A Killer in the Wind by Andrew Klavan Page B

collided with the wall before I saw it. Then I did see it, and I saw a thin, thin line of dim white light hanging in the air just above my head. I pressed my hand against the paneling, pressed harder, lifted—and again, the wall opened. Light—dazzling brightness—spilled out over me. Shielding my eyes with my hand, I stepped into it.
    From this point on, my memories of that night are more like dreams. Glimpses and fragments that waver and fade. The light, that bright white light, and the smoke and the smell, so thick, so sharp; and the fog in my brain—it all came together and overwhelmed me.
    I staggered forward. I saw the source of the light: four white circular objects packed with halogen bulbs. I could not think what they were at the time but now, looking back, I know they were lights from an operating room. Their brilliant beams reflected, gleaming, off the steel operating table beneath them. They flashed off the loathsome instruments that were laid out in readiness on a stand beside the table and hanging from hooks on the white walls.
    The smell—the smell was disinfectant. A smell so harsh and raw I could almost see it in the air like heat. Emory had a red plastic gallon container of the stuff. He was splashing it wildly over the walls and the floor.
    The smoke, meanwhile, was billowing out of a metal trash can just near him. Papers and photographs were burning there. Through the fog and fever and stench and smoke, I caught a glimpse of one of the pictures, one of the photographs. I saw what it was before it curled and blackened. I thought, My God, my Jesus God .
    Emory spotted me then. He started back, throwing his hands out, flinging away the red plastic container. It slid across the tiled floor and rattled to rest. The green disinfectant came gulping out of the open neck so that the smell grew even worse, grew overpowering.
    Emory’s weak, round features were wild with terror. His green eyes lanced laserlike at me out of their folds of flesh, burning with terror and with rage.
    “Traitor!” he shrieked.
    I pointed my gun at him. “Who’s the Fat Woman?” I said.
    “Traitor!”
    “Where is she?”
    My voice sounded bizarre in my own ears, drawn out and distorted like a recording played back at slow speed. I was drowning in the feverish atmosphere down here. I was losing myself in it, falling away from myself, farther and farther away.
    “You think you’re Justice?” Emory screamed—at least that’s what I think he screamed, that’s what I remember. He started to cry. “You’re a traitor to everything!”
    But his voice was growing distorted too. He was slipping off into the atmosphere, slipping away from me. Both of us were lost and swirling in the swirling and unreal confusion that crossed and erased the borderlines between me and the world I saw.
    The rest is all like that, all darkness and unreal confusion, all mist and smoke and bright white gleaming lights and the choking stench, all of it filling me up with darkness—filling up all reality with darkness, so that reality and I became one dark thing, darkness itself, darkness alone.
    I think Emory went on screaming in that darkness. I’m not sure. I don’t remember.
    I don’t even remember killing him.

3
    War Stories
    T HERE WAS A restaurant called Salvatore’s on Main Street in Tyler. Nothing fancy: pizza and burgers and sandwiches, that sort of thing, plus a full bar. A lot of county office workers went there at the end of the day. A lot of families and some high school kids sometimes—the good kids, the clean kids. It was the sort of place you went for dinner and a good time and no trouble. And there never was any trouble, because it was where the county’s law enforcement officers hung out too—Sheriff’s Department deputies and BCI inspectors and state police and prosecutors and assistants and all.
    Salvatore cultivated our trade. He named drinks and sandwiches after us, especially the inspectors. Mine was a veal and onion