But in the end, there’s only Mel, and walking meat for Mel to use. I’ve learned that the hard way.
Violence is all he understands, which is why I’ve called in this favor from Absalom. I want Melvin to clearly feel what he risks when he comes after us. Fear of death is the only thing that can possibly persuade him to leave us alone. I don’t know if he can fear pain; I know he experiences it, but fear is a tricky thing with him. One thing is certain, though: he won’t want to die, or be maimed for life. Not unless it’s on his own terms. He takes control to sickeningly perverse levels.
“Here’s the deal,” I tell him. “You leave us alone and forget about coming after us, and I won’t have you fucked with an iron bar and beaten to death in the shower. How’s that?”
His lips are split and swollen, but he smiles, and as he does, the purplish skin stretches and a dark crimson split opens, threading a line of fresh blood down his chin. It drools on his broken fingers and wicks into the clean cotton bandage in a spreading red stain. That’s the monster, all over him. No longer in hiding at all. He doesn’t seem to notice, or care. “Sweetheart,” he says. “I never knew you had it in you, all this violence. It’s honestly sexy.”
“Fuck you.”
“Let me tell you how this is going to go, Gina.” He likes saying my old name. Rolling it around in his mouth. Tasting it. Fine, let him have it. I’m not Gina anymore. “I know you. You’re no more mysterious than a windup toy. You’re going to go running back to your rural little patch and pray that I won’t follow through on my threat. You’ll dither around for a day, maybe two. Then you’ll realize you can’t count on my goodwill, and you’ll grab my children and run away, again. You’re destroying them, you know, with all this running and hiding. You think they won’t break? Brady’s going silently mad, and you don’t even see it. But I see it. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. And you’re going to run away and rip up their lives and doom them to another slide down the spiral—”
I hang up in the middle of his calm, eerily even diatribe, stand up, and stare at him through the dirty plastic. Other people have leaned against this barrier. I can see the sweaty outlines of handprints and the gauzy impression of lipstick.
I spit.
The saliva hits the glass and rolls down. It makes it look like he’s crying, except for the sickening, constant smile on his face. For a moment I’m overcome with it all—the Lysol-and-sweat stink of this place. The sight of fresh blood dripping from his chin. The slick, awful way his voice still worms inside me and sets off tremors of fear and disgust and self-doubt, because I once trusted this thing.
He’s still talking into the receiver.
I don’t pick up the phone again, but I lean both palms on the counter and lock eyes with the monster. The man I married. The father of my children. The murderer of more than twelve young women, whose bodies undulated under the water as they slowly, slowly rotted away. One of them’s never been identified. She’s not even a memory.
I hate him with so much force that it feels like dying. I hate myself, too.
“I’m going to kill you,” I tell him, enunciating so clearly I know he can make out the words through the soundproofing. “You filthy fucking monster.” I’m well aware that they’re recording me through the camera set up high in its protective bubble overhead. I don’t give a damn. If I end up on the wrong side of this barrier someday, maybe that’s just the price I have to pay to protect my kids. I can live with that just fine.
He laughs. His lips part, his mouth opens, and I can see the raw, dark cavern of his mouth. I remember that he bit his victims with those teeth, chewed off pieces of them. I think that the look in his eyes must have been the same as he gives me now, straining to open up those puffy, bruised lids. It doesn’t look human at all.
“Run,” I see him say, enunciating it so I can lip-read. “Run away.”
I walk instead. Slowly. Calmly.
Because fuck him.
On the way back to the airport, I am shaking so hard from delayed reaction that I have to pull over and buy a sweet, sugary drink to calm my nerves; I drink it parked, then decide to take a detour. I’m wearing a large pair of sunglasses, a blonde wig, and a floppy hat, and it’s close to sunset when I park four blocks away and walk to the empty lot that used to be our family home.
It’s nice, this little park. Thick green grass, neatly maintained; there’s a border of bright flowers and a stark marble square with a fountain bubbling on top of it. I read the inscription, which says nothing about this being a murder scene at all; it only lists the names of Mel’s victims and a date, and at the end, PEACE BE IN THIS PLACE.
There’s a bench invitingly close. There’s another small wrought-iron table and chairs on a concrete patio ten feet farther off, where our living room might have been.
I don’t sit down. I don’t have the right in this place to make myself at ease. I just look, bow my head a moment, and walk off. If anyone’s watching, I don’t want them to recognize me or approach me. I just want to be a lady out for a walk on a nice day.
It feels like I’m being watched, but I think that’s the weight of guilt on my shoulders. Ghosts must surely still linger here, angry and hungry. I can’t blame them for that. I can only blame myself.
I am walking fast by the time I reach my car again, and I pull out a little too quickly, as if something is chasing me. It takes miles for me to feel secure again, and to strip off the suffocating, sweaty weight of the wig and hat. I keep the sunglasses on. The sunset’s too bright without them.
I pull over again and take out my tablet computer. The reception isn’t great, and I have to wait for the feeds to load, but there it is: my house, viewable from the front door, the back, the long view, the inside. I can see Sam Cade out back, hammering boards on the unfinished deck.
I call Sam, and he tells me all’s well there. It all sounds like a normal, placid day. Uneventful.
Normality sounds like heaven, unattainable and forbidden. I’m all too aware how much power Mel still has over us. How he found us, I don’t know and probably never will. He’s got a source; that’s clear enough. Whoever is passing him information might not even be aware of the harm they’re doing. He’s a good liar. He’s always been a master manipulator. He’s a virulent virus loose on the world, and I should have used my shot at him to just kill the son of a bitch. If I call Absalom to set up something more final, it’ll cost more than I can safely pay. I know that. And when it comes to buying a murder, even the murder of a man on death row . . . there’s something in me that balks. Maybe it’s just a fear that I’ll be caught, and my kids will be left alone in the world. Helpless and unprotected.
I’m extra cautious on the rest of the drive, hyperaware of possible people trailing me, yet desperate to get home now. Every minute I’m gone is another minute I’m not there to protect my children, to act as their shield. I use express drop-off for the rental car. Security seems to take an eternity, and I want to scream at the idiots who don’t know how to take their shoes off, or their laptops out, or their phones from their pockets.
It doesn’t matter, because once I’m through, I find the flight out to Knoxville has been canceled. I have another two-hour wait for the next flight, and I find myself calculating the distance. I have a frantic impulse to drive it, to be doing something, but that would take even longer, of course.