Read Online A Killer in the Wind by Andrew Klavan - Free Book Online Page B

a horror movie coming up to grab you out of the grave—it was strange that I thought of the past again as I was driving my G8 over to Bethany’s. Maybe it was the fact that it was April—the start of spring—and the air had that April feeling to it that makes you long for something but you don’t know what. It was almost as if the past was in the atmosphere.
    Or maybe it was Bethany herself. How good she looked, how sweet she was. That gentleness in her eyes and the way she almost said something to me in the corridor but didn’t. I knew why she didn’t. I thought I knew why. There wasn’t really anything more to say between us. We had had it all out and it was what it was, no more. If she said too much, if she went too far, well, it just caused uneasiness between us.
    She had asked me once why—why it was I couldn’t love her. All she wanted was to do for me, she said. She had gotten emotional and asked me if maybe I might not come to love her over time. I don’t recall what I answered. What could I answer? I didn’t want to see her lower herself in that way. I wasn’t going to let her spend her life in some hell of reaching for something in me she just couldn’t touch, that no one touched.
    Of course, I asked myself the same thing, privately. Why couldn’t I love her? That cold and watchful incapacity of mine—what was it? But of course I already knew. I didn’t like to think about it, but you always know these sorts of things, deep down.
    I couldn’t love Bethany because I was in love already. I was in love with a woman I could never have. You hear people talk about that sort of thing. Usually it’s some guy who carries a torch for someone else’s wife or maybe can’t get over a girl who left him or is even pining away for someone who loved him once but died. And those are all sad stories, right enough. But this was worse than any of them. Well, it was weirder anyway.
    I couldn’t love Bethany because I was in love with Samantha. And it was thinking about her—driving the lonely backroads over to Gilead in the night and thinking about Samantha—that drew my mind back into the past again.

4
    Flashback: Samantha
    I WOKE UP IN the hospital. That was the first thing I knew after the mansion in Westchester, after my meeting with Emory in the secret cellar, with him shrieking “Traitor!” and me falling away into a fog of drugs and smoke and confusion. I opened my eyes and saw the white ceiling and thought: I don’t remember .
    I sat up slowly. Gray daylight was at the windows, coming through the slats of the venetian blinds to lie in bars across the fringe of the bedsheet. I drew a breath and turned my head—and there was Monahan. Sheepish and hunched, he looked like a pile of boulders that had tumbled from a mountainside, burying the small blue plastic chair on which he sat.
    I dragged my hand over my face and cursed. With my eyes closed, I saw a murky brainscape: swirling, impenetrable red-brown smog with clipped, spastic moments of memory and motion flashing out of it briefly, then dying away like the light from a falling flare.
    “The girl . . .” I said. “The little girl.”
    Monahan nodded glumly and spoke on a long sigh. He looked as if he hadn’t slept all night. “She’s okay. She’ll be okay. Docs say no one touched her. They were saving her for you.”
    I pressed my lips together and didn’t answer for a moment. You have to savor these things, these little victories. “What about me?” I said then. I patted myself. My chest, my belly. “Was I shot or something? What am I doing here?”
    “No,” said Monahan. “You just went down.” He targeted me with his close-set eyes so I knew there was more he wasn’t saying. The doctors must have found the Z in my bloodstream. Of course they had.
    I rolled my legs over the side of the bed. “Who is she? The girl.”
    “We don’t know. She doesn’t know. No one seems to have reported her missing. She has a name. Eva. That’s it.