James Patterson - Murder House

My training comes to me by instinct, legs spread, knees bent, weight evenly balanced, fists raised. Noah makes a move toward me, but I jab with my left, connecting with his nose, straightening him up for a moment, then follow with my right hand, my knuckles catching on his teeth. His head snaps to the right, but he recovers quickly — more quickly than I would have thought — and lunges toward me, this time with his head down, not making the same mistake twice. My left leg shoots up for a kick, but I’m off my game, disoriented myself, and he’s too fast, too athletic. His shoulder plunges into my midsection and sends me spiraling backward, he along with me. We land hard and I lose my wind.

“Who are you?” he spits, straddling me now, his palms pinning my shoulders. “What the hell are — wait — you’re — you’re that cop—”

In the moments it takes me to recover my breath, I bring up my right knee and find my backup piece on the ankle holster. I remove it and shove it into his rib cage.

“Get off me now,” I say.

The pressure eases off my shoulders. My left arm free, I shove my palm against his chest and knock him backward, until I’m out from under him. I get to my feet with some effort, my gun trained on him, a tidal wave of adrenaline coursing through me.

“I didn’t know you were a cop,” Noah says, panting, touching the cuts on his face. “Aren’t you supposed to announce who you are?”

But I’m not a cop tonight. Tonight, I’m a niece. The niece of a dear, sweet man who was shot five times in the extremities and speared with a hot poker.

“You okay?” he says to me. “I’ve never hit a woman in my—”

“Shut up!” I hiss. I move a step closer to him. “You killed all of them. Say it. Say it right this second, right this second, or I’ll shoot.”

As my eyes adjust in the semidarkness, I see Noah more clearly, a man in his boxers, crouched at the knees; I see the whites of his eyes.

“I didn’t kill anybody,” he says.

I drive my shoe into him like I’m kicking a field goal, catching arms and knees and maybe his chin. I see him fall to the floor. I see other things, too. Uncle Lang, bobbing me up and down on his leg when I was a child. Tearing up at my cadet graduation, telling me how proud my father would have been—

Tears fill my eyes, screams fill my head, adrenaline fills my chest. I struggle to keep control of my weapon. “Admit you attacked him,” I say, “or die right now.”

I want him to defy me. I want to kill him. I want to shoot him the same way he shot my uncle, in all the places it hurts, maximizing his suffering, making him beg for his life, before driving a red-hot stake through his kidney—

“I’m not going to admit something I didn’t do,” Noah says with control, with calm. “You can shoot me if you want. But I don’t think you will. Because you’re a fair person. And deep down, I think you know—”

“ Shut up! You... you took him from me... you took him...”

My entire body quivering, my voice choking off, tears rolling down my face, my breath coming in tight gasps, I lower the gun, then raise it back up, the screams in my head drowning out everything else.

“What are you talking about?” he asks.

I shuffle toward him, only steps away from him, both hands desperately clutching my gun. “Say it!” I scream.

But it doesn’t matter what he says anymore. I’m going to do it. I’m going to pull this trigger.

“I didn’t kill anybody,” he says.

My breath held tight in my lungs, I pull the trigger once, a single bullet, and then drop the weapon to my side.

I stand over the grave, the outlines of the freshly dug earth a tangible reminder of the funeral yesterday. It was a nice affair, with the police force in formal dress, a gun salute, the works. It was the very opposite of a private family ceremony, in part because Lang didn’t have any family besides me, but appropriate, too, because Lang was such a public figure, a giant in this community, the chief law enforcement officer for almost two decades.

Lang died in surgery that night at the hospital. The hemorrhaging was too massive, the doctor said. Too many wounds. Too much blood lost for too long.

Chloe Danchisin — Aunt Chloe — slides her arm inside mine and perches her chin on my shoulder. “He always loved this cemetery,” she says. “He bought these plots for us when we were first married.”

I blow my nose and take a breath. My throat aches from all the crying I’ve done over the past several days. “I... still can’t believe he’s gone.”

Chloe rubs her hand on my back, tiny circles. “It’s not fair to you, honey. It seems like just yesterday that Lydia died.”

Almost three years to the day, actually, that my mother gave in to the cancer.

“You know how much Lang loved you, don’t you?”

I nod but don’t speak. My throat is so strained that I don’t even sound like myself. My head is filled with a constant ringing.

“Oh, when he hired you to work here — he was so excited. He called me. We hadn’t spoken in over a year, but he called me to give me the news. He was like a giddy schoolboy.”

Despite the fact that I’ve shed enough tears over the last few days to fill a small lake, my eyes well up again. “I questioned his judgment,” I say. “I doubted his investigation of the Ocean Drive murders. I actually — I actually suggested that Noah Walker might be innocent.” I scoff at the notion in hindsight. It’s so clear to me now. Noah killed Lang so he couldn’t testify, and in much the same way he killed Zach and Melanie, and the prostitute in the woods. Different methods, but the same sociopathic brutality — maximizing their suffering, making sure they would bleed out in painful deaths.

Chloe directs my shoulders away from the grave, south toward the beach, and moves me along. “You were doing your job. I’m sure he was proud of you. Don’t confuse his stubbornness with disappointment.”

We walk toward the beach. Chloe looks good, notwithstanding the circumstances. Now single again for two years, she has lost about twenty pounds, cut her hair in a stylish bob, and dresses like she doesn’t mind being noticed. Sixty is the new forty, and all that.

My head is finally clearing of the hangover, from the extra bottle of wine after I left Chloe last night and went home. The nightly drinking is weighing me down, leaving me off balance and foggy. But right now, foggy feels like the best I can do.

Ocean Drive is teeming with joggers and bicyclists and people heading, like us, toward the beach. The activity, the smell of the ocean — this is precisely what I remember as a kid.

“Chloe,” I say, “why did we stop coming here when I was a kid?”

She keeps her head down, strolling along with me.

“Lang said there was a story.”

“You don’t know?” she asks.

“No.”

“If you don’t know, I don’t know.” She looks up at our surroundings, half-built structures and carved-out foundations. “That’s the house, isn’t it?”

I focus my eyes and realize that we’re passing 7 Ocean Drive, the Murder House. The crime-scene tape has been removed, but the Gothic monstrosity has no trouble looking creepy all by itself. It brings back everything in a rush, my meddling at the crime scene, my argument with Lang, resulting in my thirty-day suspension.

We were never the same after he dinged me. I was sent off to the narcotics task force assignment, and I saw him only sparingly after that. I turned down several offers to get together, for dinner or drinks or an afternoon at the beach. I was resentful. I wanted to punish him. And now he’s gone, and I’d do anything to have those weeks back. I’d tell him how much I love him, how he saved my life so many times, in so many different ways.