Jacob Brubaker sat at his kitchen table, chin propped on his interlaced hands. He thought about fixing himself a sandwich and soup, but the mere thought of food knotted his stomach into a greasy ball of absolute refusal, and in any case, he was trembling so badly that he was just as likely to drop the bread or amputate a finger as he was to fashion anything edible. It was easier to sit and let the sour, rancid-whey tang of adrenaline ebb from his veins and the roof of his mouth while he watched the slow ticking of the second hand on the cuckoo clock over the sink.
Bonnie loved that damnably ugly testament to Swiss tinkering, or had, anyway, until the mealy-mouthed little shit from the forensics lab had gotten on the witness stand in his ill-fitting suit and with his spiked hair and told the judge and God and a jury of the State of Nevada's peers lies about her. He had spoken with a serpent's tongue, and the judge and twelve slack-jawed, dull-witted dolts too stupid to lie their way out of jury duty had believed him.
He could still remember the sharp tock of the gavel in the silent courtroom as the judge passed sentence. It sounded, now that he thought about it, remarkably like the ticking of a clock, and in two strokes, it had robbed him of everything. If he had known then that two seconds would be all that was left to him, he would have fought harder, held on more tightly, stood on his chair and screamed down the halls of justice until he could no longer be ignored, but he hadn't known, and by the time realization dawned, it had been too late. He could only sit in his chair in the gallery, weightless and boneless as straw, as the expressionless bailiff led his weeping wife away and the judge thanked the upstanding citizens of Las Vegas for their time and sacrifice in the name of civic duty.
Sacrifice. As if any of them understood the term. They had lost nothing more than a few days of their lives, days they would have spent in a narcotized haze of television and takeout and whining kids. The summons to jury duty had been a mere inconvenience, and in his more morbid moments, he suspected that the experience had been the highlight of their droll lives, an intriguing sideroad that made for an amusing anecdote at the neighborhood mixer.
I thought it would be more exciting, you know? Like the courtroom scenes on Law and Ordera voice said, and in his mind's eye, he saw a smiling, balding suburbanite in Bermuda shorts and a polo shirt. The spare tire around his waist bespoke a life of God-granted excess, and his pudgy fingers pinched delicately around the toothpick of a cocktail weenie.
It shoulda been, the grinning suburbanite went on, oblivious to the gnawing anger roiling in the belly of the man who had conjured him. I mean, it had all the trappings-cold-blooded murder, an unlikely suspect, a gruesome crime scene, and a bizarre motive-but it never lived up to the hype. It was mostly a lot of droning speeches and scientific jargon, and sometimes, the perp cried at the defense table, but there was nothing special.
The imaginary juror popped the cocktail weenie into a mouth full of gleaming white teeth and nonchalantly reached for a beer from a nearby cooler. Anyway, there wasn't much to it. The cops had her dead to rights. It had to be her. The scientific evidence was overwhelming. She said she didn't do it, but isn't that what they all say? How can you argue with fingerprints and DNA? Cased closed in my book. The juror took a long swallow of beer and sighed in satisfaction. Let her rot. She got what was coming to her. I just hope I never get called up for jury duty again.
While the jurors had filed out of the courtroom with their conversation fodder, he had returned to his empty house and wandered aimlessly from room to room, occasionally lifting a cherished object from its place, turning it over in anesthetized hands, and setting it gingerly down again without seeing it. He'd opened drawers and hall closets, unsure of what he was searching for, but desperate to find it all the same, and when he had thrown wide all the doors of his life and stirred the dust bunnies from their comfortable slumber atop the linen closet shelves and the slats of the walk-in closet in the master bedroom, he had sat in the middle of the living room floor with a bottle of Jim Beam and a picture of his wedding day and taken long, bitter swallows until the picture blurred into indecipherable blankness.
You know what you were looking for, murmured a grimly practical voice. You were looking for Bonnie, as though you thought she had escaped her captors and sought refuge with the laundry detergent and the spare comforters she kept for guests. Each time you opened a door, you expected to see her huddled in the corner with her knees tucked to her chest, dressed in her flannel pajamas and staring up at you in dumbfounded confusion and childish relief.
All he had found were lint balls and dark corners and the musty smell of spaces long closed. That first night alone in the house, he had passed out on the living room floor, and when he had awoken the next day, the sun had been high in the sky and the carpet had reeked of the whiskey from his overturned bottle. He'd stared at the pungent stain and then at the finger-smudged glass of the wedding photo and made a graceless, lumbering lunge for the closest bathroom to heave his guts.
