The Tornado Watcher
by Jeffrey Greene
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Table of Contents, parts 1, 2, 3 |
conclusion
The doctor shook his head like a disappointed schoolteacher. “No, no, no. That’s one too many bodies. It’s too neat. Might leave lingering questions. I know the sheriff well, and he’s no fool. He knows my wife and I don’t get along. Much better if he’s got a villain offstage to focus on. I know you’ll talk if they catch you, but who’s a jury going to believe? The word of a respected doctor, or a known felon on a spree who’s already killed one of their own?”
Sutton drained his glass and glanced quickly around the room, looking for something to bash in the doctor’s head, but all he could see were lamps and liquor bottles, which might do for him but not for the dog. He was in a box with one door, and Morrison held the key.
As if the doctor had been following Sutton’s train of thought, he said, “Not a gun in the house. Or a baseball bat. Nothing you could kill two dobermans and a man with. But you’ll find something for a passed-out woman.” He stood up. “Well?”
Sutton thought if he could be alone for a few minutes, he could search the house, maybe find something the doctor had overlooked. “All right.”
“Her bedroom is the first one on the left upstairs. She’ll be dead to the world. Your suit is hanging in the kitchen. If I were you, I’d kill her naked: no bloodstains on your clothes that way. Clean up, get dressed, come out the front door and halfway down the walk, then wait. The dogs will watch you while I check on your work. If everything’s fine, I’ll give you the keys. Got it?”
Sutton stared at the doctor with undisguised loathing. “Yeah.”
“I’ll be right outside with the dogs. You try going out the back door, they’ll run you down. You’ve got fifteen minutes. If you haven’t come out by then, I’ll call the sheriff on the CB radio in my car.” The sharp-edged smile came and went. “Just so you know that the only way out of here is my way.” He held the door open for the dog, then, throwing a hard backward glance, he went out, closing the door softly.
An antique grandfather clock stood between two bookshelves, and in the ensuing silence, its grave, unhurried tick seemed to mock the desperate rattle of Sutton’s thoughts. It was ten after twelve. He began ransacking drawers, opening closets, looking behind doors, but the doctor had not been careless.
He went into the kitchen and turned on the light. A clock on the wall told him that two minutes of his time were gone. He changed back into the suit, stuffing the money in the back pocket, then found a chef’s knife in the drawer. He gripped it tightly, saw the blade parting the flesh over the doctor’s heart, then set it carefully on the counter, hearing the ragged sound of his breathing and the relentless whisper of the clock.
He found himself thinking of a nightmare he’d had in prison. In the dream he was a “tornado watcher,” and his foreman was driving him in a pick-up truck to a little shed at the edge of a grassy field. The man walked behind him to the door and told him to go in, then closed and locked it. A feeling of dread came over him as he heard the bolt shoot into place.
He looked out the shed’s single barred window and saw a tornado bearing down on him: black, monstrous, unstoppable. As he watched it, knowing there was no escape, he realized that this wasn’t a watchman’s job at all. He was a sacrifice. And now, so many drifting years later, he’d walked into this house and heard the door lock behind him.
After a moment’s hesitation, he undressed and changed back into the salesman’s suit. He looked at his hands, then turned his eyes to the rooms above and headed upstairs. He eased open her bedroom door and stood there, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. She was lying on her back on a big four-poster bed, still dressed and snoring loudly. He approached carefully and stood over her. Until now, he hadn’t known for certain where he drew the line, what he wouldn’t do to stay alive.
“Mrs. Morrison.” He took her by the shoulders and shook her awake. She stirred, made a petulant face without opening her eyes. “Wake up. It’s John Sutton. I have to talk to you. Right now.”
She opened her eyes. “Sutton? What do you want?” When she reached for the bedside lamp, he grabbed her wrist.
“Leave the lights off. I’ll explain.”
“Explain what?” She was fully awake now, and sobering fast. “What the hell are you doing in my bedroom?” She started to rise and he held her arms. “I’ll call my husband if you don’t let me up.”
