The Good Killer
THE
GOOD
KILLER
THE
GOOD
KILLER
HARRY
DOLAN
www.headofzeus.com
First published in the UK in 2020 by Head of Zeus Ltd
First published in the US by Mysterious Press, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic
Copyright © Harry Dolan, 2020
The moral right of Harry Dolan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (HB):9781838933746
ISBN (XTPB): 9781838933753
ISBN (E): 9781838933739
Cover photo: Tim Robinson/Arcangel
Author photo by Phillip Dattilo
Head of Zeus Ltd
First Floor East
5–8 Hardwick Street
London EC1R 4RG
WWW.HEADOFZEUS.COM
This one is for Lesa
THE
GOOD
KILLER
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
An Invitation from the Publisher
1
Henry Keen
It’s like a caterpillar in a jar, this idea he’s got in his head.
Sometimes Henry imagines he’s watching it through the glass: It’s alive in there. It’s growing. If you gave it long enough, he thinks, you could watch it evolve. If you left it for a while and came back, you’d have a butterfly.
It starts out as this thing he needs to do, and he wants to do it without leaving a mess behind. Because he’d like to believe he’s not the kind of person who leaves a mess behind.
So he won’t do it at home. He’ll drive out, someplace far, where it’s green. He can picture the spot. There’s a field and an unpaved road, and he can see himself pulling over to the side and getting out of the car.
There’s a hill with grass, and a tree at the top. He walks up until he’s in the shade of the tree. He looks around at the grass and the blue sky.
He’s in a high place and it’s windy, and he’s wearing a black wool coat. There’s a gun in the right-hand pocket. A pistol with fifteen bullets, even though he’ll only need one.
He’ll go out on his feet, standing in the shade. He’ll hold the gun to his temple. He has practiced at home in a mirror. He’ll pull the trigger and his body will crumple to the ground. His blood will end up on the grass.
That’s the idea.
But the idea evolves.
2
Sean Tennant
Morning. The windows in the bedroom face south. There’s sunlight falling on the white sheets and on the pale-gray blanket that’s been thrown aside.
Sean is half-tangled in the top sheet. His eyes are closed, but he’s awake. He hears Molly come in from the kitchen. She has coffee. He can smell it.
She sets a glass on the bedside table. Orange juice. For him. He never developed a taste for coffee.
“I know how this goes,” she says.
Sean opens his eyes. Molly is perched on the edge of the bed now, holding her mug. She’s wearing one of his shirts. Her legs are bare.
“How does this go?” Sean asks.
She takes a drink of coffee before she answers.
“I’m gonna take a shower now and wash my hair. Then I’ll dry it and put on makeup. And you’ll be in here, all lazy. But eventually you’ll remember you’re not gonna see me for five days. And then … we both know what will happen then.”
“What will happen?”
“You’ll make a move. I’ll resist at first, but then I’ll give in. Because I’m a good sport.”
Sean smiles. “That’s true.”
“Afterward I’ll have to shower again and redo my makeup,” Molly says. “And we’ll be late getting to the airport. I don’t mind being late, but I know it makes you nervous, even if you’re not the one catching a flight.”
“That’s true too.”
“So if you’re gonna make a move, you need to do it now.”
Sean sits up and reaches for the orange juice. He takes a sip and puts on a face as if he’s thinking.
“All right,” he says. “If that’s the way it’s got to be.”
*
After: Sean is lying in bed, one leg dangling from under the sheet. Molly is in the shower. The bathroom door is open, and he can hear her in there, singing.
He’s keeping track of the time. It’s a forty-minute drive to the airport from their house outside Houston. He wants to get her there at least ninety minutes before her flight is scheduled to depart. She’s flying to Bozeman, Montana.
She’s been planning the trip for months. It’s a retreat on a ranch: yoga and meditation and riding horses. It’s designed just for women, so there was never any thought of Sean going along.
The first time she mentioned the trip, it made him uneasy.
“It’s a long way,” he said.
Molly nodded. “Sure.”
“There must be yoga retreats in Texas.”
“There must be.”
“But you don’t want one of those.”
“I want this one,” she said. “Montana’s not against the rules.”
“I know.”
“You worry too much.”
He couldn’t argue with that, so he said nothing.
“You think about it,” she said. “If you don’t want me to go, I won’t go.”
She didn’t bring it up again. He’s sure she would have let it drop. But later that week, one night before they went to bed, he told her: “You should go. It’s not against the rules.”
