Alex Barclay - The Caller

‘Yeah? I thought you’d like it,’ said Joe.

‘You got your old friend to take a little trip here, didn’t you? I guess he did as you told him. Paid some teenage dirtbag to dig right alongside Donnie. There’s not a whole hell of a lot of space there. Probably fit a small woman. Or a child.’

Joe said nothing.

‘He can’t be much of a friend if you sent him my way,’ said Duke.

Joe’s heart pounded as he thought of Patti Nicotero, already bereaved.

Rawlins’ voice was quieter when he spoke again. ‘I guess you knew it was the one place I’d come back to. You couldn’t stand not knowing where I was for all those months, what I was doing, who I was doing it with…’

Anna walked into the living room. Her eyes sparkled. Her hair was newly cut. It fell to her shoulders, dark and shiny, split at one side. He smiled at her. She held out her arms. Her white top rode up and he could see her tiny belly. He was hit with love, regret, fear, guilt, shame. She opened her mouth to speak. Joe held a finger to his lips, but kept smiling. And listening.

It’s a powerful thing to be up close, sucked into the dead space of a killer, having to touch him, observe him, get answers from him, invest in him. Most people saw Duke Rawlins only in a photograph in a newspaper, from a safe remove – where they couldn’t sense what was rotting from inside him. In the flesh, it seeped out every way it could – through the soulless eyes, through unbrushed teeth and unwashed skin. Joe had forced Anna to cross that boundary unprepared. She was torn from the comfortable world Joe had helped create and plunged into Duke Rawlins’ twisted little universe. It felt like an illusion now, that Joe had sold her some bullshit dream he could never follow through on.

Joe looked at Anna and a shiver ran up his spine. Duke Rawlins had stalked her, held her, breathed on her, carried her, struck her, drawn a knife across her perfect skin…

Anna turned to leave and looked back at Joe over her shoulder, her eyes lighting up, her smile going right to his heart.

He hung up the phone.

One thing Rawlins hadn’t done: he hadn’t broken her.