As bad as the first night had been, the second had proven even worse because there was no whiskey to blunt the sharp edges of involuntary solitude and buffer the memories that had crowded his head until it throbbed. He could only sit in his easy chair and watch the ghosts on his television set and pretend that his bedroom wasn't empty. The flickering images on his television had been a poor and temporary distraction, and eventually, the need for sleep had overridden his fear of the nothingness in his bed.
Except there hadn't been nothing. She had been there, bits and pieces of her infused into the linens and the bedding. Her shampoo was in the pillows, and the lotion she used on her elbows and legs haunted the sheets. The soapy, talcum-powder scent of her skin had overlain everything in an olfactory rime, and he had groaned and fallen into them, fisted the sheets in his burning, trembling hands and buried his face in the lumpy contours of the pillow, the better to capture her in his nostrils.
It had been an agony to sleep beside the revenant of his wife, but it had been an ecstasy, too, because it meant that she was not entirely gone, and so, when the scent of her had begun to fade at the end of the second week, he had been wounded and furious. It had been unfair that he should be robbed of his only solace after losing all else. He'd fought to stem the tide and preserve what he could; he had even started sleeping on top of the comforter so as not to taint her with his own stale sweat, but it had been no use. The more tenaciously he clung to it, the faster it had slipped through his fingers, and at the end of three weeks, there had been no trace of her.
He had stood in his bedroom in his bare feet and rumpled boxers, with the sheets bundled to his chest and pressed against his chin, and he had sniffed them until his nose was dry and scoured. Loose threads had tickled his nose like playful fingers, and his eyes had watered from all the dust and allergens, but his wife's shampoo hadn't greeted him. Just dust and sweat and unwashed fabric, and all the nascent rage and grief he had so stubbornly denied throughout the trial and its aftermath had washed over him in a bilious wave. His knees had buckled, and he'd sunk to the floor with the bedding clutched to his chest and wadded on his lap, and he'd howled to the indifferent walls.
It was in that moment, kneeling on the floor in his boxers with the sheets on his lap and snot dangling from his nose, that he hated Greg Sanders. Before, his enmity had been directed at anyone associated with the witch-hunt that had snared his wife, a diffuse, snarling beast that longed to savage them all in equal measure, but in that instant, it had crystallized, focused to an exquisite point in his stupefied consciousness. It had been an emotion of such purity that he had stopped weeping in mid-sob to savor it, spun sugar in his mouth.
Greg Sanders and his bag of modern magic had been the linchpin on which the case against Bonnie had rested. With his degrees from a respected university and his collection of scientific huggermugger, he had lulled the jury into a state of credulous rapture, and then he had opened his all-American, liar's mouth and woven a spell of DNA and foreign fibers and fingerprint analysis. He hadn't understood a whit, and neither had the jury, if their politely flummoxed expressions had been any indication, but the rhythm of the words and the lulling murmur of knowledge beyond the ken of ordinary men had been enough, and the jurors had sent his wife away on the words of a young pied piper in a three-piece suit.
His focused hatred had chiseled away the extraneous images of the trial until only Sanders remained. In a perverse irony, his face was now more familiar than the face of his wife. Oh, he could still recall the color of her eyes or the set of her nose, but the smaller, more intimate details had been forgotten. He could no longer remember, for instance, the sweep of her hair from the slender nape of her neck or the way her face looked when she stood on the front porch and turned her face toward the sun. He knew that they were beautiful, these things, or had been before Sanders and his lambskin superiority had torn them away, but their beauty was far away and wistful, and no longer moved him.
Oh, it still moves you, croaked a tenebrous, cruel voice inside his head. Just not like it used to. Once, it made you ache with happiness and sweet longing. She was your private Venus, standing on the porch with one hand on the wooden support column and her face tipped toward the sun. When the light was right, it erased the crows' feet nestled in the corners of her eyes and mouth, and she was lovely as the summer rose she had been when you met her twenty-three years ago. You used to sit in the rickety, rattan chair with a beer in your hand and sneak surreptitious glances at her while you thumbed through the newspaper and congratulated yourself on your good fortune. If she was close enough, you'd reach out and thread your fingers through her hair.
