Memory Man

He rolled off Leopold and then lay there panting for a few minutes. He had never felt so tired in all his life. His gut was clenching, his legs and head were throbbing. He could feel the swelling on his face from where Leopold had struck him with the gun. And with his heart racing, blood was now starting to flow more rapidly from his wounded leg.

But most of him — the most important parts of him, anyway — felt good. Felt terrific in fact.

It took him the better part of five minutes, but he finally managed to stand with the chair and the saggy, stretched-out duct tape still wrapped around him. He threw himself against the wall repeatedly until the chair fell away in pieces. Then he tugged and ripped until he was free of the tape, and stepped out of his prison.

He turned to look across the room.

He hadn’t seen it before, during his struggles with Leopold, but, still, he had known.

She hadn’t joined the fight after all, either on his side or Leopold’s.

There had to be a reason for that.

Now he was looking at that reason.

He had been wrong. The Smith and Wesson had killed again. Or it was about to.

He staggered over to where Wyatt lay on the floor, blood still flowing out of her chest from where the shot had struck her.

He knelt down next to her. She looked far more male than female. But to him she would always be a woman. A sixteen-year-old girl, in fact, who’d suffered so much. Too much. More than anyone should.

Dr. Marshall had said that these days someone with Belinda’s intersex condition was always involved in the decision as to what gender to become fully and finally. But someone should never feel compelled to choose to be a man simply because she was terrified of being a woman.

She was not dead yet but she soon would be. The pool of blood around her seemed to exceed what was left inside her. He had no way to stanch the bleeding.

And in truth, Decker also didn’t have the desire.

He looked first at her hands. The hands that had strangled the life out of his daughter. Then at the finger that had pulled the trigger on the gun that had killed his wife. The hands that had slit throats and fired shotguns and wrapped a mother and father in plastic and stabbed an FBI agent in the heart.

Then he gazed down at the face. The eyes were starting to fix, the breathing to relax. The body’s transition to death was commencing in earnest. The brain was telling the rest of the body that it was over and that everything would soon shut down. It was doing all this in as orderly a fashion as possible given that the cause was a hole in the chest driven there by violent means.

Decker had died before too. He didn’t remember white lights, or a tunnel to brightness, or angels singing. For a man who could never forget anything, he could remember nothing of dying. He had no idea if that was comforting or not. He just wanted to be alive.

He sat down on his haunches next to her. Part of him wanted to take Leopold’s gun and blow her brains out. Part of him wanted to use his huge hands to crush the remaining life out of her. To hurry her on to where she was inevitably going anyway.

But he didn’t. Only once did her eyes flicker and seem to fix on his. There was a look there, just a glimpse, perhaps imagined, Decker didn’t know, when he thought he was looking at the scared sixteen-year-old girl back at the institute.

He sighed and closed his eyes for a moment, but didn’t even try to process what had become an unimaginable tragedy all around.

So he simply sat there and watched her die. And when she did, he closed her eyes. But he could close nothing that had come before. And Decker knew he never would.

And whether he wanted it or not, Amos Decker, Sebastian Leopold, and Belinda Wyatt, in life and now in death, were all bound together.

Forever.

But he was immeasurably relieved to be the one left standing.

Chapter 65

A bench.

Christmas Eve.

A light snow was falling. It collected on top of the foot that had already fallen over the last three days. The stores were closed. The shopping was done. And after the cataclysmic events at Mansfield, everyone in Burlington was getting ready to sleep and then awake to a day of peace and quiet spent with family.

Well, almost everyone.

Amos Decker sat on the bench staring across at Mansfield High. But really he was staring at…nothing.

In deference to the weather he had on a new overcoat and a wool-lined flapped hat. His hands were gloved and he wore brand-new size fourteen heavy-duty waterproof boots.

His thigh was nearly healed, though it would always carry a scar where the knife had struck and Belinda Wyatt had both symbolically and literally twisted the blade in him.