Tunnel of Night (30 page)

There have been many times that I’ve tried to see beyond murder, to understand what is required by intimacy. As a young man, I watched the faces of couples engrossed in conversation over coffee at the Hayes-Bickford Cafeteria. I saw them talk and touch and smile and agonize, communicating privately with only their eyes. I studied them.

Theirs was a drama that they played out for themselves while fucking their way through school. The play was a titillating mystery—the excitement of curling into a dormitory bed intended for one. The late night phone calls made to microscopically examine the details of a life together were an essential aspect of the mystery.

I decided that all relationships were self-referential. They turned back upon themselves and stayed that way until one or both participants grew bored. For me, murder remained the simpler and more satisfying endeavor.

One night during those years, a group of students gathered at a warehouse fire in East Cambridge. They gazed at the fire from a distance, fearful, while I inched closer to the flames, wondering what fear was, wanting to know if what I had tasted in my stepfather’s cellar was fear. The building crashed in upon itself, smashed down and blew up a shower of flaming chunks of debris.

I heard shrieks from the group behind me.

“Aren’t you frightened?” a young woman asked. I shook my head.

“You should move back,” she said, standing at my shoulder.

We walked together, back to Central Square, but the subway had shut down for the night.

“Ever walk the tracks?” I asked Annie.

“Through the tunnels? What about rats?”

“There’s a world underground.”

I remember the red and yellow caution lights blending into their own colors of fire, and casting oversized shadows on the walls. We became giants in the underground maze.

We ended up at her place, talked, and drank.

“I think we’re too drunk to fuck,” Annie said. “But I’d really like to.”

She fell asleep on the floor, her hair spread in a fan around her head, her hands clenched into small fists like a child. I got down on my knees and touched her face, ran my fingers across her lips, and, finally, touched her lips with mine. She never moved.

The next day she slipped into a seat beside me in the lecture hall and handed me a note. “Did you do anything to me last night?” the note said. “If you didn’t, I’m gonna be pissed.”

She had scribbled her phone number across the bottom. We both stared forward as a graduate teaching assistant tore into
The Winter’s Tale.
“Shakespeare’s message is simple,” he said. “Sin must be paid for before it can be forgiven.”

When he finished, she leaned over.

“I think I had a good time last night,” she said. “But I think all the heat was at the fire.”

The second night, she opened two beers, handed
me one, and said, “I want to know you. You don’t want that, do you?”

“If you drink faster, I won’t have to answer that question.”

“Then I’ll pass out and you’ll take advantage of me again. Or would it be the first time? I don’t remember.”

“You have no idea of the risks that you’re taking.”

“That’s what makes it so exciting. You could be a murderer. You could be the one who killed that girl last spring, strangled her with her own sock.”

She pushed a bowl of nuts across the table. “Have some,” she said. “I bet you snuck up there while she was sleeping, broke into her apartment…”

“How did I break into her apartment?”

“With a crow bar? No. A screwdriver. You pried the door so the lock slid open. Then you went in, found her in the bedroom. You probably didn’t mean to kill her, but she said she was going to tell the cops that you raped her. So then you had to kill her.”

“Annie, I’m in pre-med. I study martial arts. I know the pressure points on the neck. Why would I bother with the sock?”

“Aha,” she said. “Just like the Boston Strangles You killed her with your bare hands, then tied the sock around her neck in a bow like he used to do.”

“Let me tell you exactly how I did it.”

“Great. Let me get more beers first.”

She returned with a six-pack. “I want all the details, and don’t let me pass out.”

“I climbed up the fire escape,” I began.

“So that’s why nobody saw anything.”

“Are you going to keep interrupting?”

“No. I can’t help it, though. This is exciting.”

She was playing a game, and having a wonderful
time. She had no idea that what I was telling her was precisely what I had done.

“The bathroom window was open about two inches. I pushed it up and stepped inside.”

“Was there any light?” Annie asked, her eyes opened wide. “I’m sorry. I interrupted again.”

“No light,” I said softly. “It’s much better that way. Your eyes adjust to the darkness, and the darkness becomes your friend. It was a one-bedroom apartment, so it wasn’t hard to figure out where to go. I didn’t rape her.”

“That’s it?”

“Oh. She wore her socks to bed. During the brief struggle, she pulled off one sock. I don’t know why. Maybe panic. She grabbed at my hands, and the sock ended up draped across her throat. It wasn’t tied there.”

“You didn’t even rape her? Then why’d you kill her?”

“I wanted to spend time in her apartment, with her things, without her being there.”

Annie took a long drink from her beer. “Well, shit. Why didn’t you just break in and sniff her underwear when she was at class? I like my version better.”

Eventually, Annie married a guy from the business school. They moved to Connecticut and raised three children. Thirteen years after the warehouse fire, she sent me a gift—a copy of Loren Eiseley’s
The Unexpected Universe.
She had circled the author’s inscription: “To Wolf, who sleeps forever with an ice age bone across his heart, the last gift of one who loved him.”

A month later, I killed her in a horse stall.

I DOZED FITFULLY ON THE RETURN FLIGHT
, thinking about Wolf’s extended stay in Vermont. He’d had plenty of time to plan what was happening now. It was mere detail work. The man’s design for himself spanned a lifetime.

I also heard my father’s voice.

Trust your own mind, lad
.

My father had thirteen “heart attacks.” Most of them were trips to one drunk tank or another. The South View at least once, the Pines more than once. Sometimes, as I discovered much later, it was the less posh Charles Street Jail. They didn’t have a coronary care unit there.

Then he did die. Number fourteen was for real.

