A Welcome Grave (13 page)

“You’re lying.”

“That’s what you said last time. Pick one to believe.”

His hand tightened on the bag, pulling my hair painfully. “We’re coming from the same place. I know what you did to Jefferson, and I know what he did
to you. I admire you for it, and I sympathize with you. But the score you had to settle? The wrong you suffered? Lincoln, it can’t touch me. You saw him on his best day. I saw him on his worst. And I came to settle up.”

“You killed him.”

“Yes. I would have killed his son, too. But then you got in my way. I’m not happy about that.”

“What does the son have to do with it?”

“Everything. That little shit called his daddy for help in the middle of the night and I paid the price, paid it for five years. But that doesn’t concern you. None of it does, really, and I regret that we’re here, but when you went down to Indiana and left a dead man behind, you created some real problems. You changed the game with that move, even though you can’t see that. We’re going to have to refocus our attention now, and you’ve
got
to remove yourself from the situation.”

“Refocus where?”

“Lincoln, are you hearing me?”

I was shaking now, the wind blowing cold as I sat there on my knees, no jacket over my thin T-shirt, my mouth bleeding, my eyes blind.

“Stay away from Karen,” I said. “Whatever Jefferson did to you, it wasn’t Karen’s fault.”

He spoke with the voice of a frustrated teacher. “You don’t understand a damn thing about this. Can you tell me that? Can you tell me that you don’t understand?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Of course you don’t. And that’s a very, very good thing for you. Because I’m going to see that you get home. And home, Lincoln? That’s where you need to stay. You know what I promised Jefferson? I promised him that by the time I was done he’d welcome death. Beg for it. I told him that his would be a welcome grave, Lincoln. I don’t think he believed me. Not at first. He thought he could stop it. But by the end? He believed me by the end.”

He knelt beside me and tapped my skull with the gun.

“Leave the dumb slut alone. I’m disappointed in you even for speaking to her, but I suppose that’s to be expected. No more, though. No more. Another trip to that house may cause you problems that I can’t stop.”

There was silence for a few minutes, and then he rose, and I could hear and feel him pacing around behind me. A few raindrops were falling now, the wind blowing strong and steady, and I couldn’t stop the shivering.

“What did Jefferson’s son tell you?” he asked again.

I shifted forward on my knees, my body beginning to ache from holding the position.

“He didn’t tell me anything. Nothing more than what I’ve already said.”

“He knew what was ahead. That’s why he did it. He’d been told what his father had been told—that his would be a welcome grave—and he didn’t have his father’s arrogance, or his father’s stupidity. He believed me. He knew he couldn’t stop what was coming for him.”

It was quiet, and then he spoke again. “All right.” His voice was thoughtful. “All right.”

Good
, I thought,
the crazy bastard’s satisfied now, and he’s going to let me go
. That was the last thing I thought before he hit me again, a massive blow that seemed to separate my head from my body, and then the world went away for the second time.

I woke up in the bed of my own truck, which was still in the lot behind my building. I groaned, the pain in my head seeming to spread through every inch of my body, and tried to sit up. The sky and earth reeled around me in a crazy dance, and I settled back down, licked my bloody lips, and waited.

It took me three tries to get out of the truck. The bed wall seemed impossibly tall, the ground impossibly far away. When my feet touched the pavement my knees buckled, and if I hadn’t caught myself on the truck I would have collapsed. I hung there on the side of the truck for a while. Maybe five minutes, maybe ten. I took short, shaking breaths and tried to block out the bell choir that was banging away with gusto inside my skull.

My keys were still in my pocket. I fumbled them out with stiff fingers, unlocked the door, and went up the steps one at a time, my hand on the wall for support. Then I had to unlock the apartment door, which took further effort. When I finally staggered across the threshold, I felt like I’d just finished the last leg of a triathalon. If you ran a good portion of a triathalon on your skull, that is. I went into the bathroom, turned on the light, and looked in the mirror.

“Ho–ly shit,” I said. There was blood on my face and on my neck, and my skin was as pale as I’d ever seen it. I ran some cold water and rinsed my face with it, then turned a white towel red with blood. When I’d gotten my face cleaned off, I saw things weren’t really so bad. The cut on my lip had bled like a bastard, but it wasn’t too traumatic, just one deep slice on the inside. Probably needed stitches, and I definitely should be checked for a concussion. I didn’t
know what he’d hit me with, a blackjack maybe, or perhaps brass knuckles, but it had rung me up like a baseball bat swung by Mantle.

I ran my fingertips over the back of my head and felt two large lumps growing there, both on the right side. I knocked a bottle of ibuprofen out of the cabinet, got the top off, and threw a few into my throat and chased them with water. I’d hardly swallowed before I felt them coming back up, and I dropped to my knees and threw up in the toilet. I curled up on the floor, gasping, and leaned my head back against the bathtub. The cool ceramic felt good on my battered skull. After a few minutes had passed, I tried the ibuprofen again, and this time I held them down. I went out to the kitchen and filled a plastic bag with ice cubes, then positioned it over a pillow on the couch, lay down, and nestled my head in it.

“Holy shit,” I said again. I’d had some headaches before, like the time I ran head first into a brick building, but this was something else. Concussions were dangerous things. Skull fractures were worse. If I fell asleep now, I might never wake up.

