The Shadow Man (58 page)

Locked together, the two men thrashed on the rocks, strength against strength, trying to gain an advantage that they could turn into death. Winter pushed a knee forward, locking it against one boulder, and he used this to create leverage, jerking himself around, feeling a momentary weakness in his assailant. Both men groaned hard with exertion, saying nothing, but letting their grip try to speak for them.

The Shadow Man’s breath was hard against him, and Winter bellowed in pain as the man’s teeth tore into collarbone. The Shadow Man drew back and Winter smashed a shoulder toward the man’s nose, hearing a thudding grunt as he connected. But the force of the thrust threw them both off balance. Like an old tree battling a hurricane wind, they swayed, then toppled hard. Still

clasped together like a pair of murderous dancers, they rolled from the jetty, crashing once, then twice, against the sharp rock edges, and then tumbling into the thick, warm saltwater.

For an instant they plunged beneath the surface, still -entwined together, still struggling. Then they burst upward, their heads breaking the ink-black surface simultaneously.

Winter gasped for air as the two men twirled amidst the waves. There was no longer anything beneath his feet, nothing to push against. They both dropped beneath the surface again, then rose, kicking, back into the air.

He could feel the Shadow Man pushing the knife inexorably toward his ribs, seeking to cut out his heart. Again he tried to bring the revolver, still locked in his grip, to bear, but the man’s hand was too strong. The pistol wavered just inches away from where a bullet might do some damage, while all the time the point of the Shadow Man’s knife sought to end the struggle.

A third time they slid beneath the dip and sway of the waves, the weight of water punching him like a fist. When they burst through the surface again, Winter realized they had thrashed their way farther from the beach and the jetty. For an instant, as they churned in the blackness that enveloped them, he could just make out the Shadow Man’s eyes.

And what Simon Winter saw first, in the final darkness of this last night, was something both awful and simple. They were gripped in an odd stalemate of strength, and there was only one way to break it. He knew, right in that second what it was he had to do.

He understood: the only way to kill him is to let him kill me.

And so Simon Winter suddenly pulled the Shadow

Man’s knife hand hard toward his side, letting the blade find the flesh above his hip, just beneath his ribs and away from his stomach, in what he hoped would not be a fatal stab. The sudden pain was sharp, a wet, horrific hurt as his body absorbed the blade.

The motion took the Shadow Man by surprise, throwing him off balance, and in that small time, he did not drive home the advantage that Winter had given him. His training and instincts, which should have caused him to raise the knife point up hard, killing the old detective, for the first time perhaps ever, failed.

As the knife hesitated in his body, Winter savagely reached across and grabbed his gun with both hands. Doubling his strength, he jerked the weapon up against the Shadow Man’s chest, and shouting a great bellow of pain and rage that rose above the crash of the surf, he called on the old gun that he’d worn for so many years to answer for him one final time.

The water muffled the shots as he fired. But he felt the revolver buck in his hand and he knew that each bullet was smashing home.

He pulled the trigger five times.

A wavelet splashed in his face, and he felt the Shadow Man abruptly, almost gently, release his grip and slide back away from him. Winter gasped for air.

In the last darkness of night, Simon Winter saw a look of confused surprise on the killer’s face. He felt the Shadow Man’s hand drop from the knife, and then the blade fell away from his side, falling into the warm water. The old detective saw death just begin to seize hold of his adversary, but a final outrage soared within him, pushing past all the pain and shock. He reached across a wave, grasped hold of the Shadow Man’s white hair and he pulled it toward him, jamming his revolver into the man’s

mouth open in the astonishment of dying. He whispered harshly, ‘For Sophie, God damn you, and for all the others too.’ He held the pistol steadily for just a half second to let his words crease the last moment of the Shadow Man’s life, and then fired his final shot.

The sound echoed briefly across the waves, then was lost in the noise of the surf.

Walter Robinson drove the squad car slowly over the loose coral rock and sand of the access road adjacent to the ocean. In his left hand he held a powerful spotlight, which cut through the last of the night gloom like a rapier through loose folds of cloth. He swept the light in an arc across the expanse of empty beach, the beam dancing across the waves as they rolled toward land, following it with his eyes, searching for the old detective.

