Тимоти Уилльямз - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 126, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 769 & 770, September/October 2005

But it ended there. There were no other transactions, and a sense of the impossibility of his task cloaked him like a hair shirt, both suffocating and irritating — something to be borne or cast off, and he could do neither. He had no other purpose but this; no other identity.

His hands shook as he stared at the paper, more evidence of how easily he had been written off. Hadn’t his wife questioned these transactions at all? Surely the purchase of hardware must have seemed strange to her, set off some alarm that things weren’t right? How often had he made home-improvement purchases when on a drunk?

Desmond angrily stuffed the paper into his pants pocket, where it nestled against a twenty-dollar bill — the last of the money that Lieutenant Bowie had sent him off with. He had claimed that the officers in his department had all tossed some money in the kitty for him, but Desmond didn’t really believe that. The large policeman was not good at lying. It seemed, at the time, the kindest thing anyone had ever done, or would probably ever do, for Desmond. When he had waved farewell to that good man from the window of the bus, it had felt as if he were entering a world as dark as his coma, but this time his eyes were wide open.

He mounted the stairs two at a time, with the little dog nipping playfully at his heels. Desmond didn’t notice. He retrieved a suitcase from the attic and brought it into his old bedroom and tossed it onto the bed. Throwing it open, he turned to the closet and reached out for some of his shirts hanging there. His hand was arrested in midair, inches from the clothes. He stopped breathing. They weren’t his.

With a small, muffled cry, Desmond staggered back and sat down hard on the edge of the bed, burying his face in his hands, and remained that way for several minutes.

Then slowly, with great effort, he hauled himself back to his feet, legs shaking, and stared hard at the unfamiliar clothes. Hurt fed his anger into a white-hot flame as he began to rip suits, shirts, and pants from their hangers and fling them onto the bed. He held one particularly fine suit from a shop he had never visited up to the light. “By God, we wear the same size,” he shouted with a triumphant sob to the empty house. The dog sought shelter under the bed.

Within a few minutes, Desmond had stripped out of his baggy, donated clothes and donned the finest of his replacement’s. He was mindful to transfer the twenty-dollar bill and credit card receipt, and hastily stuffed everything else that would fit into his suitcase and carried it downstairs. The household cash was in the same kitchen drawer as always, and this, too, he snatched without hesitation. The keys to his son’s car hung next to the garage door, and he lifted them off the hook as he walked out. Hell, the boy won’t need the car till the summer, he reasoned bitterly. I own it, anyway.

Desmond began to pull the door to and stopped. He called the dog, and after a few moments’ hesitation heard her happily thumping down the stairs. She dashed to her master, tail wagging in anticipation of an outing, and gazed up at him expectantly. Desmond stared back and wondered if the new “man of the house” received the same affection from the animal he had once enjoyed. He picked up a hammer that lay on a workbench in the garage and weighed it thoughtfully; the dog continued to stare hopefully into his eyes. The darkness blew back and forth through Desmond’s mind like a black curtain in a fitful wind. Distantly, a car door slammed.

Desmond carefully laid the hammer back down. Retrieving the suitcase once more, he stalked from the garage leaving every door open behind him. She’ll stay or she’ll go; live or die. Why should she be any different from me? Desmond thought angrily, as he peeled out of the driveway in his son’s car.

As he glanced back, he saw the small, not-very-bright dog blithely following a scent trail that led to a busy nearby intersection. Desmond forced his eyes forward and sped away.

In the end, it had proved ridiculously easy to find him. Providential, even, Desmond thought, as he sat watching his Doppelganger’s home from the comfort of his son’s car.

Upon fleeing his own, he had driven to the Department of Motor Vehicles in order to report his driver’s license stolen and, hopefully, be issued a new one. He didn’t know what the future might hold for him, but he did know that he wouldn’t get very far without some form of identification. Instead, he had received the address of the man he had sworn to kill. It had been a simple, innocent exchange.

When he had explained the purpose of his visit, and given the sympathetic clerk his name and home address for verification, the unexpected had happened. After typing in the information and bringing up his license on the screen, the man had looked perplexed and glanced nervously at Desmond. “You’re reporting your license stolen?” he queried.

“Yeah,” Desmond began. “In Cumber—” he stopped short. “What’s that say?”

The clerk glanced back at the glowing screen. “It says you turned it in and applied for a new one in West Virginia... Could that be right?”

Desmond felt the first stirrings of hope. “Well...” He grinned sheepishly, leaning forward so that the clerk could get a good look at the jagged, still-livid scar that ran through his hairline. “I was in an accident up that way ’bout six months ago. I’m afraid it played hell with my memory for a while.” He wasn’t lying altogether. Even the West Virginia part... hadn’t that been his ultimate destination, after all?

The clerk drew back with a grimace. “Damn... you did take a crack on the head,” he observed sympathetically.

“Did I use my brother’s or uncle’s address on that?” Desmond inquired evenly.

“I wouldn’t know that,” the helpful clerk exclaimed, and then proceeded to read the address aloud from the screen.

“That would be my uncle’s,” Desmond lied. “So sorry to have troubled you.”

“No trouble,” the kindly bureaucrat replied as he watched Desmond stride purposefully out the door.

“My wife, my life, everything, for a hillbilly’s double-wide in the mountains,” Desmond mumbled, then spat contemptuously out the car window. His quarry glanced nervously in his direction as he crossed his rocky yard from his work shed to his house, weaving in and out of his creations: handcrafted lawn chairs, porch swings, birdhouses, even miniature windmills. Desmond’s car sat in the driveway sporting West Virginia plates like a reproach.

Desmond had made no secret of his presence, and the fact that the watched had not approached the watcher only served to convince him that he was not only right but righteous. Here, clearly, was a man whose conscience prevented him from taking those simple steps open to the innocent — inquiry, confrontation, or simply calling the police.

He shuffled across his stony patch like a whipped dog, with occasional fearful glances at his tormentor. This was a pattern that had gone on for several hours and Desmond found himself enjoying it.

A tired-looking woman came to the window after the man went inside, and studied him, but after a few moments, a hand on her shoulder pulled her away. Desmond felt swollen with power. A power that had suffused him since the moment his prey’s location was revealed to him. “This was meant to be,” Desmond whispered to the empty yard.

It took repeated blows to the flimsy door to finally produce an occupant. To the man’s credit, Desmond thought, he did not send his wife to answer the summons.

They stood staring into each other’s eyes for several moments before the mountain man shifted his gaze to his feet and said, “Yessir,” in a hoarse voice.

They were of a kind, Desmond observed coolly — roughly the same height and weight; even the same hair and eye color. He was possibly five years younger than Desmond, but hard living was written all over his lined face and he could certainly pass as older. He wondered briefly why this cringing man had even come to the door.