Relentless Page 0,66

evil men claim to be noble, and people abandon reason, bow down to them, and accept all kinds of slavery.”

Once a man with faith, with confidence in the common sense of the average man, Clitherow seemed surprised to hear himself speak those dismal words, for he inhaled sharply and after a pause returned to Waxx: “He’s untouchable, relentless. Cullen, you think you escaped him. But he didn’t want any of you to die in the house explosion. He wanted only to take it from you. If I hadn’t phoned when I did, if I hadn’t told you to get out, he would have called to warn you.”

Implicit in that statement was the assumption that Waxx had been monitoring my phones, and not only knew that Clitherow had called but knew as well what he had told me.

“Cullen, he didn’t want any of you to die in the explosion, because he breaks us down to ruins, step by step, not all at once. And now I am in the tower de Paris with—”

A noise both wretched and pitiable came through the phone line, and at first I thought that emotion had returned to Clitherow in a sudden stroke, that he was choking with grief.

A moment later, I realized this was more agony than anguish. It had been precipitated by a sound not made by the writer: a ripping noise, vicious and wet. I was listening to a man being murdered.

His phone dropped from his hand, clattered on the floor, did not disconnect. Briefly, his death throes issued from a distance.

But then came the thud-and-clump of a body falling. Perhaps his head was again close to the phone, because I heard him clearly. He seemed to be trying simultaneously to gasp for breath and to vomit.

I imagined that his throat had been slashed, that he was choking on his own blood.

I prayed for an end to his misery and at the same time hoped for one last gargled word, a revelation.

In mere seconds, Clitherow was finished and silent.

Earlier, when he became emotional and I suggested he call me back later or not at all, he said something that now had new meaning: “I have to tell you. You don’t understand. I have to tell you.”

He had not been surprised during the call by his murderer. They placed the call together. At the point of a knife, John Clitherow was forced to repeat the hideous story of his family’s destruction both for my benefit and for his humiliation.

Before me, hard shatters of rain rattled off the windshield.

At some point after the calls that John made to me at our house earlier in the day, he fell into Waxx’s hands. He used a disposable phone, but he called my listed number, not knowing that Waxx was already after me, and somehow that was his undoing.

We swept past a vehicle parked on the shoulder of the highway. I got only a rain-blurred glimpse of it, but I thought it was a black SUV. Not a Cadillac Escalade, surely not. Waxx couldn’t be everywhere at once. No headlights appeared behind us in the side mirror.

Over the open phone line, from the scene of the murder, other noises arose: the killer in motion. He fumbled the phone when he picked it up. Then came his slow steady breathing.

Determined not to be the first to speak, I listened to him as he listened to me. My resolution did not hold, and although I knew who he must be, I said, “Who is this?”

His voice was low and gravelly, ripe with a false good humor that could not conceal the underlying menace: “Hello there, brother.”

This was not Shearman Waxx, unless he was a man of many voices.

“Brother,” he said, “are you with me?”

“I’m not your brother,” I said.

“All men are my brothers,” he assured me.

“Waxx? Is that you? Who are you?”

“I am my brothers’ reaper,” he said. His soft laugh was ugly.

I put down the passenger-door window, pressed END on my cell phone, and threw it into the night.

Twenty minutes before midnight, Penny exited the interstate at the first truck stop that appeared after I tossed away the phone. Bad weather put the long-haulers behind schedule, and they did not linger at the diner. The parking lot was mostly empty, and business slow.

She stopped under the shelter of one of several service islands, where ours was the sole vehicle at the pumps. We got out, leaving Milo and Lassie asleep in the backseat.

Neither of us thought it wise to