SATURDAY, 12:01 A.M.
There was a knock on Robert Ramsey’s door. It was loud, insistent. Maybe it started off soft, but if so Ramsey hadn’t heard it over the sound of running water.
He was in the bathroom washing the dirt from his hands. He turned the water off and waited for the knocking to stop.
It didn’t.
He thought he’d been careful. Karen’s old flower bed was around back, flush against the house, blocked from view by bushes and the tall wooden fence around the yard. He’d worked by the light of the moon, though it was a cloudy night and the world around him had been little more than gray blurs in blackness.
But maybe the neighbors had heard him. There’s not much you can do to muffle the sound of a shovel biting into earth.
Ramsey crept into the hall and peeped at the picture window in the living room, thinking he might see red and blue lights flashing through the blinds. The police would need a warrant, wouldn’t they? They couldn’t just come barging in, no matter what someone had seen or heard . . . right?
But there were no flashing lights, and when Ramsey sneaked to the window and peeked at the street all he saw out front was the old Corolla he’d have to move soon with the key he’d taken from Andy Abrams’s pocket. The porch was out of his line of sight.
And still the knocking didn’t stop.
He had no choice. Whoever it was—nosy neighbors, stoned students trying to get into the wrong house, his former tenants dropping by to tell him what a tool he was for kicking them out—he’d have to shoo them away, fast. He couldn’t let anyone draw attention to his house or the car parked out front.
It occurred to him as he walked to the door that it might be Karen. Perhaps she’d found out that Andy was coming to see him. What a nightmare that would be. Or what an opportunity . . .
The knocking got louder.
“All right! I’m coming!” Ramsey faked a yawn as he reached for the doorknob. “You woke me up in the middle of the most beautiful drAHHHH!”
“Hi, Bob,” Andy Abrams said.
His clothes were dirty and disheveled, and there were clumps of sod in his dark, curly hair. But there were no marks around his throat, and his face had lost the purple-blue hue it had the last time Ramsey had seen it. Which had been, of course, the last time Ramsey had expected to see it.
“Mind if I come in?” Abrams asked. His tone was relaxed, his expression pleasant.
“Uhhhhhh . . . sure.”
“Thanks.”
Ramsey let Abrams move past him into the house. Then he leaned out and scanned the street and the neighboring homes. No one seemed to have noticed the freshly exhumed man standing on his porch.
Ramsey closed the door and joined him in the living room.
“Andy, I . . . I don’t know what to say.”
“I know.” Abrams smiled blandly. “Awkward!”
“Yeah. Look. I wonder . . . Do you know . . . Is it clear to you that . . . I mean . . . What do you think happened?”
“Oh, I remember everything, if that’s what you’re trying to ask. It’s not like I woke up in the flower bed thinking, ‘Golly, what am I doing here?’ But don’t worry. I’m not mad.”
“You’re not?” Ramsey said.
Abrams gave him an “awww, pshaw” swipe of the hand. Pebbles and dirt slid from his sleeve.
“Perish the thought. I was prodding you, Bob. Testing you. And you simply reacted according to your nature . . . which I think we’ve established pretty solidly now is ‘psychopath.’”
Ramsey gritted his teeth. “I am not a psycho.”
Abrams shrugged. “The proof is in the pudding, Bob. And up until ten minutes ago, it was in your backyard. But as I said—no hard feelings. Just pack up, get out of town, and we’ll forget the whole thing.”
“You really expect me to believe that you wouldn’t tell the cops I . . . You know. Lost my temper?”
“Sure. Don’t look a gift mitzvah in the mouth, Bob. And anyway, what choice do you have?”
Ramsey had been moving across the room as Abrams spoke, pretending to pace nervously. He stopped when his feet began crunching over silvery slivers on the floor—remnants of the frame glass he’d shattered earlier in the evening. He crouched down and picked up part of the beer bottle he’d smashed it with.
The neck.
The edges were jagged, sharp.
“What choice do I have, Andy? What choice do I have? Why don’t I show you?”
Abrams put up his hands and took a step back. “Please. No. Not like that. The strangling, Bob! The strangling wasn’t so bad!”
