The Big Bad Wolf - James Patterson [39]
The Wolf lifted Yulya even higher in the air. Her long legs kicked violently and one of her red mules went flying, scooting under a nearby table. Nobody picked up the shoe. Not a person in the club moved to help her. Or to see if Mikhail Biryukov was still alive. Word had already circulated that the madman in the front of the Passage was the Wolf.
“You are witnesses to what happens—if anyone ever crosses me. You are witnesses! So you’ve had a warning. Same as in Russia. Same now in America.”
The Wolf took his left hand out of Yulya’s hair and wrapped it around her throat. He twisted hard and Yulya’s neck broke. “You are witnesses!” he screamed in Russian. “I killed my ex-wife. And this rat Biryukov. You saw me do it! So go to hell.”
And then the Wolf stomped out of the nightclub. No one did a thing to stop him.
And no one talked to the New York police when they came.
Same as in Russia.
Same now in America.
Chapter 44
BENJAMIN COFFEY WAS being held in a dark root cellar under the barn where he’d been brought—what was it now—three, maybe four days ago? Benjamin couldn’t remember exactly, couldn’t keep track of the days.
The Providence College student had nearly lost his mind until he made an amazing discovery in the solitary confinement of the cellar. He found God, or maybe God found him.
The first and most startling thing Benjamin felt was God’s presence. God accepted him, and maybe it was time for him to accept God. He learned that God understood him. But why couldn’t he understand the first thing about God? It didn’t make sense to Benjamin, who’d attended Catholic schools from kindergarten up to his senior year at Providence, where he studied philosophy and also art history. Benjamin had come to another conclusion in the darkness of his “prison cell” under the barn. He’d always thought that he was basically a good person, but now he knew that he wasn’t; and it didn’t have anything to do with his sexuality, as his hypocritical church would have him think. The way he figured it, a bad person was someone who habitually caused harm to others. Benjamin was guilty of that by his treatment of his parents and siblings, his classmates, his lovers, even his so-called best friends. He was mean-spirited, always acted superior, and continually inflicted unnecessary pain. He had acted like this ever since he could remember. He was cruel, a snob, a martinet, a sadist, a complete piece of shit. He’d always justified his bad behavior, because other people had caused him so much pain.
So was that why things had turned out like this? Maybe. But what was truly astonishing to Benjamin was the realization that if he ever got out of this alive, he probably wouldn’t change. In fact, he believed he would use this experience as an excuse to continue being a miserable bastard for the rest of his life. Cold, cold, I’m so cold, he thought. But God loves me unconditionally. That never changes either. Then Benjamin realized that he was incredibly confused, and crying, and had been for a long time, at least a day. He was shivering, babbling nonsense to himself, and he didn’t know what he really thought about anything. Not anymore, he didn’t.
His mind kept shifting back and forth. He did have good friends, great friends, and he’d been an okay son; so why were all these terrible thoughts shuttling through his head? Because he was in hell? Was that it? Hell was this foul-smelling, claustrophobic root cellar under a decaying barn somewhere in New England, probably New Hampshire or Vermont. Was that right?
Maybe he was supposed to repent and couldn’t be set free until he did? Or maybe this was it—for eternity.
He remembered something from Catholic grade school in Great Barrington, Rhode Island. A parish priest had tried to explain an eternity in hell to Benjamin’s sixth-grade class. “Picture a river with a mountain on the other side,” the priest had said.