‘Do you think he’s here?’ Espy Martinez asked quietly.

‘Yes. No. Somewhere,’ Robinson replied hesitantly. ‘They both are.’

She did not respond to this, but continued to peer through the graying darkness. The rough stone of the road crunched beneath the tires of the policeman’s car, and she cursed the noise it made. She tried to sort through all the sounds of the end of the night; the car engine, the tires against the road, Walter Robinson’s harsh breathing so unlike the softer sounds he made when he slept by her side, the nearby rumble and slash of the surf against the shore. She thought if she could simply pigeonhole each sound, identify it, qualify it, assess it and discard it, then she would finally come across a single tone that was different, and that would be Simon Winter.

Or, she thought swiftly, the Shadow Man.

She had watched Walter Robinson plunge like a diver into the crowd of elderly people outside the rabbi’s

apartment, demanding, shouting questions at the gathering, a wild man, possessed. ‘Did you see an old man? Did you see a man with a knife?’ The rabbi and Frieda Kroner had accompanied him, rapidly speaking in several languages, like a pair of simultaneous translators. The people surrounding the detective had looked skittish, riveted by the suddenness of fear, unable to speak, until one ancient woman, clutching at the arm of an equally ancient man, had tremulously raised her hand.

‘I saw,’ she had said. ‘I saw something.’

‘What?’ Robinson had demanded.

‘A man. Not a man with a knife. But a tall man with white hair.’

‘Yes, yes, where?’

‘He ran,’ the old woman said. She lifted her arm and Espy Martinez had seen a bony finger quiver in the air as if righting a gust of wind, pointing to the ocean beach. ‘He ran that way as if he were chasing after the Devil…’

She no longer knew how long they had been searching for the old detective. Ten minutes that seemed to be a thousand. A half-hour that was longer than any day she’d known. It seemed to her that each minute that slid past them laughed cruelly, mocking their hunt.

‘He could be anywhere.’ She cursed beneath her breath. ‘We don’t even know if they came this way…’

‘I think they did,’ Robinson replied, still swinging the flashlight’s beam toward the beach and the waves beyond, his head halfway out the open window of the police cruiser. ‘If he’d gone North, he would have been turning toward all the downtown lights. No, he would come this way. He’d run for the darkness.’

‘And Simon?’

‘Simon would chase after him.’

Espy Martinez took a deep breath. ‘It will be daylight

soon,’ she said. ‘Maybe we’ll spot him then.’

‘That will be too late,’ Walter Robinson replied. His hand clenched the steering wheel tightly. He wanted to gun the engine, surge forward, anything that would make him feel as if he were a part of the pursuit and not simply wandering about aimlessly.

Espy Martinez looked at the set of Robinson’s jaw, saw the frustration tightening the muscles of his forearm. She felt helpless, like a physician standing at the bedside of some terminal patient. She turned away and continued sorting through the sounds again. A distant siren. A breaker finding the shoreline. Her own heartbeat in her ears.

And then, at that moment, something different. A single cracking sound, like someone far away stepping on a dry branch. A noise that rode the air directly to her like a lover’s whisper.

‘Stop the car!’ she shouted.

‘What? What? Did you see something?’

‘Did you hear it?’ she asked.

‘What?’ Robinson replied. ‘Hear what?’

But Espy Martinez was already jumping from her seat, slamming the door on the still-rolling vehicle. As her feet hit the sandy road, she cried back over her shoulder, ‘A

shot, I heard a shot___’ Robinson jerked the gearshift into

park and leapt after her.

Simon Winter rocked on the top of the waves like a child in a cradle. He could feel his life’s blood slipping through the knife wound in his side and it seemed to him as if he was wrapped in an immense warmth.

He thought of Frieda Kroner and the rabbi, and he spoke out loud to them: ‘You are safe now. I did what you asked.’ In the same moment, he pictured his old neighbor

and thought: Sophie Millstein, I have paid my debt.