*
She takes a while getting ready. Long enough for Sean to shower and dress and fry two eggs and make toast. He eats his breakfast standing in the kitchen. She’s already had hers: fruit and yogurt. She left him a bowl of grapes. He eats some of those, too, carrying the bowl into the bedroom.
He lingers there, leaning against the oak dresser at the foot of the bed. It’s long and low: six drawers in two rows of three.
It’s the first thing he made when he and Molly moved into this house.
Molly is in the bathroom fixing her hair. Sean watches her in profile through the open door. She’s dressed casually for her flight: jeans and a sky-blue sweater.
She’s taking a final look at herself in the mirror, and the palm of her right hand comes to rest on her stomach, just above the buckle of her belt.
It only stays there for a moment, but Sean sees it. It’s a gesture he remembers. Two years ago she got pregnant, and sometimes he would catch her in front of the mirror, her hand coming up to rest there. As if to remind herself that it was real.
She never had the baby. She lost it after three months. She cried for a week, in bed with the curtains closed. He didn’t know what to do, so he brought her meals she didn’t eat and stroked her hair and said things he thought would be soothing. Eventually the crying passed.
Now he wonders if she’s pregnant again. They haven’t been trying, but they haven’t been not trying. And if she is, he wonders if she’ll tell him or if she’ll want to wait.
She turns her head and catches him watching her. Her lips part as if she might say something, but she doesn’t.
She’s quiet on the drive to the airport. The traffic is mild. He pulls up in front of the terminal and gets out to lift her suitcase from the trunk. Kisses her and holds on to her. She draws back to look into his eyes, and he can see that she knows what he’s thinking.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” she says softly.
He keeps hold of her a little longer.
“Okay.”
He watches her walk in, the suitcase trailing behind her. The glass doors slide open to admit her and close again when she’s gone through.
*
When Sean arrives back home, he leaves the car in the driveway and raises the garage door. The garage is designed to hold two vehicles, but half of it is given over to his workshop. A long bench holds the pieces of his latest project: an armoire he’s building for a dentist in Houston.
He puts on some music—the Strokes, Is This It—and gets to work. The armoire is based on an eighteenth-century design, but he’s modernized it, made the lines cleaner. There’s trim on either side of the doors that’s meant to resemble tall, stylized pillars. There are two drawers at the bottom, each with a diamond-shaped ornament on its face.
Today he’s working on the feet for the piece. They’re broad and rounded at the bottom and narrow at the top. He turns them on the lathe, starting with blocks of cherry and cutting away everything that doesn’t belong. It takes patience to make them match.
He works until the early afternoon. When he stops it’s because he’s feeling restless, and he realizes he missed his usual morning walk. He closes the garage and drives out to Bear Creek Park.
The park covers twenty-one hundred acres, fifteen miles west of Houston. It has pavilions and tennis courts, fields for soccer and softball. There’s even a small zoo with buffalo and emus. The visitors now are mostly mothers with small children, but when the schools let out, the fields will fill up with young athletes. Sean finds a space in the parking lot at a distance from the other cars.
His hiking boots are in the trunk. He puts them on and locks the car. He sets out for one of the hiking trails, but after only a few paces he turns back.
There’s a Glock nine-millimeter in his glove compartment with a shoulder rig to hold it. He sits in the passenger seat and straps it on. He reaches into the back seat for his gray windbreaker. He puts it on to cover the gun.
Locking the car again, he heads out. He walks south on the trail that rambles along roughly parallel with Bear Creek, moving away from the busy part of the park and into the woods.
It’s October and the sun is obscured by clouds. The trail is well maintained, covered with mulch in the low-lying spots that would otherwise turn muddy. Sean encounters a few people—joggers and dog walkers—but as he pushes south, he feels more and more alone. Which is what he wants.
He listens to birdsong and the lilt of the wind through the trees. The trail curves toward the creek and veers away again. Sean treks along, thinking about Molly and the child they’re going to have—and the one they almost had. The one they lost. He remembers how he felt then, during those days that Molly spent crying. He was afraid that he would lose her too, that she would drift away from him. He thought he would wake up one morning and find her side of the bed empty.
The time seemed to crawl by, especially in the long afternoons when he sat with her in the dim of the bedroom, with only a sliver of light coming through the curtains. He started to long for the times when she would fall asleep, so he could slip out and get away from that dimness.
On the seventh day of it, he left to pick up some groceries, and when he returned he found Molly sitting up, hugging the blanket over her knees, her hair in tangles.
