Public Enemy Read online

  As she said this, Janine reached over and touched her son’s shoulder in a way that made Laramie think suddenly that she was a very good mother.

  “You know why? I knew you’d ask the same horrible questions that everybody else asked me, and that I’d be making him hear it by bringing him with me, but you know what? I don’t believe you people, and I don’t trust you either. You lie about one thing, then another, you lie to the media, to the public, you lie to me, I don’t even know who you’re lying to on any given day, who can keep track? Maybe you’re lying to everybody. It can’t be a gas main explosion and a suicide bombing, can it? It can’t be the flu and a terrible disease bomb, can it? I don’t believe you that Benny isn’t Benny, and I don’t believe you that he did this. You know what I think? I think you did it. I think somebody ran a test. They made a bomb. The CIA. FBI. Whoever. They wanted to try out their bomb, and they decided to blame Benny. Did he say something you didn’t like, something about the government? Or was he just convenient, you sons of bitches-oh my God, he’s gone…I don’t trust you people! You get it now? For all I know, you’re planning to take my son next. You’ll tell me he isn’t Carter after all, I bet. But you’ll fucking take him over my dead body.”

  She suddenly reached over with her other arm and grabbed her son in a bear-hug embrace.

  “Fuck you people, it’s not true! None of it! Get out!”

  Laramie sat still while this played out, Janine sobbing into Carter’s shoulder for a few minutes running. She felt the urge to join in on the hug, to comfort them in some way, but there wasn’t exactly anything for her to do, particularly anything like joining the hug, so she thought things through instead.

  The motel thing had bothered her from the minute she’d read about it. It had bothered the other investigators too, to the point where they’d suspected her of being in on it, until her background check came out clear, and then interrogator after interrogator sat and listened to Janine say the same things she’d just told Laramie, in almost exactly the same way. This bolstered the case for her innocence-had she been lying, it seemed impossible she wouldn’t have got caught up in even the smallest inconsistency given the multiple repeats of her tale.

  But the motel bothered Laramie in a different way: it made something register in her analyst’s mind, something that didn’t quite fit the rest of the puzzle. It was the timing. She couldn’t pin down exactly why or where the timing was off initially, but she knew it was.

  When the sobs died down, Laramie decided to come at it a little differently.

  “Listen,” she said, “if it were true that all this-”

  “ARE YOU STILL HERE?”

  Laramie let Janine’s shrill bellow hang out there for a moment.

  When the noise of the outburst felt to her as though it had faded, Laramie said, “Janine, listen to me. I don’t trust our government any more than you do. In fact I know not to trust it-them-by experience. But just in case it were true-in case it isn’t all one gigantic lie-there’s something I’d like to hear from you.”

  “Why should I tell you anything? I told everybody everything already anyway.”

  Laramie heard it in the speed of the woman’s second sentence and knew immediately she’d been right about what she was about to ask.

  “Mrs. Achar,” she said. “You’re lying.”

  “Go to hell. I’m sure that fits your conspiracy just like everything else-”

  “You’re lying because you’re trying to protect him.”

  This seemed to quiet her down, if only temporarily.

  “I think that despite all the evidence-the identity theft, the timing of your trip, all of it-I think that you know, deep inside, that he wasn’t honest with you. And that he did something terrible here.”

  “Don’t you tell me what I know or don’t know.”

  “Let me finish. You had your say, now I’ll have mine.” Laramie felt like a bully, running an interrogation with a distraught widow and her eight-year-old son by yelling in their faces. Too bad. “In reading everything you said in all the interviews, and in hearing you now, I think you will never believe he did what the government says he did. That your husband would not have tried to kill thousands of people, or a million people, or whatever it was the government is saying he was trying to do. It bothers you, because you think he was lying to you, but you know he wouldn’t have been trying to do what they’ve accused him of. So you’re protecting him.”

  Janine just stared at the floor, holding her son.

  “What did he tell you before you left?”

  Janine didn’t change expression or the direction in which she was looking, but Laramie felt something shift in the room.

  “You knew to be ready to disappear. I know that part. You had the kind of cash on you that nobody carries around anymore. Not unless they’re looking to book ten days at a local Holiday Inn under a false name. What I want to know is, What did he say? Was it during dinner? After he put Carter to bed? Over the drinks? Help me out here. Nobody else-”

  “Help you?-my God, you are just like the rest-”

  Preparing to repeat the question, Laramie suddenly realized what it was that connected the motel and the M-2, and answered her question as to the timing. The feeling was as familiar to her as the sense of un-wholeness that had greeted her that first night in the Motor 8, only this time it was a sense of completion. Of the tumblers in the keyhole racking into place.

  When she asked the question, repeating it to compel Janine to focus, Laramie felt some saliva escape from her mouth and spray halfway across the interrogation table.

  “What did he tell you!”

  Janine said nothing at first, but in a moment, something did come.

  Tears.

  There were only the tears-Janine didn’t outwardly cry, and there came no sobs, only the dual streams of the silent tears coursing down her cheeks.

  “He saved my life,” she said, almost inaudibly. “He saved Carter’s life.”