“You can’t. He’s waiting outside.”
“Outside? What are you... let go of me!” She began to struggle, opened her mouth to scream. He clapped his hand over her mouth.
“Be quiet. I won’t hurt you. But you have to listen: he sent me up here to kill you.” Her eyes widened. “He’s waiting outside with his dogs. Understand? Your husband is waiting for me to come out and tell him it’s done.”
She stared at him, shaking her head. “Yes,” he said, nodding. “We’re in a world of shit. Both of us.” She closed her eyes; her body went limp in his arms. “Will you be quiet?” She nodded. He took his hand away and stepped back. “He’s got me over a barrel. If I don’t come out in ten minutes, he’ll call the police. If I do what he wants, he’ll give me his car keys and a head start.”
She got up and staggered to the dresser, groping until she found her cigarettes. He crossed the room and put his hand on the pack, shaking his head. She sat down heavily in her reading chair and covered her face with her hands. He paced back and forth, looking out the window and then glancing down the hall. She looked up finally, pushing back her thick, disheveled hair. In the starlight, he glimpsed a sheen of wetness on her face.
“What does he have on you?” she asked in a low voice.
He told her, holding back nothing. “I did a year in prison once before and swore I’d never go back,” he said. “But I guess it’s better than—”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Sorry you stepped into his circle.”
“Can you think of anything at all he might have forgotten? An ax? Gas? Something flammable?”
She shook her head. “He keeps all that in a shed behind the house. Sorry. I’m sorry, I keep saying that, don’t I?”
“It’s not your fault.”
“I’m trying to think of something, but all I can see is Henry out there in the dark. I didn’t know he hated me that much.”
“You have to get away from him. Leave with the police when they come, stay in a hotel. Tell them he tried to kill you. I’ll testify. Got nothing to lose now.”
She laughed bleakly. “You think you’ve seen the worst of him? You haven’t heard him turn your words inside out, twist the truth around his little finger. You watch: he’ll have the police believing we were lovers, plotting to murder him. I should have warned you the minute you walked in. But I was selfish. I wanted someone to talk to, a face that wasn’t his to look at for a few minutes.”
He felt the time of his freedom slipping away, yet he couldn’t make himself move. “Why did you marry him?”
“Why? Gratitude, I suppose. We met in Berlin in 1945, when I was sixteen. The Russians were no longer coming, they’d arrived. I was trying to pass myself off as a boy: I’d cut off my hair and bundled up in a man’s clothes, but that only got me shot instead of raped. A bullet in the left leg, upper thigh; there was nerve damage. I was lucky: the Americans found me first, and Henry Morrison was the medic who treated me. He came to see me every day, watched over my recovery. My parents were dead, my friends scattered. I became dependent on him. When I turned eighteen, we married.
“What had seemed in the early years to be an attractive nonchalance turned out to be the coldness of a heart that couldn’t be warmed, by me or anybody. I stopped loving him thirty years ago. Tried to pretend, because I owed him my life and even a bad marriage becomes a habit. But he knew, and his every action toward me since then has been a form of revenge. He refused to give me a divorce, and insisted on staying here, knowing how much I need people, then bought those dogs to keep them away. I drink to drown him out.”
“You could have left him.”
“For what? I have no relatives left in Germany and no nostalgia for it. In my memory, it’s still in ruins. Nor is this my country. My country is this house.”
Something had occurred to him. “Is there a spare set of car keys?”
“Yes, but he wouldn’t have — ”
“It’s a chance. Go look. And try to keep out of sight.”
She was back in a moment, and before she spoke he knew: “He’s got them.”
The alarm clock beside her bed said twenty-three minutes after twelve. He had two minutes left.
“Listen,” he said. “I’m going out to meet him, tell him it’s done. This is a lot to ask, but when he comes in to check, if you could stand behind the door and hit him with something, a liquor bottle or a rolling pin, hard enough to put him out?”
“I can do that.” Something hard and bitter had come into her voice.
