Page 98 of There is No Devil

Cole made me watch Randall die, because I had never seen someone killed before. Especially not someone I knew personally.

Cole knew I’d have to desensitize myself to blood, to screams, to the impulses of pity that might cause me to deviate from the plan. Cole knows the terror of violence, the physical effect it has on a person. He knows how it breaks apart your mind, causing you to act on instinct in all the wrong ways.

He drills me over and over and over, so that in the heat of the battle with Shaw, I’ll stick to our agreement.

“If worse comes to worse,” Cole says, fixing me with his dark stare. “If things are going wrong … you run, Mara. You don’t try to help me. You don’t try to stay. You fucking run. Because he’ll be right behind you—and if I’m gone, there’s no one left to save you.”

“That’s not going to happen. He’ll be dead before he even knows what’s happening.”

“That’s the plan,” Cole agrees.

That would comfort me, except I remember the old quote, “No plan survives contact with the enemy.”

Another complication is the continued surveillance of Officer Hawks.

Cole complained to the SFPD. He has enough connections in city government that Hawks has been told to back off. Hawks ignored this order, still trailing Cole on his own off-hours, showing up to every event where they’ll let him in the door, and visiting Clay Street more than the artists that keep studio space in Cole’s building.

Hawks takes his opportunity to intercept me when Cole is at Corona Heights Park, overseeing the final stages of construction on his monumental sculpture. Probably freezing his ass off, because a frigid wind is blowing in from the bay.

Officer Hawks steps in front of me before I can touch the heavy glass doors of the Alta Plaza building.

The wind whips our hair into our faces—his as well as mine, because Hawks hasn’t had it cut in a while. In fact, his entire person looks ill-groomed. All these after-hours stakeouts are taking their toll on him. He’s unshaven, eyes bloodshot.

“Doesn’t it bother you?” he demands, “Sleeping with the man who killed your roommate?”

I round on him, equally as indignant.

“I told you who killed Erin,” I hiss. “I have to see him at every fucking party I attend. Shaw is the Beast, not Cole. Why don’t you do your fucking job and arrest him?”

Hawks lets out a bitter laugh.

“He’s really got you fooled, doesn’t he?”

“Cole isn’t trying to fool me, and I’m not trying to fool him. We’ve seen each other’s scars. You think you’re a good man? I bet there’s something you’re ashamed of. Something you’ve never told anyone. Cole’s told it all to me. ALL of it. I’m not saying he’s a saint. But he is honest.”

“An honest killer?” Hawks sneers.

“You’ve never shot anyone?” I sneer right back at him.

“I’m a cop. It’s my job to catch criminals.”

“Yeah? I bet you only shot them when you had to, right? I bet every time you pulled your gun out, you absolutely had to do it, there was no other way. No part of you made a judgment on that person. No part of you thought they deserved to die.”

Hawks stares at me through the smudged lenses of his glasses.

My time with Cole has taught me to look for signals: the motions on the face that the mind can’t control.

For Hawks, it’s a twitch of his right eyelid, blinking over his iris like a camera shutter.

He doesn’t even know he’s doing it.

But he can’t escape the confirmation in my face. We both know that he sees a killer in Cole because he sees something familiar: a man who crosses the line when he feels it’s necessary. When he thinks he’s justified.

“I’m going to put him in prison for a hundred years,” Hawks hisses, his nose inches from mine. “Help me to do it, or I swear to god, I’ll book you as an accomplice. I’ll make sure you see prison time along with him. You’ll be splashed across every fucking paper: the Karla Homolka to his Paul Bernardo.”

Hawks has no idea how accurate that may soon become. But not in the way he thinks.

As I try to push past him, Hawks seizes my upper arm. I don’t shake him off, not even when his fingers dig into my flesh.

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