Will Staeger - Public Enemy

“Help you?-my God, you are just like the rest-”

Preparing to repeat the question, Laramie suddenly realized what it was that connected the motel and the M-2, and answered her question as to the timing. The feeling was as familiar to her as the sense of un-wholeness that had greeted her that first night in the Motor 8, only this time it was a sense of completion. Of the tumblers in the keyhole racking into place.

When she asked the question, repeating it to compel Janine to focus, Laramie felt some saliva escape from her mouth and spray halfway across the interrogation table.

“What did he tell you!”

Janine said nothing at first, but in a moment, something did come.

Tears.

There were only the tears-Janine didn’t outwardly cry, and there came no sobs, only the dual streams of the silent tears coursing down her cheeks.

“He saved my life,” she said, almost inaudibly. “He saved Carter’s life.”

Laramie nodded slowly.

“I just don’t understand,” Janine said. She was talking to herself, quietly enough that Laramie caught most of it by watching the widow’s lips move as she spoke. “He would never do what they say he did. What you say he did. It just isn’t…possible. You can tell me whatever you want to tell me. Us-you can tell us anything. Show us any evidence. But it won’t matter. It won’t make any difference. I know my husband. We know him. Even if we didn’t know his real name. We know him-him-and he would never have done it. He would never have tried to kill thousands of people. Never. Ever.”

The tears continued in their twin streams down the sides of her haggard face. She was leaning back in her chair now. Her left arm remained draped around Carter’s shoulders. Carter’s chin was pressed against his chest and Laramie couldn’t see his face. With her right hand, Janine wiped away a tear, but it was like trying to divert a river with an oar.

Thinking she might have to assist Janine in connecting the tears and the widow’s thoughts to words, Laramie said, “But you said he saved your lives. How did-I know you don’t just mean Seattle, the trip to Seattle. How is it he saved your lives?”

In due course, Janine looked up at Laramie through her tears.

“He told me-” she said, then stopped, and now the sobs came, the woman taking in a big, heaving, choppy breath of air that sounded almost like a rattle-“he told me that if something happened-”-a kind of wail escaped her throat and merged with the sobbing and crying, Laramie nearly cringing at the raw outburst from this desperate, grieving widow with no source of hope or comfort-“he told me that if something happened while I was gone, I would need to hide. To go away. For as long as I could. But for no less than seven days…oh, Christ…for no less than seven days!”

The piercing wails that followed prompted Carter to burst into tears, the boy calling for her as he grabbed her around the neck and waist.

They cried into each other’s bodies for many minutes. After almost ten minutes had passed without the sobs lessening, Laramie decided she couldn’t take it any longer. She rose, came around the table, reached down, and placed a hand on the widow’s shoulder. Nothing changed-the wails continued, the sobbing cries, Carter burrowing into his mom’s bosom, his cries of “Mommy, mommy,” muted by her storm of wails-but at least, Laramie thought, she isn’t pushing my arm away.

Laramie stayed there, touching Janine Achar’s shoulder, for a while. When the pitch of the wails seemed destined never to shift or end, Laramie decided there was nothing more to be asked or done. She had learned what she needed to learn. She could do nothing more for this person-not that she had done anything for her anyway. Not that anybody could-probably ever.

Laramie opened the door and left the interview room.

He waited until they came all the way in-until the very instant before they grabbed him. While the cell door was open and he was still free to move. He felt their presence, he heard that the door had not yet closed, and he took his shot.

Sidestepping, he spun, seized the pistol from its nook in the ammo belt of the guard closest to him, and fired blindly. He fired blindly because of the obvious-he wore a blindfold and his hands were cuffed behind his back-but he managed to empty the revolver’s chambers in what he estimated to be the vicinity of the three men. Then he dove into the hall, smashing his chin and ear as he bounced on the hard stone of the passageway.

He had grown so emaciated and his musculature was so weak following his imprisonment and starvation that he was able, and quickly, to pull his cuffed wrists down past his ass and under his squatting legs. He felt his hands partially dislocate from the wrists as he did it, but this weird bending of his frayed bones allowed his wrists to slip from the cuffs like twigs from a bucket. The dislocation should have hurt, but he never remembered any pain from that moment.

He remembered only that he had discovered his hands to be free.

He still dreamed, often, of the house of horrors that followed. As much as he had been trained to kill, as any soldier was, he later admitted the actions he undertook on that day were the actions of a killer-not those of a soldier trained to kill, but those of a murderer. One who kills pathologically, for sexual pleasure-the more brutal the act, the better. He viewed himself differently from that point forward, and this altered view of himself hadn’t changed over time. He knew it never would. That it never could.

Once he got the blindfold off and had slipped out of the cuffs, he looked up and found he’d downed two of them. The felled men were making noises-grunts and curses, each man far from dead. Cooper saw the third man, coward that he was, turning the corner ahead of them in the passageway. Going to get help-going, Cooper knew, to the chamber of horrors. What came next, he knew God would never forgive him for. That He couldn’t, and shouldn’t. Presuming there was even somebody upstairs, which he often found hard to believe-Cooper considering it would be better if the attic were empty, given the toll the big man would undoubtedly collect once Cooper’s time came around.

He found another gun on one of the men he’d shot, snatching it as the bloodied guard realized what was happening and, too late, made a grab for it. Cooper held the pistol to the man’s chin, leaned in close, eye to eye, screamed some obscenity he’d never been able to remember, and pulled the trigger. He watched from two inches away as the man’s face erupted, chin to hairline, blasting across the floor in wet fragments of bone, tooth, flesh, and gristle, a triangular spray that deflected off the floor and rained out and up, catching his own chin and cheeks with wet warmth as it shot forth. Ears ringing-for the moment, deaf besides the ringing-face burned from the muzzle blast, one eye partially blinded by the bright burst of the shot-Cooper pocketed the pistol. He knew he would need it for what he would do when he caught up to the third man. The coward-running for the chamber of horrors.

First, though, the second of the three.

Cooper found the man gurgling in pain on the floor of the passageway, rocking slightly, busy trying to get oxygen into his flooded lungs. Pulling the machete the man kept on his belt, memories registering of the slices this one had made on his arms, legs, even once across his cock, Cooper grinned a diseased, insane, murderous grin-and swung. He sliced clear through one of the man’s arms and Cooper heard the machete clang on the rock floor of the passageway. It felt so good to him that the tremors of an orgasm came searching for his loins, but his testicles had endured so much pain by then the tremors were met by a brick wall and retreated. Cooper sought more of the pleasure, savagely-an addict going for the ultimate hit, slicing, whacking, chopping, exhausting himself as he diced his former captor into what he remembered counting as nine pieces. He went back, then, to the man with no face-the one he had shot. The man was already dead, but the addict craving another hit could not shake his need, and so he lifted the man by his remaining hair, held his body in a seated position, and beheaded what was left of the guard’s skull with the machete.