Chapter 47
The sound of the shot was loud, reverberant, deafening.
Alex waited for the searing pain. When it didn’t come, she feared the worst.
I’m dead.
Her father had brought her up agnostic, but after Alex’s mother passed away, Brandon had had a change of heart. It wasn’t a complete one-eighty, the man didn’t suddenly start preaching or drag Alex to Evangelist events on the weekends, but she’d caught him on several occasions mentioning a sort of afterlife.
Alex, still young then, had naturally adopted her father’s beliefs.
I’m dead, she thought again. That’s why I don’t feel anything.
Alex opened her eyes, which, in this new context, felt like a bewilderingly new experience .
Not knowing what to expect– Golden Gates? Angels with wings? Halos? A blazing inferno and heads on spikes?– Alex was taken aback when she realized that scene before her hadn’t changed.
Only, it wasn’t exactly the same.
For one, Edward wasn’t staring at her menacingly, wasn’t pointing a gun at her chest.
In fact, he was nowhere to be found.
I’m not dead.
For some reason, this revelation was less profound than when Alex had thought she’d been killed.
“Alex?” The voice was like sandpaper on a wet tongue.
She looked left.
AA’s eyes were open. He looked stunned.
“Oh my god, you’re okay.”
Something fell from AA’s hand, and he took a shuddering breath. His features were pinched.
Alex’s eyes dropped to the object that was now resting on the ceiling of the car.
It was his gun.
She whipped her head to the window again, ignoring the pain that flared in her neck.
Edward Samuelson lay on his back, his arms out to his sides, palms up.
There was a dark, spreading stain in the center of his graphic T.
The man’s eyes were open, and he was mouth breathing in short, wet bursts.
Blood coated his lips.
“Alex! Alex! ”
It wasn’t AA this time, but Con.
She recognized his voice even though it, too, was tight.
“Con?” Alex coughed. “Con? I’m in here.”
Con came into view.
His face, which he turned in her direction for but a second, was slick with sweat.
He looked the way she felt: worn, injured.
Defeated.
Maybe he nodded at her. Maybe his experience told Con during this extremely brief once-over that she was okay.
Maybe he just let his anger take over.
It wouldn’t be the first time.
Instead of coming to her aid, Alex saw Con jump on top of Edward Samuelson’s wounded chest.
***
All Constantine Striker saw was Matthew Nelson Neil.
He didn’t see Alex, suspended upside down by her seatbelt.
He didn’t see AA, the man’s weathered face a mask of agony. He didn’t see the gun, a thin wisp of superheated gray air still leaking lazily from the barrel.
It was just him and The Sandman.
It always had been.
The words Matthew Nelson Neil had uttered in that concrete San Quentin interview room filled Con’s mind.
Took it over.
Erased everything else.
He couldn’t kill me then and he can’t kill me now. He doesn’t have what it takes.
“I have what it takes, Matthew. You’ll see,” Con stated, his tone disturbingly flat, like The Sandman’s during his narration of the audiobook.
Con felt a moist squish as he drove his knees into the man’s chest.
And then he wrapped his hands around The Sandman’s throat, intent on finally finishing what he’d started more than a decade ago.
***
“Stop!” Alex croaked.
She didn’t understand what Con was doing.
Can’t he see that Edward is dying already? Why is he choking him?
“Stop!” she repeated with as much gusto as she could muster. Which, admittedly, wasn’t much.
Con’s fingers completely disappeared in the soft tissue of Edward Samuelson’s throat.
“I have what takes, Matthew. You’ll see.”
Her partner’s tone was strange, almost detached.
Matthew? Matthew?
Alex suddenly realized what was happening. Con didn’t see a deranged, murderous, film editor bleeding from a gunshot wound to his chest.
He saw Matthew Nelson Neil.
His mind had snapped like a dry creosote branch.
And she knew that she had to stop him.
Alex braced herself by putting an arm over her head and then reached to her hip and unclicked her seatbelt. More pain flooded her system as she crumpled on the roof of the car.
Alex grunted, then struggled to roll over and right herself in the small space. She batted the deflated airbag out of her way and was met by a puff of white powder for her efforts.
It stung her eyes and the cut on her forehead.
“Con! Con, stop!”
But the man didn’t hear her. Couldn’t hear her.
Alex squeezed her body through the open window and began a military crawl across the sand.
“Con, please.”
She reached her partner and put a shaky hand on his shoulder.
Con turned his head and set his dangerous red eyes on her.
***
It was Valerie. It was his twin sister—she’d driven away, but then she’d come back. Now Val was on all fours for some reason, staring at him, blood caked from eyebrows to hairline. Her face was covered in a thin layer of white powder which might have been dust or some bizarre makeup.
She was older now, but she still had that intense look in her eyes that he remembered from when they were kids.
“Val?”
He finally relaxed his sore hands.
The Sandman had gone limp.
It was over.
He did have what it takes, after all.
Emotion poured out of him like water from a fire extinguisher.
Con reached out and embraced his sister, pulling her in close.
“I missed you,” he sobbed. “I missed you, Val. I missed you and I’m so, so sorry.”
***
Alex just went with her partner, thinking that this might be a situation similar to trying to wake someone from a nightmare.
It was better just to let Con play this out and hopefully, he’d come out of it on the other side.
As they hugged, she peered over Con’s shoulder at Edward Samuelson.
The man’s lips were slack, his eyes staring blankly at the bright sun above them.
He was dead.
Con sobbed heavily.
This went on for a good minute before the man finally pulled back.
“Val, I—” Con’s eyes suddenly narrowed. “Alex?”
She wiped tears from his face, gently, softly.
“It’s me, Con. It’s Alex. Things are going to be okay.”
Empty words. Placating, condescending.
But Alex didn’t have any idea what else to do.
Making sure to keep eye contact with Con, Alex pulled out her cell phone and started to dial 9-1-1.
Before the operator answered, Con suddenly reared back and cocked his head.
“Do you—do you hear that?” there was desperation in his tone. Deep, almost carnal desperation. An impossible longing.
Alex listened closely.
She heard the tick of the cruiser, the Mustang’s engine purring.
“I don’t—”
“Do you hear the coyote, Alex? Tell me you hear the coyote…”