John Lutz - Serial

Quinn got up on one knee, laid his gun on the pavement, then removed his shirt and tied it around the gash in his arm. He used his belt to make a tourniquet, which he yanked tight high on his bicep.

Roy had his injured hands together again inside the blood-coagulated mass of material that was his shirt. On his knees and elbows, he was crawling toward the knife lying on the blacktop. Quinn knew what Roy wanted. It was what almost all the sick animals who became serial killers wanted-to exit in a blaze of glory. Fame and finale at last! Quinn would have to kill him, if Quinn himself hoped to survive.

Sirens were sounding blocks away. The NYPD wolves closing in. Roy didn’t have much time. But it was enough to get his wish.

They were across the street from a boarded-up building. Parked trailers blocked vision from the warehouse.

When Roy had almost reached the knife, both his hands still wrapped tightly in the packed layers of his shirt material, Quinn picked up his revolver and aimed carefully. Three bullets ripped through the bloody mass of material, and through Roy’s hands.

Roy stopped crawling, then rolled over on the hot blacktop and stretched his jaws wide in a silent scream of terror and frustration. He drew up his knees and hugged his ruined hands tightly to his body.

“Self defense,” Quinn said. “You came at me again with the knife.”

“Not fair!” Roy yowled. “Not goddamn fair! Shoot me! Shoot me in the heart!”

“You’ve got no heart,” Quinn said. “And you won’t harm another woman with what’s left of those hands, in or out of prison.”

“You’re goin’ to hell!”

“Maybe we’ll do this again there,” Quinn said.

“Roy Brannigan all the time,” Renz said from behind his vast, uncluttered desk. “He did his Skinner murders between out-of-state truck runs delivering carpet, and he used Link Evans for a patsy, while Evans was using those same weekends in New York putting it over on his wife with Julie Flack.”

“Jock Sanderson had it worked out almost from the beginning,” Quinn said. “He used Roy to kill Judith Blaney, the woman who’d wrongly sent Sanderson to prison. Sanderson even provided Roy with an alibi. But all the time, he was planning on taking it further with blackmail. The little bastard decided he’d rather be a rich fugitive in South America or someplace else with a favorable exchange rate, living high where there was no extradition treaty and he couldn’t be touched by the law, than be an impoverished janitor in this country.”

“He didn’t get to the airport quite fast enough,” Renz said. He opened a desk drawer and withdrew an aluminum tube. He unscrewed the tube and produced a cigar, which he fired up with a lighter from the same drawer, puffing so that his jowls expanded and made him look like a bullfrog working up to a good croak. Instead of croaking, he said, “There’s a certain judge wants to take a bite out of your ass, Quinn. His wife is pretty much out of legal trouble, but she’s embarrassed as hell.”

“I did what I could.”

“He puts people like that away all the time.”

“The incredibly popular police commissioner will protect me,” Quinn said.

Renz smiled around the cigar. “Thash true.” He removed the cigar from his mouth and held it up. “You want one of these? Against the rules, but so what? We’re celebrating the arrest of the real Skinner.”

“No, thanks.”

“You’re gonna go home and smoke one of your Cubans. That’s okay. I’m gonna hold a press conference this afternoon, talk about how our policy under my administration is never to give up on a case until all avenues are explored and all questions answered. We owe it to the public.”

“I’ll be watching on TV,” Quinn lied. He’d already seen Renz blow enough smoke for one day.

“You did a good job, Quinn. If you were still in the department, I’d present you with a commendation. But you can understand why I won’t mention your name or Julie Flack’s in the press conference.”

“Sure. It’s your press conference. Your political ass.”

Renz smiled and blew more smoke.

Quinn and Pearl stood and watched the workmen put the finishing touches on laying the brownstone’s upstairs carpet. The gray-haired man doing the artful and delicate trimming around the baseboard finished with his tucking knife and then stood up and grinned, admiring his work. He glanced over at Quinn and Pearl.

“Beautiful,” Quinn said. The spread of beige carpet lay wide and pristine, a geometrically perfect blank space awaiting an identity. Outside the tall windows, their panes distorted by the years of three centuries, the city hummed and bustled, but the old building’s thick walls reduced the sounds to subtle punctuation.

“It makes a hell of an improvement,” the carpet layer said.

Quinn agreed.

Pearl gave Quinn’s arm a squeeze. “It looks like home.”