Killer Within Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2015 Jeff Gunhus

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781477822234

  ISBN-10: 1477822232

  Cover design by Salamander Hill Design Inc.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014952438

  For Nicole

  I love you

  CONTENTS

  GENESIS

  THIRTEEN YEARS LATER

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  GENESIS

  Arnie Milhouse never considered himself much of a hero. Especially since no event in his first three decades on the planet gave him any reason to think otherwise. Even as his fingers flexed around the pen he was about to jab into the neck of the man in front of him, he still had his doubts.

  Twenty minutes earlier, he passed the last of the boarded-up row houses that made up this Baltimore neighborhood and turned into Rocco’s Convenience and Liquor, a place that seemed ready to live up to the promise of its name. There was plenty of liquor and not another soul to mess up the convenience of it all. It wasn’t unusual for the store to be empty at ten thirty on a Tuesday night. Friday would have been a different story. Workers trading their paychecks for cheap whiskey and smokes. Old ladies down to run their Powerball numbers, high school kids scoping for someone to pimp them some beers. But Tuesday was as quiet as a church.

  Arnie shuffled to the back of the store, curling his toes to keep his ill-fitting slippers from sliding off his feet. Vaguely, he wondered if he ought to have put on his shoes before leaving the house. He shrugged away the thought when he reached the wall of refrigerators in the back of the store. He opened a door and pulled out a milk jug. White flakes coated the plastic where past spills had dried, but the expiration date was still a respectable five days away. It would do.

  He stood at the counter to pay for his milk, shooting for the minimum acceptable amount of interaction with the acne-tortured teenager brooding behind the cash register. The kid’s face made him think too much about his own awkward adolescence for him to make eye contact for too long. He caught himself running his fingers over the pockmarks left from acne so bad it had made Arnie stay home from school some days in embarrassment. He remembered the jokes from other kids, the sympathetic looks from teachers, the tut-tut of the dermatologist who never found a way to help him. He felt a surge of anger at the kid for dredging up those painful memories. Arnie preferred to forget those days. Not that things were much better now.

  “What’s that?” the kid asked.

  “What?”

  “What’s not better now?”

  “Nothing,” Arnie mumbled. He hadn’t realized he’d said anything. “I wasn’t talking to you.”

  The teenager rolled his eyes and held out his hand, nodding to the register’s display that showed the amount owed.

  Arnie handed over some cash and waited for his change, taking in the space around Rocco’s cash register. It looked like a million other places with the yellow laminate surface stained and chipped away, rows of ninety-nine-cent packets of herbal supplements, a display of Harley-Davidson lighters, walls of breath mints, and racks of chewing gum.

  Boring and expected. But then again, what in life wasn’t?

  Arnie hadn’t always felt that way. Like any young man, he had once been full of expectation, ready for the road to rise before him in a never-ending adventure. Ready to make his mark. Slay dragons. Grab the world by its balls and squeeze until it screamed for mercy. But none of it was meant to be.

  Things had started out in his favor. He was good-looking, filling out and growing into his own during college. He possessed a work ethic and was wicked smart. Even Mensa, the society of high IQs, had been impressed by his intellect and had sent him a document to print out, certifying that he, Arnie Milhouse, was a goddamn genius.

  “You’re so fucking smart that you’re stupid” was his wife’s favorite line, a battering ram that smashed into him the minute he had the poor taste to feel good about himself. Problem was, she wasn’t wrong.

  He overanalyzed every decision he faced, which made him indecisive and a chronic second-guesser. So he’d sought refuge in the certainty and infallibility of math and computers. Over time he turned meek and timid. He didn’t stop to realize the mouse he had let himself become until it was the only thing he knew how to be. He was disgusted with the man he saw in the mirror, but it was the hand life had dealt him.

  Then the door to Rocco’s Convenience and Liquor opened and life took an unexpected turn.

  It wasn’t like in the movies. The bad guy wasn’t dressed in gang colors, eyes darting around like a crack fiend, ski mask pulled down over his face. No, the guy who came through the door looked like a middle-American dad: blue jeans, a little faded but new enough; a clean white T-shirt worn under a rust-colored flannel button-down, hung open and untucked sleeves rolled up to midforearm, like he was going camping and just stopped by to pick up some night crawlers and ingredients to make s’mores. The man seemed so totally average and unthreatening that Arnie didn’t give him a second thought. He was too tired to care. Too worried about what might be happening back at home.