Two minutes later, I was gone.

I woke sometime after two, rivulets of cold water from the melted ice trickling down my neck. I moved around a bit, testing my coordination. Everything seemed to function right. My head hurt, yes, but it wasn’t as intense as it had been. My vision was clear.

“No hospital,” I decided. That would turn into an hour or so of sitting in a chair in the emergency room, anyhow. I was walking and talking and not bleeding profusely, and in a Cleveland ER, that knocks you to the bottom of the list. Instead, I swallowed a few more ibuprofen to keep the swelling down and went to bed.

He’d told me I’d be left alone as long as I stayed away from it. What the asshole didn’t understand was that I
was
going to stay away from it. Right up until he put that bag on my head.

I
found the photograph in the morning. It was a simple print on low-quality paper, slipped into the back pocket of my jeans. I hadn’t noticed it the previous night, but I’d been damn groggy then. Besides, the picture didn’t have much weight to it. Not until you looked at it.

Alex Jefferson’s head and upper torso filled the frame. His shirt was off, and there were two diagonal slashes across his chest, intersecting at the bottom of the picture in a way that made me think it was the top half of an
X
. The blood appeared more black than red in the photograph, and the wound had to be fresh, because the blood was just beginning to spill and coat his skin and the wiry gray hairs that covered his chest.

There was duct tape over his mouth, covering the lower half of his face, and above it his eyes bulged with pain and horror. His gray hair hung disheveled over his forehead, a sheen of sweat on his skin. Temperatures had taken a drop the week Jefferson died, cold nights and cool mornings, like the one when Targent and Daly showed up at my gym. I remembered that, and then I thought about the sort of pain that could make your body break out into a full sweat on a cold night.

For a long time I looked at his eyes. I’d swung on them that night in the country club parking lot. Connected with his nose, maybe, but when I felt my fist shatter bone and saw Jefferson’s legs crumple soft beneath him, it was his
eyes I wanted to change. The smugness, the arrogance, that sense he had that the world was in his palm, everything perfectly in control. I wanted to remove it, and I failed. The splash of blood on the pavement didn’t disrupt his life anywhere near as much as mine. The next time I saw him, the world was still his, and his eyes showed it.

Not anymore. I looked at the photograph, and I saw that all the things I’d loathed were gone from his face. The world had risen up out of his palm, risen harsh and angry and violent, leaving a powerful man utterly powerless in the end. The world has that tendency.

Several minutes passed while I stood alone in the bedroom with the photograph in my hand. The police should have it—evidence, directly connected to the crime scene.

Evidence. The word had been running through my brain for all of my professional life. It was the focus of my work, what I pursued, what I needed. And now, what I feared. Any other day, with a photograph of a murder scene in my hand, I’d be reaching for the telephone to call the police. Today, I hesitated. Evidence.

I saw Targent leaning into the cab of my truck again, his face reflecting the dashboard lights, explaining the options he and Brewer had discussed. They were options that would send me to jail. Ludicrous options, sure. But now I held a photograph of a murdered man in my hand. It would be evidence, yes, but evidence against whom? I already knew that there would be no fingerprints on it, that the paper would be a generic brand sold across the country, that the image itself would offer nothing to point back to the killer’s identity. All that would have been cleared long before it was carefully folded and placed in my pocket. Jefferson’s killer was a pro.

There was my face, the bruises and damage left by my attacker. Would that be proof enough, though? Would Targent and Brewer, pinning me between two investigations hundreds of miles apart, believe my story?

I wasn’t going to give them the photograph. Even while I realized this, I marveled at it, the audacity and stupidity of such a decision. It was ridiculous. A crime, suppression of evidence. I chastised myself when I held the flame of a cigarette lighter to the photograph’s edge, continued even while I sprayed water at the charred remains to drive them down the sink drain in a swirling smear of wet ash, kept the lecture up until I was in my truck and headed for Karen’s. I expected the berating would scare me eventually, convince me I had made a mistake. Instead, what let the fear loose was the unshakable sense that I had not.

______

“Lincoln—your face!”

It wasn’t the nicest greeting I’d ever heard, but I suppose it had to be expected. I tried to smile at Karen as she stood there in the doorway, but didn’t put too much into it. Wouldn’t want that split lip to open up again and start dripping blood all over her furniture.

“Morning,” I said. “You mind if I come in?”

She stepped away from the door, her expression still horrified, and let me inside. This time, she didn’t take me into the living room but just stood in the entryway.

“What happened?”

There was a mirror just over her shoulder, a huge thing with a polished brass frame that probably weighed about eighty pounds. I caught a glimpse of myself in it, and it took effort not to grimace.

“One of your husband’s old friends decided to look me up,” I said. “He wished to talk. The talk, I was told, was the alternative to killing me.”

She lifted a hand to her mouth and then lowered it, slowly. “Who . . .”

“Didn’t give me a name, unfortunately.”

“Well, what did he say? What did he say about Alex?”

“That he killed him.”

Her head rocked back, and more of the rest of her went with it than should have, and then she blinked and steadied herself.

“You saw the person who killed him.”

I shook my head. “No. I saw the inside of the bag he tied over my head after he knocked me out and dragged me off into the woods to sit with a gun against the back of my head and answer questions.”