down on her.

Mackenzie could only flinch, waiting for
the whip to come down on her flesh with that sick cracking noise, its barbed
end to pierce her flesh and disfigure her for good. She wondered what she would
look like when he was done—if she survived at all.

Suddenly, there came a booming noise in
the kitchen. Mackenzie didn’t understand what it was until she saw a body
appear in the hallway. It came racing down the hall and leapt for the killer.

The killer, caught in mid-turn, was
tackled to the ground. It wasn’t until the two bodies started fighting for
position on the ground that Mackenzie saw, to her shock, who the other person
was.

Porter.

It made no sense. A part of Mackenzie
wondered if she had hit her head on the way down the stairs and was seeing
things.

But as her back finally started to
loosen up, she groggily got to her knees and saw what was happening before her.
Porter had saved her. He was now fighting with the killer, positioned on top of
him and delivering a deft right hand to the face.

With black dots racing in her vision, Mackenzie
looked around for her gun. The floor felt like it was swaying beneath her and
she could actually
smell
her own blood now. It was coming out of her cheek
in what felt like a river and—

Suddenly, she saw her gun. It was inches
from the killer’s hand and he was clearly reaching for it.

“Porter,” she croaked, still finding her
back untrusting and her legs wobbly.

She tried to run forward but her back
locked up and she went to her knees in a grimace of pain. She could only look
on helplessly as the killer grabbed her Glock.

Porter noticed it just in time, reaching
out to stop the killer from getting the gun into position to fire.

But Porter lost his balance atop the
killer as he did this and the killer took advantage, rolling away, sending
Porter to the floor, and grabbing the gun.

The killer stood and fired.

The gunshot was deafening and the roar
of pain from Porter was far too brief. Mackenzie’s heart fell, hoping it didn’t
mean what she thought it did.

Mackenzie pushed past the flaring pain
in her back and stumbled forward. The killer stood there, his face now also
bloodied from Porter’s attack, and Mackenzie attacked him from behind, driving
an elbow hard into the space between his shoulder blades.

He went falling to the floor, the gun
flying from his grasp.

Mackenzie cried out from the pain in her
back as she followed up by driving her knee into the center of the man’s back.
She could practically feel the air rush out of him and she took advantage of
this right away.

She grabbed him by both sides of his
head, her right hand nothing more than a glove of blood from his whip attack,
and raised it several inches from the ground. Then, with a scream that was a sublime
mixture of pain, frustration, and victory, she slammed his head into the wooden
floor.

He groaned and gasped.

She did it again, in a quick
machine-like motion. Up, then down.

This time, he made no noise.

She rolled off of his back and leaned
against the wall. She slid over to Porter and her heart swelled when she saw
that he was moving. There was blood coating the left side of his head and he
was holding his ear like a frightened child.

“Porter?”

He didn’t respond. He did, however, roll
over and look at her.

“White?”

He looked worried, wiping blood away
from his face.

“The damned gun went off right by my
ear,” he said, his voice loud. “I can’t hear a thing.”

She nodded, arching her back and trying
to stretch out the pain. But the pain was there to stay, or so it seemed. She
reached over to the killer and placed her hand to his neck. It was hard to tell
through her own surging adrenaline and heartbeat, but she was fairly certain
there was a pulse there.

Mackenzie lay on the floor next to
Porter and slowly pulled her cell phone out of her back pocket. When she
scrolled for Nelson’s number, she left bloody streaks all over the phone.

As the phone started to ring in her ear,
she reached out with her free hand and found Porter’s. She gave it a squeeze
and despite the sticky blood coating her fingers, Porter squeezed back.

Three days after the Scarecrow Killer
had been taken into custody, Mackenzie returned to the same hospital she had
left just two days previous with fourteen stitches in her cheek and five along
the top of her right hand. She went to the third floor and entered a room that
was being occupied by Porter. Seeing him in a hospital bed broke her heart,
especially considering how he had ended up there.

He smiled at her when she came in. There
was heavy padding and bandaging along the left side of his head but she was
relieved to see that all of the IVs had been removed since she last saw him.

