A Kiss Before the Apocalypse (2 page)

“Don’t do anything stupid,” Remy cautioned, his hands held out in front of him. “I’m unarmed.”

He felt a surge of adrenaline flood through his body as he watched the man squint down the barrel of the pistol.
This is what it’s like to be truly alive,
he thought. In the old days, before his renouncement, Remy had never known the thrill of fear; there was no reason to. But now, moments such as this made what he had given up seem almost insignificant.

The man jabbed the gun at Remy and screamed, “Shut the door!” Slowly, Remy did as he was told, never taking his eyes from the gunman.

“It’s not what you think,” Mountgomery began. “Not what you think at all.” He brought the weapon up and scratched at his temple offhandedly with the muzzle. “Who . . . who are you?” the editor stammered, his features twisting in confusion as he thrust the gun toward Remy again. “What are you doing here?” His voice was frantic, teetering on the edge of hysteria.

Hands still raised, Remy cautiously stepped farther into the room. As a general rule, he didn’t like to lie when he had a gun pointed at him. “I’m a private investigator, Mr. Mountgomery,” he said in a soft, calm voice. “Your wife hired me. I’m not going to try anything, okay? Just put the gun down and we’ll talk. Maybe we can figure a way out of this mess. What do you think?”

Mountgomery blinked as if trying to focus. He stumbled slightly to the left, the gun still aimed at Remy. “A way out of this mess,” he repeated, with a giggle. “Nobody’s getting out of this one.”

He glanced at his companion on the bed and began to sob, his voice trembling with emotion. “Did you hear that, Carol? The bitch hired a detective to follow me.”

Mountgomery reached out to the dead woman. But when she didn’t respond, he let his arm flop dejectedly to his side. He looked back at Remy. “Carol was the only one who understood. She listened. She believed me.” Tears of genuine emotion ran down his face. “I wish we’d had more time together,” he said wistfully.

“The bitch at home thought I was crazy. Well, we’ll see how crazy I am when it all turns to shit.” The sadness was turning to anger again. “This is so much harder than I imagined,” he said, his face twisted in pain.

He lowered the gun slightly, and Remy started to move. Instantly, Mountgomery reacted, the weapon suddenly inches from the detective’s face. Obviously, madness had done little to slow his reflexes.

“It started when they opened up my head,” Mountgomery began. “The dreams. At first I thought they were just that, bad dreams, but then I realized they were much more.”

The editor pressed the gun against Remy’s cheek. “I was dreaming about the end of the world, you see. Every night it became clearer—the dreams—more horrible. I don’t want to die like that,” he said, shaking his head, eyes glassy. “And I don’t want the people I love to die like that either.” The man leaned closer to Remy. He smelled of aftershave and a sickly sour sweat. “Are you a religious man?”

If he had not been so caught up in the seriousness of the situation, Remy Chandler would have laughed. “I have certain—beliefs. Yes. What do
you
believe in, Peter?”

Mountgomery swallowed hard. “I believe we’re all going to die horribly. Carol, that was her name.” He jerked his head toward the dead woman on the bed. “Carol Weir. She wanted to be brave, to face the end with me. But she was too good to die that way.”

He smiled forlornly and tightened his grip on the gun. “I would have divorced my wife and married her, but it seemed kind of pointless when we looked at the big picture. This was the nicest thing I could do for her. She thanked me before I . . .”

Mountgomery’s face went wild with the realization of what he had done, and he jammed the barrel of the gun into Remy’s forehead. The muzzle felt warm.

“Would you prefer to die now, or wait until it all goes to Hell?” the editor asked him.

“I’m not ready to make that decision.”

Remy suddenly jerked his head to one side, grabbing the man’s wrist, pushing the gun away from his face. Mountgomery pulled the trigger. A bullet roared from the weapon to bury itself in the worn shag carpet under them.

The two men struggled for the weapon, Mountgomery screaming like a wild animal. But he was stronger than Remy had imagined, and quickly regained control of the pistol, forcing the detective back.

Again, the editor raised his arm and aimed the weapon.

