A Killer in the Wind Read Free

voice. When I glared at it now, it whimpered and shut up and circled the floorboards, its chain scraping. Finally, it lay down again. I went down the stairs to the dirt drive.
    Dunn was just working Frank Bagot into the backseat of the Beamer. I stood where I was a while and composed myself, considering the night sky: the gibbous moon rising and the Big Dipper bright and the bright stars and planets flickering out from behind the trees, making the woods seem mysterious and deep. With the dog quiet, I could hear the swamp creatures again. Whistling, chattering, humming, groaning like bulls. There was a peacefulness about it after the sudden violence, an atmosphere of rightness and content as if things were working in the dark of the forest the way they were intended to.
    That’s when the ghosts returned to me—the memory of the ghosts, I mean. The memory of the city with all a city’s suddenness and jarring noise. I was thinking about Frank Bagot and the way he came back to his past and the way the past comes back. I had lived three years in exurban Tyler County, but New York was always with me. I was always half-afraid that I would turn this way or that and see the little boy who wasn’t there, see him staring at me with his phantom eyes. Or the woman. Samantha . . . The past shapes your desires and your desires lead you back into the past.
    I took a deep breath of the cool spring air, rich and moist and somehow green, full of the swamp and the forest. You’re fine, I told myself. Fine . But I guess the thing is: Once you’ve been crazy, once you’ve seen ghosts and lived with delusions, you can never be quite sure of yourself anymore. Reality seems fragile to you. You’re always worried it’ll crack and you’ll step through it into the bad time again.
    I heard Deputy Dunn shut the Beamer’s rear door. I walked over to the driver’s side.
    “Nice work,” I said.
    He nodded, big-eyed, big Adam’s apple going up and down. He was still all fired up and confused. But I could see by the look of him that he was beginning to realize he had come through it, and he’d have a good story to tell his Sal tonight.
    We both got into the car, me behind the wheel.
    “You bastard, you hit me,” said Frank Bagot out of the back.
    “You’re lucky I didn’t shove that gun up your ass and blow your brains out,” I told him. I started the car.
    I paused for a moment there, my hand on the gearshift. Looking out the windshield at the lighted house with the moon above it. Finally, with some small trepidation, I scanned the edges of the surrounding forest. Fearing I would see those old ghosts standing there, watching me, from just within the trees.
    But there was nothing. Of course not. I felt fine. Good. I had for years. Not likely ever to see what I once saw, what I saw back then, down in the city. The boy. The woman. Not likely.
    But once you’ve been crazy, you can never be quite sure.

2
    Flashback: The Emory Case
    T HIS WAS A little over three years ago. I was NYPD back then. An undercover vice detective in Manhattan North—what in cop-speak we called an uncle . I had the whole uncle routine going too: the longish hair, the motorcycle, the cigarettes—and the ganja, when off-duty—not to mention the complete disdain for rules and procedures that goes along with the undercover trade.
    I had been a while finding my calling. Raised in orphanages and foster homes, I’d bummed around for a few years after high school. Did construction work here and there. Drank hard. Broke hearts. Punched people. Then, on the advice of a deputy sheriff who’d just finished kicking me in the stomach, I joined the Army. Traveled to the Hindu Kush, met exotic, Pakol -wearing evildoers, and killed them. Came back, got my degree in law enforcement at Syracuse, then applied to the NYPD.
    I became a white shield uncle in PMD—the Public Morals Division—right out of the academy. You can do that in Vice. It’s not like Narcotics. You don’t