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Authors: Max Allan Collins

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BOOK: What Doesn’t Kill Her
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Jordan’s eyes drifted to a dark-haired man seated halfway between Dr. Hurst and David. This group member had obviously undergone some serious plastic surgery.
What was his story?
she wondered.
Was he a burn victim?
Whatever the case, he was watching David raptly. Everyone else in the circle did likewise, if without that intensity.

“Didn’t matter that Salvatore’s was clear across town,” David said, “and didn’t deliver. She wanted what she wanted, and I wanted her to have it. Called in the order and drove to pick it up.”

He drew in a deep breath, let it out, and looked toward the doctor, the way a guy on the wrong side of a lifeboat views somebody with a spare life jacket. What he got was an encouraging nod.

“When I got back…” David stopped.

The group sat silently. A thirtyish brunette woman sitting next to David touched his elbow. When he turned to her, she patted his arm.

“When I got back, they were dead, Belle and Akina—shot. And… mutilated.”

No one moved.

“I still don’t know whether the killer had been waiting for me to leave, or whether he would have killed me too, if I had been there.”

Silence.

“I wish he had killed me.”

Dr. Hurst said, “Do you, David?”

“… No. Not really. What I wish is that I had been there, too, to defend them, to stop him or die trying.”

The doctor nodded and smiled a little. Apparently arriving at this place had required a long journey for David.

“But I wasn’t there,” he said. “I wasn’t there to defend them
or
to die. Except… he did kill me, in a way.” He let out something that might have been a laugh, but wasn’t. “And there hasn’t been a David Elkins novel since.”

David Elkins.
The thriller writer!
Jordan had never read him, but his books had often rested on the nightstands of both her parents. And hadn’t there been movies?

She knew nothing of the loss he’d suffered. Was it a famous crime, out in that world she’d withdrawn from? Certainly David had been famous. Or famous for a writer, anyway.

And now Jordan spoke: “Did they catch who did it?”

Every eye turned to her, and it knocked her back.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Dr. Hurst said, “Jordan, that’s all right. Usually we don’t ask questions until we’re sure the group member is done speaking, but… I didn’t give you the protocol. My bad.”

“No, I’m sorry,” Jordan said again, weakly. “None of my business.”

The doctor said, “We’re
here
to share.…”

“It’s all right,” David said, looking at Jordan, but his smile died somewhere on its way to his lips. “No, they… the police… never did.”

“I’m sorry,” she said yet again.

“I’ve never been able to understand why he picked my family. Was it the nature of what I wrote? Was I spared? Or was my survival just a fluke?”

I was spared, too,
she thought. But didn’t say it.

The brunette woman was squeezing David’s shoulder now. He had the expression of a crying man, but no moisture came.

Too cried out,
Jordan thought. She knew all about that.

Dr. Hurst said, “David, I know how difficult that was. I would never have asked you to put yourself through that. Why did you?”

He made a tiny hand gesture in reference to the much grander one he’d just made. “I thought our new member should know that she wasn’t the only one here… the only one in the world… to have lost everything.”

She hadn’t known of David’s tragedy, but he seemed aware of hers.

“This group has done me good,” he said to Jordan, “and it can do good things for you, too. But it starts with you
letting
it. You can’t allow this thing to fester inside of you. Or it will kill you.”

“What doesn’t kill ya,” Levi muttered.

Jordan turned to him sharply.

“Makes ya strong?” He held up his hands in surrender and returned to silence.

She supposed he was just trying to help. But what Levi had said—did that mean this long-haired goof knew who she was, too, and what she had gone through? How much did they
all
know about her?

Dr. Hurst said to David, “I understand that you’re writing again.”

David gave up a halfhearted shrug. “If you can call it that. Certainly nothing that’s worth a diddly damn.”

“Are you working on something now?”