Now the beauty and grace that so moved you makes your heart ache for its very absence. You can no longer touch her hair or let your idle fingers stray to her nape. There is plexiglass to stop your fingers. You have been tempted more than once to smash it, but you never quite dare. The light plastic chair in which you sit during your weekly pilgrimage is not sturdy enough to bear the full brunt of your rage, and even if it were, the sloe-eyed guards who oversee your visitation would bring you down before you achieved your end, lions bringing down a fear-crazed ibis. So you curl your hands around the sides of the chair and force your grinding teeth into a rictus only a madman would call a smile and gaze at Bonnie through the finger-smeared pane.
Prison has leached her of her vitality, rendered her a shuffling, slack-jawed Nosferatu in leg shackles. Her auburn hair has turned a dull, dishwater grey to match the walls of the prison and the sexless, grey jumpsuit that has become her second skin. Her hands are thin, rough, and milky as whey from the lack of sunlight. When she lays them palms-down on the table, you can trace the network of veins beneath the flesh, even the minute capillaries, and your stomach roils.
Her eyes are the worst, opaque pebbles pressed carelessly into slack, doughy flesh. They respond to light, but produce none of their own. When she smiles, it does not reach them as it once did. It withers and dies in the twisted corners of her mouth, and her eyes remain as cold and blank as doused embers. They are shuttered and dark, and nothing you say kindles the faintest spark of interest. Sometimes you wonder if the figure behind the plexiglass is Bonnie at all, and not an automaton fashioned from the worn lives and souls the prison has devoured over the years. You drive home in ninety-degree weather and shiver all the way there, and when you get there, you take a scalding shower to rid yourself of the taint.
But he hadn't gotten rid of it. No matter how feverishly he scrubbed, it had clung to him, fine and unseen as cobwebs against his skin, and it had gradually spread to everything else-clothes, furniture, the carpet. Near the end, just before he'd fled the house with nothing but his wallet and the stupid cuckoo clock that now hung on the far wall, it had invaded the shower itself, hidden beneath the layer of mildew and soap scum that had accrued without Bonnie to keep it at bay.
He'd spent twenty-three years in that house, building a life with the work of his hands. For a time, he had dreamed of rocking cradles within its rooms, but it wasn't meant to be, and when that dream had been tearfully lain to rest by a specialist's pronouncement of profound uterine scarring from undetected endometriosis, he and Bonnie had tended others. He'd talked now and again of opening a furniture repair shop, and Bonnie had passed the seasons and years with her windowbox garden, undaunted by the blistering desert heat. Sometimes, green things poked determined shoots above the soil; most of the time, they didn't, but that was all right. It was enough for her to know that the opportunity to reach for the sun had been given.
There had been no repair shop, no sawdust and warm sugared banana smell of freshly hewn wood, and when last he'd seen it, the windowbox garden had been barren and dead, its potting soil dry as ash. The incubator in which they'd nursed their fragile dreams stood abandoned and dark, surrendered to the dust and the creeping rot of the prison. His wedding picture still hung in the entryway for any passing spirits to see.
And it was all Greg Sanders' doing.
Unlike the timid flowers in Bonnie's windowbox garden, his hatred for Sanders had blossomed and thrived in the hothouse heat of his rage and the long Vegas summer, a deadly lotus flower with vines dark as ichor and latticed with thorns of nightshade poison. He nurtured it with liberal applications of Jim Beam and the curdled, galling memory of Sanders' smug face on the witness stand. It grew and sharpened until he could recall the shaving nick on his throat that had bobbed with the movement of his Adam's apple. Soon, it blotted out all else even unto his wife's face as it sought out the sun, and this final act of hubris made him all the angrier.
He could remember the precise moment when muddled grief had given way to vengeance. He'd been masturbating joylessly into his loosely fisted fingers, mouth open in a soundless gape as his hips duplicated the primal rhythm of sex against the flat, unyielding plane of the hard mattress. Bonnie had been in his mind's eye, ripe and full with the maturity of years and absolutely exquisite. His fingers and mouth had ached and throbbed with the phantom heft of a breast and the sharp just of hip. He had tasted her on his tongue, salt and heated flesh and cocoa butter, and the sweet delirium had burned in his veins, a heady, purifying fever. Fingers had flexed and clenched, and hips had thrust erratically with the frenzied promise of release, and he had allowed himself a ragged exhalation of triumph.
