Endings by Linda Richards (portable ebook reader .TXT) 📗

I’d been putting myself through on the Central Coast and before that in Vancouver.

I can tell from first glance that the job itself will be unremarkable. Routine, if such a thing can be said about an assignment in my particular line of work. But once I get there, the City energizes me, as it always does. So many people, and all so beautifully, stridently, vitally alive. It is all I can do, sometimes, not to smile at people as I walk around. I control the urge though. People sometimes remember people who smile.

I feel those people inside me, though. Waking some nearly dead part of me. Making me feel a part of something instead of separate. Or more a part of it, anyway. Walking around that singular city, I feel alive in ways I haven’t for some time.

I am in this sort of lighthearted, people-loving mood when I get to Times Square. The job has gone well, textbook after the last one, and I have a solid day before my flight is due to leave from La Guardia.

In Times Square, I buy a brightly colored shawl from an old woman, thinking the color will bring out my eyes, plus she looks hungry, as though she needs to sell as many shawls as she can. That seems reason enough to buy.

She is set up next to a newsbox, and I let my eyes run over a headline, then feel my heart move down.

“William Atwater Escapes Custody,” reads the headline. “Serial Killer Loose Again,” reads the subheadline.

I buy a paper. Find a bench, the shawl forgotten in my hand. I sit down and start to read. As bad as the headline had seemed, things are worse, even, than that.

The paper reports that he had disguised himself as another prisoner, then faked his way out on a work detail. No one had realized the switch until they found the corpse of the prisoner he had impersonated. This sounds simplistic to me. I suspect the truth is somewhat more complicated than what the news is reporting, but I also know that the details won’t change the outcome. Alarms had been sounded, but it was too late: Atwater was nowhere to be found.

I sit there for several minutes, just letting the information penetrate and thinking about what, if anything, I can do. What, if anything, I even want to do.

I am aware of the blood forcing its way through my veins, making an echo through my mind. For a short time, I am aware of a sort of absolute stillness in my brain where all of the shouting should be. I hold things together in this way—careful of thought, of sound—while it all sinks in. After that, I don’t know quite how I feel. I only know it is terrible.

Somehow, I find my way back to my posh hotel room. Once there, I forget about the relaxing I’d intended to do and turn on the television. The media circus has returned. Though now I wonder: Were they ever really far away? Whatever the case, once again it is all Atwater, all the time. It hasn’t taken long at all and there is a sort of dull satisfaction in my gut at its return. This time, the networks already have a pile of file footage in the can. I’d seen it in the newspaper, after all. It is no surprise that it is already streaming on every station.

Through the magical lens of television, I see again the charming town of San Pasado. It feels like a homecoming. And then the most endearing photos of past victims, the most heartbreaking stories from parents, the most hair-raising stories from people who had experienced near misses with Atwater or thought they had. It’s the same material that was aired a few weeks ago, but this time dramatic twists have been added. It’s like in the time between, teams of artists have been working on all this material, just in case. And now here it all is: ready to make us feel more frightened and afraid and apprehensive, if any of that was even possible. And it seems that it was.

And now again there are the talking heads. Those with opinions on Atwater himself. Those with opinions on what his condition might be and what can be done about it. A psychiatrist who looks as though he has been summoned from Central Casting grabs my attention. He is slender to the point of thinness—his hair, his face, his hands. Even his voice is thin. His words stick with me despite that.

“What we are discussing here is the very nature of good and evil.”

“Are we?” The host has flat blue eyes and a helmet of close blond hair. This is already not going as she’d thought it would.

“Well, of course. It’s not as though we’re talking about someone who can be captured and neutralized and then remediated. We are not discussing here the aberrations of a petty thief or a crooked stockbroker. Nor are we discussing someone who has fallen off the rails of civilization because he is having trouble making his mortgage payments and so has poked his hand into the till. No!” The thin glass table in front of him is slammed so severely, even on television we can see it shimmer and shake as though in fear for its life. “What we are discussing here is something else entirely.”

“Well, these are different issues, certainly.” Helmet Head is trying hard here. I can see it on the glisten of sweat on her brow. And she’s not even treading water while her makeup assistant sweats it out offstage. Helmet Head’s goal is to keep her interview in check and under her control. I can see she doesn’t really care that much about what her guest is saying, one way or the other. She’s just concerned that he doesn’t come across as a loon or, worse, that she herself comes over as an asshole. It’s image to her, nothing more. Another