The Good Killer Read online

  He tears along the trail, downhill now in the dark. He picks up speed. The trail winds back and forth, and he expects to see the girl around every bend. She can’t be far ahead. If she came this way.

  If.

  He keeps on, but he’s starting to have doubts.

  Then he thinks he hears her.

  Molly Winter

  It was reckless, running past the cabin. Molly knew.

  But all she could think of was Kate in there. She wanted to lure Jimmy away from her.

  If nothing else, she hopes she’s done that.

  Her breathing is heavier than it should be. Molly ran track in school, but that was ten years ago. Her endurance is not what it was then. Still, she thinks she’s going to make it. It can’t be much farther to Castle Mountain Road.

  Another mile? Less, she thinks.

  She’ll make it, and Sean will be there.

  Up ahead, something darts across the path. A mouse or a chipmunk. Molly takes in a sharp breath. Cool air.

  She feels it even before she hears it—someone behind her.

  She dodges right, off the trail, into the woods. She stops and listens. Perfectly still. She can feel her heart pumping.

  With the moonlight, she can see him through the trees. The bike guy. He slows to a jog and then to a walk. Hands on his hips. Listening for her.

  He walks past the spot where she left the trail.

  She looks around. Pinecones on the ground, some bigger than her fist. A few feet away: a broken branch, long as a walking stick, sharp on one end. Molly takes a slow step toward it, then another. She bends to pick it up. The bike guy turns in a circle on the trail.

  Molly waits for him to move on. He doesn’t. She picks up a pinecone. Feels the weight of it in her hand.

  She thinks of another thing Sean told her once.

  When they come for us, you should run if you can. But if you have to fight, you fight. You’re a good person. You don’t want to hurt anyone. They’ll count on that. It will make you hesitate. But they won’t hesitate. They’ll be ruthless. So you have to be ruthless. You have to be willing to do damage.

  With the branch in her right hand, Molly tosses the pinecone across the path. It lands in the brush and the bike guy turns toward the sound. He takes something from his belt. A knife. He moves toward the far side of the trail. Molly charges at him, two hands on the branch now. He hears her and spins around, and she jabs the sharp end at his left eye.

  He jerks his head back at the last moment and the branch misses his eye, but it tears a gash in his cheek. His scream breaks the quiet of the woods. She goes for the eye a second time and once again he jerks away, but the effort throws him off balance. He falls over backward, landing hard, dropping the knife. His hands move to shield his face.

  Molly stands over him and hears Sean’s voice in her head: You have to be ruthless. The bike guy is covering his face, but his neck is exposed. She brings up the branch again, but her heart is racing, she’s trembling.

  She’s not that ruthless.

  She can’t leave him like this though. She hasn’t done enough damage. She doesn’t want him coming after her.

  The lead rope she took from the stable is still coiled around her. She thinks about tying him up, but it would be a struggle and would take time, and she doesn’t know where Jimmy is.

  Instead she reverses the branch in her hands, holds it like a baseball bat, and brings it down hard on the side of the bike guy’s head. He groans and tries to get away from her, sliding along the ground. Molly lifts the branch again and brings it down, four more times, the last time across the bridge of his nose. By then he’s begging her to stop.

  She drops the branch and picks up his knife and runs.

  Jimmy Harper

  Jimmy hears the scream and it stops him.

  First he thinks it’s Molly, that the kid caught her. But before long he’s hearing his own name. It’s Nick, calling for him. It sounds pitiful.

  Jimmy leaves the trail he’s on and cuts through the woods. It’s rough going, and he wonders if he should have doubled back to the fork instead, gone the long way around. But he stays on course, weaving through the trees. He’s got Nick’s voice to guide him.

  He finds him sitting cross-legged on the ground, one hand in his lap, the other covering his cheek. Blood running between his fingers. He’s rocking forward and back.

  “Jesus, Jimmy,” Nick says.

  “Where is she?”

