He drove on, parked up the road at a trailhead for Pine Pond. There were a couple of other cars in the dirt lot; typical – a Subaru with a bike rack, a Jeep with a canoe mount and mud splattered on the sides, a pickup truck, a sporty little Honda Fit. His own vehicle would have been out of place if it weren’t for the rest of the people in the Adirondacks like him, riding the poverty line or close to it, driving cars that didn’t look like ads for rich people cramming in their outdoor recreation because it was trendy to “love nature.”
He walked along the edge of the road, almost fully dark now, watching the lightning flash as the clouds merged into a serious black mass. Within a few minutes he was at the mouth of the driveway. A mailbox listed to one side, FOGAR Y, spelled in white reflective letters, missing the T.
The wall of clouds rumbled, throbbed with internal flashes of light.
He thought about Jim Morrison wandering the western landscape in his early, pre-Doors days, writing poetry, taking mescaline. These people in their normal, everyday worlds, they didn’t have the first clue about the true nature of the universe. He hummed along to a track in his head as he turned down the driveway.
He was out of sight from anyone in the distant house. If Bobbi were to leave while he was still walking, the woods would provide easy cover, just have to hop in amid the trees, disappear.
Creeping closer, though, he saw shapes in the lighted windows: people moving around.
Bobbi was in there – what was she doing? She was making nice with them, perhaps, showing them her pity.
Clay stopped, having gotten halfway along the driveway, sticking close to the trees.
There was a smell in the air – what was it? It tasted like metal. Like pennies…
The first of the rain fell, like a spray from an ocean wave, followed by a swift downpour, a change in pitch as it hit. Clay turned his face toward the sky. The drops were warm, the warmest they would be all year long…
* * *
What was he thinking?
He remembered: Alison Hadley. The girl who thought she was better than him. Who thought she was a fucking princess, above it all, just like Bobbi Noelle.
He started walking again.
Hadley had never seen who he really was because she’d never given him a chance. She’d judged and dismissed him. Maybe that was what high school was like, but maybe, too, she’d been an uppity cunt.
Those old moves, four years of wrestling, you just couldn’t help yourself. It was so easy, and Hadley was so little, like a doll, nothing to her, barely able to resist him. He could have taken it all the way but she’d raked him with her fingernails – that had been the worst of it. He still even had the scar.
Not that anyone ever noticed.
Nobody ever noticed anything that wasn’t in their self-interest.
As he made his way closer to the house, he let rain wash away the memory of Hadley’s bitchy ways. The first girl he’d ever tried to ask out, and her callous rebuff, the humiliation. Fuck all that. Now there was Bobbi Noelle, and Bobbi was a lot like Hadley, and it had struck him that she was a new chance for him to be seen.
A dog barked when he was halfway down the Fogarty’s long driveway. Dammit. The Fogartys had a dog and the dog had caught his scent.
Clay scrambled up the short embankment, into the woods, maneuvering a bit so he could see out and still have an angle on those windows. The way he was crouching, though, the knife sheath jammed into his calf muscle a bit. He shifted his weight and peered at the house.
The dog was joined by another – two of them barking at shadows now. He waited for a porch light to come on, or an area light, maybe over that saggy-looking shed beside the main house, but nothing happened.
Stupid. Should’ve known they had dogs. He saw people-shapes moving in the windows again, was pretty sure the shape looming near the corner of the house was that of Terry Fogarty. But then the shapes went away, and the dogs stopped barking.
The rain continued to pound him, the woods a rush of water smacking the leaves, and he was soaked through to the skin. It was just a reconnaissance mission, just a chance to watch Bobbi for a while, to “get the feels” as the kids liked to say, and it had run its course.
But.
But the dogs gave him an idea. The knife, uncomfortably jamming into his body, gave him an idea, too. He drew it out, turned the blade over in the rain and thought about how he’d love a rifle.
A rifle would take care of anything in his way, like dogs. Pop them both off from a distance. Rifles couldn’t be too hard to figure out, a couple of YouTube videos would do it, and he was always a fast learner. Not that these particular dogs would be a problem – Fogarty’s house wasn’t part of the plan – but the DSS employees always had someone around now. Cops were going with caseworkers to home-fucking-assessments. They might as well have been dogs.
Like the tall one, the one who looked like a city-slicker. Nelson. Mr. “Call me Mike.” He had that I’m-better-than-you vibe written all over him, just like Bobbi.
Mr. “Call me Mike” was probably already patting himself on the back, thinking this was a “knife killer” at work, or something.
But this was Clay, and clay was mutable.
Clay was a shapeshifter.
He moved back toward the main road, keeping to the trees. His hands were soon sticky with sap and leaves, his boots squished. The rain was almost blinding, the thunder right above him, but he was content to marvel at how his plan kept growing, evolving, getting better.
Maybe there was no God, but as he slipped back out of the woods, looked over his shoulder at the dark house in the rain-blurred distance, he thought maybe there was a secret to things, a life hidden behind the masks we wear, and once you got in touch with that secret, gave over to it, once you felt the thrum of its power shaking the ground beneath your feet, you were invincible.
He bet Jim Morrison had felt that, at least once, too.
Fifteen
“Why do you want people to call you by your first name?” Overton lay beside him in the motel room bed.
Mike looked up at the ceiling, hands nested behind his head. “Just a habit.”
“Okay, Mike.” She put out her hand. “Call me Lena.”
He laughed and shook it.
She propped up on her elbow, her face close. “That’s not what I heard.”
“Oh no? And what did you hear?”
“I heard it was an interview tactic. That you’re good in the box – you get called in for assists all the time, got quite the confession record.”
He didn’t say anything for a couple of seconds. “I don’t know. I never really thought about it.”
“Uh-huh… Okay, so your dad worked in the Seven-Seven back in the eighties. Uniformed? That had to be a hell of a time to be working New York.”
“He worked anti-crime, plainclothes division. There was a big corruption scandal when I was a kid.”
“We read about it in college,” she said. “Cops working with drug dealers. What was the big organization going on?”
Mike sat up a little, fixing the pillows. “La Compania. Guy named Chelo ran the outfit like the military. His guys had all kinds of hardware – street-sweepers, you name it. He put out contracts on cops. I mean he would literally chase the cops, cook off a few shots in broad daylight. That’s how it was. And he had pros coming up from the Dominican Republic just to take people out.”
Mike thought for a minute about the Harriet Fogarty crime scene, the only trace evidence a couple of bloody shoe prints. Then he got back to the story and said, “My dad was killed. Could’ve been Chelo, but…”
Lena’s eyes got big and she spoke through a hand covering her mouth. “How old were you?”
“This was in ’84, so – nineteen. I wanted to go down there the next day, sign up, get to working the Seven-Seven, and not stop until I found his killer.”
“But you didn’t go…”
“Mom pleaded with me. She’d had a hard enough time letting me go down there when I was growing up. And these contract killers they just… you know. After the job, they’re gone. So. I was ready, though. I was ready to take on Chelo myself.” He laughed a little, but it didn’t feel funny.
After a moment Lena asked, “Where’s your mother now?”
“North Carolina. With my sister, Kim. Couldn’t take the winters anymore, either. A warm-weather type, like your son Avery. I mean, this summer, though – it might as well be Florida.”