The Bride Collector

41
BRAD SAT IN defeat, begging God for one last mercy. Please, please don’t let her come. Send her far away. Don’t let her hear.
He watched the Bride Collector hovering over him with his drill, heard his threats, but his mind was on his prayer of desperation to God in heaven, if he was indeed listening—and Brad had to believe now that he was.
Protect her, I beg you. She’s innocent, she’s naive, she will run here for love, but don’t let my love draw her. Not now, please, not now.
Then Quinton bent over and pressed the drill into his shin and the pain was so vicious that Brad’s whole leg began to shake violently. His stomach rolled and his vision blurred, but he could not allow the scream tearing at his throat a moment’s breath.
Quinton stood. He was talking, but Brad didn’t hear him. His mind was begging all the more earnestly. Please, please save her. Save her, please. She’s your child. Save her…
Movement from the corner of his left eye stopped him, and he looked and he saw what he had begged not to see. She stood in the wide barn doorway, like an angel of mercy.
Brad could not breathe.
“Hello, Quinton.”
Quinton started. Then slowly turned. For a moment they stared at each other and Brad could only imagine what vile thoughts were running through the mind of this psychopath.
“Hello, Paradise.”
Brad wanted to scream out to her. Run, Paradise! Run away! He’s a monster and he’s going to hurt you. You’re too naive! Run!
A moan broke from his mouth, nothing more. He struggled to keep from passing out. It couldn’t end this way! She had to run.
Paradise just stood there, staring at the killer. And Quinton stared back.
Brad found his voice, breathy and stretched with fear. “Run…” Then again, in a cry. “Run, Paradise, run!”
“No, Brad. Not this time.”
Her voice was so light, so sweet, so innocent. And it sent a shaft of searing anguish through his chest. She was going to die on account of him! And she was too stubborn to see it.
Quinton walked over to the table, set down the drill, and picked up his pistol.
Paradise looked at Brad, cheeks wet by trails of tears. But she didn’t flinch.
He leaned against his ropes, frantic for her to run. “Please, Paradise, you can’t do this…” But she wasn’t listening. “Please…”
Her head turned back to Quinton, who stood in the middle of the quilted stage, before the wall on which he intended to drain Paradise.
Brad started to speak again but couldn’t. His words were only noise in his mind. A great lament rolled through him.
Forgive me, Paradise! I’m sorry that I let you love me. I’m sorry that your tormented life has led you here to me, to the first man who showed you any love. You don’t have to give your life for me! It doesn’t work that way! Those are the foolish ideas in stories. I’m not worth it, I’m a wretch. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, Paradise!
Twenty feet down the middle of the barn separated them now. Quinton seemed caught in some kind of trance, as if in facing the culmination of his plans he could not find the words to express the import of the moment. He stood with his gun at his side, watching her. No wise words, no gloating, no expression of hatred, no cursing, not even a twitch on his face or a tremble in his hand.
He just stared at her, dumb.
Perhaps he couldn’t believe that she really was stupid enough to come back, knowing what faced her. Yes. Yes, that had to be it. Both he and Quinton saw the same thing. Only someone so raw, so idealistic could have stepped willingly into harm’s way with no hope for survival.
“You’re wondering why I would come back,” she said.
She stepped forward cautiously and stopped ten feet from him. Her face showed no expression, but new tears broke from her eyes.
“It makes no sense to you,” she said. “Does it?”
He answered after a moment. “You’re innocent and foolish,” he said. “That’s what makes you so beautiful. That is why I have to kill you.”
“Then you’ll be killing the one thing you want.”
They watched each other.
“I’ve been thinking about it, Quinton. That’s why you came to me that night seven years ago. You wanted the innocence and beauty that you saw in me.”
“You can’t manipulate me with your words. You’re the most beautiful woman in the world, and I have been sent to kill you.”
“Because you can’t possess me?” Her voice quivered.
“Because you’re God’s favorite and no one can have you.”
“The truth is, you’re afraid of me, Quinton. I terrify you.”
“I can break you like any doll.”
But she was undeterred. “I terrify you because you’re afraid that you can never be beautiful like me. You’re like a jealous boy, and now you’re throwing a fit.”
Brad stared, caught off guard by the exchange between them. This was the Paradise who had first drawn him with her simple insight and logic, seeing and speaking about what only she could see outside the window. The naive girl who could see ghosts when others could not.
