Chapter 52 #2
“Baby,” he says in a whisper.
I brush my hands over his hair, getting his attention so I can mouth I’m okay.
He shapes the words Brave girl, and I settle onto the floor next to him so we can lean against the wall side by side.
“Roll call.” Fi’s quiet voice comes through our earpieces. “Is everybody okay?”
I cough softly.
“Did you really get him to change into something more comfortable?” Quinn asks.
I laugh, then I cough, wince, and pray if Timms just heard me, he’ll think it’s some kind of fucked-up sex noise.
Pell’s the next one to check in. “Guessing you’re alone in the room but don’t wanna risk talking?”
Hugo lightly taps once on the zipper-pull mic.
“Is this like a séance?” Quinn asks. “Once for yes?”
Hugo quickly taps again.
“No summoning the dead,” Fi says. “You both good for this last stretch?”
I lock eyes with Hugo as I tap the mic, then slide my gloved fingers into his bare ones.
His answering squeeze reminds me this is worth doing.
The humiliation Timms tried to force on me, the threats, the posturing…
I’ve survived worse from scarier people, and none of it broke me.
But acting like it did? Making Lester Timms think he actually stopped me from killing him at his back door an hour ago? That’s the misery.
“Almost there,” Hugo whispers into my neck.
Almost there. Assuming Timms films the video. Assuming he confesses his crimes on it. Assuming he goes full Socrates when it’s done. Assuming he doesn’t turn on Hugo or me.
Assuming, assuming, assuming.
We snap into character when Timms’s boot heels thump their way down the hall. Hugo stands and wraps my braid around his hand like a leash, and I adopt a sullen expression as I shift into a kneeling position at his feet.
Geez, Joe has some messed-up ideas about sex.
“Well, aren’t you two cozy?” Timms beams like a proud father when he sees Hugo holding me in place. He’s carrying a ring light on a tripod in one hand and a golf club in the other.
A golf club. Jesus Christ.
Timms notices my awareness and chuckles as he sets the tripod down in front of the couch and struts over to me. “That’s right, Miz Bellamy. I had it in my closet this whole time. This is how I get them all to listen.”
He gives a cruel laugh and rests the club on his shoulder like a baseball bat, the grip loose in his hand.
“You know, it occurs to me that this lying whore’s smear campaign won’t be able to touch me by the morning, so I’m thinking I just kill her now.” He cocks his head and studies me with his flat eyes. “Maybe I’ll even use the murder weapon she’s been looking for to do it.”
Hugo’s fingers tighten around my hair, and Fi breathes a pained, “No.”
We may have just found the flaw in our plan.
Pivot. What’s my pivot?
“Actually, sir, it would be my honor to take care of her.” Hugo-as-Joe does the pivoting for me, hauling me to my feet, his hand still gripping my braid. He uses it to tip my head back so I’m looking up at him, throat exposed. “I promise you, I’ll give her everything she deserves.”
He smiles with feral possessiveness that would be terrifying if I weren’t utterly certain he loves me enough to put hemlock in the municipal water supply if he thought it would keep me alive for even one more day.
“Damn, Joe.” Timms chortles, the sound surprisingly jovial for someone who’s preparing to die. Then with no warning, he whips the club at me, stopping just shy of my forehead. I shrink against Hugo with a whimper, my fear authentic this time.
“Fine. Handle her yourself,” he says, dropping the club to his side with a playful grin. “I don’t want to fuck up the DNA evidence, after all. This thing is covered in Paul Franklin.”
All I want is to keep clinging to Hugo, but I force myself to pull away and watch as Timms sets the club against the arm of the couch and the phone in the tripod.
He turns it on to check the angles, and once he’s happy with the setup—couch in the center, shelves with the unread books and the dusty busts behind it, the painting of Socrates to the right—he nods in satisfaction, downright delighted by his plan to go out with a bang.
“All right, let’s do this.” He settles on the couch and tugs on the bright white polo he’s chosen for his farewell message to the world.
It’s loose over his belly before it tucks into his jeans, which are cinched with a braided leather belt.
His gun rests on his knee, the fingers of his right hand curled around it, and his feet sit flat on the floor. “Will you hit record, brother?”
Hugo hesitates, the word Fingerprints! traveling down his nervous system and into his bare palm where it rests against the delicate skin covering my vertebrae.
“Of course,” he says stiffly. “Do you want to do a practice run first, though? This is for posterity. People will be watching it for years to come.”