  Laramie nodded slowly.

  “I just don’t understand,” Janine said. She was talking to herself, quietly enough that Laramie caught most of it by watching the widow’s lips move as she spoke. “He would never do what they say he did. What you say he did. It just isn’t…possible. You can tell me whatever you want to tell me. Us-you can tell us anything. Show us any evidence. But it won’t matter. It won’t make any difference. I know my husband. We know him. Even if we didn’t know his real name. We know him-him-and he would never have done it. He would never have tried to kill thousands of people. Never. Ever.”

  The tears continued in their twin streams down the sides of her haggard face. She was leaning back in her chair now. Her left arm remained draped around Carter’s shoulders. Carter’s chin was pressed against his chest and Laramie couldn’t see his face. With her right hand, Janine wiped away a tear, but it was like trying to divert a river with an oar.

  Thinking she might have to assist Janine in connecting the tears and the widow’s thoughts to words, Laramie said, “But you said he saved your lives. How did-I know you don’t just mean Seattle, the trip to Seattle. How is it he saved your lives?”

  In due course, Janine looked up at Laramie through her tears.

  “He told me-” she said, then stopped, and now the sobs came, the woman taking in a big, heaving, choppy breath of air that sounded almost like a rattle-“he told me that if something happened-”-a kind of wail escaped her throat and merged with the sobbing and crying, Laramie nearly cringing at the raw outburst from this desperate, grieving widow with no source of hope or comfort-“he told me that if something happened while I was gone, I would need to hide. To go away. For as long as I could. But for no less than seven days…oh, Christ…for no less than seven days!”

  The piercing wails that followed prompted Carter to burst into tears, the boy calling for her as he grabbed her around the neck and waist.

  They cried into each other’s bodies for many minutes. After almost ten minutes had passed without the
sobs lessening, Laramie decided she couldn’t take it any longer. She rose, came around the table, reached down, and placed a hand on the widow’s shoulder. Nothing changed-the wails continued, the sobbing cries, Carter burrowing into his mom’s bosom, his cries of “Mommy, mommy,” muted by her storm of wails-but at least, Laramie thought, she isn’t pushing my arm away.

  Laramie stayed there, touching Janine Achar’s shoulder, for a while. When the pitch of the wails seemed destined never to shift or end, Laramie decided there was nothing more to be asked or done. She had learned what she needed to learn. She could do nothing more for this person-not that she had done anything for her anyway. Not that anybody could-probably ever.

  Laramie opened the door and left the interview room.

  18

  He waited until they came all the way in-until the very instant before they grabbed him. While the cell door was open and he was still free to move. He felt their presence, he heard that the door had not yet closed, and he took his shot.

  Sidestepping, he spun, seized the pistol from its nook in the ammo belt of the guard closest to him, and fired blindly. He fired blindly because of the obvious-he wore a blindfold and his hands were cuffed behind his back-but he managed to empty the revolver’s chambers in what he estimated to be the vicinity of the three men. Then he dove into the hall, smashing his chin and ear as he bounced on the hard stone of the passageway.

  He had grown so emaciated and his musculature was so weak following his imprisonment and starvation that he was able, and quickly, to pull his cuffed wrists down past his ass and under his squatting legs. He felt his hands partially dislocate from the wrists as he did it, but this weird bending of his frayed bones allowed his wrists to slip from the cuffs like twigs from a bucket. The dislocation should have hurt, but he never remembered any pain from that moment.

  He remembered only that he had discovered his hands to be free.

  He still dreamed, often, of the house of horrors that followed. As much as he had been trained to kill, as any soldier was, he later admitted the actions he undertook on that day were the actions of a killer-not those of a soldier trained to kill, but those of a murderer. One who kills pathologically, for sexual pleasure-the more brutal the act, the better. He viewed himself differently from that point forward, and this altered view of himself hadn’t changed over time. He knew it never would. That it never could.

  Once he got the blindfold off and had slipped out of the cuffs, he looked up and found he’d downed two of them. The felled men were making noises-grunts and curses, each man far from dead. Cooper saw the third man, coward that he was, turning the corner ahead of them in the passageway. Going to get help-going, Cooper knew, to the chamber of horrors. What came next, he knew God would never forgive him for. That He couldn’t, and shouldn’t. Presuming there was even somebody upstairs, which he often found hard to believe-Cooper considering it would be better if the attic were empty, given the toll the big man would undoubtedly collect once Cooper’s time came around.

  He found another gun on one of the men he’d shot, snatching it as the bloodied guard realized what was happening and, too late, made a grab for it. Cooper held the pistol to the man’s chin, leaned in close, eye to eye, screamed some obscenity he’d never been able to remember, and pulled the trigger. He watched from two inches away as the man’s face erupted, chin to hairline, blasting across the floor in wet fragments of bone, tooth, flesh, and gristle, a triangular spray that deflected off the floor and rained out and up, catching his own chin and cheeks with wet warmth as it shot forth. Ears ringing-for the moment, deaf besides the ringing-face burned from the muzzle blast, one eye partially blinded by the bright burst of the shot-Cooper pocketed the pistol. He knew he would need it for what he would do when he caught up to the third man. The coward-running for the chamber of horrors.

