Michael Dibdin - Dark Specter

I dimly recalled my father telling me that a friend of mine had called a few days earlier. I hadn’t paid any attention at the time. I certainly hadn’t thought of Sam. As far as I was knew he was dead.

“This won’t hurt,” Sam went on in the same rapid patter. “I watched all the videos we made those other times, to get the new guys used to the idea. You can tell they didn’t feel a thing. Specters don’t have feelings. That’s the whole point.”

He stepped toward us, hefting the revolver. Since it didn’t matter what I said anymore, I wanted my last words to be the truth.

“We aren’t the specters, Sam. You are.”

He grinned tightly.

“We could argue all day about that, Phil. But there’s an easier way to prove you wrong.”

I knew that any resistance was hopeless, but just to wait passively to be killed seemed inhuman. As Sam moved toward Andrea, I hurled myself against his legs. He stumbled and fell. The gun went off with a sharp crack. For a moment we both lay sprawled on the floor. Then he wrenched himself free, whirled around and smashed the barrel of the revolver into my face.

“You stupid bastard!” he screamed. “Do you think you can change the will of God? You’re nothing, less than nothing!”

He got up and grabbed me by the hair, hauling me back to my knees. The pain was excruciating. I felt blood flowing from my cheek and nose. Sam went over to Andrea and stood behind her. He pressed the gun against her head. I gave her one last glance, to assure her that I loved her, that she wasn’t dying alone.

But she wasn’t looking at me. Her face was turned to the far end of the room and her eyes were stretched open in amazement. I turned, and at that moment the window looking on to the porch imploded in a shower of glass. Fragments flew everywhere, tinkling off the walls and furniture, cracking like sheets of ice on the floor. When the fallout ceased there was another person in the room, a figure of savage splendor, half-naked and covered in blood from head to toe.

Kristine Kjarstad was stretched out on a canvas lounger in her front yard wearing a black-and-white one-piece swimsuit. The book she had been reading lay facedown on the patio beside the remains of a glass of iced tea. Her eyes were closed, her face relaxed, stunned by the hot sun.

The yard was enclosed by a tall wooden fence, built as high as the code allowed, which made the space feel like an annex of the house, another room. A border of native shrubs in varying shades of green surrounded the brick patio: wax myrtles, ferns, viburnums and the ground-hugging evergreens which Kristine had planted because they were drought resistant. It seemed like a bad joke that a city where it rained as much as in Seattle should be subject to periodic water shortages, but a mild winter with little snowmelt to fill the reservoirs had resulted in yet another watering ban.

This was the last day of Kristine’s vacation, and she was making the most of it. Thomas was spending the weekend with his father, leaving her to luxuriate in peace, quiet and idleness. She had slept in, eaten a boiled egg, plowed through several pounds of newsprint, then smeared herself with sun block and gone outside. She knew that tanning was now regarded as seriously incorrect, but it was a pleasure she refused to give up. It was almost as good as sex, she thought, and better than some sex she could remember. She stretched out luxuriously and gave herself up to a gentle, pervasive sense of well-being.

When the gate clicked open, she thought for a moment that it was the paperboy or the mailman. Then she remembered it was Sunday, and the paper had already come. She straightened up slightly, raising one hand as a screen against the sun. The front gate was still closed, but the one at the side of the house was open. A child was standing just inside it, at the very edge of the patio, as though afraid to advance any further.

Kristine blinked rapidly, trying to focus her sun-drenched eyes.

“Hi there!” she said.

A moment later she recognized the boy as Thomas’s new friend, the one who’d just moved into the Wallis house.

“Thomas isn’t home right now,” she said lazily.

But the boy wasn’t listening. He was talking, blurting something out in one long continuous sentence punctuated only by frequent gasps for breath. He must have run over from his house through the backyard, Kristine thought. She rolled up off the lounger, replacing a strap which she had slid down. She still couldn’t figure out what he was saying, but he seemed to be in distress. He backed away as Kristine approached, still gabbling, seemingly on the verge of tears.

“What is it, David?” she asked gently. “What’s the matter?”

Now the tears came, making the boy’s speedy patter even more incomprehensible. Kristine crouched down, making herself look smaller and unthreatening.

“Is something wrong? Where are your mom and dad?”

