April Smith - Good Morning, Killer

“Yes, yes, we are totally cool. I’m sorry, too!” I bellowed over the screaming wind. “I really, really am. Just give me what you’ve got!”

His mother’s maiden name was Connors. Lilly Connors. The title to the house was in her name. It had taken Rapid Start about a half a second to retrieve it.

Step by step, I walked Kelsey through the procedure, while simultaneously accelerating the Barracuda over an overpass like a toy race car that defies gravity on the loop-the-loop. By the time I was peeling off at National, she had run an emergency property search and come up with the address in Mar Vista. His mother’s house. Where Ray Brennan had grown up.

The moment I pulled up, I wanted to bang my head against the dashboard.

It was a house I had seen before, when Jason and I were on surveillance. I just didn’t know what I was looking at.

It is like that, often.

It was the house on the corner, across from the Montessori school, a small stucco bungalow sun-scorched to indiscriminate gray, with a porch supported by thin white posts — a suggestion of a porch really — and rotted concrete steps. A rusted TV aerial was perched on top of a sloping roof. The lawn was dead, the place had looked abandoned, but there was a bright green AstroTurf doormat. I remember thinking when Jason and I were there the first time that something was not right.

I have noticed when the hairs go up on the back of your neck, and you think something is not right, something is not right.

There were two windows on the porch side, two on the left where a front bedroom might be. The windows were not boarded up, as I had hastily assumed, but blackened in, with paint.

I had been looking at Ray Brennan’s darkroom.

His roving abduction-mobile was parked out front.

“I see the van. I’m at the address,” lifting the latch on a chain-link gate. “I’m going in.”

“Wait!” cried Kelsey over the phone in my ear. “Culver City police are responding!”

“He’s got a girl in there, now. ”

“Are you armed?”

“They took my gun, remember?”

I was heading up the weedy path.

“If he’s into it and you interrupt him, he’ll go into a rage and he’ll—”

“Where are the cops? The cops aren’t here! He’s doing her, you think I’m going to stand outside and wait? I’m going to distract him,” and cut it off.

I pulled back the creaking screen door and knocked on the peeling wood until my knuckles hurt, then picked up a piece of cinder block and banged. Finally there were footsteps.

“Who’s there?”

I said: “Do you believe the Bible is only a book?”

“What the hell ?”

The door opened.

It was Brennan. He was wearing clear oval glasses, a studious look that went with the dimples you could not see in the photographs. His light brown hair was military-short, and he wore a tank top and baggy camouflage shorts and the polished boots. Hunting. Behind the glasses, his lucent eyes went to the curb, where a unit from Culver City police had just pulled up, siren whupping quietly.

“What’s going on?”

I did not turn. I tried to maintain eye contact and just stay still until he could be subdued.

“Nothing to worry about, I’m sure.”

I heard the latch on the gate unlock behind me.

“Ray?” someone called.

“Who the hell are you?”

“Culver City police. We just want to talk to you.”

“Bullshit!” he shouted. “This is CIA harassment!”

“Now come on Ray, we’re just local police—”

Then he had me in a headlock, up against his chest, a knife to my throat. I could smell his personal sweat. His forearm was rock hard and gritty, his skin on my skin.

The uniforms on the pathway froze.

“I’ll kill the bitch.”

“Take it easy, Ray.”

“Try me, assholes.”

“No problem,” said one of the cops, lifting his hands to show they were empty. “Hear that, buddy? You’re the man.”

Ray Brennan pulled me inside and kicked the door shut.

He started yelling his head off and threw me across the floor.

“Goddamn son of a bitch! Oh, you goddamn bastard!”

My hip hit first, I tried to roll with it, slammed a shin into the bulging leg of a sofa. The floor was rough old redwood with protruding nail heads here and there. Where my jeans had snagged, blood was darkening the denim; my palms had turned abraded and raw.

In the small daylight coming through random scratches in the black-painted windows, I could see we were in a tiny living room, empty except for a green fleabag couch. The walls had mostly been stripped, but flayed sheets of wallpaper still curled away from the studs — delicate garlands of flowers on stiff old-fashioned backing. Paint chips had collected near the baseboard. The house smelled cold, as if it had been empty a long time. Our footsteps echoed. There were white beams in the ceiling with rows of hooks — for plants.

Ray Brennan had dead-bolted the front door and was pacing and cursing, suddenly wheeling and stabbing the knife halfway into an exposed beam.

“Take it easy.”

“Shut up, bitch.”

Slowly, watchfully, I got to my feet. Immediately my hip flexor gave out, causing an excruciating buckle of the leg.

“If I were you, I’d stay away from the window.”

“Oh, shut up. I was raised by nuns, I don’t need you to tell me what to do.”

“That’s not why—”

“Shut up. ”

He was coming fast with fist cocked and I was cornered, just managing to twist away as the blow grazed my shoulder, bouncing my temple against the denuded plaster as I scuttled behind the couch. Now they would find paint chips in my hair, too. Infuriated, Brennan picked up one end of the couch and tossed it.

If he rapes me, I’ll survive. I’ll let him do it and survive.

“They have night vision!” I shouted hoarsely. “The police snipers! They can see through the windows!”

It was a lie (night vision works only at night) and he knew it—“Bullshit!”—but it distracted him enough so I could move farther behind the angled end of the couch and maybe start a dialogue that showed I cared about his welfare.

“Seriously,” I managed between chattering teeth. “Stay down.”

He nodded several times as if listening to someone else not in the room— Okay, okay —then squatted low and crab-walked like a Russian dancer to the wall space between the windows. I saw how young and lithe he was, younger than Juliana had described, young as a recruit who signs up to save the world.

“I know who you are—”

“Me? I’m Superfuck.”

A wave of nausea spiraled up my gut. The hip gave out again. I was not certain I could remain standing.

“… the schedule,” he was saying.

“Is someone back there? I thought I heard something.”

A phone began to ring.

The mistake the Culver City police had made was calling him Ray. You never wanted to call him Ray. You wanted to ooze respect. You called him “sir.”

“Are you going to answer the phone, sir?”

“Sit the fuck down.”

I sank to my haunches and drew up my knees. The phone, an ancient black rotary, sat on the floor between us. Its rings were coarse and jangling, as if dragged through the wires from another epoch. I held my breath, as the echo of each became another lost opportunity for connection to the outside.

Brennan was sitting on the floor with his legs splayed out so I could stare at the lug soles of his boots. He was playing a high-speed game of mumblety-peg, flipping the knife so it landed perfectly, pulling it out and flipping again, making small quick cuts in a circle on the soft redwood planks.