Chapter Text
The wind howls like a symphony of the damned.
Like a freight train, like a thousand runaway freight trains barreling at each other all at the same time. It sounds like hell. Like everything you’ve ever loved being ripped apart, shredded without a shred of mercy. If someone cut a hole directly into the underworld and held it open, this is what it would sound like to the living. A sea of lost souls, crying out in agony.
The gusts are so strong Eve can barely see anything. Around her the trees, the rows and rows of parallel pines limber and rubbery with sticky sap, creak and bend until their tops almost touch the ground. When will they snap, Eve wonders. When will they finally give under this unnatural pressure?
Stumbling forward, Eve grasps for a handhold, for anything. Half-blind from the deafening noise and near whiteout conditions, she can only press herself against the thin trunk of a sapling, dodging branches as it’s piteously whipped by the solid walls of wind. The world around her swells and shudders, alive and full of fury. Everything looks the same, identical alleys stretching north, south, east and west as far as she can see, which really is only a few yards.
Another gust dislodges Eve from her hiding spot and her feet slip in the sandy mud. Her knees catch her fall, pain ricocheting up her femur and locking her hip into place. She struggles against another battering of wind and for a moment, she flashes back to those late night LifeCall infomercials, the old lady sprawled on the ground yelling about how she can’t get up. Eve thought she had at least another 30 years before her bitter, self-imposed isolation led to her dying alone on the floor but apparently life, or more accurately, Florida, has other plans.
Somehow, though, in the swirling, earsplitting gale, Eve’s ears catch something out of place. Faint, yet recognizable. Distinct. The shrill ring of a telephone.
Crawling on her hands and knees, Eve scrambles toward the sound, trying to triangulate its position. Scrambles so fast it takes her a minute to realize she’s sinking, that she’s nearly up to her elbows in mud. The faster she crawls, the harder she tugs, the stronger the suction, until she can’t wrench her hands free anymore. Until she collapses forward into the muck.
That’s when she feels it. Something shifts beneath her hands, buried deep in the mud. Brushes against her fingertips, exploring, then firm. Eve recoils, or tries to, when she works out what it is. What they are. What she’s feeling.
Hands. Grasping for her. Pulling her deeper. Pulling her to where they live.
With a burst of fear and adrenaline, Eve manages to clamber up to her feet and scurry a few steps toward the sound of the telephone. As she does, hands begin to erupt up from the mud, knuckles first, like crabs when the tide goes out. Dozens of them poke out from their holes, reaching for her, for something to drag into the swamp. For the first time, Eve is grateful for the roar of the wind so she doesn’t have to hear the horrible squelch.
Carefully, she picks her way around the hands while moving fast enough to avoid sinking further into the mud. She’s closer, so close she can hear the ring clearly against the backdrop of the storm. She’s so close she can see it, the phone, attached to the trunk of one of the older pines, sturdy for now but ready to splinter at any moment. It looks just like the phone in her hotel room.
The wind at her back propels Eve forward at a steady pace, until another gust howls and her feet are swept from under her. She lands face first with a thud and a mouthful of wet sand, but when she tries to get up, she’s stopped by an insistent tug.
A hand, gray and bloated, its knuckles kissed with rot, wrapped around her ankle.
Her scream is lost to the storm, carried away to the underworld as she kicks, desperately, at the hand circling her ankle like a cuff. She connects but manages only to scrape away chunks of squishy flesh and expose white bone. Her adrenaline spent, she’s about to lay on her back and let herself be dragged into oblivion when a black shape descends from the swirling sky, talons first, with great, thunderous wingbeats.
A crow, all gleaming pearlescent blue-black feathers and eyes like the night. It pecks and claws at the hand until it releases Eve and slithers back into the silt, beaten into submission. Perched on the ground now, the crow turns to Eve, head tilting slightly as if trying to see some other, hidden part of her.
“Caw,” it instructs. Around them, the wind dials back to a healthy breeze.
“Yeah,” Eve answers, scrambling to her feet.
She reaches the phone mid-ring, bringing the receiver to her ear and choking out a greeting into the scratchy connection.
“Hello Dr. Polastri,” a voice answers, calm. Authoritative. “This is Gary Scott. Governor of Alabama. I hope I’m not bothering you.”
Eve swallows.
“What do you need?” she asks. Despite knowing what he needs. There’s only one thing he could possibly be calling about.
“As you probably know, Raymond Greenway is scheduled for execution tonight,” he says. Of course. “His lawyers asked for a stay, and the Supreme Court granted one. It’s short, though. Enough time for me to quickly review the case and make a final decision. I was reading through the transcript of the appeal hearing and reached your testimony —”
“With all due respect,” Eve interrupts. “There were about a half-dozen other psychologists and social workers who testified, under oath, that Raymond Greenway was a reformed man. That he’d been healed of his trauma. That he’d found religion and he just wanted to go back to his frumpy wife and ugly kids and be a productive member of society again despite, you know, killing ten people.”
“But you didn’t,” the governor cuts in. “And that’s why I’m calling you. Six months ago, you got on the stand and testified that Raymond Greenway deserved to die. Tonight, I’m asking if you stand by that.”
Eve doesn’t need a script to know what comes next. She doesn’t even need to think. The words spill out of her mouth as if they’d been replaying over and over and over, on a loop, since that night. Because they had. Like a tape recording, rewinding and starting over on repeat. They’d stopped only when she’d come to Florida. Only when she met ....
“Raymond Greenway is genuinely intelligent, self aware and organized, traits not commonly seen together in serial killers. It’s how he was able to convince the psychologists and social workers, in the span of a two hour interview, that he was a changed man. He knew what they wanted to hear, and understood what he needed to say to achieve the desired outcome.
