The Shadowkiller (3 page)

Around the campfire that night, Ty regaled all with the lucid minutiae of his encounter. Ronnie thought it sounded like a really great pitch for a video game, and she wasn't alone. Ty had a reputation as a showman and many felt he seemed to be setting them up, pitching a new product, an entry into the lucrative games market. For a while the whispered buzz was infectious about Ty's thrilling new Bigfoot video game. But as the evening wore on and no title was revealed, no release date mentioned, people began squirming over Ty's seeming departure from sanity. Some suggested that if it had really been Bigfoot, it was apparently playing with him and he was likely never in danger. Ty was furious. Someone ventured that the thing might be up above in the woods watching them that very moment. One man was pretty liquored up and suggested they take flashlights and go look for it. He got no takers. Ironically, the people who knew Ty best were the ones who most doubted his story.

Ronnie's troubles with Ty started that night when he insisted they sleep in their Suburban. Ty tossed and turned all night and in the morning looked like a wreck. His continued insistence finally resulted in six men walking the trail for about a mile looking for a sign of “Ty's monster.” The men were not trackers and therefore missed myriad broken branches and disturbed debris, but it didn't matter. By the end of the day no one believed him.

The next day Ty angrily informed Ronnie they were leaving. Against her wishes they left and drove the five hundred and some miles back to Snohomish. Ronnie read a book the entire way, not knowing what to say to Ty.

When they got home, Ronnie paid the sitter, then went to bed. Ty went to his office and started drinking. Ronnie found him the next morning snoring in his chair, a glass and a bottle nearby. She went into her office and called a psychologist. Ty woke up and called a press conference. And that's when the circus began.

Whether he was shut away in his office, gone for days or weeks in chartered airplanes equipped with infrared sensors and spy cameras, or off on treks to Idaho and northern Canada, he changed all of their lives. His offer of a huge reward backfired when kooks from all walks of life created a furious blizzard of false claims. And the media were all too eager to mock the ringleader.

All right, maybe it was the way I handled the story that made me a laughingstock.
When the media pushed him, he pushed back, and in that contest he was doomed to lose. Should he have just laughed it off? Would it have gone away? The
Weekly World News
had been the first. And typical Ty Greenwood, he had to get in a fight, and that's when the mainstream media got hold of the story like a slathering, fevered dog and wouldn't let go.

But truth be told, from the time he first tasted success, Ty just knew things would go bad. The product of hardscrabble Pentecostals from the Mississippi Delta, Ty had been infused from birth with the rule that no great success goes unpunished by God. For so many years Ty heard his father solemnly spout Matthew 19:24 like a mantra,
“It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”
Although Ty's faith had long since been shaken, he was still programmed to look for dropping shoes. He had moved away from his roots, literally and figuratively, but his outrageous bounty had brought both a feeling of elation and a submerged sense of dread. Deep in his brain that Trojan Horse virus planted by his father so many years ago told him that getting higher on the mountain only meant you had farther to fall. With depression and whisky working to cement his self-loathing, Ty now accepted his demise as predestined.

T
y comforted himself that he had just relived that awful chapter in his life for the last time. He switched on the headlights, put the Mercedes in gear, gripped the huge, two-spoked wheel, and rolled down their hundred-yard driveway. He accelerated with a low burble from the exhaust pipes and headed into the blackness.

Sleeping with a window open a few inches for fresh air, Ronnie stirred, thinking she heard the far-off rattle of one of the garage doors. Then she heard a car engine, the unmistakable low thrumming of her husband's old Mercedes. Ty liked to fire it up once in a while just to hear it growl. She pushed down the edge of the comforter to see the clock's red numerals: 3:19. Too sleepy to reason out everything that was going on, her mind synopsized that he was depressed as usual and, judging by the varying pitch of the engine, he was going somewhere at three-something a.m. in a car he never drove. Whatever. She'd talk to Ty when she got home from her morning call with a major client in their London office.
Just like the workaholic Japanese to pick a Saturday for a teleconference
was her last semiconscious thought as she drifted back to sleep.

Ty slowly accelerated down Harrsch Road, a woodsy secondary lane with the occasional mailbox identifying another five- or ten-acre spread. Thick woods shielded all the houses from view. He heard the odd plaintive honking sounds of the Harrisons' emus as he passed them. His kindhearted neighbors had started rescuing the strange birds from various meat ranchers around the country who had discovered that emu meat was not going to be the new pork. Ty felt their hearts were in the right place but he wouldn't miss the shrill cacophony that ensued every time the birds panicked over a possum or raccoon.

His right foot propelled the big coupe down the road, as he worked his way through the gears and up the speedometer. It was a real shot of adrenaline to not worry about safety. In his sodden state he wondered if race car drivers felt any fear at such blurring speeds or if they could just shut off the fear. He decided to enjoy that last rush of utter carelessness, because he was going to die presently, probably by running into a bridge overpass or a divider or whatever good immovable object presented itself.

The needle edged past the century mark and he was now solidly overdriving his headlights as the car floated over the dips in the narrow, black, tree-lined corridor. Reaching to uncork the Glenmorangie and take a pull, he single-handed the wheel at one-ten, a wildly exhilarating feeling. He took out a CD and put it in the deck. The song's instrumental opening got Ty's hands tapping on the wheel. The lyrics evoked an image of the here and now:

You call me a fool

You say it's a crazy scene

This one's for real

I already bought the dream

So useless to ask me why

Throw a kiss and say good-bye

I'll make it this time

I'm ready to cross that fine line…

Listening to the song on the way home from work one evening recently, Ty had
really
heard for the first time what Steely Dan was saying.