I remembered standing on a hill as he was lowered into the ground, and thinking about how we inhabit both the surface and the depths of the earth—wondering how long it would be before there were more people beneath the ground than above. Maybe there already were.

Because the living can be as blind as the dead, chance continues to rule the universe. There are no absolutes—not even in quantum physics. We exist for the blink of an
eye in the lifetimes of the galaxies. We have no choice but to trust our own minds
.

I stood in that cemetery on the hill, and I watched a bird on a phone wire. It flew out from its perch, snapped an insect out of the air, then returned to the wire.

“It’s a kingbird,” I had told my sister. “See the white band across the bottom of its tail?”

She squeezed my hand and whispered, “Listen to what the minister is saying.”

I didn’t understand a word of what the man in black went on about, but I was fascinated with the bird’s darting movements, its abrupt changes of direction, how it seemed almost to stop dead in midair.

Wolf had given Janet Orr a page from Peterson—the kingbird
.

Dexter Willoughby’s words about Wolf’s note in
The Collector
echoed in my mind: “It was dated and he wrote down the time.”

I had received a mockingbird
.

All of Wolf’s entries in his computer journal were numbered.

Coots and old squaws
.

“Jesus Christ,” I said, sitting up and grabbing the back of the seat in front of me.

The woman in the seat beside me glared and pulled away.

The first characteristic of Wolf’s that I had identified a year ago had been his rigidity. The man was methodical to a fault.

You have owned your world, lad, but you had to give it balance and order, didn’t you
?

“Sorry, ma’am,” I said to my flight companion. “I left my duffel in a locker back in Hartford.”

The birds had nothing to do with Wolf’s messages.
It was the fucking page numbers. What had Jackson said? Coots, page sixty-one. Wolf had killed Chadwick about two months ago. I needed a calender, but I was willing to bet that sixty-one was the start of a countdown, the number of days remaining until Wolf’s grand finale. He had killed his sister about a month ago. Old squaws, thirty-four.

“Shit,” I muttered.

Again, the woman’s head snapped around.

“My wallet’s in the duffel,” I explained, wondering how far I could go with that particular charade.

Kingbirds, eight. Mockingbirds, one-twenty-four. Only the final digit mattered. Wolf had delivered the phoenix four days after he had killed Janet. What did that leave?

Less than two days.

Thirty-six hours.

IT WAS LATE WHEN I ARRIVED BACK AT THE
Willard. I wanted to sleep for an hour, but my mind wouldn’t stop. I settled back on the bed with a bottle of ale, and drifted.

Suddenly, I was working in a restaurant on Nantasket Beach. It was the sixties. I wore jeans, a T-shirt, a white apron.

I was closing the restaurant—Amanda’s—while Leo, the owner, counted the nights receipts
.

The kid was carrying a knife when he walked in through the kitchen at the hack. He held the blade at Leo’s chin and said he wanted the money
.

I felt a familiar stirring inside me. I grabbed the kid by his greasy black hair
.

He brought the knife up and sliced my arm. For an
instant, I gazed into his eyes, at the wild panic there, then slammed his face down through the glass candy counter. Then I did it again. His blood spurted up, spattering my white apron
.

The cops questioned me. They said I might have killed the kid. They made it sound like I was the one who had done something wrong
.

Even Leo said, “Something like that happens, you just give ’em the money
.”

But I couldn’t. I had been cursed with my very own beast. A beast not unlike Wolf’s. I feared him. I loved him. I knew that if he ever escaped, ever took over, I would never be able to bring him back under control
.

After that incident—seeing the blade pressed into Leo’s flesh and feeling its edge myself—my beast was agitated for days, glaring at me with his black eyes, moving about, refusing to sit with his back to me
.

My sister had said, “It happened again, didn’t it
?”

I nodded
.

“Can’t you stop it?”

“
I don’t want to
.”

“
But
…”

“
He’s part of me,” I explained. “He scares me, but he’ll never let me down
.”

“He always finds a way to get out,” I muttered.

I lit a cigarette and watched the smoke spiral upward, remembering the fog as it moved in and hugged the Massachusetts shoreline. I thought about the worlds that lay beyond the fog. An ocean. A continent. Another continent. If I let my thoughts fly free enough and far enough, they circled the world, working their way home to me again.

I couldn’t remember how old I was the first time I knew that I had lost my way. Too young to cross the
street without holding my sister’s hand. Too young to walk down to the pier without her. But I could remember the sound of the waves crashing against the wall— the feel of the air and the smell of the sea. Even then I knew that people kill each other—a piece at a time, or in an orgasm of homicidal rage.

A man like Wolf fits smoothly into the scheme of things. Just as I do.

The line between us has blurred.

It has to, if I am to stop him.

LANE AND I WERE GETTING TOGETHER FOR A
late dinner.

I had my hand on the doorknob, prepared to step into the hall, then realized that I was distracted. I was about to walk out without my gun.

I retrieved my nine-millimeter and headed for the lobby

When I begin to drift, when my beast begins to stir, the breaking away becomes involuntary My thoughts assume lives of their own.

Of all things, I was thinking about a family trip we had taken years ago to Franconia Notch State Park in New Hampshire. After a picnic lunch, Lanie and Savvy and I had crossed Route 3 to the Flume, a series of underground caverns, rivers, waterfalls. Savvy said the place made her feel claustrophobic, so she had stayed behind in one of the larger caves while Lanie and I forged through the tunnels worn into the rocks over millions of years.

“Pop?”

I looked across the table at Lane.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“What?”

“You haven’t touched your food.”