“What time is it?” she asked him.
He looked at his watch. “Four thirty.”
“I’m tired,” she said.
“It’s okay,” he told her.
“No. It’s not.” She rubbed her face, looked around the room. “I thought you were gone.”
“I went to the store.”
“Gone gone,” she said. “Not coming back.”
He went to the side of the bed and laid his palm between her shoulder blades.
“Well, you were mistaken,” he said.
She shrank away from him. “You shouldn’t touch me. I’m all sweaty.”
“I don’t care.”
“I need a bath.”
“I don’t care about that either.”
“You could go, if you wanted to.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Find a woman who’s not going to have a breakdown every time some little thing goes wrong.”
A big statement there. A lot packed into it. Sean stood by the bed with his hand pressed against her back, trying to decide how to respond. The air felt thick in the room. She spoke before he did, in a small voice, hunched over, her face turned away from him.
“I thought you were gone.”
He bent to kiss the top of her head. “I wasn’t,” he said. “I wouldn’t.”
He felt her shoulders tremble and he breathed the words into her hair: “I will never leave you. Never. Not ever.”
The words were true then, and they’re true now as Sean walks in the woods of Bear Creek Park, his thoughts shifting to the future. To the baby Molly’s going to have. He’s not worried that they might lose this one the way they lost the other. He’s not exactly an optimist, but he believes that when things go wrong, they go wrong in ways you’re not expecting. So he takes it for granted that the child is coming and that plans need to be made.
Raising children requires money. Sean expects to make three thousand dollars for the armoire he’s building, but most of the projects he takes on don’t pay quite so well. He and Molly keep their expenses low, but having a child will alter the equation. Sean plays with some numbers in his head, trying to guess how much more he’ll need to earn. He slows down without meaning to, from a brisk walk to a stroll.
He thinks he hears footsteps behind him.
He stops and turns to look. There’s no one there.
He scans the woods to find the source of the sound. A few yards back along the trail, a small gray bird swoops down from the canopy of the trees. It peels off in the direction of the creek.
Sean starts walking again, waiting for the sound he heard to repeat itself. He knows it didn’t come from a bird. He goes along for half a mile before he hears it again.
He doesn’t turn this time. He knows what it is now.
It’s Cole Harper.
Sean spent long stretches of his childhood walking with Cole, on sidewalks and through the halls of schools. When they were older they spent fifteen months in Iraq. They walked together on the streets of East Baghdad, sweating in the heat under body armor, surrounded by the smell of dust and burning trash. Sean knows the sound of Cole’s foot
steps.
He listens to them now as the trail bends toward the creek again. He stops by the bank and catches sight of a family of ducks floating in the current.
No sound of footsteps now. Only the rush of the water.
Sean watches the ducks as they glide away downstream, but his thoughts are elsewhere. He’s wondering if he’ll see Cole. It hasn’t happened in a while. Cole is hard to see these days. Sometimes you can glimpse him out of the corner of your eye, but if you turn and look directly he won’t be there. Because Cole doesn’t exist. He died years ago.
All that’s left of him are the things Sean carries around in his head.
Like Cole’s voice.
“What are you doing out here?” it says.
The tone is calm and steady. Sean doesn’t answer. He gets back on the trail. It moves away from the creek, and the sound of the water grows distant. A post from some forgotten fence leans crooked by the trailside, and when Sean sees it he leaves the path and makes his way deeper into the woods. He’s guided by a few familiar landmarks. There’s a tall elm that cracked from rot near the base of its trunk and keeled over. There’s a clearing with a hickory tree on its eastern edge.
Sean skirts past that hickory and finds another beyond it. Some of the bark has been peeled off, but the tree is still alive. He kicks away some fallen leaves and exposes two of its larger roots. There’s a shallow depression between them, and in the middle of it rests a flat rock nearly a foot wide.
Sean sets his back against the tree and looks down at the rock.
“It’s still here,” Cole’s voice says. It’s coming from a remove, as if Cole is lurking on the other side of the tree.
“Yeah,” Sean says.
“Well, go ahead,” says Cole. “You came all this way.”
There’s a dead branch on the ground. Sean uses the sharper end of it to pry up the rock and move it aside. He takes a folding knife from his pocket, crouches down, and uses the blade to begin to loosen the earth.
He pauses, looks around to be sure there’s no one watching.
“Paranoid,” Cole says.
Sean digs with the knife and the branch. Soon he’s sweating, but he doesn’t need to go very deep. Less than a foot.