Drink Scotch whisky all night long and die behind the wheel…
What a great, heroic notion.
Forget shooting yourself. Anyway, I don't
even have a handgun. Forget pills, that's a woman's way to go. Exhaust fumes? Too passive. That's for pussies.

“Passive pussies,” he slurred and chuckled at the alliteration.

No, go out in style, my man.

They call me Deacon Blues…Deacon Blues…

Drink Scotch whisky all night long, or at least until you're shitfaced enough to do it, and die behind the wheel of a really fine automobile. No one could say Ty Greenwood didn't know how to kill himself.

They got a name for the winners in the world…
As Walter Becker and Donald Fagen's words and music filled the car, Ty had another decision to make: where to do it.

I want a name when I lose…

He'd drive away from town and run himself into a nice concrete something or other.

My back to the wall, a victim of laughing chance…

He'd know it when he saw it. He took another pull off the Scotch.

This is for me the essence of true romance…

He wondered what the impact would be like, then realized he had unconsciously buckled his seat belt. He chuckled slightly, unfastened it, and put the Scotch to his lips.

Drink Scotch whisky all night long and die behind the wheel…

As he laid the bottle on the seat, Ty caught a flash of brown and a spark of red animal retinas in the distant penumbra of his headlight beams. He instinctively slammed the brakes as hard as he could and the old Benz, without benefit of antilock technology, tried to bite the mist-wetted asphalt. Despite his desire for self-destruction, Ty did not want his last earthly act to be mowing down a hapless doe and her fawns, so he rapidly pumped the brakes to maintain control. The deer family stood fast, as they are wont to do in the wash of headlights, and Ty pulled back on the wheel as if it would stop the car faster. Squealing rubber spooked the deer, but they didn't bolt.

As fast as the crisis was upon them it was over. The car stopped so close to the deer, Ty could see their black, shiny noses—even their long eyelashes. As they casually strutted from his path on stick-thin legs, he honked the horn to speed their departure.

Now they move.
“Shit! Stupid goddamn deer!”

The car sat in the middle of the road, wrapped in the dark woods, running lights glowing, exhaust steam quickly dissipating in the frigid early morning air. Ty's heart raced. His hands shook as he grabbed the Glenmorangie and took a slug off it.
Glug, glug, glug.
He was supposed to be on his way to his final destiny and a
near-death experience
had him rattled. Great. What did that tell him?

Easing away at a greatly reduced pace gave him more control over his mental resources, more time to figure out just what it was he was doing. If anything, he wanted some control over when it would happen.
If it happens,
he now thought.

A few minutes later he saw a familiar landmark and slowed. He couldn't believe it but he'd driven the wrong way, and instead of heading away from Snohomish, he'd driven
into
it. At almost four in the morning there wasn't much going on except some men drinking beer in front of a bar that had closed a few hours before.

A half block away, for some reason he wasn't quite sure of, he pulled into the town's only 7-Eleven, sliding in front of the windows filled with racks of magazines. The kid behind the counter made eye contact, probably because he'd never seen a car like that. Ty shut off the engine, took another swig off the Scotch, and slouched as best he could in the low-backed seat.

His eyes went from the storefront to the instrument panel to his hands on the wheel. In the fluorescent glow of the store he examined the lines and veins in them. Good hands, they still looked youthful despite his being technically defined as “middle-aged.” They were the same hands that had held his wife when they made love, when he slipped the ring on her finger, when he cut the cord when his children were born…

Don't do it. Think of your family…

Oh, that's not fair.

Then the trump card. His left brain, in desperate overdrive to make its case for survival, ran footage of the faces of Ronnie, Meredith, and Christopher, shrunken into hideous masks of anguish as they learned of his violent suicide.

Ty lost the battle to die right then and there, and tears began streaming down his cheeks.

No, no, no, I've been over this, I can't live!

But I can't die…because of them.

Oh shit. No, no, no…

Reason, and all the whys and why nots dissolved into a sea of tears as Ty crumpled behind the wheel of his old German car, sobbing like a man without hope or answers, save for one: he would continue living, yet he didn't have the faintest idea how.

Todd Shelton had been plagued by wicked acne from the time he was eleven. Now nineteen, he liked working graveyard because his acne scars and rampant zits made interaction with other people painful, and at this time of night in Snohomish, Washington, you interacted with very few people. And while Todd had seen some strange stuff working the counter for a year and a half at 7-Eleven, this was really weird. This older dude, like thirty or so, pulls up in a really cool old car, drinkin' right outta the bottle, then bawls like a baby.
Weird, man, definitely weird.

He kept his eye on the guy and went back to sorting the morning newspapers. That was one thing his boss had been adamant about: “Put the papers out the minute they come in.” As he straightened a stack of the local
Snohomish Daily News,
his eyes gravitated to a headline he found a little grabbier than usual.

It intrigued him enough to scan a few lines about some guy who'd disappeared from his truck and left his engine running. Todd wasn't a good reader but the bits of info he gathered made him wonder why a guy would do that.
Weird, man.
He shrugged it off as shit happens and stuck the papers in their slot.

He looked out again and the dude in the cool car was wiping his eyes and drinking some more. Todd shook his head.
That's fucked up, man.