  Arnie pictured his wife pacing the small kitchen of their one-bedroom row house, checking and rechecking her watch as she chain-smoked her Kools and chewed down her yellowing nails. He figured she felt the same way he did: desperately hoping that little Jason, the product of their single, fumbling night together—a total mercy fuck, to hear her describe it—wouldn’t wake up before she could get
the hell out of there.

  Arnie didn’t know where she went or even care that much. Sometimes she came back smelling like another man. Some nights she didn’t come back at all. Once, she disappeared for a week, one of the best of Arnie and Jason’s life. Just when he allowed himself the giddy idea that she might be gone forever, she reappeared on their front porch, passed out, her face covered with bruises, a dirty, torn dress hiked up over her hips, ass on show for the entire neighborhood to see. He took her in and nursed her to health, fighting down the impulse each time he entered her room to cover her face with a pillow and put an end to his misery.

  Leaving her at home was a risk. Jason wasn’t likely to get up this late, but if he did, he’d want a bottle. Arnie knew if he didn’t get home fast enough, his wife would get impatient and start slapping Jason on the backs of the legs to make him stop whining. A month ago, Arnie came home late from work and Jason’s legs were bright red, welted up where his mom had used a flyswatter instead of her hand. For greater reach, Arnie suspected.

  This act of violence against his little boy filled Arnie with a kind of rage he didn’t know was in him. He did the unthinkable and confronted her, but she didn’t back down. She screamed at Arnie. Punched him in the face. Told him to fuck off. That he was as much an annoying little prick as their son. That if he wasn’t late, little fucking Jason wouldn’t get fucking slapped, would he? She must not have liked the hurt look on Arnie’s face because she grabbed Jason, yanking him up by the arm until only his toes touched the ground, and slapped at the backs of his legs until he was screaming. “Happy now, asshole?” She’d grabbed the car keys out of his hand and come back two days later, reeking of booze.

  So no, Arnie didn’t bother with the new arrival to the store. He just wanted to get the hell out of there, climb back into his Toyota Camry, and get back up the street before things got out of hand on the homestead.

  He didn’t want to be the reason Jason got hurt again.

  But he was in a holding pattern. The teenager seemed to be stuck by the higher math required to make change out of the five-dollar bill Arnie had given him. He stood there, both hands in the drawer, mouth slack, eyes fixed over Arnie’s right shoulder.

  Arnie was about to wave his hand in front of the kid’s face to snap him back from whatever mental vacation he was on when something hard and cold poked him in the back of his neck.

  The instant he felt the pressure against his skin, he knew it was a gun.

  “Easy. Don’t move,” a voice whispered inches from his right ear. “I won’t hurt you if you don’t move.”

  The voice was deep, smooth but with a gravelly rumble at the lowest register. Absurdly, Arnie thought the voice would be great on the radio announcing the weather. Gray skies ahead, buckaroo. “Stay calm or I’ll blow your head right through.”

  Arnie nodded to let the man know he understood. No heroics here. Take the money and run. What did he care? He just needed to get home to Jason. That was all he cared about.

  Arnie didn’t say these things but he conveyed the message through slumped shoulders and a lowered head, the universal signs of subservience he’d practiced all his life. Practiced with his boss. With his father. His wife. Certainly a man with a gun deserved the same treatment.

  “Good, stand to the side. Right there. You make a move and I shoot the kid. Got it?”

  Arnie’s eyes instinctively went to the teenager, who backed away from the cash register with his hands up until he ran into the wall of cigarette dispensers behind him. Instead of looking at his face, Arnie fixated on the name tag pinned to the poor SOB’s shirt. “Hello. My Name Is EDGAR” it proclaimed to the patrons of Rocco’s Convenience and Liquor, who, of course, never for one second gave a damn. Arnie hadn’t either.

  But now Arnie was glad he knew the teenager’s name. Somehow it was important. And for some reason, Arnie wished the kid knew his.

  He let his eyes move up to Edgar’s terrified face. His cheeks were flushed with two thick splotches of crimson, but the rest of his face was the gray-white of dead skin. Even his zits looked drained of their color, only a faint pink instead of the painful, oozing bloodred visible just a few seconds before. His lower lip had caved and disappeared into his mouth, where the kid was chewing on it.

  Arnie considered whether the lip biting was from nerves or if he was trying to stop trembling so he would look brave. The dark piss stain spreading out from the kid’s crotch answered that question. Arnie didn’t blame him. He watched a lot of cop shows, and he knew things usually went bad in a hurry for the fella who had what the guy with the gun wanted. Even though the robber looked like a soccer dad, he was holding up a liquor store at gunpoint, an act that reeked of desperation. And desperation and guns were a terrible combination when you were on the business end of a firearm.

