CHAPTER ELEVEN
He slid his car to a stop at the bottom of the lane.
This was right on the edge of suburbia, where the houses grew fewer and farther between, but the yards expanded to compensate.
Prime real estate, if you liked your space.
He knew his target did. This street was for those who valued privacy and seclusion, and he had plenty of both in this spot.
There might be a few cameras and nosy neighbors around, but he had all the hotspots staked out in advance.
Right now, it was just him and the jitters – the ones that hadn’t dissolved since last night.
Perverse as it sounded, he hoped that stayed with him for the rest of his life, because those shaky hands and oiled guts made the eventual consequences worth it.
Last night still felt like a fever dream, but driving past that alley on Natkin Way this morning had all but confirmed this was very real.
He hadn’t intended to take two lives in one night, but fortune had rained down upon him and forced his hand.
After leaving the redhead dead by the river, he’d driven around in a state of frenzy, and some unconscious prompt had taken him towards his next target’s house.
As though something else, some kind of unseen force, had guided him there.
Then, this same force had dropped a divine gift in his lap – Rose Michaels, his next target – walking alone through the midnight streets in that pretty little sundress.
He hadn’t been able to resist, and before his conscious mind had caught up with his body, he had his hands around her neck and her life in his hands.
And since then, those sixteen or seventeen hours ago, he’d played both scenes in his head on a loop.
He’d met plenty of junkies in the big house and they’d always said that when you discovered a new drug, you couldn’t think of anything else.
He’d laughed them off at the time, but after last night, he understood.
His mentor had been right. This was his calling. The mentor hadn’t put it in those exact words, of course, but they’d seen his pain and named his rage and told him to put it somewhere before it ate him alive.
‘The pain is a part of you. A manifestation of unresolved trauma. That void in your chest is aching to be filled.’
Initially, it had sounded like psychobabble, but the comments had followed him back to his bunk and sat with him in the dark and slowly, over weeks, they’d started to make sense.
The good mentor had talked about meaning and creating something bigger than yourself and most importantly, preventing other people from enduring the same pain.
‘Pure empathy,’ the mentor had called it, and then they’d talked about externalizing the trauma, transference, projection.
And then the mentor had asked, ‘If you could, how would you help someone in your position?’
The jigsaw pieces had begun to align at that point.
He killed the engine. There was no sense announcing his arrival.
By now he knew the rhythm of the neighborhood.
Mrs. Kowalski next door would be engrossed in soap operas, the Coogans across the street were on vacation in California, and the retiree two doors down only unglued himself from his chair to hit the bathroom.
For this brief window, the street was his and his alone.
Reaching under his collar, he clutched the object that never left his neck. This was all that remained of his old life, the life that seemed a million years ago now. But he had to keep those memories close, to remind himself what all this was for.
And so he grabbed his tools and slipped out of the car and ambled up the street with his jacket hood concealing his face.
The breeze that had swept in worked in his favor, because if anyone caught sight of him, they’d assume he was just protecting himself from the wind.
He’d learned long ago that it was the little things that completed the lie.
The grass whispered under his feet as he crept closer to the house.
Across the lawn, to the front door. He loitered there a second, feigned a knock on the door, just in case there were any curtain-twitchers across the street.
He counted down the seconds, idly glanced in every direction then slipped down the side of the house.
Along the fence, round to the rear and completely invisible from the rest of the street.
Time to put this plan into action.
He climbed the trash cans and peered into the garden on the other side. It was a perfectly manicured lawn with rows of plants on either side. What would really make the garden pop was a slide or a swing set, but there would be neither of those in the owner’s future.
He slung a leg over the top, then the other.
Hopped down with a grunt. The impact shuddered up his bones but he pushed through it.
Mind over matter, he’d always been good at that.
On the other side, he edged closer to the French doors that led into the living room.
He idly tried the handle but it didn’t budge.
So, all that stood between him and his destination was a lock.
He almost smiled. Locks were no longer an obstacle, not since a man with steady hands and too much time had taught him the basics in a place where learning to open things you weren’t supposed to was a survival skill.
It was a five-lever mortice. The oval keyway gave it away. Five false gates to navigate, but he’d practised on worse in tighter spots with less light and more at stake.
He fished his tools from a jacket pocket and went to work.
The pick slid home. He applied torque and felt for the subtle clicks as the pins yielded. Twelve seconds in and the lock gave way.
He was inside. Now, all he had to do was wait.