I threw up my arm to take the brunt of the blow.
He was strong for someone his size and the force of the impact against my forearm threw me off balance. I tumbled backward, tripped over an overstuffed garbage bag that lay behind me, and landed on the ground, but I was able to keep my gun directed at Griffin’s chest. “Drop the tire iron!”
To my surprise, he did, then stood still, leering at me.
“Hands up!”
Again he obeyed, and I was kind of wishing he hadn’t, that he would have rushed me instead. I could have ended this whole thing on the spot.
“The jacket,” he said. “I knew it was you.”
“It was me, what?” Without taking the gun off him, I stood up.
“With Mindy. You found her.” He grinned, and as he spoke, every word seemed to drip with venom. “Did you like seeing her like that? The way I left her? She was special to me. She was my first.”
Hot anger coursed through me, tightening everything. “How did you know?”
“Your name was in the papers. You think I didn’t keep clippings of the girls? And just a kid yourself, huh? Sixteen? How’s that been for you over the years? Detective?”
I felt my finger pressing against the cool steel of the trigger. Just a little more pressure, just one twitch and he would be dead.
Keep the demons at bay.
“On your knees.” He was less than three meters away and didn’t move.
“On your knees.” He didn’t comply.
I was about to order him again, but I suddenly realized that I kind of hoped he would go for a weapon and give me an excuse to squeeze the trigger.
“Were there others?” I kept my finger on the trigger. “Besides Jenna and Mindy?”
“There are always others. You should know that, Detective.”
“Who?”
“I’m afraid that’s my little secret.”
“Who is Slate Seagirt?”
He smiled, but on him it wasn’t really a smile. “Oh, you’re gonna have a load of fun when you find that out.”
“Who’s the Maneater of the Midwest?”
“Now there’s a man who knows how to acquire what he wants. Does it for a living.”
“Who is he?”
He glanced to his left and then lowered his hands.
“Hands up!”
But he didn’t raise them. Instead, he flicked his right hand toward his jacket pocket and simultaneously his chest blossomed open like a grisly, bloody flower as the sound of three gunshots ricocheted through the air. He swayed limply forward and dropped face-first onto the garbage-strewn ground.
Heart hammering, I looked over and saw Radar standing twenty-five meters away, his weapon still level, his eyes still drawing a bead on where Griffin had stood only a moment earlier. We were virtually aiming our guns at each other. He’d managed to fire even before I could. We simultaneously lowered our weapons.
“You okay, Pat?”
“Yeah.”
He’d hit Griffin center mass, just like we were taught at the academy. Textbook. And the shots did what they were supposed to do. They took the subject down.
I didn’t think there was any way Griffin was alive, but I held my gun on him even as I bent, cuffed his hands behind him, felt for a pulse.
“I had to fire.” Radar was on his way toward me. “He was reaching for a weapon.”
“Yeah.” I wished Griffin had been able to tell me the Maneater’s identity-if he even knew it-but I doubted that he would have told us, even if Radar hadn’t fired.
No pulse. Griffin was gone. I searched the pocket he’d been reaching for, but I found only his car keys. No weapon.
I hesitated.
“What is it?” Radar knelt beside me.
“Hang on.”
I checked his other jacket pockets, found nothing. Felt for a holster; he wasn’t wearing one.
“Oh.” Radar caught on. “You’re not telling me…”
“Wait.” At last, on the back of his belt, I found a sheath. Gloves on, I snapped it open and it yielded a serious-looking hunting knife.
“He might have been going for this,” I said.
But even as I spoke, a question rose inside me: from where Radar had been standing, could he have seen Griffin reaching for his pocket?
Radar was quiet for a moment. “I got two kids, Pat. I can’t…I can’t, you know…”
“Yeah.”
The decision was easy. I wrapped Griffin’s fingers around the knife’s handle, then dropped it beside his body. “It’s a good thing you fired when you did, Radar.”
He watched me silently.
“He could have killed me if he got to me with that blade,” I said honestly.
“Yeah, he could have.”
It’s hard to say what justice really is. If it’s balancing the scales, then it’s a lot rarer than we like to think. Sometimes they can’t be balanced. Even by killing a person who deserves to die.
I stood.
Part of me wished that Griffin hadn’t died so quickly, that he would have been injured instead and lain there suffering and begging and sputtering for breath. It wouldn’t have made up for what he did to those girls, but it would have at least been a step in the right direction.
Radar was quiet. “Thank you.”
“No. Thank you.”
My nightmare from Sunday night came to mind again, but now there was an added moment in the dream where the man who was shoveling dirt into the shallow grave on top of the crying girl sealed in the sleeping bag looked at me. I saw his face, and it was Griffin. That grin, that uneven, self-satisfied grin.
I could only imagine what special place in hell was reserved for guys like him.
And actually, I have to admit, that thought did bring me a degree of satisfaction.
Griffin lay dead in a pool of his own blood, facedown in the trash, the knife by his side, a small price tag dangling from the handle. And we left him like that, Radar and I did, as we walked back toward the house.