Then, just as the pleasure had crested, Bonnie was gone, and Sanders' arrogant face peered down at him, lips curved in a cocksure smile. Rage had swallowed ecstasy, but he'd been too far gone, and he'd come hard onto his hand and the sheets, hot and sticky and bitter in his nose. The bastard had breached his fantasies, had insinuated himself into his most private solace, and lying atop the sheets in a boneless puddle with cooling, bitter come on his fingers, he'd found his second calling. He'd spent the rest of the night staring at the flyspecks on the ceiling and turning various scenarios over in his mind and rolling them on his tongue, a sommelier sampling a rare vintage.
It had been surprisingly easy once he'd made up his mind. The address for the Clark County crime lab was a matter of public record, and so all he'd had to do was drive there in his old Chevy Tahoe and wait for him to come out. When he did, he'd simply followed him home. There had been no cloak-and-dagger theatrics, no slouching behind the wheel and concealing his face beneath the bill of an old ballcap. It had been painfully pedestrian, two working stiffs driving home from work, and when Sanders had coasted into the parking lot of his shoddy complex and opened the door, there had been no dramatic moment of recognition. He'd merely glanced at him in idle curiosity and gone inside without a backward glance.
He'd wanted to leap out of his truck and wrap his fingers around his quarry's unsuspecting throat, throttle him there on the asphalt and watch as recognition dawned in his eyes even as the life bled out, but had been too risky, too exposed. A passing neighbor might have interrupted him and denied him his deserved justice, and that was a chance he'd been unwilling to take. Besides, Bonnie had spoken up inside his head then, sweet and low and soothing as balm.
Patience, Jacob, she'd whispered, and the familiar voice had sent a ripple of longing up his spine. Do it right. Do it slow. Revenge is a dish best served cold.
So he'd driven away with his hands clamped to the steering wheel in a white-knuckled grip and sworn that he'd present her a dish cold as arctic frost.
He'd filed appeals on Bonnie's behalf and spoken with her lawyer about the possibility of overturning the verdict on an obscure technicality, but while he'd waited for the reams of paperwork to filter their way through the sluggish, indifferent digestive tract of the judicial system, he'd sat in his car on the most distant perimeter of the crime lab parking lot and watched the comings and goings of his nemesis.
Despite his unconventional appearance, Sanders had turned out to be remarkably dependable. The time of his departure was never fixed, but whenever he left, he always whistled as he walked to his car and twirled his keys nonchalantly around his index finger. On the rare days he didn't report to work, he never left the apartment, and on those days, Brubaker would sit in the truck and stare at the hazy glow of the television set behind closed blinds, letting his mind drift and taking long pulls from the bottle of Jim Beam nestled securely against his crotch. His mother-God rest her soul-had always told him that idle hands were the Devil's workshop, and he supposed that she would have heartily disapproved of the long hours spent sitting in a truck, but it was not sloth that drove him to his task at the appointed hour. It was purpose, and he never felt more alive than when he was stationed at the post he had designated for himself.
He had wanted Sanders at first. He'd intended to dent his skull with a concrete block or the blade of a shovel, abscond with him into the Nevada desert, and strip him of his dignity and life with no one but the scorpions and buzzards to bear witness. He'd fantasized about it during his endless vigils in the truck, painted it on the limitless canvas of his imagination in loving detail and rendered it again in the tendrils and whorls of cigarette smoke that drifted lazily from his mouth. He'd let his head loll and dreamed of blood and screams and Sanders pleading for mercy with snot on his face. It was narcosis, and when he succumbed to the daydreams, the wounds were not so deep.
The one he'd liked most saw Sanders spreadeagle on the scorching sand, bound to the desert by four stakes pounded into the hardpan. There were no clothes to shield him from the blind, lidless fury of the sun or the skittering, chitinous claws of the biting, slithering creatures of the earth. The sun broiled his skin, turned it pink and red and purple-black, and the insects crawled over him with their sharp, pitiless legs, living needles in his cooked flesh. Sanders would plead, scream, and curse. Perhaps he would waste valuable moisture by weeping or urinating on himself, but there would be no Divine intervention, no pang of conscience to spare him.
There would only be the long, remorseless shadow on the periphery of his vision, retribution come on darkest and slowest wings. It would take him days to die, endless, timeless, excruciating days. His lips would crack and bleed and blacken for want of moisture, and his organs, in a desperate bid for survival, would steal water from wherever they could, until his eyes dried and guttered to darkness in their sockets and his tongue shriveled to jerky in his mouth.
