Chill Of Night. John Lutz
checked beneath the desk, and sure enough there was a small box wrapped in plain brown paper, hand addressed to the hotel in care of a Mr. I. Justice.
“Came in today’s delivery,” Franklin said, and handed over the package, which was heavy for its size. He saw that it was marked book rate. Guy might be a writer. They stayed at the Waldemeyer sometimes.
Justice thanked Franklin, tucked the package under an arm, then hoisted his suitcase and walked toward the elevators. A cheap vinyl suitcase, Franklin figured, and the way Justice was carrying it, moving so balanced, it couldn’t be very heavy.
Okay, Franklin thought, whatever the guy’s game, it was fine with him. Whatever was making Justice edgy in a deadpan sort of way, it was none of Franklin’s business. In fact, it didn’t really interest him. Didn’t interest him much what might be in the package, either—could be pornography, or not a book at all but a vibrator, or one of those blow-up dolls. No matter. In Franklin’s job, you learned to submerge your curiosity.
As soon as Justice had stepped into an elevator, and the tarnished brass arrow above its sliding door started its hesitant journey toward the numeral five, Franklin turned his attention back to the newspaper he’d been reading.
More shit in the Middle East. Always.
After a while he forgot about watching for a woman entering the lobby and going straight to the stairs or elevators.
After a while, he pretty much forgot about Justice.
The guest in the raincoat had decided on traveling under the name Justice because it seemed apropos, though “Vengeance” might have done as well.
He laid the half-packed suitcase on one side of the queen-sized bed, then removed his coat and his sport jacket and stretched out on his back on the other side.
But he couldn’t relax.
Suddenly unable to lie still, he sat up on the edge of the mattress and reached for the phone directories in the nightstand drawer. It took him only a few minutes to find what he was looking for in the Queens directory. Davison’s Dent and Paint, an auto body shop on Filmont Avenue.
He sat with the directory spread open on his lap, staring at the phone number. He could call the repair shop now and probably talk to Elvis Davison, who owned and operated the dent removal and paint business. Who a year ago had sexually molested and murdered Justice’s four-year-old son, Will. Davison, who, acquitted despite overwhelming evidence, had walked smiling from the courtroom. Who’d returned to his family and business and life as usual after an unpleasant but brief interval, while Justice and his wife April walked from the courtroom into hell.
Elvis Davison, who was right now, since it wasn’t quite closing time, probably concerned mostly with pounding out dents and matching paint colors. Davison, the child molester and murderer, free because the police had searched his apartment with a faulty warrant.
Davison, who had killed what was bright and pure in a dismal, cruel world.
Davison, the man Justice was here to kill.
After the trial, Justice and April had thought the tragedy might somehow make them closer. Couples who shared grief at least shared something. Perhaps they might lessen each other’s burden of pain.
They’d instead discovered that grief was a thing you could almost reach out and touch and feel grow, if it weren’t for your terror. Even though two people rather than one desperately wanted it to leave, it didn’t go away any sooner. Instead it loomed larger, feeding off the agony of two rather than one. It did drive Justice closer to April. It drove April further and further away.
Justice’s wife, the murdered Will’s mother, lived now more on antidepressants than food. When she wasn’t taking pills, she drank. When she wasn’t drinking, she was downing pills. Two psychologists and a psychiatrist had been unable to make her grief bearable. Unable to sleep, she roamed the house at night, and she roamed Justice’s dreams.
He slid the phone closer to him and punched out the code for an outside line. Then he called, but not the number of Davison’s Dent and Paint. He called his home.
April picked up on the third ring and said hello. He could tell from the slow slide of her voice that she was heavily medicated.
At first he said nothing, then simply, “It’s me.”
“Why aren’t you home?” She sounded disinterested, everything obscured by her fog of medication.
“I told you I had a business trip. I’m in Cincinnati.”
“Cinciwhat?”
“—Nati. In Ohio.”
“That’s right, a business trip. I forgot.”
“You okay?”
“What’s okay? Who the hell’s okay?”
“April, have you had supper?”
“Not suppertime,” she slurred.
She was right, he realized. He was an hour ahead of her in New York. She was in their apartment in St. Louis.
“I’ll eat somethin’ later,” she said, obviously not meaning it. She’d have a drink later, or take a pill. Or take too many pills, as she had more than once.
He thought of telling her where he really was, what he was going to do. She would approve, he was sure. At least she wouldn’t disapprove. She was beyond caring, beyond hoping. He wasn’t. Not quite yet. She could pull out of her pain and grief, as he could. Someday. Possibly. It might help them to know that Davison was dead, that he’d paid for what he’d done to their child.
But would she recover from her grief without Justice—her husband?
“You still there?” she asked.
“Always,” he said.
She didn’t answer. He could hear her breathing into the receiver, maybe sobbing. He wanted to be there to comfort her. Should be there.
“April?”
“Yeah?”
“Promise me something.”
“Why not?”
“Make yourself a pizza for supper. We’ve still got some in the freezer. Put one in the microwave. Will you do that? Eat something instead of…Will you put in a pizza?”
“Oh, sure.”
Yeah.
“Whatever we do,” she said, “we can’t bring back Will. It won’t unhappen.”
Why did she say that? Can she somehow know where I am? What I’m intending to do?
Her voice, heavy with medication, came over the phone. “Like the prosecutor said, there’s no way to unring a—”
“I know what he said!” Justice interrupted.
“The bastard was right.”
“The bastard was,” he said after a while.
“I’ll put in the pizza,” she said, and hung up.
Justice replaced the receiver, stood, and went to the dresser, where he’d placed the package he’d picked up at the desk. He peeled off the brown wrapping paper, opened the box inside, and from wadded newspaper used as packing material he withdrew a .45 caliber revolver. It had belonged to his father, who’d been an avid hunter, and who had bought the gun at a hardware store in Iowa, before permits were required and firearm sales recorded. Justice didn’t hunt. After his father’s funeral six years ago, he’d left the shotguns and rifles to be disposed of by the estate, and for some reason had kept the revolver.
Now it seemed like fate, helping him to make up his mind to come here and kill Davison, so he’d mailed the gun, loaded, ahead to the hotel, telling the postal clerk it was a book, hoping it would make it through security. It had. Now it