While the writer stammered for an answer, Jordan felt a tingle at the back of her neck. She knew she would want to talk to David, and away from group. The crime against him and his family bore at least vague similarities to her own family’s tragedy, despite some jarring differences. She and he had both been spared. In her case, at least, it had been intentional. Had the same been true in David’s?

Glancing up, she noticed that the group was wrapping up with David, eyes again slowly turning her way.

Jordan tried to think of how to say that she had
nothing
to say when the man bearing signs of plastic surgery spoke up, in rescue.

“I’ll go next,” he said in a measured baritone. “My name is Phillip. This is my second meeting.”

Heads swiveled in his direction. Phillip had short brown hair and, unlike the other more casually attired members, wore a white shirt and red tie under a navy blue vest, with navy slacks and black loafers. He sat square in the chair, both feet on the floor, his hands folded in his lap.

Then there was his face.…

Angular, with high cheekbones and a pointed chin, his skin unnaturally white, his eyes light brown, his nose little more than nostrils, like two holes poked in snow. Lips virtually nonexistent. Though his speech was relatively normal, his breathing between words was clearly audible.

“I didn’t speak at the last meeting,” he said, “but now the time seems right for me to share my story.”

Everyone watched him expectantly. Though the damage to his face made it hard for Jordan to estimate his age, he must be somewhere in his thirties.

“Go ahead, Phillip,” Dr. Hurst said.

“I was walking my dog in Rockefeller Park,” Phillip said, sitting woodenly on the metal chair. “Near Wade Avenue Bridge.”

Knowing nods; a well-known area.

“What kind of dog?” someone asked.

Dr. Hurst said, “That’s really not of any—”

“English bulldog,” Phillip interrupted. “Named Cromwell.” He smiled and it was fairly ghastly. “I named him after a hero of mine.”

This elicited a few impressed smiles and nods, but Jordan had no idea who Phillip was talking about.

“Anyway,” Phillip said, “I was walking with Cromwell—this was two and a half years ago, winter. Cloudy, getting dark, but we’d walked that route, oh, hundreds of times before.”

Jordan allowed herself to be drawn into the man’s account. She knew what he had to say would be terrible, and rather than bother her, it made him seem an ally.

“Cold evening,” Phillip said. “Snowing earlier, but wasn’t when we were walking. I saw a man coming toward me with a shovel in his hands. I assumed he was a park employee, who’d been out clearing the sidewalks.”

Phillip paused, inhaled, the sound resonating, punctuating silence that sat among them like another member of the group.

“As we neared each other, I nodded at him,” Phillip said, eyes flicking around the circle. “When we were almost even with each other, the man swung the shovel, hitting me in the face.”

Two members, a woman, a man, shuddered, as if feeling the impact.

Unconsciously, a hand rose to brush his wounds. “It felt like he hit me with his car, but only in my face, my head. Everything went black, not in the sense that I lost consciousness—just vision. My feet went up and my head went back.”

Phillip’s hands moved behind him, miming his effort to break his fall.

“I felt my balance go, but I couldn’t get my hands down fast enough to brace me. When I hit, I cracked my head on the sidewalk.”

“My God,” the woman halfway around the circle said. Then she covered her mouth, as if to prevent further comment.

“Still, I didn’t lose consciousness. I was awake, seeing flashing lights—seeing stars, as they say—with blood running into my eyes. I knew what
he was doing, though. Every single thing. He stole my wallet, my watch, my dog.”

“He stole your
dog
?” someone asked.

Phillip gave a weary nod. “I’m afraid Cromwell wasn’t much of a watchdog. I like to think he looked back at me with regret, as my assailant dragged him off. But I heard no whines, much less barks. Canines can be fickle.”

Next to Jordan, Levi blurted, “Did they catch the jag-off?”

“Cromwell or my assailant?” Phillip said with dry humor. “Neither, I’m afraid.”

“Did you see your… your assailant’s face?” someone asked.