  “She tried to poke out my fuckin’ eye. With a stick.”

  Jimmy crouches down. Lays the sawed-off shotgun on the ground.

  “Let me see,” he says.

  “She cut my face.”

  “Let me look.”

  Eventually the kid takes his hand away and Jimmy looks. The wound on Nick’s cheek is deep and ugly.

  “It’s not bad,” Jimmy says.

  “Fuck you, it’s not bad. It hurts like hell.”

  There’s a smaller cut on Nick’s forehead, and his face is a collection of bruises starting to swell.

  “We’ll get you fixed up when this is over,” Jimmy says. “I promise you.”

  “When it’s over? I think it’s fuckin’ over.”

  Jimmy’s not in the mood to argue. “It’s over when I say it’s over, kid.” He picks up the shotgun and stands. Looks down the path, orienting himself. “Did she go this way?” he asks.

  Nick doesn’t answer. He’s covering his cheek again, rocking.

  “This way?” Jimmy says again.

  “Yeah,” Nick says.

  “On your feet. Let’s move.”

  “I’m done running after her.”

  “Then you can walk,” Jimmy says. “But we’re going. Now.”

  He doesn’t wait. He starts off at a jog, the shotgun in his right hand. He builds up to a run. The trail slopes downward. The night air feels cold in his lungs. The muscles of his legs burn. He pushes on.

  He’s heading roughly east now, he thinks. He left the trail map behind in the car, but he can almost picture it. If he keeps on in this direction, he’ll come to a road. Castle something.

  Castle Mountain Road. Maybe that’s where Molly’s heading.

  Jimmy covers half a mile and he believes he’s going to catch her. She’s younger, but his stride is longer and one thing he’s always had is endurance. He gets his second wind and puts on a burst of speed. He’s running steadily downhill now and he feels good. Strong. Like a wild animal, leaping.

  Another quarter mile and out of nowhere something tears at his ankle. He pitches forward, airborne, and lands on knees and elbows, his chin scraping the ground. He loses his grip on the shotgun and it skitters along the trail ahead of him.

  Molly Winter

  She watches him from the cover of the trees and she thinks he might leap over it—the lead rope that she’s tied low and taut across the trail. But it snares him and he’s undone. He lands with a groan and his face in the dirt. Molly steps out onto the trail and stops the shotgun with her foot.

  She bends to pick it up. Stands straight again. Aims it at him.

  “Hello, Jimmy,” she says.

  He turns onto his side, wipes blood from his chin with the back of his hand.

  “Jesus,” he says.

  He plants his palms on the ground and tries to get his feet under him. His shoes skid over the dirt.

  “Take it easy,” Molly says. “Stay down.”

  He gets one foot set and starts to rise.

  “I’m serious,” Molly says. “Stay down or I’ll blast your face off. Try me and see.”

  He goes still. Eases himself back down until he’s sitting, one arm braced on the ground to hold himself up.

  She keeps the gun trained on him. “Why did you have to come here?”

  “You know why,” he says.

  “That’s over,” she says. “We can’t change it. Let it go.”

  He’s peering up at her in the moonlit dark. His eyes look black.

  “Where’s Sean?” he says.<
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  “It’s over,” Molly says. “You don’t even want him. You want somebody else, from years ago.”

  “Where is he?” Jimmy says again.

  Molly takes a step back and shakes her head. “He’s not the same,” she says. “He’s a different person now. What he did back then—he wouldn’t do it now. If you want revenge, you might as well go after a random stranger. It would make about as much sense.”

  Jimmy’s been breathing hard, but he’s starting to get it under control. There’s a line of blood running from his chin down his neck, but he makes no effort to wipe it away.

  “I know who I’m after,” he says.

  Molly fades back another step. The road is behind her, only a few yards away. She hears a car’s engine, faintly at first and then growing closer. She hears the car come to a stop.

  Jimmy hears it too. His black eyes are watching her.

  “That’s my ride,” she says.

