Mania by Craig Larsen Page B

Metropolitan Café, Nick found himself drawn to the parking lot beneath Pike Place Market. This was his first visit back to the scene since Sam’s murder, and he had to steel himself against an upwelling of memories.
    At three o’clock, the sun had broken through the clouds, and the waterfront was crowded. A flock of seagulls was circling and screeching overhead. He wasn’t certain precisely what he was looking for. Standing on the edge of the lot in the light of day, among hundreds of tourists and residents happy for the interlude of warm sunshine, he was convinced that he was grasping at straws. He looped the camera’s leather shoulder strap around his hand a few times, letting the camera dangle at his legs. The cast aluminum body of the telephoto lens tapped against his knee. There wasn’t anything for him to see here. Nothing to find that the police wouldn’t already have found.
    He was ready to give up when two girls caught his attention. He hardly noticed the yellow tube top that the blonde was wearing, or the brunette’s long, slender legs. It was the way the blond girl was laughing that grabbed him. The shrill sound resonated in Nick’s head, and despite the sunlight, despite the crowd of people streaming past him on either side, his world went black. Nick was shivering, dressed once again in his jacket. A mist was swirling around him, a foghorn was sounding over the water. A few students were talking loudly, drunkenly, a couple of blocks down, their words indistinct. A girl was laughing. And Sam was next to him, in step at his side.
    Nick was grasping something cold and metallic in his hand. He didn’t have to see it to know that it was the knife that had killed his brother. The handle and half its blade protruded unnaturally from his brother’s chest, wedged savagely into his body. The silvery steel blade was covered in gore, but Nick could see that its edge was rough and dinged. Sam’s last breath was gurgling from his lungs through a hole in his ribs. Nick looked down at his brother’s disfigured face, then stood up and, leaving the knife lodged in his brother’s chest, began to run.
    Nick shook off the enveloping memory. As he came to, he could feel his heart pounding in his chest. He concentrated on the feeling of the sunlight on his face, warming his skin. He searched the parking lot for the two girls, but they were gone, swallowed into the crowd. He pushed himself off the light pole he had been leaning against, shaken by the vision, his legs weak beneath him. He was about to start home when, across the lot, something caught his eye.
    In the midst of the throng, a lone vagrant was shambling toward the ferry landing.
    The man had his back to Nick. All Nick was able to see at first was his ragged, greasy hair and the long, tattered coat he was wearing. An image of the killer’s face filled Nick’s mind. His watery blue eyes. The pocked, ravaged skin. Nick blinked, suppressing the memory, trying to focus his mind onto the homeless man in front of him instead. The man’s shoulders were hunched as he shuffled through the late afternoon crowd, cutting diagonally across Alaskan Way. When Nick banged into a passerby, a man turned and gestured at him. The man’s hands fluttered in the air in slow motion, and his mouth opened and closed in a curse, but Nick heard nothing he said. Except for the homeless man’s slow and deliberate footsteps, the day had gone completely silent. Nick raised his camera to his eye and snapped a picture of the man. Then, taking a deep breath, he followed him.
     
    Nick was trying not to draw attention to himself. He had kept a good distance between the homeless man and himself. For over an hour the man had led him across town. The man had paused at any number of waste bins along the way, searching through them for scraps of food. In front of the Art Museum, he stopped to stuff some newspaper into his ragged shoes. When he stood back up, a pedestrian handed him a dollar, then