“Will the dogs obey you?”
“Yes.”
“All right. When I go out the door, you get a weapon, and for Christ’s sake don’t let him see you.”
“He won’t.”
“Good. You ready?”
She nodded and, still nodding, backed slowly away from him and out of the room. He descended the stairs, then turned the knob and went outside, panting with fear. The crickets near the porch stopped chirping as suddenly as if turned off by a switch. The stone walk shaded off into darkness, and at the fringes of the yard, where a line of cedars paralleled the fence, he saw the faint glow of a cigarette. Around the invisible figure of the doctor, the dogs circled, black against black, more sensed than seen.
He stepped off the porch, his abdominal muscles painfully tensed, fighting the urge to break and run. He stopped, wiping his wet palms on his pants and waited. He saw the cigarette arc into the grass, then heard the swish of feet in the wet grass and the clink of dog tags. The dogs seemed to strain toward him, held reluctantly in check by the doctor’s quiet ticking sounds. There was a repressed excitement in his quick shuffling steps and busy hands, which ran through his hair and stroked his chin, and in his eyes, commingled with suspicion, was an overwhelming question.
Morrison looked him up and down. “No blood. No signs of a struggle. What took you so long?”
“Ever killed anyone before?”
The doctor stiffened at the word “kill,” as if the finality of what he’d set into motion had just sunk in. “Where is she?”
Sutton stared at the man, hating him as he’d never hated anyone in his life. “In the hallway,” he said. “I dragged her out of bed and strangled her in the hallway. It’ll look like she heard a noise downstairs and came out to check.”
Dr. Morrison clenched his jaw muscles. “All right.” He ticked, and the dogs attended him. Pointing to Sutton, he said, “Guard.” The dogs stiffened into attitudes of potential menace. “Just stay where you are and you’ll be fine. It’s time to see if you’ve earned yourself a getaway car or a cell on death row.” He walked past him.
He turned his head to watch the doctor mount the walk, then gritted his teeth as he opened the door. He heard a harsh scream, then a strangled cough. Something heavy fell against the door and closed it. Instinctively he turned toward the door, and both dogs growled, flattening their ears and baring their teeth.
“Mrs. Morrison!” he called. “Suzanne?”
A long minute passed. The door opened and she came out, approaching him slowly, in a wandering arc across the grass, her arms hanging loosely at her sides, her eyes glassy.
“Rolf. Ivan.” They loped to her, wagging their stubby tails, and followed her around the side of the house. When they were out of sight, he ran to the front door and forced it open.
Henry Morrison was lying on his left side in the hallway, his bleeding right hand clutching that portion of the blade of the knife protruding from the flesh at the base of his neck between his left shoulder blade and his clavicle. His left hand strained feebly to grasp his broken glasses lying just beyond his reach.
Sutton knelt down and pushed the glasses into his hand. The fingers closed on them. The eyes turned in their sockets, to fix his in a shocked, unblinking stare, then, as he watched, they glazed over and the bubbling breaths ceased.
He heard a sound behind him. She stood in the doorway, looking down at her husband with a bewildered expression, her mouth working as if she were trying to unstop her ears. He started to speak to her, but something in her eyes stopped him.
Sutton got up and shut the door, then turned back to the body and went through the pockets until he found both sets of car keys. He took her hand and put one set of keys in it, then went into the kitchen and got a dish towel. He came back, knelt down, and carefully wiped down the knife handle, then grasped it hard for a moment.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “No.”
He rose and took her hands in his. “Yes. Give me an hour, then walk out to the road and flag down a car. A salesman came to your house . Your husband assured you he could deal with him easily. After you went to bed, the intruder killed your husband and escaped in your car. Tell them that. Stick to it. This is self-defense. Don’t go to jail for his crime.” Sutton let go her hands and started for the door.
“They’ll catch you.”
“Maybe not.” He looked down at the body. “It was a good plan.” He opened the door and went out.
Copyright © 2026 by Jeffrey Greene