  She moves slowly backward down the trail, keeping the gun leveled on him.

  “It’s all over, Jimmy,” she says. “Forget about us, and we’ll forget about you.”

  He’s still on the ground when she turns. She covers the final distance to the car at a run. Gets the passenger door open and slips inside. She shifts the shotgun to her left hand so she can close the door.

  “Where’d that come from?” Sean asks her.

  All the tension that’s been built up inside her comes out in a laugh.

  “Drive,” she says.

  15

  Rafael Garza

  Nobody ever holds still.

  Something Garza’s late partner used to say. Don Lefors.

  Lefors liked to tell stories. Sometimes they rambled, but generally they had a point. There was one about a bricklayer named Art Charlemagne who called 911 on a late summer night to report that his wife had fallen down a flight of stairs. She was still breathing. He hoped someone would come fast.

  The call came in at one in the morning, and by the time Lefors arrived at the scene it was closer to two. Art Charlemagne was long gone. His wife might have been breathing when he made the 911 call, but she had stopped before the EMTs arrived. The medical examiner opined that the fall had probably killed her, but there was more to it than met the eye. There were bloodstains on the carpet in the Charlemagnes’ bedroom—along with three of Mrs. Charlemagne’s teeth. They’d been knocked out with a masonry hammer. Lefors found the hammer under the bed.

  Garza heard the story years later on a stakeout one night, the two of them in a car that smelled of coffee and fast-food hamburgers.

  “I interviewed the Charlemagnes’ friends and neighbors,” Lefors said. “And they all told me the same things about Art. He liked to drink, and he liked to fish. He didn’t much like to work or to get nagged by his wife. He had a temper that he usually kept under control, until he couldn’t anymore. No one was surprised that he killed his wife, though some raised an eyebrow when they learned he’d used a hammer. They figured his bare hands would be enough.”

  Lefors drank from his takeout coffee and went on. “Took me two weeks to find him. One of his friends told me that whenever Art got hold of some money, he’d go down to the coast and rent a cabin. I put together a list of the places he’d rented before and checked them out one by one. I ended up at this little shack ten miles south of Corpus Christi. Green clapboard rotting away, and the shingles falling off the roof. I found the front door locked and the curtains closed, but when I walked around to the back I saw him: Art Charlemagne in cutoff jeans and a ball cap, sitting on a blanket in the sand with the Gulf of Mexico in front of him and a cooler of beer by his side.

  “I told him where I’d come from and why, but it wasn’t news to him. He knew someone would come. He started talking, without any prompting from me. He wanted to justify himself. It really was an accident, he said. His wife had tripped down the stairs trying to get away from him. I told him I had to take him in, even so. He wanted to bargain: just a few more minutes to feel the wind coming in from the ocean. That’s all he wanted. Long enough to finish his beer. He turned his face out toward the waves and closed his eyes, but I kept mine open. I watched him.

  “While I was watching him, a waitress he’d picked up at a truck stop came out of the cabin and crept up behind me. She went barefoot in the sand, and with the shussh of the waves I didn’t hear her. Didn’t know she was there until she clocked me on the back of the head with a cast-iron pan.”

  Lefors frowned, his coffee forgotten. “I was probably out for less than a minute, but I woke up in a hazier world. Blood in my hair and sand in the blood. The waves coming in slower than before. I rolled up to my feet and set off down the beach. I don’t know why. I made it about a quarter of a mile before I stumbled through some kid’s sand castle. His father started to give me hell, until he realized there was something wrong. I had a concussion.”

  “What happened to Art Charlemagne and the woman?” Garza asked.

  “They got away, for a while. A month later they got picked up in New Mexico when Charlemagne tried to rob a convenience store. He’d run out of money. The point is he didn’t hold still. I wanted him to, so I could catch him. But he didn’t. Nobody does. You see what I’m saying?”

  “Sure.”