“Don’t you point that thing at me,” Remy snarled, glaring at the madman. “If you want to die, then die. If you want to take the coward’s way out, do it. But don’t you dare try to take me with you.”

Mountgomery seemed taken aback by the detective’s fierce words. He squinted, tilting his head from left to right, as if seeing the man before him for the first time. “Look at you,” he said suddenly, with an odd smile and a small chuckle. “I didn’t even notice until now.” He dropped the weapon to his side.

It was Remy’s turn to be confused. He glanced briefly behind him to be sure no one else had entered the room.

“Are you here for her—for Carol?” Mountgomery continued. “She deserves to be in Heaven. She is—
was
a good person—a very good person.”

“What are you talking about, Peter?” Remy asked. “Why would I be here for Carol? Your wife hired me to . . .”

Mountgomery guffawed, the strange barking sound cutting Remy off midsentence. “There’s no need to pretend with me,” he said smiling. “I can see what you are.”

A finger of ice ran down Remy’s spine.

With a look of resigned calm, Mountgomery raised the gun and pressed the muzzle beneath the flesh of his chin. “I never imagined I’d be this close to one,” he said, finger tensing on the trigger. “Angels are even more beautiful than they say.”

Remy lunged, but Mountgomery proved faster again. The editor pulled the trigger and the bullet punched through the flesh and bone of his chin and up into his brain, exiting through the top of his head in a spray of crimson. He fell back stiffly onto the bed— atop his true love, twitching wildly as the life drained out of him, and then rolling off the bed to land on the floor. His eyes, wide in death, gazed with frozen fascination at the wing-shaped pattern created by his blood and brains on the ceiling above.

Remy studied the gruesome example of man’s fragile mortality before him, Mountgomery’s final words reverberating through his mind.

He caught his reflection in a mirror over the room’s single dresser and stared hard at himself, searching for cracks in the facade.
Is it possible?
he wondered. Had Peter Mountgomery somehow seen through Remy’s mask of humanity?

Remy looked away from his own image and back to the victims of violence.
How could a case so simple turn into something so ugly?
he asked himself, moving toward the broken door, followed by the words of a man who could see angels and had dreamt of the end of the world.

He stepped quickly into the afternoon sun and almost collided with the Hispanic cleaning woman and her cart of linens. She looked at him and then craned her neck to see around him and into the room. Remy caught the first signs of panic growing in her eyes and reached back for the knob, pulling the door closed. In flawless Spanish he told her not to go into the room, that death had visited those within, and it was not for her to see. The woman nodded slowly, her eyes never leaving his as she pushed her cart quickly away.

Homicide Detective Steven Mulvehill stood beside Remy, as the team from the medical examiner’s office prepared to remove the bodies from the motel room. Remy leaned against his car, arms crossed. The two friends were silent as they watched the activity across the lot.

A small crowd had formed, kept at bay by a strip of yellow crime-scene tape and four uniformed officers. The curious pack craned their necks, moving from one end of the tape to the other, eager to catch a glimpse of something to fill the misery quotient in their lives. It was something that Remy had never really understood but had come to accept: the human species was enthralled with the pain of others. Whether a natural disaster or a drive-by shooting, the average Joe wanted to hear every detail. Maybe the fascination stemmed from the fact that somebody else had incurred the wrath of the fates, and he, for the moment, could breathe a sigh of relief.

Mulvehill and his partner, Rich Healey, had already examined the scene in the motel room and released the bodies to the coroner. Healey was still inside, supervising the removal.

The detective took a long drag of a cigarette, expelled the smoke from his nostrils like some great medieval beast, then broke the uncomfortable silence. “You all right?” he asked. “You’re kind of quiet.” He took another pull from his smoke.

Remy stared straight ahead, his eyes focused on the entryway of the room across the lot. “He saw me, Steven. Right before that guy killed himself, he really saw me.”

Mulvehill was a stocky man, average height with a wild head of thick, black hair. He was forty-seven years old, divorced, and living the job. Remy had met him more than five years earlier, when a homicide investigation had intersected with a missing-persons case he had been working on. The two had been friends ever since.

