me to the bank. No! Just get me out of here and we can get on the computer and I’ll dump everything off to you! Set up an offshore account in a phony name. I know how to do all that. I’m not fucking with you. I mean it. I won’t even look at your—”
FACE!
In the pulse of the strobe the man returned—this time, without his ski mask.
Donovan gasped in horror.
The man’s face!—no, not a face, but a terrifying, gaping mouth with fangs as long as fingers. And his eyes—floating fierce with yellow fire as they flashed down at him like lasers between his legs. Donovan’s mind began to crack, began to scream that this couldn’t be happening.
“But I didn’t do anything!” he cried, the tears beginning to flow.
Then he saw the long wooden stake in the man’s right hand.
Donovan shrieked—struggled against his bonds and tried to move his hips—but the man only leveled the stake and ran him through.
The pain was excruciating, incomprehensible in its brutality, but Donovan was silent, his breath ripped from his lungs as the stake tore him apart inside.
“Tell me how could you think I ’d let you get away?”
Mercifully, in the flash-flash-flash of the strobe, Randall Donovan went insane—watched his own death through the eyes of a madman before the stake finally burst from his neck and drained his life onto the floor.
As always, Michelle sits gazing up at him from the bed—her eyes, the crystal of her wineglass sparkling in the candlelight.
“To us,” she toasts. “You, me, and baby make three.”
Strawberry Quik, he thinks. She always drinks strawberry Quik.
“What’s a good name for a strawberry?” she asks.
“I won’t let it happen,” he replies. “Not this time.”
But the voice comes anyway—out of sight, from behind. Just like it always does.
“How ’bout Elmer?” cackles the man in the closet. “Elmer Stokes is a good name for a strawberry.”
He tries to turn around, tries to cock his hands back à la Spiderman and shoot the webs from his wrists like he did the last time, but his muscles are slow and rubbery today, and the hulking, square-headed figure of Elmer Stokes glides right past him.
Pop-pop goes the gun—a silly pop that reminds him of bubble wrap—and then the blood begins to pour from his wife’s head.
Elmer Stokes laughs and disappears into the kitchen.
“You got anything to eat, Agent Dipshit?” he calls out of sight. “I got the munchies from smoking your wife!”
But he does not follow—knows from experience that it is better to stay with Michelle, to spend what little time he has left with her. He rushes to her side, takes her in his arms, and tries to plug up the bullet holes with the bouquet of pink tulips that had only moments ago been her glass of strawberry Quik.
It’s cold, he thinks. Her blood is always so cold.
“Cold like a shower to wake you up,” his wife spits through bloody lips.
And with a start Sam Markham opened his eyes—his lungs clawing at the darkness as the wave of despair washed over him. He swallowed hard, gritted his teeth, and pushed the pressure in his sinuses down to his stomach. And after a moment he felt his breathing level off, felt his heart rate slow and his face relax.
He rolled over and stared at the big orange numbers beside his bed—5:11 … 5:12 … 5:13—and when his mind had settled, he reached for the nightstand and checked the date on his BlackBerry.
Wednesday, April 5th, he said to himself. Almost two weeks since the last one.
He closed his eyes and made a mental note of it.
Later, just after dawn, he sat at the kitchen table watching the ducks dawdle around the pond. He crunched his Wheaties methodically, in time with the waddle of a fat one that was poking around in the reeds. He had many years ago given up analyzing the dream itself; stopped trying to understand exactly why sometimes he saved Michelle and sometimes he didn’t.
True, for a long time he hadn’t dreamed of her at all. Started up again only after that nonsense in Tampa. No need to ask why. No need to worry. No, just as he had learned to do in another lifetime, if he absolutely had to dream of his dead wife, he preferred instead to control and catalog his feelings afterwards. Like a scientist.
Pensive, he said to himself as the fat duck plopped into the pond and paddled away. Buoyant? No. Treading water.
He gulped down the last of his milk and dropped the bowl in the sink; walked aimlessly from the kitchen and felt pleased for some reason with how spongy his running shoes felt on the hardwood floors of his new town house. He ended up in the living room, the boxes from Tampa and his ten years with the Bureau stacked before him like crowded gravestones. The move, the promotion to supervisory special agent at Quantico had been quick and painless, no attachments, no regrets—just the way he liked it.
Of course, his people would welcome him, would try to bond with him in subtle ways like inviting him to the occasional poker night or asking him to join their fantasy football league. And when he refused, like he always did, he knew what they would say about their new boss: at first, that he was arrogant and aloof, perhaps snobbish and condescending; then later, that he was simply reserved and private. But he also knew that, in time, his people would grow to respect him—would grow to admire his work ethic and eventually accept his desire for distance.
And for Sam Markham that was enough.
He scanned the boxes and quickly settled on one labeled MISC BEDROOM. If the Bureau was good at anything it was packing, he thought, admiring the organization and care with which they moved him from Tampa.
That’s because you’re a “special” special agent, a voice said his head. Not standard protocol for everybody. Just another carrot they dangled to get you back here.
Markham sliced open the MISC BEDROOM box with his house key, unwrapped some newspaper, and found what he was looking for: a long, wooden plaque with neatly engraved letters that read:
LASCIATE OGNE SPERANZA, VOI CH’ENTRATE
“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” Markham whispered.
Dante’s Inferno, Canto