  “I don’t just mean that he ran. People keep living their lives, even when you’re not watching. Charlemagne picked up that waitress and convinced her to run off with him to a cabin on the beach. He told her what happened to his wife—his version anyway—and she still fell for him. I didn’t expect that. It never entered into my calculations. And it cost me.”

  *

  Nobody ever holds still.

  It’s the first thing Garza thinks of Monday morning when he drives out to Long Meadow Ranch and sees a sheriff’s cruiser parked at the roadside.

  Garza has kept busy since his arrival in Bozeman. He’s been tracking down passengers and flight attendants who might have spoken to Molly Winter on her flight from Houston to Montana. No one was any help—until this morning, when he found the woman who’d been in the aisle seat across from Molly’s.

  She was in her sixties, retired. She’d been flying home from a visit with her granddaughter. And she remembered Molly.

  “People don’t talk on planes anymore,” she said to Garza. “They’ve got a laptop open, or earphones in their ears. They’re in their own little world. It’s a shame.”

  “But you spoke to Molly.”

  “Oh, yes. She had a book with her, but she kept it closed in her lap as much as she kept it open. Something about her, she seemed happy. Eager to get where she was going. I asked her if she had family in Bozeman.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She shook her head. Told me she was on vacation. Heading to a retreat, at a ranch.”

  “Did she tell you the name of the ranch?” Garza asked.

  “She might have,” the woman said, looking off, trying to remember. “I don’t recall. But it was a yoga retreat. With horses. Does that help?”

  It did. Garza steps out of his car onto the dusty driveway of the ranch. There’s a farmhouse in the distance with a throng of women gathered on the porch. Two men as well, in uniform. Sheriff’s deputies. One of them catches sight of Garza and breaks away. Garza reaches into a pocket for his badge, and the deputy’s hand goes instinctively to the gun on his belt.

  Garza spreads his arms out. Offers his name with a big friendly smile. Lets the deputy study his badge.

  “You’re a long way from home,” the deputy says, handing it back.

  “I’m here on business,” says Garza. “Looking for a woman named Molly Winter.”

  The deputy’s eyes narrow. “That’s interesting. What do you want her for?”

  “Is she here? Did something happen?”

  The deputy looks up at the sky, as if it might hold the answer. But there’s nothing there, just a lot of clouds with the sun somewhere behind them.

  “I guess you could put it that way,” the deputy says.
“Something happened.”

  *

  It’s a mess.

  Molly Winter is gone. That much is clear. She’s left behind her clothes and possessions and the car she rented at the airport in Bozeman.

  Garza gathers the details—some from the deputies, some from the women. He talks first to Barbara Holland, who’s running the retreat. But all she can give him are bits and pieces, and they don’t fit together into anything that makes sense.

  There’s a series of phone calls from Sean Tennant to Molly, which Molly only learned about last night.

  There’s a horse that was saddled and bridled and left wandering in the paddock by the stable. Molly’s horse—the one she’d been riding.

  There’s a tool found lying in the grass of the paddock. A hoof pick, stained with blood.

  No one knows whose blood it is.

  “Not Molly’s,” Barbara Holland says.

  “What makes you say that?” Garza asks.

  “Molly called me after she left,” Barbara tells him. “She wouldn’t say where she was, but she said she was okay. She wasn’t hurt. She wanted us to check on Kate.”

  She’s referring to Kate Domenico, the real estate agent from California who shared a cabin with Molly. Garza talks to her next, and she tells him a harrowing story about being attacked in the night, bound to a bed with zip ties, a pillowcase over her head.

  She remained there for more than an hour, until Barbara and the other women found her after Molly’s call.

  When Garza asks her about her attacker, Kate looks frustrated. She never saw his face.

  “What about his voice?” Garza asks. “Did he say anything?”

  “‘Stop struggling or I’ll kill you.’ It was sort of a whisper.”

  “Nothing more? He didn’t ask you about Molly?”

  “No,” Kate says. “But I wondered if it could have been her stalker.”

  “She had a stalker?”