“He saw me for what I really am,” Remy said again, truly disturbed by what he was saying.

Mulvehill looked at Remy, the last of the cigarette protruding from the corner of his mouth. “What, a shitty detective?” The cop smirked, taking the smoke from his mouth and flicking the remains to the ground.

The case that had first brought them together had ended badly, the murder suspect dead and Mulvehill with a bullet in his gut.

“You’re a riot,” Remy responded. “The stuff of Vegas floor shows. Really, if this cop thing doesn’t work out . . .”

Mulvehill laughed out loud as he reached into his sports jacket for his pack of cigarettes. “And you’re an asshole. Tell me again what you were doing here.” He pulled one from the pack and placed it in his mouth.

“Very smooth, Detective.” Remy grinned wryly. “It was simple surveillance,” he explained. “Wife suspected he was having an affair. Nothing out of the ordinary.”

Mulvehill lit up with an old-fashioned Zippo. He flicked the cover closed with a metallic click, then slipped it back inside his pocket next to the cigarette pack. He took a long, thoughtful drag. Smoking helped him think, he often said. Helped him focus. He’d tried to stop once, but it had made him stupid.

“So he shows up here with his secretary, they go in, and after a while you hear the first shot?”

Remy nodded. “That’s about it. By the time I got in there, he’d already killed the woman. I think he was getting ready to shoot himself, but I interrupted him.”

The homicide detective idly brushed some ash from the lapel of his navy blue sports coat. “So you think this guy could somehow see you—the real you.”

Mulvehill had been near death when Remy found him lying in a pool of blood in an abandoned water-front warehouse. To ease his suffering and calm the terrified detective, Remy had revealed his true countenance.
Death is only a new beginning,
he had reassured the man.

Remy nodded, replaying the conversation with Mountgomery inside his head. “I didn’t drop the facade at all, haven’t done it in a long time. But the way he looked at me—and that smile. He was definitely seeing something.”

The doctors said it was a miracle that Mulvehill had survived the shooting. After his recovery, the homicide detective had come looking for Remy, who had denied nothing—and offered nothing. But Mulvehill knew he had encountered something very much out of the ordinary, something that couldn’t simply be attributed to loss of blood.

Remy knew that Mulvehill’s mother and grand-mother had been strict Catholics, and had tried to raise him in the faith as well. As a young man, he had gone to church to please them, but he had believed Christian doctrine to be nothing more than fairy tales, fantasies to relieve the fears of the devoted when faced with their own mortality. But since his own brush with death, and his encounter with a certain private investigator, the Boston detective wasn’t quite sure what he believed anymore. In fact, he’d even started to attend Mass again.
Just to be on the safe side,
he’d told Remy.

But Remy had shown Mulvehill his true face by design. He had revealed himself on purpose.
This
was something else altogether. This dead man had seen beneath his mask.

“That ever happen before?” Mulvehill asked, interrupting Remy’s brooding. “Besides when you wanted it to, I mean?”

Remy looked at his friend. “Not to me, but throughout the ages there have been holy men, visionaries, who could glimpse the unseen world and its inhabitants— usually before some kind of change in the world— something of great religious significance.”

Mulvehill sucked a final drag from his cigarette. “Anything coming down the pike that you know of? New pope or something?”

Remy shrugged. “Well, the guy did talk about having dreams about the end of the world, the Apocalypse. He thought he was doing the woman a favor by killing her, thought I was here to take them up to Heaven.”

Mulvehill looked at his friend with a serious expression, a new, unlit cigarette having appeared almost magically in his mouth. “When the time comes, will you carry me up to Heaven?” he asked, fishing for his lighter.

Remy grinned. “Sorry, that’s not my job, but I imagine you’re gonna have to drop a few pounds if you want anybody carrying your sorry ass up to—”

Their playful banter was cut short by a sudden commotion. Healey ran from the motel room and beckoned to one of the uniforms. They exchanged some words and the cop spoke rapidly into his radio, then followed the detective back into the room. Mulvehill grumbled beneath his breath, threw his latest smoke to the ground, and hurried toward the crime scene.