She’d only spoken to them once, apart from phone calls to arrange for the children to get together. The father was one of Paul Merlowitz’s clients-Paul hadn’t disclosed anything about the case, of course-and had been an English professor. They seemed a pleasant enough couple, although they’d managed to deflect her questions about where they were from and what they were doing in Seattle. Kristine hadn’t insisted. If she had been one of the framers of the Constitution, she would have added “privacy” to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

After listening to the boy’s staccato delivery for another few minutes, she finally began to tune in to what he was saying. It was like doing a jigsaw puzzle, picking out a few phrases here and there, then trying to fit them together. The picture which emerged seemed harmless enough at first. A man had come to the house. He was a friend, or at least someone known to the family. Then David added a few more pieces to the puzzle, and the pattern abruptly became more sinister. The man had hurt his dad. He had started shouting angrily. David had been watching TV. He had got scared and run away. He was afraid the man had come to take him away again.

Kristine didn’t particularly want to butt in on some domestic dispute, but the boy’s terror seemed real enough. Then he added one final, decisive detail.

“He’s got a gun.”

Kristine Kjarstad ran up the steps to the porch.

“Stay here!” she told David. “Don’t leave this yard!”

She raced upstairs to her bedroom and opened the blue chest, painted with elaborate red and yellow designs in traditional Norwegian style, where she kept her issue revolver. It took her a few seconds to load the weapon-she’d seen the results of too many accidents to keep a loaded gun in the house with kids-then rushed downstairs again and out into the sunshine.

The boy was nowhere to be seen. As she hurried along the side of the house, it occurred to her that she might well be making a complete fool of herself. The whole thing could well be some fantasy the boy had dreamed up. Men with guns coming to a private house in broad daylight? Things like that didn’t happen in Wallingford.

She ran across the mangy lawn pitted with weeds and past the unpruned apple tree whose crop had already started to fall and rot. Next door, Mr. Shadegg was tending the immaculate beds of vegetables and herbs which his wife pressed on Kristine continually. He looked up at the figure in the bathing suit running by, revolver in hand.

“Call 911!” Kristine shouted at him. “The Wallis house!”

Mr. Shadegg just stood gaping. Kristine opened the gate in the picket fence and ran on across the Wallis’s yard to the back steps with their ancient stenciled notice NO PEDDLERS. It made her think again about the wisdom of what she was doing. If David had made the whole thing up, the story might end up in the papers. People would be coming up to her at Food Giant for months with an ironic glint in their eye.

She went around the side of the house and up the front steps to the porch. The lace curtains were pulled across the window and all she could see was a vague silhouetted figure at the rear of the room. She was about to ring the bell when she heard the sound of a gunshot inside. A man shouted something in a tone of fury. There was a cry of pain.

She tried the door. It was locked. Someone could be injured, even dying. There could be more shooting at any minute. Closing her eyes and saying a swift prayer, Kristine took a step back and hurled herself at the window. It shattered under the impact and she fell into the room, stumbling over some piece of furniture. She quickly recovered her balance and straightened up, grasping the revolver two-handed. Thin seams of blood seeped from her exposed skin, but she didn’t notice the pain, riveted by the scene at the other end of the room. The couple who lived here were kneeling on the floor. They were both handcuffed, and a patch of silvery tape covered the woman’s mouth. A man in some kind of uniform was holding a pistol to her head.

“Police!” Kristine shouted. “Drop it!”

The gunman smiled.

“You shoot, so do I,” he said in a quiet voice. “You might miss. I won’t.”

“There’s no way you can escape!” Kristine rapped out. “I called 911 already. There’ll be a squad car here any second. You haven’t killed anyone yet. Don’t make it worse for yourself.”

The gunman’s smile broadened. He seemed to be enjoying himself.

“Great tits!” he said. “I bet you have a cute ass, too. Even the blood’s kind of a turn-on, tell you the truth.”

Kristine ignored the taunts. She knew she had to take the initiative in the next few seconds or the situation would get out of control. But what was the situation? The setup looked like one of the cases she had been working on before her leave. Was this a copycat, some jealous lover who had read about the Renton case in the papers and decided to borrow the MO?

“Looks like we have a standoff here,” the gunman said, staring at her intently. “I’ll tell you what we’ll do. We’ll let God decide.”

“God?” echoed Kristine faintly.

