Joe’d had his eye on Sandra for a very long time. Such a looker. Bright, polished, with real smarts. She’d be running this island one day, he bet. Made a point of stopping to talk to her every chance he got. Stopped her for speeding once but let her off with a friendly warning, made a little joke. “You can buy me a cup of coffee one day,” he’d said.
And she was married to a grease monkey who fixed motorcycles for a living. She could do so much better.
When Joe got to the pickup truck window and saw what kind of condition Adam was in, the way he was choking on his own blood, those shards of windshield glass sticking out of the man’s throat, he knew it was only a matter of time.
Adam had managed to gargle out the words, “Fell asleep.”
Joe placed a comforting hand on his shoulder. “Hang in there. Help’s coming.”
Except it wasn’t.
Adam’s head tilted forward until it was resting on the twisted steering wheel. It was an old truck, produced before airbags became standard equipment and, admittedly, a testament to Adam’s skills as a mechanic that it was still running. It was cancered with rust, missing a passenger side mirror; odds were it wouldn’t have passed a safety check, but the son of a bitch ran.
Joe walked around to the back of the truck, leaned up against the tailgate, and waited. Checked on Adam five minutes later. The guy was still breathing. So he went back to his spot at the back of the truck and waited a while longer.
At fifteen minutes, Adam appeared good and dead. But Joe gave it another four minutes before making the call, just to be sure.
He’d give Sandra some time. Didn’t want to move in on her right away. Let her grieve. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t be supportive in the meantime. Pop into her office, see how she was doing. Accidentally on purpose run into her at the grocery store, ask how the kids were managing.
Give it a few months. Then, hey, I’m just heading to the diner, wanna grab a sandwich? Not a date, but sort of a date. Work up to dinner, which had a more intimate subtext.
Joe had no doubt that once Sandra got over the trauma of losing Adam, he could give her a better life. But she could never know.
Never.
Brandon Kyle had to promise him that whatever evidence he had about this would be destroyed, and that whatever he knew would be forgotten. And in return, Joe would swear, should the need arise, that Ruskin took the blame for the Arrival catastrophe.
Joe was jolted out of his thoughts by a text. He looked at his phone and saw that it was from Sandra, although the caller ID was LISA CARVER.
KATIE HOME. ARCHIE AT MALL. GOING 4 HIM. INJURED MAN IN CADDY ON TURNER POINT RD. CAN YOU HELP?
Jesus, was she crazy? Was she really going to ride that wobbly stolen bike to the mall? And how the hell did she think he was going to get out to Turner Point Road? How was the Garrett Island police force supposed to respond to anything?
Joe shook his head wearily, folded down the laptop screen, and decided to head back out, see what he could do.
After all, he was the chief of police.
Forty-Three
Archie didn’t want to spend the rest of his life sitting on these loading docks.
He’d gone back in search of something to eat, giving that dead butcher on the floor a wide berth. In one corner of the meat department, beyond the reach of any Arrivals still patrolling Discount Bonanza, he’d found one of those large upright ovens filled with chickens rotating on spits. He opened the door and, without actually sliding a chicken off the end, ripped one off, breaking it in half. The chicken was hot as hell, and Archie ended up tossing it from hand to hand until it cooled down some. He took it, along with a huge wad of paper napkins, and went back out onto the loading dock, hoping that maybe, just maybe, the cars had gotten bored with waiting to kill him and wandered off.
No such luck.
So he sat cross-legged on the dock and ate his chicken. The cars sat there, unmoving.
When he had gnawed all the meat off one of the wings, he tossed it onto the hood of the closest car. “There you go, boy, little treat for you.”
Archie had never been a big fan of the drumstick, so he threw one of those onto the roof of another car. “Enjoy, fucker!” he said.
The chicken, he had to admit, tasted pretty damn good, especially the skin, which was crisp and salty. When he’d had all he wanted, and thrown the rest of the bones onto another car, he used the napkins to wipe the barbecue sauce from his hands. What he couldn’t remove with the napkin, he licked off, finger by finger.
And sat there.
“Come on, guys,” he said. “Go chase a cat or something.”
Archie stood. He suddenly felt the need to take a piss. But where were the bathrooms? Would he have to go back into Discount Bonanza and find the public washrooms? Weren’t they in an area where the Arrivals had been patrolling?
He stood at the edge of the loading dock, facing the cars, and unzipped. Like many young boys, he had a strong and mighty stream, and was able to get a little more distance by arching his back.
And a beautiful arc it was, too, heading upward, almost as high as Archie was tall, before reaching its apex and coming back down, onto the hood of a yellow Arrival.
Archie laughed. A perfect match.
But he didn’t want to get just one car, so he spun from his hips, spraying piss like a gardener watering his flowers.
One of the car’s water-sensitive wipers engaged as Archie’s urine splashed a windshield. That prompted yet another laugh.
That was when he heard something.
A motor... an engine... a loud engine. Definitely not an Arrival. These battery-powered wusses couldn’t make an aggressive noise like that.
It didn’t sound like an honest-to-God car. No, it was more like a motorcycle. And it sounded like it was racing along one of the mall’s perimeter roads.
A couple of the Arrivals inched back, as if ready to go on the hunt.
The motorcycle sounded closer, but it was also powering down, as though turning into the mall lot. The loading bay area was recessed into the mall structure, so Archie had a limited view beyond it. Archie thought this was the first gas-powered engine he’d heard on the island since the beginning of the Arrival experiment, except for maybe the odd lawn mower.
The bike’s roar intensified. It was getting closer.
Archie glanced down, saw his open zipper, and pulled it up.
And then—
VROOMMM
The bike raced past. Archie knew a little bit about motorcycles, and he was pretty sure what he’d seen was, indeed, a Harley-Davidson, which happened to be the same kind of bike that Rory’s dad owned. A Sportster model, in blue, 1200 cc.
But there was something more curious than the bike itself. It was who was sitting on it.
“Mom?” Archie whispered.
It had only taken the bike a second to cross his field of vision, but he was pretty sure he’d seen his mother. It was a woman, no doubt about that. Skirt hiked up high so she could straddle the bike. She wasn’t wearing a helmet or goggles, so he could see her long, brown hair trailing behind her in the wind.
The Arrivals had heard the motorcycle, too.
Fresh meat.
The cars farthest away from Archie were pulling out of formation to follow the noise of the bike, like animals picking up a scent.
Could it really be Mom?
There was that old picture in her bedroom, of her with Dad, in their biker leathers. He’d never paid that much attention to it, thought maybe it was a photo from a Halloween party or something. Pretended to be a couple of badass Hell’s Angels. Sure, he knew his dad loved bikes and could fix them and had owned some in the past.