“You were mixed up then and you’re still mixed up now,” she said. “You are a lost, lonely boy who was hurt by his father. Just like I was.”
HER WORDS CAME to him and in an instant the buzzing stopped. The world went silent, as if someone had pulled the plug.
She knew this? It was a guess, of course, anyone could guess that someone had been abused as a boy, hadn’t half the world? But her tone didn’t hold even a hint of question. Her eyes were reaching past him, into the place of secrets. This was hallowed ground, a place so deep and holy that he himself was only rarely allowed to step into it.
And yet she was walking in, trampling his soul underfoot. Quinton felt suddenly and forcefully violated.
The silence between them stretched, and he searched for the buzzing, the voices, the calm, the intelligence that had made him so powerful and such a worthy servant. He hated her for stripping them away.
And then the buzzing was back, screaming in his mind like a swarm of angry hornets. His whole body tensed and his fingers clamped down on the gun by his side.
He’d removed the silencer when he’d replaced the weapon in the case. The discharge thundered through the barn as the gun bucked in his hand and sent a bullet into the ground by his feet.
Paradise did not flinch.
“Your father hurt you just like my father hurt me. That’s what first drew you to me,” she said.
“No.”
“I didn’t have a father to tell me that I was one of God’s favorites,” she said.
He saw something so unnerving that he would have lifted the gun and shot her in her forehead if not for the fact that he had planned so long to drill her. There was empathy in her eyes.
“But that’s one thing you’re right about, Quinton. I am one of God’s favorites.”
“Please, be quiet.”
“My father never told me who I was, just like your father never told you who you were.”
Why didn’t he move? Why didn’t he just shoot her? Why didn’t he grab her and tie her down and drill her full of holes? Why did he feel as if the glue that held him together was melting?
“Because you are one of God’s favorites, too, Quinton.”
BRAD DARED NOT utter a word, not now, not while Paradise was speaking and Quinton was listening. The slightest shift in tension might set him off, as it had discharged his gun moments ago.
Quinton had gone stiff. Sweat beaded his forehead. His hands were balled into fists, and his blood vessels ran like cords down his forearms. At any moment it would all end. Brad knew what Paradise was trying to do, but it wouldn’t work!
The rage in the killer would overtake him and he would crush her. She was naive enough to believe that if she just reached out to him he would understand and change.
But men like Quinton Gauld did not change, not this side of a cosmic shift in their souls far beyond human words or any kind of psychiatric soothing. He might play along. He might even give in to the pain that her words clearly evoked. But in the end the monster would rise up and rip into her.
Even so, Brad dared not utter a single word.
He hopelessly worked to free the ropes that bound his wrists, but there wasn’t a millimeter of play in them. He pulled at the post, but it was anchored deep.
And then in the long silence, something changed. Paradise began to cry. Her small shoulders began to shake in a sob.
She drew a deep breath. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”
What was she saying?
“I’ve lived with this pain so long. I can’t do it anymore.” She sobbed and sucked at the air, lips trembling. “I don’t want to hide in the closet anymore. I can’t take the darkness. I can’t take the fear!”
Her words sounded obscenely loud in the barn. She stood shaking, gasping for air, looking now at Brad with pleading eyes, then back at Quinton.
“I can’t do it… I can’t live like this…”
She was crying for herself, he realized. She’d said it in the field and now she was saying it here. Paradise was here as much for her own rescue as for his. She needed to free herself from the claws piercing her heart.
This wasn’t about manipulating the man who’d violated her seven years ago in the hope of destroying him; this was about casting off her own fear so that she could be free.
“I can’t fear you anymore, Quinton. I can’t fear my father. I can’t take the hate and fear that’s trying to kill me.”
Quinton stood on the quilts, eyes wide. His fists were shaking.
“I forgive you, Quinton.” She spoke the confession in a sob and then walked forward, stood in front of him, and reached out her hand slowly.
Pressed her palm against his belly.
The moment her fingers made contact with him, she sucked in a short gasp. But then, she could see ghosts, couldn’t she? She was seeing something now, or was she only shocked at her own audacity?
Quinton was so appalled, so stunned, by her actions that he seemed to forget his options. He looked frightened. Lost.
Now in a soft voice, Paradise pleaded with him through her tears. “He’s trying to kill you. The same monster that’s trying to kill me because I’m God’s favorite is trying to kill you, too.” Then very quietly so that Brad could barely hear her: “You’re like me. He’s trying to kill us both.”