“There she is,” Porter said.

She smiled, marveling at how much their
relationship had changed.

“How are you, Porter?”

“Well, the good news is that I can hear
you, which is something the doctors weren’t too sure about two days ago. The
bad news is that I can’t hear you very well. The worse news is that my right
ear is never going to look the same again. It seems the bullet actually tore
off part of the top.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Well, what was I supposed to do?”
Porter asked, a little ill-tempered. “Your FBI buddy calls me and tells me that
you’re planning on trying to find this guy’s lair all alone. I had to help.”

She shook her head and squeezed his
hand.

“How did you find me, anyway?”

“I may have broken into your house,”
Porter said with a sly smile. “I saw the map you made, pinpointing the location
at the center of the cities. Then when I reached the area, I heard gunshots—I
guess that’s from when you got the jump on him in the shed. So I just followed
the commotion.”

“Porter, thank you so much. I would have
died—”

He shook his head, his jaw set.

“Hell no,” he said. “You would have
gotten him somehow.”

Mackenzie nodded, touched by the
compliment, but wasn’t so sure. She could still see the killer’s face when she
closed her eyes, raising that whip, preparing to kill her. She had awakened the
last two nights in a panic attack, sweating, alone in bed, and wondered if she
would ever stop seeing it.

She found herself getting lost in
reverie, and wasn’t sure how much time had passed when Porter spoke again.

“So, how’s your back?” he asked, quickly
changing the subject, probably sensing what was happening to her.

She smiled, forcing herself to snap out
of it, forcing herself to stay upbeat. After all, she’d come here to comfort
Porter, and she owed him at least that much.

“I had my final X-ray this morning,” she
said. “Everything checks out. No spinal injuries, just a bad sprain. I was
lucky.”

“To look at the stitches in your face
and my mangled ear, I’m not so sure
lucky
is the word I would use.”

Mackenzie went to the visitor’s chair by
the head of the bed and looked at him with as much sincerity as she could
muster.

“I came by to thank you,” she said. “And
to say goodbye.”

He looked alarmed.

“Goodbye?”

She braced herself.

“Yes. Nelson had to make a hard
decision. When things got out that I caught the killer after he had taken me
off the case, it got ugly.”

“He actually
fired
you?”

“No. He suspended me for six months. And
after he did that, I quit.”

Porter sat up in bed, grimacing but
still managing to sneer at Mackenzie.

“Why the hell would you do that?”

She looked to the floor, unsure how to
explain it.

“Because,” she said, “I spent too much
time trying to prove that I wasn’t just some young naïve girl that was looking
to out-work a mostly older male police force. Now, if you add to that a
renegade who openly disregards the chief’s rules, that’s just something else
for me to live down.”

He frowned, silent for a long time.

“What do you plan on doing now?” he
asked. “You’re too good of a detective to be anything else.”

She smiled and said: “I’m considering
other opportunities.”

He grinned at her for a moment and then
chuckled.

“You’re going to the FBI, aren’t you?”

She was sure she did a poor job of
hiding her shock. She returned his smile as he reached out and took her hand.
It reminded her of their final coherent moments in the killer’s house and she
found herself wanting to tell him what she had in mind for her future. She left
it quiet, though. Now wasn’t the time.

He’d hit the nail on the head and it had
surprised her. Had he always been so perceptive? Had he been hiding some sort
of genuine care for her beneath the snark and impatience all this time?

“You
are,”
he said.
“And
good for you. Let’s be honest here—that’s where you belong. You were always too
good for this place. I know that and
you
damn well better know it. I
always rode you so hard because I wanted you to be better. I wanted you to get
the hell out. And it looks like I did a fine job.”

She had expected a reprimand, and she
was so touched and relieved by his warmth and his genuine happiness for her.

For the first time in a very long time,
she felt tears of gratitude. She managed to keep them in, though, letting the
silence speak for them as their hands remained clasped together in a solemn
gesture of a friendship that had developed far too late.