Evil at Heart (49 page)

           
“I don’t know,” Archie said.

           
“She took care of me.”

           
“She tortured you, as much as she tortured your sister,” Archie said gently. “Only you’ve had to live with it. There was no reason.” He was talking to himself now as much as Jeremy. “She didn’t care about you. You don’t owe her anything.”

           
Jeremy started to sob. “I’m sorry,” he gasped. “I killed those people. I killed a man I found sleeping in a park and a girl I picked up hitchhiking. I tricked another man into getting into my car, by offering him work. I killed them and I kept their eyes. Because their eyes reminded me of Isabel’s. Dead eyes, like hers.”

           
“You put them at Gretchen’s crime scenes.”

           
“I wanted her to notice me.”

           
Archie looked at Jeremy, wasted, wrecked—the garbage Gretchen had thrown to the curb—and he promised himself that he would do everything he could for him. “You’re in trouble,” Archie said. “People are dead. You stabbed a journalist.” Archie could have

           
gone on, but Jeremy didn’t seem to be in the state of mind to discuss the practicing-medicine-without-a-license charge.

           
“Help me,” Jeremy pleaded.

           
“Your dad will get you a good criminal lawyer,” Archie said. They were both damaged goods. Face-to-face, with their ravaged torsos exposed, Archie felt like he was looking in the mirror. “You’ll be okay,” Archie said. “You’re going to be okay. You’ll get help. We’re going to be okay.”

           
The lights flickered.

           
Archie looked up. Something was wrong.

           
The ceiling seemed to bend toward him, and Archie shook his head and looked at Jeremy to see if he had seen it, too. But Jeremy wasn’t looking at the ceiling. He was looking at Archie, a soft smile on his lips.

           
“We should get out of here,” Archie said. He felt warm, his head muddy. Maybe his blood pressure was still off from the suspension. He tried to stand but his stomach lurched, like the floor had elevated and dropped, or they had hit a swell on a boat, and he fell to his knees.

           
He looked to Jeremy, to see if he’d felt it that time, but Jeremy hadn’t moved. He still sat there, monklike, watching. Then Archie saw Jeremy’s eyes drift to the sports bottle of sugar water.

           
“What did you do?” Archie said. A warm tingle gnawed up his spine and down his arms, and he tried again to stand, but his legs were useless.

           
It was all sickeningly familiar.

           
Archie tried to lift a dead arm, to reach out to Jeremy, but the aperture of his vision was already closing and his head swam. He fell forward into Jeremy’s arms. He heard a fleshy smack and it took a moment to realize it was the sound of his own jaw hitting Jeremy’s bony shoulder. Archie’s face slid a few inches and came to a stop pressed against Jeremy’s hairless and scar-ravaged chest. Archie could

           
taste the blood from Jeremy’s wound mixed with his own saliva, hear Jeremy’s heart beat, as Archie’s own pulse unnaturally slowed. It took all of his energy just to speak one word. It came out in a thick, barely perceptible rasp: “ Phentobomine.”

           
“Yes,” Jeremy said. He held Archie, rocking him. Archie couldn’t feel it, couldn’t feel anything anymore, but he could sense the motion through a pinhole vision of color and light. “It’s what Gretchen drugged you with when she took you captive,” Jeremy said. “I read it in The Last Victim.” He slipped out from under Archie’s weight and gently rolled him over onto his back on the floor. “It will wear off in the next half hour,” Jeremy said. He seemed genuinely sorry. Which did not in the least make up for being left drugged and naked on a concrete floor.

           
“Don’t leave,” Archie said. But it came out “doneeeiliv.”

           
Jeremy stepped away, into the darkness. “I don’t want to go to jail,” Archie heard him say in the black. “They won’t let me bring my toys.”

           
Archie tried again to speak. But his tongue was too huge, too thick, his mouth too dry, and Jeremy was gone into the dark.

           
It was only one sentence. Three words. But he couldn’t form them in his mouth.

           
Turn me over.

           
Gretchen Lowell had been a nurse. She knew how to use Phentobomine. Jeremy had probably ordered it on the Internet. He was a kid. He was scared. He didn’t know.

           
He didn’t know that he shouldn’t leave Archie on his back. That he couldn’t move. That he couldn’t clear the saliva that was pooling in his throat.

           
The lights flickered, as Archie listened to the rattling of his labored breaths. He tried to expand his lungs slowly, to draw in as much oxygen as he could. But his body was betraying him. His heart rate increased. He focused on that, counting beats, trying to

           
stay alive another twenty beats, another ten. His lungs ached. The rattle turned to an ugly hum. Every cell of his body wanted to take a great gasp of air, and he could do nothing but lie there, drowning in his own spit.

           
A pleasant black whirlpool enveloped him, as his lungs surrendered their last store of oxygen.

           
Archie fought it. He willed his body to breathe, to stay alive just a few minutes more. He struggled and strained and raged, and forced his lungs to draw in a thin thread of air.

           
As he did, a pair of hands pressed against his body and rolled him over on his side.

           
C H A P T E R 57

           
Susan clutched her purse on her lap. Mace, to be most effective, should be held upright and sprayed in short half-second bursts at the assailant’s face. Eyes and noses are especially good targets. Range is ten to twelve feet (more or less, depending on canister pressure and wind conditions). Spray and move. Then spray again. If you keep moving, you lessen the likelihood of being a victim of your own chemical attack. Done right, mace causes immediate capillary dilation, temporary blindness, and instant inflammation of the breathing-tube tissues. It also burns like a motherfucker.

           
Henry slid her a look. “You’re staying in the car,” he said.

           
Fuck that, Susan thought, gripping her purse full of self-defense sprays a little tighter. “Right,” she said.

           
Jeremy’s squat was in Portland’s Northwest Industrial District. Years ago it had been a swamp. Then someone had gotten the fine idea to put in a great big rail yard, and after that folks from the Lewis and Clark Exposition of 1905 saw the land and they thought

           
it would be just perfect for their fair, waist-high stagnant water notwithstanding. The fair was a big success, and folks from all around came to Portland for the pavilions, and stayed for the cheap beer and strapping lumberjacks. The fairgrounds’ structures rotted away. The lumberjacks went back to the woods, and the area was built up with light industrial businesses that didn’t make anything, but made parts for a lot of things.

           
“That’s it,” Pearl said from the backseat. Henry slid the car in front of it and parked. The building was blue, one story, with no windows. The remnants of a hand-painted sign of some long-dead business still hung above the old office.

           
Pearl pointed to a beater parked on the street. “That’s Jeremy’s car,” she said.

           
Henry’s mouth flattened and he snatched the radio receiver off the dash console and called for backup.

           
Goose bumps rose on Susan’s arms. Wheat-pasted along the entire length of the building’s buckling loading dock were posters for the upcoming Gretchen Lowell episode of America’s Sexiest Serial Killers.

           
Henry hung up the radio and looked over at Susan. “Let me go in first. Stay in the car with the doors locked. Don’t touch anything.” And then, as if anticipating her protest, he threw a glance back at Pearl. “You need to stay with the girl.”

           
Susan held her purse tighter and looked out the window at the building, Gretchen’s face on the posters, the axe on the old sign. If Archie was in there, he needed help. There wasn’t time to argue.

           
She bit her lip and nodded.

           
Henry unholstered his gun, treated her to one last stern look, and then got out of the car.

           
She didn’t take her eyes off Henry as he walked toward the building in a low crouch, gun angled at the ground in front of him.

           
The loading-bay door was open a foot and she watched as Henry pounded on it and shouted something and then, with one last glance back at the car, slipped inside.