A slight quiver had swept over Quinton’s whole body. Brad didn’t know what to say. He wanted to tell her to run, to claw at Quinton’s eyes and sprint, to dart around him and throw the lamp to the ground and then run for the back door.
Instead she spoke softly, now without tears, like an angel sent here for his sake. “I’m sorry you were hurt by your father, Quinton. But you’re still a favorite. You don’t need to prove yourself to God, or be jealous of his favorites.”
What happened next drained Brad’s blood from his face. The quiver that had reached Quinton’s extremities intensified. Tears pooled in his eyes, ran down his face. His lips twisted with despair and right there with the seventh favorite’s hand on his belly, Quinton began to cry.
And Paradise cried with him.
But Brad could see no reason for gratitude or relief. He could only see this monster’s guilt being exposed by his own innocent victim, and it made him sick with fear.
“Paradise…” He still didn’t know what to say, because to say the wrong thing could as easily bring about her end as save her. And she wasn’t paying Brad any attention.
“If I’m his favorite, then so are you,” she said. “And he loves them all. Even me. Even you.”
Now the man towering over Paradise came unglued. He broke apart from the inside out. Shaking with his sobs, he began to sag. His hands went limp, spread wide. The gun fell from loosed fingers and he sank slowly to his knees.
Brad could not shout down the warning bells that clanged in his head.
Run, Paradise! Run!
Run because you are right and he knows that you are right and he can’t live with that knowledge. He’s going to snap, he’s going to cut you, he’s going to kill you, Paradise! Run!
Brad’s mouth was parted, but he couldn’t risk undoing what she was doing. He could only beg God for mercy.
Paradise did not run. To Brad’s continued horror, she placed her hand on Quinton Gauld’s shoulder, and he settled back on his haunches, a sobbing, slobbering mess of a man.
It was true, Paradise was the most beautiful woman in the world. She, who stood just a hair over five feet tall and wasn’t too experienced in the fine arts of hygiene, makeup, and fashion, was the most stunning creature God had created.
And Brad knew that the Bride Collector was going to kill her.

QUINTON DIDN’T KNOW what had happened except that he’d been thoroughly violated. The very woman he had violated had returned and with a few simple words peeled back the layers he’d so lovingly wrapped around himself over the years.
He was a man who could not deny the truth, but neither could he accept that truth, not now.
He could only feel its effects and mourn his own pathetic nature, while before him stood the one whom God had granted such a lofty status.
He had been right. She was the most, most, most beautiful! It was no wonder he’d fallen madly in love with her. And he would again, because the man who could not or did not love Paradise needed to be summarily shot and buried in a deep bed of wet concrete.
And when she said that he, too, Quinton Gauld, the man who had violated her, was as loved… The earth had crumbled beneath his feet and hell itself had sucked him deep. It could not be true. To compare him to Paradise was to compare a slug to a peacock, a dove, a bird of paradise.
Yet it was true. He knew it the moment the words came from her mouth.
Then she told him that evil was working in him to make a mockery of them both, and he knew not only that this, too, was true, but that he was powerless to change it.
So then he would have to kill her. She was crying with him and her hand was on his shoulder, and now he had to kill her.
PARADISE TOUCHED THE man the way she imagined a mother might touch another mother’s hateful son who was having a change of heart. She felt no intimacy. He was still a monster.
It had occurred to her as she waited in the ditch that perhaps the killer was dead. Not physically dead, but spiritually and mentally. That, like her, he had died a long time ago when his father had taken his life as a boy.
And when her hand made contact with his chest, she had seen that in many ways she was right, he was dead. Because in that moment her mind had filled with the image of a small boy weeping on his knees as a bearded man twice his height stood over him with a piece of pipe.
Before this night she’d seen only images that the dead had seen, and then only a few times. Although Quinton was not buried, he was indeed dead, because she wasn’t imagining this, was she?
If she ever saw Allison again, Paradise would beg her to explain how this worked; why God allowed her to see these things; what was his power and what was hers.
But for now she only knew that she had to love this man because, although he was pathetic, he was also the mirror image of the ugliness inside of her. The fear and hate that had haunted her for so many years were all wrapped up in this man.
How many times had Allison talked to her about God’s forgiving power? More than she could count. Judge not lest you be judged, she used to say. Love your enemies, mostly the ones who throw you away because they don’t know what they’re doing. Let the light of our Savior shine mercy and forgiveness into your heart. These impossible sayings had only come to full meaning as Paradise waited in the ditch.