He would be there for every moment, crouched beneath the protective shade of a beach umbrella like a monstrous buzzard. He would watch Sanders' body collapse in upon itself and the violent convulsions that presaged death, and when the last pitiful cry had been wrenched from his wasted throat and his body surrendered the last vestiges of life in a gassy, septic stink, he would smile his vulpine smile and drink a celebratory beer. It would taste cool and good on his parched throat, and he would savor it as victor's ambrosia. He would drink until his belly sloshed and his bladder was distended and hot, and then he would piss on the earthly remains of his enemy and leave them for the crows and the coyotes. Bones would bleach in the sun, and as they brightened, the nightmares would fade.
It was a simple plan, a beautiful plan, and he had been fully prepared to carry it out. And then, on one of his forays to Sanders' apartment, he'd seen the woman, and all his well-laid plans had disappeared in a flashfire of epiphany. He couldn't see much of her-just a flash of red hair-but he had seen the way Sanders had reached for her before the door was fully open, the eager grasp of his arms around her neck. He'd known then what he would take, and it would cut more deeply than the torturous loss of his misbegotten life.
He would show Sanders how the other half lived. He would steal his touchstone, his precious, living, breathing animus. Let him lie in a bed and grope for that which was not there and never would be again. Let him fumble blindly in the sheets for a memory of her, press his nose to the mattress for the merest whiff of her and strain his stinging eyes for an outline of her against the pillows. It would be his turn to grip his come-slick cock in trembling, numb fingers and fuck old memories grown hazy with grief and booze and the passage of time; maybe in the instant before he turned inside out and the world supernovaed white, he would see his-Brubaker's- face leering at him.
He shuddered at the thought and wondered if Sanders would be so sure of the justice system he had so smugly championed on the witness stand. He had sworn under God that he and his cronies had committed no error in their search for the truth, and his voice had been strong and steady when he spoke, anchored in unassailable faith. But would he still be so certain now that roles had been so rudely reversed? Would he still swear by the infallibility of his comrades and the whirring, clicking machines upon which so many helpless fates rested? He thought not, and it pleased him to no end.
He envisioned Sanders wandering the sacrosanct, sanitized halls of the crime lab, drifting from room to room and office to office with no purpose, searching aimlessly for salvation, for a fragile kernel of hope to which he could cling.
He'll be pariah among his own kind, Bonnie cooed. Everywhere he turns, he will see his wife's face and the places she used to be, and their emptiness will burn in his belly and twist in his heart. He will be a ghost among the living, a shade that is felt but never touched. Colleagues will see him and avert their eyes and not know why, and he will hear their conspiratorial whispers and wonder if they are doing all they can to find his soul before it's too late. No matter what they tell him, he will not believe because he has seen them eating and drinking and sleeping as though the world is still in order, and because his guilty conscience knows the truth. He will be a shadowman in the world of light, invisible, yet terribly exposed, and he will bleed.
The thought ignited a logy, erotic warmth in his stomach, and he smiled. The cuckoo clock struck the hour, and the little canary emerged from his artificial, airless nest in a merry dazzle of yellow. He watched, bemused, as it darted forward and trilled in glorious herald of five o'clock in the morning. He couldn't remember why he had chosen it, of all things, to bring to the cabin. It was hideously incongruous with the rest of the décor, and when he had first lain eyes on it, he'd hated it.
You brought it because Bonnie adored it. You were with her when she saw it at the rummage sale, and you knew even before she made a beeline for it that you'd be bringing it home. Your protests that it was ugly and tacky fell on deaf ears, and her eyes were alight with childish pleasure when she plucked it from the table. The old coot in charge of the sale wanted ten dollars, but you wangled it to five, and she carried it home on her lap, cradled in the crook of her arm like a puppy. She twittered about it all the way home, and though you still found it ugly, her enthusiasm made it bearable. You brought it to serve as a reminder of your purpose, a flint of wood and glue to keep your anger a bright, fierce flame.
He rose from the table with a grimace and stretched until his vertebrae popped. A muscle in his lower back gave a hot, sizzling twinge of protest, and he grunted as he shambled stiffly towards the small spare bedroom in the rear of the cabin. As soon as he was finished, he was going to take a hot sitz bath. Fifty-three had never felt so damned old, but he was determined that his body hold out for the next few days-the next five, to be exact. He had waited too long to accept any other outcome. After that, it could do as it pleased.
He took a last look at the cuckoo clock and went to greet his houseguest.