  First, though, the second of the three.

  Cooper found the man gurgling in pain on the floor of the passageway, rocking slightly, busy trying to get oxygen into his flooded lungs. Pulling the machete the man kept on his belt, memories registering of the slices this one had made on his arms, legs, even once across his cock, Cooper grinned a diseased, insane, murderous grin-and swung. He sliced clear through one of the man’s arms and Cooper heard the machete clang on the rock floor of the passageway. It felt so good to him that the tremors of an orgasm came searching for his loins, but his testicles had endured so much pain by then the tremors were met by a brick wall and retreated. Cooper sought more of the pleasure, savagely-an addict going for the ultimate hit, slicing, whacking, chopping, exhausting himself as he diced his former captor into what he remembered counting as nine pieces. He went back, then, to the man with no face-the one he had shot. The man was already dead, but the addict craving another hit could not shake his need, and so he lifted the man by his remaining hair, held his body in a seated position, and beheaded what was left of the guard’s skull with the machete.

  Thrusting the machete under the arm that held the faceless head, he drew the stolen pistol again with the other hand and began to run. Not away-not yet. Head in hand, holding it out ahead of him, he ran, screaming at the edge of his deteriorated larynx, sprinting headlong down the dark tunnel…to the room.

  He came at them with the pistol blazing. They were ready for him, warned by the fleeing coward, and they shot at him and hit him more than once from their hiding places. He saw where they were hiding-one crouched astride the open doorway, one prone beside the chair, the third standing behind the wooden post that kept the ceiling of the ancient room from caving in. Without adequate training and the requisite balls, however, felling a target shooting back from close range was one of the most challenging tasks in combat, and these men were no match for the addict seeking his next hit.

  Bullets whinging and pocking on the wall and floor around him, Cooper found his opponents to be pathetic, the cowards generating miss after miss. He was struck in the left forearm and outer thigh, but with the pain tolerance he’d developed-that they’d fostered in him-he didn’t even notice. With the five shots he had remaining in the revolver, the addict went five-for-five against the three opponents. He knew exactly who each man was: the guard who had fled in the passageway had been the one feeding him the crusty tortillas; the one beside the chair was the one who had whipped and strafed him; the one behind the post, the man with the mustache, was the one who’d always done the talking as the other whipped him with the serrated paddle from hell.

  Two bullets made it into each of Whip-man and Tortilla, one into Mustache. The direct hits disabled them, and they fell, and whether two of them had survived the initial bullet strikes, Cooper had never known. He knew that Mustache had not been killed, because he gutted him with the machete while the man screamed and flailed on the floor. He laid waste to the other two in like fashion, Cooper screaming, a constant yell, as though he held no need for breath in the process of emitting the steady, curdling wail that escaped his throat. When he was through with the men, he took to the chair-the chair-and killed it with the machete like he had the men. When he had chopped it to pieces, he took all of the guns in the room and emptied them at the remaining pieces of the chair, blasting away until each revolver clicked on an empty chamber. Until there were no more bullets to shoot with.

  In the process of his committing these inhuman murders, the door of the chamber had somehow eased shut. He remembered seeing this, feeling the deep cringe of ungodly fear, as though the devil himself had closed the door and would shortly be setting the oven to broil. He’d made an impossible escape, accomplished vengeful, disturbingly satisfying retaliation-and yet it seemed he would remain trapped for eternity in the chamber of horrors.

  He dropped the first man’s severed head, which he realized only then he had held on to throughout; he dropped the pistol he’d just exhausted. Then he scrambled for the door, slipped, and fell. On his face. And hands-he remembered his hands from that moment, the sight of them in the torch-lit room, because he found them coated in blood
when he looked at them. Dipped and soaked to well above the wrists. He felt the same blood dripping from his face, and chin, and neck, and as he stood, he saw that he had become coated with it, with the blood of his enemies, that he was standing in a puddle of it, of the blood he had shed, a puddle the edge of which he could not see. His shoeless feet were immersed in it, toes nearly covered.

  He slipped and skidded through the blood, all but wading, as though he were dreaming of trying to run through quicksand. He grasped the handle of the door, the handle he had wanted so badly to grasp all those times, and his hands slipped on it, and he thought for a terrifying moment that it was locked, that he had somehow locked himself in, but then he tried it again and it opened.

  He didn’t know which way to go, but he knew that if he followed the lost light he could find his way, that hint of daylight reaching through the darkness and the torches lighting the tunnels, the drab gray mist of daylight brighter around each succeeding corner and stairwell, and then there was a massive wooden door with a round, windowless opening in the center, and he grasped its handle with his bloodied hand, pulled it inward, and felt the blinding assault of equatorial sunshine on eyes that hadn’t seen daylight in months. He collapsed from the blinding daylight-the pain striking him in his eyes, a place he was not accustomed to feeling pain.

  He rose slowly, recovering-squinting, so that he saw the world only through the miniscule slivers between his interlaced eyelashes.