Oliver Stark: 88 Killer

Jack Carney moved across to the cell. ‘Have you been telling secrets? Did you find my mother?’

Abby’s voice was barely a whisper. ‘She’s the only one who knows where your mother lives. You kill her and you’ll never find her.’

Abby was a smart kid, Harper thought. She was buying time. He looked around. What could he do? The gas ran through hastily welded scaffolding pipes, across and then above him.

‘Where is she?’ said Carney. ‘I want her dead. I want you all dead. Fuck her. It’s too late. It’s too fucking late.’

‘It’s not too late,’ said Abby, drawing breath slowly at each sentence. ‘She’s been living right here in Brooklyn all that time. Knew who you were. She’s been keeping clippings of you, your whole life.’

‘Is this true, Lucy? Speak or you die.’

Lucy nodded.

‘Tell me where she is. She’ll be the next one to die.’ Then Carney looked at them and laughed. ‘You’re both lying. You’ll regret that.’

Carney turned and headed back to the Zyklon B. Harper jumped and grabbed on to the scaffolding pole with both hands. It snapped under his weight. Carney turned and shot. It hit the Plexiglass. Harper swung hard and low. He didn’t want to miss. The pole hit Carney’s legs and he fell. Harper moved to him, but Carney was good. The Luger pointed directly at him. ‘Go on, make another move, Harper.’

Harper stopped. ‘You’re not going to gas them, you fucking freak. You can shoot us all, but your sick little experiment isn’t going to work.’

Carney pulled himself up from the floor. ‘I don’t care a damn for her! Lucy, you understand? Fuck you all. Fuck her. I’ll show you. I’ll show her too. I’m going to be written about for years.’ He pointed the gun at Harper’s face.

Then at the door, he heard a shout. ‘Drop your weapon.’ They turned and saw Denise Levene step in the door. She raised her gun. ‘Move away from the bucket, victim,’ she shouted.

Carney let out a laugh. ‘You too.’ His hand started to turn.

‘Don’t try it, victim!’ she told him.

Carney saw her fear and smiled. ‘You wouldn’t dare — that’s your problem, isn’t it?’

‘Try me,’ she said. Denise remembered everything Mac had told her. She wasn’t afraid; she was the hunter — not him. She fired, two quick rounds, into the wall. Carney’s hand stopped moving. ‘Drop the weapon.’

‘You don’t want to kill your beloved detective, do you, Dr Levene?’ sneered Carney. ‘You shoot me and I’ll put a bullet through his head.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Denise. ‘It’s over now. We know — Blue Team knows. They’re on their way. We found you, Jack. We traced the book on Sturbe, traced your lending record. It’s all there. Jack Carney’s self-hatred. The Jew who couldn’t stand to be a Jew.’

‘Fuck you,’ said Carney.

‘And you know what, Carney? We understand how it happened.’

‘What do you understand?’ ‘You were searching for your mommy, weren’t you? That lovely Jewish woman who abandoned you. The one who gave you your Jewish blood then dumped you on a group of Gentiles. Confusing for a kid, wasn’t it? It’s not unusual, Jack, to become obsessed, to identify with your attackers, to try to destroy the part of yourself you think they hate. You’re not a special case, you’re just a boy who didn’t grow up properly — not emotionally. You learned to hate yourself.’

‘So clever and so wrong.’

‘Really? We found your mother, Jack. She borrowed the same books as you. Every book you read, she read a week later. She was looking out for you all that time. Must’ve been watching you. Desperate to contact you, but scared. Her name was Hannah Sternberg.’

‘Sternberg?’

‘She left you when you were five. I guess what happened was that you only vaguely remembered her name. There weren’t any adoption records. That’s partly why your parents hated your Jewishness. What they did was illegal: take a child off a twenty-year-old Jewish girl with no other options. So you searched for your mother, didn’t you? For a name you could only half-remember. Sterne, Sterne-be. Sturbe. You came across this Nazi, and he made sense to you, right? You thought it was some incredible truth about you. And you devoured it and replaced all that loss and pain with this monster.’

Jack looked shaken. He stepped backwards. He was finding it hard to take in. ‘Is she alive?’

‘She wants to see you, Jack.’

Carney lowered his head. ‘It’s too late,’ he spat. ‘It’s way too late for that Jewish whore to save you, any of you. I’m going to make you all pay for this. I’m going to finish this for good. I must complete the transformation. I have it all planned. There is nothing else to do.’ He fired suddenly without lifting his head. The bullet hit the door. Denise threw herself against the wall. It was enough. Carney rose quickly, pushed past her and darted out of the lock-up.

Crown Heights, Brooklyn

March 15, 10.33 a.m.

The orange truck was heavy over the potholes, the back end lifting and heaving on the old springs. Carney tapped impatiently on the steering wheel. He turned too quickly into 82nd Street. The van lurched high on its suspension and sat flat with a jolt.

‘Damn roads. City’s run by fucking monkeys.’

Still, that didn’t matter now, did it? He felt the walls moving in. Harper had survived. They all knew. Everyone would now be chasing Jack Carney. It had to be now. Nothing mattered any more. Not anyone, either. Friends, colleagues. Screw the lot of them. All except one.

There were still things he wanted to say to Lucy. Their separation had never made sense to him. All that talk about his behavior and her need for freedom. All that he had understood when she ended things was that she had rejected him because he was a Jew. And then she had started dating Capske — a Jew. The insult was unbearable, so much so that he could hardly let himself think about it. The implication was clear — it wasn’t his Jewishness that offended her, it was just him. Carney felt the anger rise again; he still nurtured the wounds as if they were fresh cuts.

He felt the weight of thirty years of being oppressed by the filth who now ran this country. He felt their betrayal as a stream of invective. The Nazi slogans and racist bile jumbled in his mind.

He hit the steering wheel hard with the heel of his hand. ‘Shit alive, I hate this fucking world.’ He drove on with a determined expression. Past an NYPD Charger with two asshole cops eating in the front seats. One Hispanic and one black.

‘Take a fucking look at that, Josef, that’s who we answer to now. The fucking parasites are leading the beasts.’

Carney patted his antique Luger pistol, pressed hard against his hip, raised his hand towards the officers and formed a gun with his fingers. They didn’t bat an eyelid as they watched the bright orange truck trundle by.

He turned into the street and pulled to a halt halfway down. He looked over at the big mansion on the corner. The location had been carefully chosen. The synagogue lay at the eastern end, but it would be empty today. The Museum of Tolerance to the west, however, would be full of Jew-lovers. It was the perfect target. He reached for a pair of binoculars and brought the façade into sharp focus. It was a nice building. Gothic. It looked like a French château. Another example of the fakery ruining the western world.

To the left and right, the leafless trees had green buds beginning to emerge. It gave him an uninterrupted view. He checked his watch. The doors to the Museum of Tolerance would open soon enough, the crowds would enter and then he would start his work.