Thomas Perry - Vanishing Act

"Harry!" she said. He didn’t seem to pay any attention to her, so she yelled, "Harry! It’s me!"

Harry looked up at her and then back down at the fire. "What—you think this is some kind of coincidence? Like I’m going to be surprised to see you?"

"I’m sorry," she said.

He held up his hand and nodded wearily, the way he used to. "No harm done." He bent closer to the fire. "Jesus, it’s cold out here."

"I’m sorry he killed you."

He shrugged and pointed to the place where the undertaker had stitched up his throat. The sewing was thick and crude, like the laces of a shoe. "It only took about a minute."

"It was my fault," she said. He seemed to oscillate, as though she was seeing him through water, and then she realized it was her tears.

"Yeah," he said. "But it doesn’t matter."

"What doesn’t matter?"

"None of it. People are born and they die. What any of them do in between doesn’t look like much from a distance. Viruses and rusty nails and people like Martin, they’re working all the time on the same side. Always were, always will be. If they didn’t exist, we’d die anyway." He scratched at his stitches gingerly, then looked back down at the fire and rubbed his hands together.

Jane could sense that some new rule was in place. Harry was waiting for her to ask the right question. "Did Martin kill Jerry Cappadocia, too?"

He turned his head to look to the right and the left, then at her. "Am I talking to myself, or what? I’m trying to tell you nobody gives a shit."

Maybe he needed to tell her something that nobody else could. A dead person wouldn’t come if a living one could give the same answer. "Do you know who hired Martin to do it?"

Harry seemed angry. "Of course I do. You still don’t get it, do you? What’s it going to get you if I tell you the name of one more criminal you never met and will never see?"

"I’ll get to know. That’s what the mind is for. It has to know."

Harry rolled his eyes and sighed. "Jerry was a scumbag. I told you that years ago. Another scumbag just like him paid some money so he could take his place with some girl."

Jane gasped. "Lenore Sanders. The one who hired Martin was Robert Cotton. Of course. The reason nobody figured it out was that it never occurred to them that it wasn’t about money and power. Cotton got the girl and nobody noticed."

"It doesn’t matter," said Harry. "Nothing happened. Hanegoategeh, the left-handed twin, took Jerry off the count and Hawenneyu, the right-handed, replaced him. The Creator creates, the Destroyer destroys, and it goes on like that. It was a harvest. Bobby Cotton is ripening too."

Jane said, "What you’re telling me is that it’s just good and evil in this constant fight and that there’s no outcome."

"Right. It’s a wash. You’re out here to get revenge, punish Martin. I’m telling you not to bother. I stopped caring when he got me. I’m just a dream." He looked up from the fire. "It’s you I feel sorry for."

Jane began to feel afraid. "Why?"

Harry pointed off into the woods toward the next lake. "He’s the real thing. Every time he kills somebody, it makes him stronger. He gets better at it—a little faster, a little less easy to surprise. He watches what we do to get away, how we try to fight back. Once he’s seen anything, he knows how to beat it; and every time he gets somebody, that’s one person who could have stopped him who can’t anymore. I’m telling you, he’s a monster. Killing me fed him."

"How can I turn a monster loose?"

Harry tugged at the laces on his throat. "Nice of you to think of that now, kid."

She stepped forward through the fire, but it didn’t burn her. She put her arms around Harry. He was cold and hard, like a side of beef in a freezer, and she could feel the water squeezing out of his suit and soaking into her clothes.

Harry sighed, then said grudgingly, "He’s going way back into the woods, as far as he can go. Make sure you see him before he sees you. Don’t feed him again."

Then her arms closed, because there was nothing between them. Harry was at the shore already, walking back into the water, up to his knees, his waist, his chest, and then she could just see the top of his head for a moment before it disappeared, leaving a little ripple.

26

She awoke feeling cold and wet, just as the day was beginning. She knew all of it now. Harry had told her the answer to the question that the police and half of the no-neck population of the Midwest had been asking for five years. She already had traced the conspiracy all the way back to its source, but the words had not come to her until she had imagined Harry saying them. A criminal with a name she had never heard until a couple of days ago had wanted Jerry Cappadocia’s girlfriend.

Harry had told her the first time he mentioned Lenore Sanders, five years ago, that Jerry had a rival. Jane had never considered what that meant, and she was not the only one. Everyone who had heard the story of the massacre at the poker game had known immediately that whoever had paid for Jerry’s murder had to be another criminal. He was a criminal by definition: A man who hired killers to kill his enemy was a killer. It had not occurred to any of the others that the motive could be anything except taking over Jerry’s territory, because that was what criminals did. But Bobby Cotton was a criminal who lived in St. Louis. He had no practical way of taking Jerry Cappadocia’s holdings in Chicago, so he never tried and never revealed himself. All he had wanted was the girl.

Jane had been given all of the information she had needed, but it had lain in a jumble in the back of her mind until the dream. She should have wondered why St. Louis kept coming up. When Martin wanted to fool her, he had told her he was a cop from St. Louis. Why had he chosen St. Louis? It was because he knew the city and knew a lot of details about the cop who had arrested him there. But why had he been arrested in St. Louis in the first place? He had been there on business, killing somebody there. She should have known instantly that it was unlikely that anybody in St. Louis had been enough of an annoyance to Martin’s usual customers in Chicago to make them send him down there. Martin may very well have been working for Cotton that time; he had at least come to Cotton’s attention.

Harry had told Jane so much about the girl that she should have wondered what had happened to her. It was ironic that nobody had spent any time thinking about the girl in five years—probably since she showed up at the funeral wearing a black dress she had bought at Dennaway’s. Most murders weren’t about money. They were about love. Whenever the cops found a body, the first thing they did was go out to look for the wife or the husband or the lover. She opened her eyes, looked up at the sky, and held the story in her mind to determine whether it felt like the truth. Yes, she had put the issue to rest. She was satisfied that she knew what had happened five years ago. As Harry had warned her, it did her no good at all.

She looked out at the surface of the lake before she stood up. At first she thought she was just looking to be sure that Harry had only been a dream, but then she sensed that she had wanted to ask him something. It was something she had thought of after he was gone. There was something she had figured out after what Harry had said. She opened the map and looked at it, and it was as though her mind had been wandering across it as she slept. She looked at the string of lakes and was sure. She folded the map and set to work. When she loaded her possessions and paddled up the next stream to Big Rock Lake, she knew he wouldn’t be there. She knew that he wouldn’t paddle on up the next stream to Bottle Lake, either. It was too small.