  An image came to Arnie’s mind. It was an unkind thought, and he tried to squeeze it back into whatever dark place it had come from, but it refused to leave. So, when he looked back at the kid’s name tag, he saw the new version that had come to his mind. It said: “Hello. My Name Is EDGAR and I Am Fucked.”

  “How you doin’, Edgar?” the man with the gun asked. “You all right?”

  Edgar didn’t move. He stared down at the gun, his jaw working away at his lower lip.

  The man moved the gun from side to side. Edgar’s head swayed to the same rhythm, like a cobra dancing with a snake charmer.

  “EDGAR!”

  The boy flinched backward and finally looked up. A tiny rivulet of blood dribbled from his mouth. Arnie almost told him to calm down and stop chewing his lip, but he had been given his instructions. He intended to wait for the storm to pass. Do exactly as he was told. No muss, no fuss, as his old man used to say.

  “Are you paying attention now?”

  Edgar nodded, spilling a little more saliva-blood mixture from his mouth. It drained down his chin, and soon it was falling in long, wet strands to the floor. Edgar didn’t wipe the blood away. Arnie understood. He and the kid were the same kind of animal. Just ride it out. No sudden moves.

  They wanted to live. Shutting up was their ticket out.

  “Put the cash in the bag. Hurry up.”

  The man was still calm, which Arnie took as a good sign. The crook was less likely to lash out that way. Of course, he was basing this analysis on nothing more than thousands of hours of watching cop shows on TV. This was the closest he’d been to real danger. It’s not that he was a coward, at least he didn’t think of himself as one; it was just that a thirty-year-old dad who spent fifty hours a week networking people’s computers seldom stared death in the face.

  Now, only four or five feet away from a loaded gun, Arnie thought he would be the one pissing his pants, biting his lip until blood gushed down his chin. But he wasn’t. Instead, he felt a cool detachment from the situation as a growing sense of wonder and excitement worked its way up inside his chest.

  It was the same way he’d felt last summer when he’d stood at the edge of the Grand Canyon. Right on the edge, toes touching the rim, so close that a gust of wind could have launched him into the abyss. With the outlandish scale of the canyon wrapped around him, he’d suddenly understood that the thousands of pictures he had seen hadn’t conveyed a single thing about the place. But the experience—the experience told him everything.

  That moment had revealed to Arnie a basic truth, something he felt sure he had once known but somehow had simply forgotten, beat out of him like a flyswatter taken to a baby’s soft skin.

  Life is revealed through experience, the canyon had whispered to him. Not seen through a screen, or read about, or talked about. Experienced.

  And his entire life was a step away from experience; he was on the other side of the glass looking out, on the other side of the TV screen looking in.

  Arnie had decided that day at the Grand Canyon to make changes in his life, big changes. But that was a y
ear ago. And like every time he decided to completely change his life, not a single thing had happened.

  But now, standing so close to danger, real danger, he felt the visceral power of raw experience, felt the pull of it even more than the canyon on that summer day, that pure day when the wind whispered his name, begging him to jump off the rim and float on the air currents for fifty glorious seconds before his brains bashed against the rocks below. This was different, not the explosive celebration of a fantastic ending but something better: the promise of a different beginning. Somewhere in the danger he sensed that there was a basic right he had denied himself his entire life.

  He looked into himself, trying to understand.

  And this internal view, for years a black wall of closed thinking, was suddenly a breathtaking vista. Arnie nearly staggered backward from the enormity of it.

  “Now the drop box. The money in the drop box.”

  Edgar’s eyes widened. The kid took half a step backward, the bag of money from the cash register still clutched in his hands.

  “I . . . I can’t open it.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “It’s not bullshit, man,” Edgar shouted, the stress forcing the words out in spastic bursts. “C’mon . . . like . . . like I care if you get the fuckin’ money from this place.”

  Blood splattered down the front of Edgar’s uniform. Arnie figured the kid must have chewed half his lip away for it to bleed that much.

  “Open the safe.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Do it now!”

  “I told you, man, I can’t . . .”

  BAM.

  Arnie fell back against a candy rack.

  Skittles, M&M’s, and Snickers bars flew everywhere.

  Then screaming.

  Edgar. Jesus, this son of a bitch shot Edgar.

  Arnie looked up. The gun was pointed at his head.

  “Up. Get up.”

  Arnie did as he was told. Any excitement he’d felt was gone. His stomach turned in on itself and he thought he might be sick.

  “Shut up, Edgar,” the man yelled. “You’re not hurt. That was just a warning shot. Now open the fucking lockbox.”