“Isn’t that best? After all, we’re only human. We could make a mistake. But God doesn’t make mistakes.”

His tone changed abruptly, from ruminative meditation to rapped-out instructions.

“We both raise our guns so they’re pointing at the ceiling, then break out the cylinder, cover one of the shells and let the rest fall to the floor, engage the cylinder again and spin it. Then we lower our guns at the same time and fire. If nothing happens we try again. Sooner or later one of us will get lucky. God will decide which.”

“No fucking way!” Kristine snarled.

The gunman’s smile vanished. He jammed the pistol against the woman’s skull so hard she winced with pain.

“Five seconds. Four. Three. Two …”

The bound man kneeling on the floor spoke for the first time, a howl of despair.

“For God’s sake!”

“OK, I’ll do it,” Kristine shouted.

She had no choice. Even if she fired now, the gunman would have time to blast the woman’s head apart. This way, he would at least be forced to remove the pistol from his victim’s head. Once he did that the odds would be even, and there was a possibility that Kristine might get a shot at him. But she would only have one chance. She wished she had spent more time on the range.

“I know what you’re thinking,” the man said. “You’re thinking you can maybe get the drop on me while we’re unloading the guns. Well, think again.”

Keeping the pistol rammed up against the kneeling woman’s head, he reached into the black bag lying on the dining table and produced a snub-nosed lump of black metal. Kristine recognized it as a Cobray M-11/9 semiautomatic submachine pistol, long the weapon of choice among drug gangs and other connoisseurs of violence. “Semiautomatic” described the way the weapon came set up, in order to evade the provisions of the 1934 National Firearms Act, but converting it to full auto was simply a matter of sending off for a kit to form the lower receiver frame. After that, the thing was capable of delivering a full clip of thirty-two 9mm pistol bullets in a couple of seconds.

The man laid the Cobray down on the table.

“This is going to stay right here,” he told Kristine. “If you try anything funny, or your buddies come to the door, this house is going to be full of corpses in no time at all.”

Kristine stared right into his eyes. The stinging pain of her lacerations was beginning to tell.

“That’s not fair,” she said. “You could blow me away while I’m unloading.”

The man smiled and shook his head.

“You don’t get it, do you? No one seems to get it! I’m not going to try any tricks. I don’t need to. I already know what’s going to happen. As long as you play straight, I won’t touch the automatic.”

In one smooth gesture he whisked the pistol away from the woman’s head and pointed it at Kristine. Her finger tightened instinctively on the trigger, then relaxed. I’m outclassed here, she thought. I could never have done that so quickly. The gunman seemed to have endless reserves of confidence and capability.

“Let’s go!” he said.

Locking eyes with her, he began to raise his pistol in a slow, smooth arc. Kristine found herself doing the same. She had the tunnel vision of the shooter, focused only on what is happening up front, rigid, inflexible, locked into combat.

“Now we’re going to break out the cylinder,” the man said, as though talking to a child.

The two clicks were practically simultaneous.

“Cover one of the shells and let the rest fall to the ground.”

If he tries anything, I can dive behind the chair and take him from there, Kristine thought. But it seemed a faint, weak memory from a previous existence, with no force or relevance to what was happening. She blocked one hole in the cylinder with her thumb and let the other bullets fall to the floor. In the background, she could hear a television blatting away.

“Put it together again and spin the cylinder three times,” the man said.

Kristine obeyed. The man nodded. She had done well, he was pleased with her.

“OK,” he said, “here’s where we play.”

She tightened her hold on the wooden grip of the revolver and started to lower it in time with his, the two guns describing twin parabolas through the still air. Someone was weeping somewhere. It was the kneeling man. She felt irritated with him for disturbing them at this important time.

“I want to play too,” said a voice from the kitchen.

Something flew through the air, striking the gunman in the face. He whirled around to face this new threat. The moment his eyes left Kristine’s, the spell was broken. She pulled the trigger, but the gun just clicked emptily. She was vaguely aware of a shape in the doorway to the right, small and indistinct. The gunman was turning back now, taking aim. Click. Click. Click. Kristine pumped the trigger desperately, all her force in that one finger, aiming for the center of mass in the upper chest area, and then felt rather than heard the gun come to life in her hands, and saw the gunman reel back clutching himself, his mouth open in amazement.