He did not feel any pain and this surprised him. All the deaths he’d known over so many years had always seemed to him to be so many rippings and tearings, he had always assumed that violence was the bridegroom of pain. That he felt only a slight lightheaded dizziness intrigued him.

The weight in his free hand reminded him that he still held his empty revolver. He leaned back, as if reclining on the waves, and considered for an instant that he should simply let it slide from his fingers into the black water beneath him, but he could not bring himself to do this. Inwardly, he told the weapon: You did what I asked, and I am grateful. It was what I expected and you do not deserve to be abandoned and thrown away after such service, but I do not know if I have the strength to lift you up.

Still, he tried, failing the first time, then coughing back some sea water, and succeeding in slipping the weapon back into his shoulder harness, which gave him an immense sense of satisfaction.

Simon Winter took a deep breath. He clasped one hand over the bleeding wound, and with the other, he took a single, great overhand stroke, swimming for an instant.

He thought to himself that it would be nice to die on the beach, that when he slid away from life it would be good to have solid ground beneath his feet, so that when he had to face death alone, he could do so squarely. But the long stretch of sand was more than fifty yards distant, an impossible trek, and he could sense the tug of the tide, pulling him further from the shore. He swept through the water again with his free arm, but exhaustion abruptly filled him, and he told himself that choosing the site of one’s own death was something of a luxury that few people could afford, and that he should pay this no mind, but

accept what the next few minutes had in store for him. But, even with this thought ringing in his head, he found his arm pushing past the fatigue brought on by the chase, the fight and the wound, and he struggled again against the current.

This made him smile.

I have always been stubborn, he thought. I was a stubborn child, and I became a stubborn young man and years passed and I turned into a stubborn old man and that is what I am now and fighting is a good way to die.

He kicked hard with his feet, trying to swim with the last bit of strength that he had. He gasped for a breath of air, and saw something that astonished him, coming from the beach, piercing the gray hour. It was a shaft of light, and at first he thought it was death coming for him, and then he realized it was nothing so romantic; instead, it was something temporal searching for him, and he lifted his free arm above the waves as the beam probed the air about him, and finally fastened on his hand lifted high.

‘There!’ Espy Martinez shouted. ‘Jesus, it’s him! Simon!’ She cried out to the old man. ‘Simon! We’re here!’

‘Do you see …’ Walter Robinson began, but she finished,’… No, he’s alone.’

He handed her the light as he started to strip off his jacket, his own weapon, socks and shoes. ‘Hold the light on him,’ Robinson insisted. ‘Don’t lose him.’

She nodded and stepped into the wash from the breakers, the tropical waters encircling her knees, trying to get closer to the old man. ‘Go, Walter,’ she said. ‘Help him now!’

But she did not have to say this, as the detective was already thrusting himself headlong into the surf. He disappeared for an instant in a burst of white water,

crashing through a breaker as it rolled onto the beach, emerging on the far side, his arms and legs stabbing furiously into the body of the ocean.

She kept the light riveted on the old man struggling far from shore. She could just barely make out Walter Robinson’s dark form, darker even than the waters that gripped them both. She saw Winter’s outstretched hand wobble and then dip out of sight, although she could still just see his shock of white hair like a whitecap on the waves. ‘Go, Walter! Go!’ she cried, although she didn’t think her words would carry above the surf. Swim hard, she whispered to him. Swim fast, Walter.

He could feel the tidal pull helping him leave the shore in his wake, but he knew the fickleness of the ocean, for what was helping him this second, would turn on him treacherously when he reached the old detective. He kept his head down, rotating it only to grasp immense drafts of air and to check his bearings. His swim had none of the usual steady rhythm of exercise, but was filled with a fierce wrestling against the warm dark that encapsulated him.

Walter Robinson pierced the water rapidly. He was aware that the beam from the flashlight seemed to be dissipating, and realized that gray dawn was creeping across the horizon. He paid this no mind, but swam on, each pull with his arms straining his muscles. He called out once: ‘I’m coming, Simon! Hang on!’ but the effort to lift his head and shout disrupted the fury of his progress, and so he pushed his head into the waves silently, listening only to the splash of his hands and kick of his feet and the hoarse sound of his wind as he bit air from the last of the night.