guess it does,’ Reggie said, then fell quiet.
He stared at the walls of the tree house and the whirly patterns in the wood. He stared at the floor too. The killer said nothing as well. They stayed that way for awhile, high up in the little house, silent with their thoughts in a place all their own.
1.
The sheriff’s department came around about an hour later. The white and green Ford could be seen over and through the trees from their perch in the tree house, crawling up the road at a leisurely pace.
Reggie moved for the ladder and Ivan grabbed him by the arm.
‘Remember our arrangement,’ he said, not a question but a statement.
Reggie nodded.
‘In my line of work,’ he said, ‘there’s consequences for breaking your word.’
Reggie didn’t remember actually giving his word about anything, but nodded again anyway. Then he was moving down the ladder and emerging from the woods and jogging back to the house across the dry field of the front yard. A slight summer breeze stirred things and made a whisper in the air over the expanse. He walked in the back door just as his mom was leaving the kitchen to check on the sound of the car pulling up out front.
He watched from the hall as she opened the screen door and stepped out on the porch to greet the man walking up. The cadence of heavy boots pounding up the steps to meet her sounded like heartbeats.
‘Good morning ma’am,’ the man said. Through the mesh of the screen door he was a vague form with a wide-brimmed hat and a gun belt. ‘I’m Deputy Collins,’ said the man and they shook hands.
The voice was familiar and Reggie wanted to reach out and pull his mom back inside and lock the door behind her.
‘Good morning, officer,’ his mom replied. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘We’re driving around notifying nearby residents about a situation,’ the deputy said. How the same voice that had tauntingly asked You know what rape is, kid? could now disguise itself with civility, was beyond Reggie.
Such a trick seemed dangerous to him. Something a predator did to lull its prey into a false sense of security. Just before it flashed its claws and dragged the hunted into a dark den.
‘What situation would that be?’ his mom asked. Interest rather than concern tinged his mom’s voice. Serene calm or outbursts of emotion when he was late home for something or wasn’t where he was supposed to be were her only two moods since his dad had died. One or the other. Nothing in between.
That was almost as troubling to Reggie as the deputy’s dual personalities.
‘Not to cause any alarm, ma’am,’ the deputy began, ‘but it seems there’s a dangerous man on the loose.’
‘You don’t say?’ said his mom.
‘Unfortunately so,’ said the deputy. ‘Yesterday morning a man escaped from a police escort taking him to the county jail in Tucson.’
‘What’d he do?’ she asked. She leaned nonchalantly against the door, her back pushing against the mesh and bending it inward.
‘He’s a killer,’ said Deputy Collins, friendly neighbourhood peace officer and tormentor of bike riding boys.
‘Who’d he kill?’ his mom asked, her tone still mildly interested, like someone spying a squashed bug on the sidewalk momentarily before passing.
‘Many people,’ the deputy replied. ‘He’s a contract killer.’
‘My word,’ his mom said.
‘Yes, I know,’ said the officer. ‘Who’d think such a man loose in our town?’
They each shook their head at the wonder of it all.
‘If you see this man,’ the officer said and held up a photo Reggie couldn’t see through the screen door, ‘stay away from him and get to a phone. Give us a call and we’ll be there lickety-split.’
They shook hands again, and the deputy walked away, climbing in his car and driving off. Plumes of dirt billowed into the air and then settled like battlefield detritus. His mom stood on the porch for a time, looking at the photo without really looking at it, and then came back inside.
Reggie left silently by the back door.
2.
‘Tell me about the first person you killed,’ Reggie said after climbing back up the ladder and settling down again across from the killer. Together they’d watched the patrol car weaving away in the distance, until, crawling first up and then down a hill, it blinked away in the white horizon.
Despite the deputy’s unsettling offer to let him see crime scene photographs, Reggie thought about what the officer had said to him by the side of the highway: He raped and killed a woman and killed her kid. And about how Ivan himself had admitted to killing women and children only a short time ago.
Reggie idly wondered if he could get to the ladder before the killer drew his gun. If, peddling fast, he could catch up to the patrol car on his bike before it reached the highway. But these were just fleeting thoughts without substance, like the remnants of vague dreams upon awakening, drifting away.
The two of them had an arrangement, a deal. And in Ivan’s line of work, a man’s word was everything. Ivan had rightly judged Reggie when he’d asked what if he called the police and the killer had said he knew Reggie wouldn’t. Reggie was likewise sure the man would keep to the terms of the deal. He was safe as long as he didn’t betray the killer’s trust.
At least, he was pretty sure.
‘My first hit?’ Ivan asked. ‘Or the first person I killed?’
‘There’s a difference?’ Reggie asked.
‘There is,’ the killer said. ‘A hit is never personal, just business. Killing someone because you want to is an entirely other thing.’
‘The first person you killed then,’ Reggie said, nodding with the decision. ‘The very first.’
Reggie thought it might take him a moment or two to call forth the memories. So many killed over so many years, he figured the killer might have to close his eyes against the tide. Take himself back and carefully reel in the memory out from the rest. But Ivan answered immediately.
‘That would be my father,’ he said, looking now not at Reggie but at some spot above and past him. He was indeed reeling in the memory, Reggie realized, only it wasn’t difficult at all. This was something that was at the core of the man sitting across from him. It was there all the time, merely waiting for him to draw it forth from beneath the surface.
‘Why’d you kill your own dad?’ Reggie asked. He thought of his mom and his own dad. Such a thing – killing one of them – didn’t make sense. He couldn’t even fully develop the thought.
‘I caught him touching my sister,’ Ivan said. ‘You know, in the way grown-ups aren’t supposed to.’
Images came unbidden to Reggie’s mind. Dark basements; old corners; unlighted children’s rooms at night. A large, hulking figure standing over a frail one with sheet covers pulled to her chin. Again he thought of the deputy on the side of the highway, and later on Reggie’s own front porch: Do you know what rape is, kid?
‘How many times did he do it?’ Reggie heard himself asking. He realized what he was saying, and he thought of the gun lying beside the man across from him. But Ivan didn’t show any reaction to this question, and