The Long Fall

“I got my girl and son down on an island off the Carolina coast,” he said, continuing our conversation. “Everything you need to know about them is in an envelope that I gave that lawyer of yours—that Breland Lewis. Don’t worry, though, he won’t know you know me until he opens the letter.”

I hadn’t given him Breland’s name, never told him that I had a lawyer.

“I want you to look in on them from time to time if I’m incapacitated or dead,” he added. “You’ll have access to the funds they’ll need. Tamara has to cosign, of course.”

“Of course,” I said, just to make it a conversation.

I suppose that was Hush’s way of saying that he considered me a friend. It felt like having a king cobra slither up on the barstool next to you: you didn’t necessarily like the company, but then again, you had second thoughts about any sudden motions, much less getting up and walking away.

At 2:18 my cell phone made the sound of yipping hyenas.

“Hello?”

“Sanderson’s awake,” Carson Kitteridge said in my ear.

HUSH TOOK THE laptop in the front seat and I walked over to Tenth Avenue, where I hailed a cab.

The hospital they had Sanderson in was up in the Sixties on the East Side.

The man who should have been dead was on the fifth floor, with two strapping police guards on the door.

As I approached they got to their feet, forming a very effective blockade. I might have been nervous if I hadn’t alreë€ I hadn’ady fought and won against the monster that they were guarding.

“Off limits,” the cop closest to me said. He had copper hair and skin so white it seemed to be turning green.

He put a hand on my shoulder.

“Get yer fuckin’ hand off me, son,” I said. Don’t ask me why. Maybe it was all the tension from being in such close quarters with a commercial serial killer for the better part of four hours.

“What?” the bright penny said in warning.

“It’s okay, Landis,” Carson Kitteridge said. He was coming out from the hospital room. “LT here has a thin skin. Breathe on him hard and he feels it.”

Landis was six feet tall, so he had to look down to peer into my eyes. He didn’t like me. Maybe I should have given him a number and asked him to stand on line.

“Shall we?” Kitteridge said, indicating the room behind with a twist of his head.

“I wanna talk to him alone,” I said.

This time he shook his head.

“Nice talkin’ to you, then.” When I moved my shoulder in preparation to leave, Landis spoke again.

“Stay right where you are.”

“Say what?”

“You heard me.”

“Tell me something, boy,” I said slowly and clearly. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you that children should be seen and not heard?”

The green undershade of the cop’s complexion was turning pink.

“Stand down, Landis,” Carson said. And then to me, “Okay, LT. But I wanna know what you get.”

THERE WERE LIFE-SUPPORT machines in the private hospital room but they weren’t hooked up or turned on. Sanderson had two IVs dripping medicine and sustenance into his veins and two strawlike oxygen tubes that he’d pulled away from his nose. He was sitting up against a few pillows, staring at me. His left hand was shackled to the metal bed frame. I remember wondering if that short span of chain was enough to hold the monster.

The gash on his forehead was already closing up. It was the first time that I got a good look at what I like to call the face of the man’s personality.

It was the bloated visage of a petulant boy but I wasn’t fooled; I had felt that boy’s strength and murderous intent.

Rather than slaughter, there was now ë€there wawariness in Willie’s eyes. He was looking for the thirty-odd-pound chair upside his head. I could see that, just in our fight, I had only one chance with him.

“They got you on the Roger Brown killing,” I said before sitting in the chair next to his mechanical bed. I noted that Kitteridge had placed the seat out of the killer’s reach. “They also know about Norman Fell.”

Only the quick darting of his eyes told me that he was surprised at the mention of the Albany detective.

“I went up to see Bunny at the sanitarium,” I added.

“He put her back in there?” he said.

I must have reacted in some way, shown an eagerness or something, because he clamped down after uttering those few words and nothing I could do would open him up again.

I told him that turning against the people that hired him would lessen his sentence by half a lifetime and that the law would otherwise likely go heavy on him because he’d already committed one murder and gotten away with it. I made a dozen threats and suggestions but he remained mute.

You don’t have to be smart to be tough-minded. As a matter of fact, the combination of stupidity and silence might be the greatest weapon in the history of our species.

“WHAT’D HE SAY?” Kitteridge asked when I exited Sanderson’s hospital room twenty minutes later.

“Not a damn thing.”

“How do you read it, LT?”

“It has to have something to do with the two men getting killed,” I said. “Thurman is the key, that’s for sure.”