I try to scream, but my throat closes. I’m back at Nichols. I’m pinned against my car on a back road. I’m watching a live feed of my girls on a playground. Images of my husband and his lover.
It’s becoming familiar, so the reaction passes quickly through me. In mere seconds the shock is gone, and I am moving with clarity and intention.
I grab a towel and wrap it around my body. I take a nail file—the metal one with the sharp end—from the shelf against the wall with the window. I see my sweats on the bed just through the door and think that my phone is in the pocket and the burner phone is in the kitchen where I left it and that Wade is making his escape. If he’d wanted to get to me, he could have.
He could have come into the bathroom and locked the door behind him. The water was pounding, and my back was turned.
I stop at the entrance and exhale quickly to even out the adrenaline. I picture the sharp end of the nail file plunging into his neck, his left carotid artery because I am right handed. I will have to reach for it.
And then I make a move.
I scan the bedroom in an instant. It’s clear, so I go to the bed and shake the clothes, then feel them with my left hand because my right hand holds the weapon and my eyes do not leave the open door to the hallway. Nothing falls from the pockets. The phone is gone.
No phone. No gun because it’s still locked in the box downstairs. The windows face the backyard. I can’t see the street. My voice will be muted if I call out to the detail, and even then, there would be too many words.
I hear footsteps on the stairs. I know every sound this house makes. He’s taking them slowly, wanting me to hear the way he wanted me to see. But he doesn’t want to catch me. He doesn’t want me to catch him. This is a game he plays in his mind, and now in mine.
I put on the sweats. Drop the towel to the ground. Next, I go to the hallway, and the sound of the feet on the stairs quicken and then become steps across the floor that leads back to the kitchen. It’s the same sound I hear at night when Mitch comes to find me.
I run after him because if this is a game, I want it to be over. I want to win or lose or draw—any way it has to happen.
I’m at the bottom of the steps when I see the front door but hear the back door and know I have a choice. It will take Wade fewer than ten seconds to reach the van, where he’ll get inside and turn the ignition, his feet on a plastic bag or a rubber mat. He wears a uniform, polyester head to toe. A matching baseball cap with the Amazon logo. He’s been back in my classroom, reading about diversions and hiding in plain sight. Reading about cases where a killer gained entry to an apartment building by posing as a cable repairman. Or a security guard. Or a mail carrier.
I think about the rookie cops out in that SUV. I think about them checking the time. Used to nothing ever happening on this detail. Not once. Everyone assumes that he is done with me because I’ve kept things to myself. Complacency has set in. This is why he’s waited. Another lesson I taught him.
I can go for the front door. Race outside. But he will beat me to the van, drive right past me. I have nothing but my body to stop him. The detail is facing the other way, in the wrong direction. Five seconds to reach them. Fifteen to explain. Then they’ll have to call it in while they start the car and turn it around and chase after the van.
And then what?
The sound of the back door is still hanging in the air as these calculations are made in mere seconds. They come not as thoughts now but instincts.
We won’t catch him. The van will disappear before more units can get to the neighborhood. Once he leaves my street, he can choose left or right, then left or right or straight, easily five or six times before we could catch up, and that’s assuming we guessed right at each juncture. The odds are against us. Against me. Because, I remind myself, I am alone with this man. With his obsession. With the knowledge about the plastic bag from the Getaway Inn and the surveillance from the Ridgeway Shopping Center and the secret phone.
I am alone, the way I was in Nichols that day.
I am alone now, in this house, as I look out the window from the front hall and see the van disappear down the road. The rookies don’t even notice because they have grown weary of checking their rearview mirrors.
My body feels limp as I walk the same hall as the intruder, to my kitchen and the back door that is closed as it was before. He must have walked right in my front door because that was the only one I left open when I took the girls to the bus stop. He drove the van from the other end of the street. He parked. He carried a package, which I see when I open the back door, now unlocked.
He walked up my flagstone steps and into my open house and waited for me to return. I wonder where he hid as I cleaned the dishes and turned on the shower and then went to the girls’ room and their bathroom and picked up the pajamas from the floor. I wonder if he pulled that towel from the hook and let it fall to the floor where I was sure to see it. And remember.
I wonder where he hid while I took off my clothes and got in the shower and how long he stood there, watching me through the doorway and the steamy glass, reveling in my vulnerability.
I take the package, place it on the table and open it with the nail file that remains clutched in my hand. Inside the box is a crisp new folder. I pick it up with clumsy, trembling fingers. The adrenaline has subsided, and I am left frail and limp. It’s a struggle to stand. To remain upright.
I open the folder to find a stack of photos. They’ve been printed at an office store. The paper is glossy and the images sharp. These did not come from the hotel.
They are images of people, gathered in pairs and small groups. I recognize the scene. It’s from the underpass, from under the bridge. These are the dealers and the sex workers and the homeless. These are the people who provided shelter to Clay Lucas, who gave him access to a gun. The photos then zoom in on the small clusters so each face can be seen in at least one frame. Faces of people from under the bridge. Faces of the dealers. Faces of people I told Wade I wanted to die. I think about the words I used.Hatred. Vengeance. Justice.I told him that it tortured me, having killed a man. But that I knew I could kill again if given the chance to rid the world of this evil. The person who put a weapon in the hands of someone like Clay. Someone sick and vulnerable.
I didn’t mean it. Not any of it. Yes, I wanted to find the dealer. And yes, a part of me had been reeling with these raw emotions. When I followed that blue truck to the edge of town, I’d been holding them in for two weeks because I knew they were dangerous. It’s what our brains do for us hundreds of times every day. Push against emotion with reason. With civility. And morality and judgment. The world would be a very different place if our impulses were left unchecked. If it suddenly became acceptable to behave however we wanted, moment to moment. Instead, we don’t even speak of the things we want to do and say, let alone do and say them.
But for that one moment on that back road, Wade managed to tear down the barricades, to give me permission, and I did speak of the things I wanted to do and say after the shooting. It felt safe because he echoed each and every one. He, too, wanted to find the dealer and rid him from the world. He, too, felt rage and hatred. His eyes lit up when he said this. And again, when I said it back.
Christ, I know better.
The last photo zooms in on a young man. I don’t recognize him, but his face is circled with a red pen. And I know exactly what this means.
I hear the burner phone, which he moved to the counter near the coffee machine along with the one he took from my clothing, buzz with a new message. It says simply,You’re welcome.
