Are You Afraid of the Dark?. Seth Adams C.
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Yesterday morning a man escaped from a police escort taking him to the county jail in Tucson.
‘No,’ said the killer, the answer snapping Reggie back to the moment. ‘There were two people I wish I hadn’t killed.’
‘Who were they?’ Reggie asked.
‘Just a woman and her son,’ the killer said. ‘No one special.’
‘Is it the woman you raped and killed yesterday?’ Reggie asked.
Ivan looked at him sternly.
‘What are you talking about?’ he said.
‘When I rode into town for the medicine,’ Reggie said, ‘there were police all over the highway. One of them stopped me and told me about the woman and kid you killed when you escaped.’
‘I didn’t kill anyone yesterday,’ he said.
‘But the cop said …’ Reggie began.
‘I don’t care what the cop said,’ the killer interrupted him. ‘A state trooper recognized the car I was driving as reported stolen. Pulled me over. A second highway patrol vehicle happened to be passing and pulled in behind me. They cuffed me, searched the vehicle.’
‘What were you doing here in Payne, then?’ Reggie asked. ‘Were you sent to kill someone?’
‘Only if necessary,’ the killer said. ‘I was sent to find something. Not my usual business, but the money was good.’
‘How’d you get away?’ Reggie asked, interested in what the killer was supposed to find, but deciding to save that question for another time.
‘There are a few ways to work yourself out of handcuffs if you know what you’re doing,’ Ivan said. ‘I waited until the two police cars were separated in traffic before I made my move. The trooper was young, inexperienced, and panicked when he saw me free of the cuffs. He crashed into the concrete divider, the window shattered, and I crawled out.’
Reggie’s uncertainty must have shown on his face, because the killer elaborated a little more. That the man wanted Reggie to believe him seemed somehow important, and so he filed that away in his mind.
Always mind the details, he thought, and was slightly disturbed by the killer’s voice replaying in his head.
‘I escaped yesterday from the police, beat them up pretty bad, got my stuff back, but I didn’t kill anyone. And I don’t do rape.’
‘So the woman and kid you’re talking about …’
‘Happened a long time ago,’ said the killer.
‘The officer said he’d show me the pictures,’ Reggie said, thinking of the deputy standing in front of his bike, blocking him, and later on the porch with his mom. ‘You know … of the crime scene.’
‘He was fucking with you,’ Ivan said.
Reggie thought of the deputy, and the bigger kid knocking him off his bike. He thought of holding the cool, heavy gun and pulling the trigger. He thought of what Ivan had said to him earlier.
The common denominator.
People know you’re weak.
He hadn’t felt weak with the pistol in his hands.
‘What about this woman and her son?’ Reggie said, changing the subject back again. ‘The ones you killed a long time ago.’
After a brief pause the killer spoke, and Reggie listened.
***
‘There was a woman who left her husband because he hit her. And we’re not just talking about how some guys do when they’re drunk. He hit her a lot.
‘Like many women in the same situation, at first she tried to placate him. She thought it was her fault. Maybe she didn’t pay enough attention to him. Maybe she wasn’t pretty enough. Lots of maybes with no answers.
‘He never gave her answers. He just hit her. And she took it, because a wife was supposed to be obedient to her husband. That’s how she was raised, and so she just took it. Until he hit their son.
‘That’s when things changed. That’s when she couldn’t take it anymore.
‘So one day she left him. She packed a couple suitcases when he was at work, took their son, and left. Didn’t leave a note or anything.
‘There was only one problem,’ the killer said. ‘Her husband was someone important. Or, more accurately, his father was. Her husband was a coyote for human traffickers. His father was the man financing that operation, and many others.
‘Her husband’s family had their hands not only in human trafficking, but drugs, prostitution, weapons procurement, and pornography. This family was used to getting what they wanted, and once they had something it was theirs until they no longer wanted it. And her husband wanted her back, just not alive.
‘He didn’t even need all of her. Just the head would do, he said.
‘Furthermore, since his son was a quiet kid, a reader, and not at all likely suitable for the family business, he saw no reason to let the kid live either.
‘So the husband called me. He explained to me what he wanted, and offered me a lot of money. I accepted the job.
‘I found the woman less than a week later. She was working as a card dealer in some Indian casino. The kid was going to school nearby.
‘I waited for them at their home. The kid came first and I knocked him out and tied him to a chair. The woman called some time later and left a message on the machine. She told her son she was going to cover a shift for one of the other dealers and wouldn’t be home until the following morning. She told him not to wait up.
‘My initial plan was to do them together. Let the mom watch me kill her son, then kill her. The husband said he wanted her to suffer, but he didn’t specify how. I thought that was as good a way as any. Sometimes emotional pain is greater than physical.
‘Remember that, Reggie,’ the killer said.
Reggie did just that, adding it to the litany of other things the killer had already told him:
Always mind the details.
Some things live. Some things die.
‘But I didn’t see any sense in making the kid wait that long,’ the killer continued. ‘He’d woken up at the ringing of the phone, took stock of the situation, and was crying. He’d also peed himself, and I thought that was enough so I shot him in the face.’
The offhand manner in which the killer relayed the story at first bothered Reggie. At the mention of the kid in the story getting shot in the face, Reggie thought of the gun in the holster under Ivan’s jacket. He thought of holding that gun only a short while ago, squeezing the trigger, watching the bottles get whisked away. The power he’d felt with its weight in his hands.
But picturing one of those bullets punching into the face of a boy like himself was another thing altogether. And then the faceless boy in this mental movie was replaced by his dad, sprawled in the parking lot of the church.
Shifting uneasily against the tree house wall, Reggie looked out the window, then looked to the ladder again. But he didn’t move, and listened as the killer continued.
Ivan likewise shifted against the wall he sat against, a hand to his bandage. A barely audible moan escaped as he shuffled for a more comfortable position. But otherwise there was no hint of pain – either physical, or the greater sort he’d just mentioned as he’d confessed to killing a child.
‘It was just after midnight when I shot him.
‘She came home at around