Ramsey rushed him.
It was a lot messier this time. And louder. But it was more definitive, too. No one was going to wake up from that. And there was an advantage to murdering a man twice in the same night, Ramsey discovered.
You only had to dig the grave once.
SATURDAY, 2:24 A.M.
There was a knock on Robert Ramsey’s door.
Ramsey opened his eyes and found himself staring up at the ceiling. He blinked and blinked and blinked again. Then he remembered.
He’d collapsed back onto his bed, exhausted, after finishing up out back. He was only going to rest for a minute, he’d told himself. Then he’d get up and move Abrams’s car.
Only he’d fallen asleep instead. And now a dream about a knock on the door had—
There was another knock. Loud and long and very, very real.
It wasn’t a dream. Someone was at the front door.
It couldn’t be, Ramsey thought. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t be.
Yet he couldn’t make himself get off the bed and go check. He couldn’t make himself move at all, except to turn his head to look at the clock.
2:28—still knocking.
2:33—still knocking.
2:37—the knocking stopped.
Ramsey heaved a sigh of relief.
Then someone tapped on the window just above his bed.
“I hope you don’t mind if I lecture a bit here, Bob,” Andy Abrams said. “But it seems like my message just isn’t getting through.”
The window was closed and the blind drawn, thank God, so Ramsey couldn’t see him. But he could picture him. And what Ramsey pictured made him want to puke.
“Do you know what dybbukim are, Bob?” Abrams said. “I assume not. I might have mentioned them to you once, at a party or something, but you probably stopped listening. Jewish mysticism—not your thing, I know. So here’s a little refresher: A dybbuk is a malicious spirit that attaches itself to a living host. Sort of like a psychic parasite. And sort of like you, Bob. What you did to Karen. Haunting her, hurting her, sucking her dry. I thought I’d give you a taste of it. That bad, bad penny that keeps turning up. Not fun, is it?”
Another rap on the glass jolted Ramsey off the bed.
“I hope you’re listening, Bob. I hope you’re taking notes,” Abrams said. “Oh, Karen was never unfaithful to you, by the way. I just made that up to get your goat. And boy howdy, did it! Ouch! Vick’s isn’t going to do a thing for this sore throat, let me tell you. It’s worth it, though. Karen is a very special lady. So smart, so funny. And cute as a button. I do admit I’ve had my eye on her. You had me pegged there. She stirred something in me that had been asleep for a long, long . . . Well. I’ve strayed off topic, haven’t I? Summation time. Listen closely. This will be on the final exam.
“You’ve got to get over this jealous-possessive-crazy thing, Bob . . . because I’m going to keep dropping in on you if you don’t. Go forth and sin no more, that’s my message to you. People can change. It’s hard, it takes time, but it happens. So try. Please. If you find you can’t hack it . . . I don’t know. Maybe castrate yourself. Or at the very least join a monastery. But you’ve got to knock it off with the stalking. Do you hear me, Bob? Hmm? Scream or something so I know you’re listening. Bob? Bob?”
Abrams was leaning in close to the window, listening intently, one ear to the glass. Which is why he hadn’t noticed Ramsey slipping out the back door and coming up behind him.
He didn’t ask to be strangled this time. Didn’t complain about the aluminum softball bat in Ramsey’s hands. He never saw it coming.
Ramsey brought the bat down over Abrams’s head like he was Abe Lincoln splitting a log. The head didn’t act very loglike, though. It was more like a watermelon taking a whack from a mallet. There wasn’t much of it left by the time the body was dragged inside.
Ramsey deposited Abrams on the kitchen floor, then went out to the garage for his power tools and a tarp. When he was done an hour later, he loaded up Abrams’s Toyota and went for a little spin. There were four suitcases in the trunk.
One he left in the woods north of town.
One he left in the lake south of town.
One he left in the quarry east of town.
One he left at the dump west of town.
The car he left at Kroger.
It was a long walk home, made all the longer by the need to keep to alleys and yards and shadows. But at last, at exactly 5:30 A.M., Ramsey was able to collapse back onto his bed and close his eyes and rest.