Билл Пронзини - In an Evil Time

Wednesday Night

He sat in the dark Lexus, on the dark street, waiting dry-mouthed for the man he was going to kill. It was twenty of eleven by the radium dial of his watch; he’d been here an hour and still no sign of Rakubian. Habitual, every minute of the bastard’s time jealously budgeted, his weeknight regimen as strict as an army recruit’s... he should have been home long ago.

Hollis shifted position to ease cramped muscles, the pressure in his bladder. In the cold darkness he could hear the beat of his heart, or imagined he could. Steady. Accelerated but steady. One hand lay quiet in his lap, the other resting on the Colt Woodsman on the seat beside him. Palms and underarms sweat-free. Yet the dryness threatened to close his throat, and he could feel his nerves squirming inside him like a nest of night crawlers.

Across the curving, mist-choked street Rakubian’s house loomed black and fuzzy-edged behind its front tangle of yew trees and shrubbery. Small place by St. Francis Wood standards, Spanish style, set well back from the street and well apart from its neighbors. A line of eucalyptus ran along the west side, their elongated shadows thick as unstirred ink. One advantage there. The fog was another. It was dense enough to blur lights and distort shapes, hide him when he crossed to the house and back almost as effectively as it hid him now behind the opaque film of wetness it had laid over the windshield.

The house and property were familiar enough; he and Cassie had visited Angela a few times in the early months, when her marriage had still been tolerable and she’d hidden the truth about Rakubian out of loyalty instead of fear. But at the same time it was an alien place. It had never been hers, was never allowed to be hers, in any way. Furnishings, decor, landscaping, everything Rakubian’s, all carefully selected and rigidly governed. As he’d selected and was still trying to govern her even though her divorce had been granted. Rakubian, the control freak. Rakubian, the psychotic abuser.

Once more Hollis let himself remember the night six weeks ago, when she’d finally had enough and the whole ugly truth came out. The details were etched as if with acid on the walls of his mind: Angela standing on the dark porch, Kenny beside her crying and clutching her hand, her face pale and her body hunched, saying in a hurt little girl’s voice, “Daddy, can we come home, can we please come home?” Her shamed unveiling of the bruises, welts, scabbed cuts and scratches, old marks as well as new ones. Her confession about the beatings, most of them done with Rakubian’s fists but that night with an antique walking stick, and his threats to do worse to her if she didn’t obey him. “Discipline,” he’d called it — punishment for imagined flirtations, for violating one of his other strict rules of wifely conduct. And the abject, hammered-down misery in her voice when she begged their forgiveness for letting it go on so long, saying, “I would’ve left him sooner if he’d hurt Kenny, but he didn’t... terrorized him but never hit him. Kenny doesn’t really exist for David because he’s another man’s son. It’s me he’s obsessed with, me he wants to hurt.”

Hollis held on to the memory, using it like a bellows to stoke the fire of his hate and resolve. It was what would let him get out of the car when Rakubian finally came home, and walk over there and ring the bell, and put a bullet point-blank into his brain when he opened the door.

No words, no hesitation.

Look him in the eye and kill him.

Take a human life, even one as sick and worthless as David Rakubian’s. Him, Jack Hollis, law-abiding citizen, staunch believer in the Judeo-Christian ethic and the sanctity of life. Commit cold-blooded, premeditated murder.

But there was simply no other option. He’d been through the alternatives so many times and none of them were any good. If there was one thing the experts agreed on, it was that nothing short of a death — not a divorce decree, not the antistalking laws, not restraining orders, not support groups or round-the-clock bodyguards or the victims moving away and changing their names or even hiring a couple of thugs to break bones — would stop the committed stalker. And that was exactly what Rakubian was, committed and lethal. All the letters and phone calls, the thinly veiled and escalating threats, said so. So did the incident last week: showing up when Angela was at Long’s Drugs, trying to force her and Kenny into his car in front of witnesses, punching her when she resisted. They’d had him arrested, and a few hours later he was out on bail. A judge had finally granted a temporary restraining order, and already he’d found ways, sly lawyer’s tricks, to circumvent it.

Hollis conjured up another memory — the conversation in Rakubian’s office the day he’d made the mistake of going there to confront him, not long after her return home.

“You have no right to interfere in my personal affairs, Hollis. Angela isn’t yours any longer, she’s mine.”

“The hell she is. She’s filed for divorce, she wants nothing more to do with you.”

“I don’t believe in divorce. I won’t accept it. Angela will never be free of me, why can’t you and she understand that? She’ll always be my wife. I’ll always love her more than life itself.”

“You beat her like a dog!”

“I disciplined her. A wife needs discipline to learn to cleave unto her husband.”

“You’re a goddamn sadist, Rakubian.”

“Hardly. What I am is an old-fashioned realist. The world would be better off if there were more men like me. I take my marriage vows and duties seriously and I believe in them to the letter. For better or for worse, till death do us part.”

“I won’t let you hurt her any more than you already have.”

“You have no say in the matter. What I do or don’t do is between my wife and me.”

“Stay away from her! Stay away from my grandson!”

“I suggest you remember what I’ve told you, that you tell Angela to remember it. For better or for worse, till death do us part.”

The implication, the promise had been crystal clear: If I can’t have her, no one else will. Oh, yes, no mistake — Rakubian was the classic profile of a homicidal stalker. Inflexible as stone, egotistical, delusional, sociopathic. A ticking time bomb. Allow him to live, and before too much longer he would explode in the deadliest way imaginable.

Taking his life first wasn’t murder; it was self-defense, an act of survival. Either David Rakubian died or Angela would die. Kenny, too, most likely. Cassie, Eric, himself... anyone Rakubian perceived as standing in his way was at risk. Hollis would not let that happen. His family meant more to him than anything else, including his own life.

Yet the enormity of the act still frightened and sickened him. Determination on the one hand, revulsion on the other. As if he were existing on two overlapping planes, half on one and half on the second, a schizoid state that would end only when he squeezed the Woodsman’s trigger.

If he squeezed it.

If he could go through with it.