Phillip shook his head. “He wore a hoodie, up, and it was getting dark. It all happened so fast. And yet I remember it in slow motion.…”

There was a long silence.

Finally breaking it, Phillip said, “But I learned one thing, at least, on that cold winter night.”

They looked at him the way a disciple might at Christ or maybe the Dalai Lama. Would the secret of life be revealed?

“I can take more than I ever dreamed I could,” Phillip said matter-of-factly. “And I learned that you have to focus on what’s important in life. Which is two things, come to think of it.”

But what,
Jordan wondered,
if you didn’t have
anything
important in your life?

Directing his comment to the stalled writer, Phillip said, “You have to do what you were put here to do.”

By whom? God? The same God who allowed terrible things to happen to damage these people?

Dr. Hurst asked, “And what is that for you, Phillip?”

He smiled, and this time it wasn’t ghastly at all. “I’m a teacher.”

As they shuffled out after the meeting, Jordan mulled it all. Among the people she had met here, one was still trapped by what had happened to his family, while another had managed to turn an attack on himself into something positive.

David Elkins was a survivor, but one who had been absent at the time of the crime. The survivor Phillip, like her, had been personally attacked—perhaps not to the extent she had, but certainly violently assaulted.

Two survivors—one positive, one negative. She felt close to both men, in their misfortune.

But closer to Elkins.

Was she crazy, thinking his family’s intruder might have been hers?

She was well aware that she was posing herself this question while walking on the grounds of a mental institution.

CHAPTER FOUR

Mark Pryor sprinted up the alley, the material of his Men’s Wearhouse two-for-one suit pants straining, suit jacket unbuttoned and flapping, tie flapping too, his white shirt cool with underarm sweat, his Florsheims scuffing on the concrete.

“Freeze!”
he yelled, but why did he bother?

The kid he was chasing, on this warm spring day—white, maybe twenty, surfer-blondness undermined by the dopey dragon tat running down his left arm—was way out in front, running as effortlessly as a track star among wannabes. This was probably due in part to the perp’s better aerodynamics—after all, he wore only Reebok running shoes and a red leather thong.

Mark had ten years on the freak, but even so was still the youngest detective on the Cleveland PD, only recently promoted. Right now, he felt like the oldest, lungs burning, legs aching, as the mismatched pair entered block three of the pursuit. The detective had his gun in hand, but that was mostly just a threat, and might have been a baton he was hoping to pass to a relay runner.

Charging hard, Mark entertained the thought of shooting the perp—he was barely closing the distance between them—but that was only a fantasy. The paperwork and condemnation that would follow, even if he just winged the guy? Not worth it. Not close to worth it.

Anyway, Detective Mark Pryor had never shot anybody.

Ahead, the alley came to a T and his only real chance to catch Perry the Perv, as the youthful perp was known to the neighborhood, was anticipate which way the kid would go and beat him there.

“Left,” Mark said between gasping breaths. A command, though Perry couldn’t hear him. Almost a prayer.

Perry’s nickname, incidentally, came from everyone knowing that he collected jars of his bodily fluids in his rathole apartment and applied their contents in various unspeakable ways to, in, and on various mentally challenged teenage boys, who he also collected.

Right now Perry was lathered in sweat, and the last thing the detective wished to do was lay hands on this noxious sex offender, and shooting the creep would prevent that. But how could you explain it to a shooting board? Bringing down a guy armed only with a thong.

Mark picked up speed and cut a diagonal line toward the left corner—if Perry went right, then he was in the wind, good and g.d. gone. But the young detective was betting on left, because Perry hadn’t done anything
right
in his whole pathetic life.…

True to his nature, Perry veered left, where Mark was coming up fast. The detective launched himself, his shoulder driving into the Perv’s ribs. He’d been the team kicker back in high school, but he knew how to tackle, all right. As much as he despised having to touch this lowlife, Mark hugged him tight and together they flew.

BOOK: What Doesn’t Kill Her
10.33Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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