If it was true and she was God’s favorite, then so was he. And the only thing that would rescue either of them was to return that favor.
So she’d done what Allison had said God would do. She forgave him. And she let him cry on her shoulder as she embraced the light that freed her from him.
It was like walking down a path of coals into the gaping mouth of hell, and she still didn’t know if she really had, in her heart of hearts, forgiven Quinton.
Then she remembered Brad. Brad was there, on her right.
She blinked, and turned and saw him. And for the first time she saw that he was bleeding.
HE WAS GOING to snap, he was going to break, he was going to explode.
But he didn’t snap. He didn’t break, he didn’t explode.
Paradise let him lay his head against her shoulder and she comforted him as a sister might comfort a weeping brother.
After several long minutes of tension cut by the dreadful sound of sorrow and guilt, Brad first began to consider the possibility that he’d been wrong. Some power greater than any he’d seen had affected them both and was doing what no FBI agent could ever do. Maybe Quinton Gauld, the angel of death, had been undone by the forgiving words of an innocent young woman.
The man looked wretched, sobbing now with head bowed. His hands occasionally clawed at her back, but his fingers were too limp to grasp her shirt or back. His eyes were closed, and flecks of white spittle had settled in the corners of his mouth. White mucus ran from the broken man’s nose. He was a mess, a shriveled-up carcass that used to be a man.
Paradise seemed to accept the same conclusion. She calmed and looked at the miserable man before her, then turned her eyes to Brad, as if remembering him again. Her eyes shifted down to his shin, the one that Quinton had drilled a hole into.
Blood had run from the wound and pooled on the dirt under his calf. He’d forgotten the pain, but it throbbed now to remind him.
When Brad looked back up at Paradise, her eyes were still on his shin and they were wide with horror.
Her mouth parted and she took a step toward him, leaving Quinton. The moment she turned her back on him, something changed.
It was subtle at first, the catching of his breath, the stilling of his sob, as if the cue had been called and then someone yelled, Cut. Brad saw it all, but now he refused to believe it, because if Paradise had failed, then they were both dead.
Paradise started to walk toward him. “Brad…” Her voice swam in empathy. “I came, Brad.”
This was the young, naive Paradise, and he cherished her for it.
The man behind her, however, was not nearly so innocent, and when his eyes opened, when he turned to look at the back of the woman who’d left him on his knees and crossed to the man she loved, Brad knew he was going to kill her.
“Paradise!”
Quinton’s face twisted with rage and he calmly reached for the fallen gun near his right knee.
Paradise rushed like a nurse on a battlefield to the man she loved. “I’m sorry, Brad. I couldn’t leave—”
“Get down!” Brad shouted. “Run, Paradise!” If she ran she might make it. She might!
“Run!”
Paradise stopped halfway to him, confused. “What?”
Brad watched the scene as if it were playing out on a huge screen in slow motion. His scream came out in a long groan, slowed to half speed.
“Run!”
“What?”
Quinton had his gun in his palm.
He swung it around to bear on her back.
Paradise saw Brad’s horrified expression and slowly turned back to follow his eyes, blocking his view of the killer. And of the gunshot that bellowed like a cannon announcing the end of an era.
Boom!
Brad’s heart stopped.
She started to fall. His eyes were searching for the exit wound because that’s what his mind was trained to do, but in his heart he was dying with her.
Paradise sank to her knees, shaking as if even now she was refusing to die, because even now she was innocent enough to cling to hope when none existed.
“Are you okay, sir?”
The voice came from his left, but it hardly registered. What was registering was the fact that Paradise hadn’t fallen.
Then, only when Paradise leaned over and sobbed, did Brad see Quinton Gauld’s fallen form beyond her. He had been shot through his head.
Brad blinked.
A voice crackled over a radio. “… an ambulance here. One dead, believed to be the subject in question. Let the FBI know we have their crime scene secure.” A Kansas state peace officer in a brown uniform holstered his weapon and nodded at Brad.
“Special Agent Brad Raines?”
“Yes,” he croaked.
“Sergeant Robby Bitterman, sir.” He glanced at the man he’d shot. “I’d say that was a close one.”
Then Paradise was rushing toward Brad. Falling to her knees. Throwing her arms around his neck.
She said nothing; she only wept.