Desert Places (Andrew Z. Thomas/Luther Kite Series 1)

He sounded medicated already, and I thought his eyes had closed. I turned on the bedside lamp so I could be sure. They were slits.

“What are you doing, Andy?” he asked. “How did you…” His words trailed off.

“You killed my mother,” I said to him.

“I don’t think you…” His eyes closed.

“Orson?” I could see the red dot on his arm where the needle had penetrated the skin. “Orson!” He still didn’t move, so I reached forward and slapped his face. He groaned, but it was an incoherent response, which only assured me that the drug had taken control of him.

Backpedaling toward the closet, I took the walkie-talkie from my fanny pack.

“Walter?” I said, breathless. “Walt …Fred?”

“Over.”

“You close?”

“A hundred yards.”

“Get up here and come inside.”

I leaned against the wall and wiped the sweat from my eyelids.

Orson lunged from the bed and drilled his head into my stomach before I could even think about my gun. As I lost my breath, he drove his knee between my legs and grabbed the back of my neck with both hands. He butted his forehead into my nose, and I felt the cartilage crunch and then the subsequent burn. Cool blood flowed over my lips.

“What are you thinking, Andy? You can just do this to me?”

I’d just managed to fill my lungs with air, when he shovel-punched me in the gut, right below my navel. As I hunched over, he kneed my face, and I dropped to the floor.

Instantly, he was on me, his fingers digging under my stomach, where my hands retained an iron grip on the Glock. A sharp, brutal pinch speared through my shirt into my back, and I moaned.

“Yeah, you like that, don’t you? I’m gonna do it again and again.” He’d stuck me with the needle. I felt it wiggling in me. “You’re gonna give it up,” he said, “and I’m gonna spend the weekend killing you. What were you thinking, Andy? What?”

I kept thinking that I should at least try to fight him, but if I moved, he might wrangle the gun from my hands.

A hard bone pummeled the back of my head, and it hurt like hell. I felt the needle pull out and enter again.

“Ah shit,” he muttered. He struck the back of my head again, but it wasn’t nearly as powerful a blow. “Ah, f**k you, Andy.” He slumped onto the floor, crouching on his hands and knees, trying to preserve his consciousness. “Stay with it,” he mumbled. “No. No.”

Yanking the needle out of my back, I stood up and moved to the open doorway of his bedroom. My face felt swollen, and I could not see as clearly through my left eye. But the adrenaline masked the pain, even the deep microscopic holes in my back. Beneath the mechanic’s suit, lines of blood streamed down my legs. Orson fell over onto his side on the floor.

“No.” He sighed sleepily, his speech beginning to slur. “Andy. Don’t do things…” He shut his eyes and was still.

There was a knock on the front door. I held the gun by the muzzle and hammered Orson across the forehead until I saw blood. Then I ran into the hallway and rushed down the staircase.

“Walter?” I yelled through the door.

“It’s me,” he said, and I let him inside. The coldness of the night radiated off his clothes. “Where’s your broth— Oh God, your face…”

“I’m fine. Come on,” I said, starting back up the steps. “Put on your latex gloves. He’s upstairs.”

26

WHILE Walter dragged Orson down the steps in his boxer shorts and rolled him up in the florid Persian rug, I again searched every crevice of my brother’s bedroom. Searching under the bed, I located the shoe box of microcassettes and two more videotapes, but this was the extent of my discovery. Another thorough inspection of the closet produced nothing out of the ordinary. In the guest room, I found nothing, and by the time I’d begun a second perusal of the study, I waxed furious.

“You see this?” I said, exiting the hallway on the first floor and lifting the shoe box above my head. “It’s all he keeps in his entire house that would clue anyone in to what he is.”

In a mechanic’s suit like mine, Walter sat on top of Orson, who was now cocooned inside the rug.

“There are more pictures than this,” I said. “Pictures of me doing horrible things to people. In a self-storage unit or a safety-deposit box. You know what happens when this son of a bitch can’t pay the bill ’cause he’s dead? They clear out his space and find pictures of me digging a heart out of a woman’s chest.” Now you know.

Walter looked at me, but he didn’t ask for elaboration. Standing up, he walked across the hardwood floor into Orson’s study. He lifted the decanter of cognac and poured himself an immoderately full snifter.

“You want one?” he asked, warming the brandy with a delicate swirling motion of the glass.

“Please.” He poured me one, too, and brought it into the living room. We sat down on Orson’s futon before the hearth, swirling and sipping our brandies in silence, each waiting for that euphoric calm, though it never fully came.

“Will he tell us?” Walter asked finally.

“Tell us what?”

“About the pictures of you, and the man who wrote on Jenna’s arm.”

I turned my head and found Walter’s eyes, my cheeks candescent with the liquor.

“Absofuckinlutely.”

We carried him out the front door and down the steps. The moon shone bone white through the leafless, calligraphic trees. The alcohol numbed my face, diminishing the sting of the cold.

The rug wouldn’t fit into the trunk, so we unrolled it and let Orson slide into the dark, empty cavity. I checked his breathing, and though it was steady, they were damn shallow breaths. A light cut on in the house across the street. The figure of a man came to a bay window.

“Come on, Walter,” I said. “This is just about the worst place we could be right now.”

We headed back down the mountain the way we’d come and turned right onto Main Street. I stared out my window as we passed the campus, its brick walkways lighted but empty. Farther on, I caught a glimpse of the white gazebo, where I’d stood in the snow just yesterday, in search of the man who now lay unconscious in the trunk.

“We got him, didn’t we?” I said, and the brandy drew a smirk across my face.

“I’ll celebrate when he’s got a hundred pounds of cold dirt on top of his face, and we know where the man is who threatened my daughter.”