Brian Freeman - The Voice Inside

“I couldn’t move fast if I wanted to,” Rudy said. “That thing packs a punch.”

He got up from the floor with a groan. His body swayed from dizziness, but he exaggerated his movements to make himself look more unsteady than he really was. The effects of the Taser were short-lived. Below him, Keyes sat in the wheelchair, looking small. Behind the old man’s cockiness, Rudy could see a nervous tremble of fear. Keyes tried to hold the revolver steady, but his hand shook, and he squinted to stay focused. His good eye was worse than he let on.

Rudy grabbed the phone from its cradle. The television was still on and still loud, blaring out the voice of Alex Trebek. He turned toward the old man and stopped, the muscles in his face twitching. Keyes watched him, jumpy and jittery. Rudy’s eyes never left the barrel of the gun. It wobbled like a toy in the man’s hand, pointing left, right, up, and down.

“Here,” Rudy said, extending the phone but keeping it just out of the old man’s grasp.

“Toss it.” Keyes leaned forward, his empty hand stretching out.

“Whatever you say.”

Rudy threw the phone over the old man’s head and then dropped to one knee and grabbed for the gun. Keyes fired in panic, sending a bullet into the wall above the television. Rudy’s hand locked around the brittle wrist that held the gun, shoving the old man’s arm sideways and squeezing it in a vise until Keyes loosened his fingers. The revolver dropped to the wooden floor.

He leaned in to the man’s terrified face.

“See, the thing is , Jimmy Keyes, I really don’t like people getting in the way of my plans,” Rudy whispered.

He put one gloved hand behind the man’s head. The other clenched his neck, choking off any sound. He watched Keyes’s eyes widen, his mouth forming an O, knowing what was going to happen. With one quick, vicious snap, Rudy shoved the old man’s skull forward until his neck broke with a sickening crack. Keyes’s whole body jerked, as if he’d taken a shot from the Taser. Air gurgled from the man’s lungs with a long, labored sigh.

Rudy straightened up. He listened to the roar of the game show, then used the remote control to switch off the television. In the background, the building was silent. If anyone had heard the shot, they didn’t care. No one came running. No one called the cops.

His head still buzzed from the electric shock. He disentangled himself calmly from the probes and wires of the Taser and then unzipped his backpack and stuffed the Taser and the revolver inside. When he was done, he did a survey of the studio to make sure that there was nothing left behind that might point to his presence there. No fingerprints. No DNA.

The old man wasn’t quite gone yet. His lungs gurgled.

Rudy was hungry. He checked the refrigerator and found a recent deli bag of sliced turkey. He sat on the bed, finished the turkey, and watched the traffic crawling on the street outside as he waited for Keyes to die.

Frost tried to decide what he felt about Eden Shay.

He didn’t particularly like her. She was a desert saguaro, with a prickly wall around herself to keep away intruders. He sensed a degree of cruelty and instability about her; the only person she would ever put first was herself. As a writer, she would collect all his secrets without sharing any of her own. And yet he also admired her cool calculations, her in-your-face aggressiveness, her drive to get exactly what she wanted. She’d made her physical intentions toward him crystal clear, and her candor had an erotic appeal.

Do you want to talk some more? Or do you want to do something else?

It had been a long time since he’d slept with a woman. Not since Jess. And sex with Eden would be risky because nothing was off the record with her. If she wound up in his bed, she’d make it another chapter in her book.

That didn’t stop him from thinking about it.

Frost got up from his sofa by the bay window. It was dark, midevening. Shack slept on his back on the floor, exposing his white stomach without a care in the world. The house smelled of cinnamon, but that was only because his dinner had consisted of two brown sugar — cinnamon Pop-Tarts. There had been no care packages left in his refrigerator since his argument with Duane earlier in the month, and his meals had been mostly takeout.

He went upstairs to the walk-in closet where he kept all the boxes that made up his past. He remembered seeing Eden’s Iowa memoir in the Katie box, and he dug out the book. He brought it back downstairs to the sofa with him. The first thing he did was study Eden’s photo on the back cover. It was an unusual photograph, but very Eden, now that he knew her. She wasn’t in close-up; she was far away from the camera, difficult to see in detail. She sat on the second-floor balcony of her San Francisco house, in a precarious pose, with her legs dangling through the railing. The balcony was held in place by what looked like a stone rope emerging from the mouth of a lion attached to the building wall. Below her legs, he could see two horrific gargoyles mounted above the house’s front door.

Her face was younger, angrier, and more raw. Her hair was even fuller. This was a woman who had something to prove. She looked in jeopardy, surrounded by sculpted monsters. The scar on her neck was covered by the cotton fabric of a yellow turtleneck that matched the paint of the house.

Frost opened Eden’s memoir to a random page. He read a few lines, then closed it again. He almost felt as if he were a voyeur spying on an intimate moment in her life, even though she had put it out there for the world to see.

He stared at her research boxes about the Golden Gate Murders, which he’d left on the floor near the sofa. He went to the kitchen, opened a pale ale, and returned to the living room to sit down again. Shack made a small, annoyed groan at all the activity. Frost apologized to the cat, then propped his feet on the coffee table and lifted the printed manuscript pages from the box.

The Voice Inside.

He turned to the prologue of Eden’s book, which started with the first meeting of Nina Flores and Rudy Cutter in the coffee shop at the Ferry Building. He could hear Eden’s voice in his head, like the narrator of an audio book, as he read what she’d written. He liked her quirky style and insights. She looked for unusual details, the fragments of a life that told you who a person really was.

With Nina, it was the fluffy brown hair piled on her head like a chocolate ice cream cone and dripping down the sides of her face. That image summed up Nina. Sweet but a little messy.

With Cutter, it was the melted ice in his latte, the way he stayed and stayed at the coffee counter long after his cold drink had turned warm. In Eden’s hands, the ice slowly sweating into the coffee became a scene out of a horror movie, as something grotesque and dark took shape inside Cutter’s head.

Frost spent an hour reading before he put aside the manuscript pages.

He realized that Eden had a good eye for the things about a crime that were important. Her first chapter cut to the heart of everything. This mystery had begun right there in the Ferry Building. The chain started with Nina Flores, and typically the oldest link in the chain was the easiest to break.

Was Cutter already thinking about murder when he met Nina? No. You don’t hand your credit card to a girl you were thinking of killing a few days later. So what happened between them in the coffee shop that electrified Rudy Cutter? Twenty years had already passed since Cutter’s wife murdered their daughter, and as far as anyone knew, he had never been a violent man. And then came Nina, a girl he’d never met, a pretty, innocent girl on her twenty-first birthday. Cutter met Nina, and suddenly he pried open his coffin door like a vampire discovering the night.