I didn’t spend two hours with him, though. I spent three months, not only with him, but with his family, his friends. The people he went to school with. The detectives who investigated his case. And I found that Raymond Greenway is a man who derives pleasure from manipulating and killing. From exacting his will over others. In fact, I believe it is the only way he experiences pleasure and has been for much of his life. It is hardwired into him and no amount of therapy or medication or religion will change that.
Give him a chance at parole, and you’re sending him back into the unsuspecting world with the belief that he’s outsmarted the system. Only this time, he’ll know something he didn’t before — how to not get caught. Give him life and take him off death row, and you’ve locked a predator in a confined space with dozens of other people and nothing to lose.”
“You think he’d kill again?”
“I’d be surprised if he hasn’t tried to go after a guard while he’s waiting.”
Silence.
“He has, hasn’t he?”
“Thank you, Dr. Polastri. I appreciate your time and attention in this matter.”
The line goes dead.
Eve holds the receiver to her ear for a few moments, hoping for something, anything to break her out of this cycle. Instead, the dial tone cuts in. She returns the phone to its cradle, fitting the two halves into a hole.
As she does, as she completes the circuit, another hand, stronger than the first, bursts from the mud below and clamps around her ankle. Before she can react, the dead weight drags her down up to her knees, then her hips. No crow comes to her rescue. She tries to call for it, mouth opening in vain only to fill with thick, suffocating muck.
Eve jolts upright in the bed, a too-heavy hotel duvet sliding onto the floor. She gulps down mouthfuls of air, the slick of sweat on her forehead and neck evaporating too quickly in the air conditioning, taking her body heat with it. An old as shit episode of Forensic Files plays on the TV, the forensic tech lifting a shoe print from a package of hamburger buns for evidence. The moon watches her, silvery and unblinking, through the window.
Groaning, she flops back against the pillows and throws an arm over her eyes. She’s already sinking again, consciousness slipping down through quicksand. From somewhere in the room, she swears she hears a Russian-tinged voice tell her to go back to sleep.
***********************
Morning finds her down by the lake, tossing torn off chunks of a gas station Krispy Kreme 6-pack to the massive gator. She’d managed to coax him out of the water with the promise of bready sugar, trailing the donut bits up from the bank like breadcrumbs. Now, he waits patiently with his mouth open, waiting for her to throw the bits right onto his tongue. Brightly colored ducks gather up on the grass just out of reach, jealous of the gator’s meal.
They continue like that, Eve and the gator, through the first few donuts. But around donut number four, Eve gets curious. The gator watches her, fat and docile. Patient. Slow. She wonders if he might let her get close enough to pet him. To run her fingers down his back. This ancient, powerful thing-turned-tame. She throws a piece of donut onto the ground a few inches away from his mouth and as he turns to eat it, she inches forward, her hand outstretched.
She’s just about to make contact, just a hair’s width away, when he remembers. Remembers he isn’t in a petting zoo. Remembers he isn’t some hand-raised facsimile of a wild thing and lunges, quick as a whip, turning back on himself with a flash of teeth and snapping jaws.
She steps back just in time, laughing as she cradles her hand to her chest. He growls and she feels the vibrations of it in her ribs. It touches something primal in her, something her ancestors put away once they moved from the forests into cities. Put away but not forgotten. The gator faces her, his back to the water, unsure as to whether he should open his mouth for more donuts or scamper back to the dignity of the lake.
“That gator botherin’ you ma’am?”
Eve turns to find a portly man dressed in khaki watching them. He looks like he’s ready for a safari, with a short sleeved-button up and shorts, but he’s wilting under the Florida sun, pit stains already blotting under his arms at barely 9 a.m. A badge on his chest identifies the man as a warden for the park around the lake. That sounds like a cushy job, Eve thinks. She wonders, briefly, if she’d be qualified.
“No,” she answers, looking back at the gator, who waits, unmoving. He seems to know this man means trouble. “We’re fine here.”
“Well, if he gets a little too familiar, here’s the number for the Nuisance Gator Hotline,” he says, handing her a card. “Tell them where you are, and some Fish and Wildlife folks will come and take care of it.”
“Take care of it?”
“They’ll wrangle him and toss him in the back of a truck. Take him away.”
“To where,” she says, still watching the gator, its green eyes holding her stare, unblinking.
“I mean,” he starts. “Aw, ma’am, you didn’t hear it from me, but they do kill them. Make ‘em into trophies and give ‘em to the hunting clubs. You know how it is. We can’t have gators out here snapping at people. And it’s not like there’s a shortage. There’ll be a new one in here in a week. Crawled in from the sewers.”
“Kill them,” Eve whispers, appalled. Appalled that they would kill something, destroy it, for daring to express itself. For following its nature, because they found it distasteful. She thinks of Villanelle, sitting in her cell, waiting on the same fate.
“Thank you sir, but as I said, we’re fine here.” As if on cue, the gator swings back toward the lake and slides into the water, having decided he’s had enough of this humiliating ordeal. The ducks eye Eve with hope, but she instead stuffs the last sugar-glazed Krispy Kreme into her mouth whole. It melts in her mouth like cotton candy as she chews and the man, apparently repulsed by her display, wanders back to wherever he came from.
Good riddance.
Just as she’s finished chewing, her phone rings in two quick buzzes against her back pocket. Fishing it out, she swallows quickly and answers.
“Hello, Dr. Polastri. This is Konstantin Vasiliev. We met at the prison yesterday. You and I have a friend in common.”