My urge to roll my eyes fights with my need to vomit from nerves, but Hugo just plants his feet and waits, radiating patience and mild curiosity.
“Certainly, son.”
“Son,” Quinn whisper-scoffs, and I have to agree. Timms is only eight years older than Hugo.
He leans against the couch and drapes his left arm over the back, practically begging us to mistake him for the lord of the manor, about to school the peasants.
“I’m not apologizing. I’m defending. And I’m not skimping on any details, either. They’ll say I’m sloppy if I do, so I’ll take them through every step of my plan and how I pulled it off.”
A slow smile spreads across Hugo’s face, his look of awe downright comical. “Brilliant,” he murmurs.
Timms inclines his head graciously.
“Can I make one suggestion, sir?” Hugo seamlessly adopts the meek role that Timms seems to need from him now that he’s in control of his own destiny.
“You can try.” Timms makes a show of stroking his fingers down his mustache. He used extra oil for the occasion, and I can smell the sharp tea tree scent from six feet away, along with a trace of the last cigarette he’ll ever smoke.
“Don’t make it about tonight.” Hugo pulls me next to the camera, and I make a show of dropping to the right of the tripod, which should keep us from showing up on the video as reflections in the glass covering the Socrates painting.
“This isn’t the woman who tried to kill you on Christmas Eve.
This is every woman who’s tried to bring you down since you were a child. ”
“Right.” Timms nods like he’s deep in thought. “Don’t want anyone to think this wasn’t my idea, top to bottom.”
This draws a soft snort from Fi.
“In fact, I’ll be the one to turn the camera on and off. People need to know I make my own goddamn decisions. I act alone.”
I feel Hugo relax against me, and I breathe easier, too. We both edge backward when Timms leans forward and taps RECORD.
Here we go.
“Hello, fellow Philosopher Kings,” he says, his brow furrowed in an expression of constipated seriousness.
“I’m coming to you today with my Apology.
That’s Apology with a capital A because, like the great Socrates on his deathbed”—he gestures at the fanboy memorabilia behind him, his movements awkward and self-conscious—“I’m not here to apologize.
I’m here to defend myself. True disciples will understand the difference.
If you don’t, look it up. It’ll change your life. Examined, not unexamined.”
He taps his temple, his eyes fixed uncomfortably on the camera. It’s a lot of hard eye contact.
“I’m recording this video so there can be no question about my methods and my thought process. And then I’m choosing my own ending.”
He taps the gun on his knee, a movement I’m sure the people who watch this in the aftermath will notice and remark on.
“On June eighteenth, I went to talk to Paul Franklin, man to man, about my wife. Things escalated. He disrespected me, so I put hands on him. What happened afterward, well…” He leans into the camera. “Here’s what you’ve all been asking. I killed Paul Franklin.”
I hear a hissed exhale from one of the people listening in my empty living room. At a minimum, we have this. Now to get him to wrap it up and make himself dead.
“I did it in my wife’s home,” he says. “The home I paid for with my humble civil servant’s salary. The home where he had carnal relations with her in my bed. And I killed him with the nine-iron I bought for her on our sixth anniversary.”
I fucking knew the force of the blows to Franklin’s skull didn’t match the person they arrested for the crime, but nobody cared enough to pump the brakes and look into it no matter how much I pressed the issue.
I even asked why there were no defensive wounds on Franklin’s body.
A blow from a strong but small woman wouldn’t drop Paul immediately; he’d have tried to fight back.
A blow from a gym-strong cop drops a man like Paul in his tracks.
It’s a funny feeling, having your own forensic findings confirmed by the murderer, on camera, while you’re in the room.
And he’s enjoying it. Timms looks like he set down the two-ton weight he’s been carrying since June.
“That’s right,” he says. “I killed him while my wife was drinking alone at some artsy-fartsy street fair, waiting for him to show up. And nobody came forward to support her alibi because the world rightly doesn’t give a shit about a past-her-prime female alone in the crowd.”
His face darkens then. “So we’re clear, I displayed proportionate anger toward an appropriate target. Any man who says otherwise never had anything worth defending.”
Hugo and I don’t exchange glances. We don’t exchange glances harder than any two people have ever not exchanged glances as this cretin justifies murder using words my boyfriend put into his mouth.
I’m going to make this man rail me so hard when we get home tonight.
“Now,” Timms drapes himself against the couch, warming up to having an audience, exactly like Hugo said he would, “you may be wondering what happened to that particular item. It certainly left our city’s finest investigative minds stumped.”