Now gone.
Suddenly sweating, one uneasy foot half set down on dirt, she squinted at the grainy air beneath the dip of the branch, unable to discern much in the gathered darkness by the trunk. Whoever was there, she had come right up on him. Her breathing had gone all jerky.
The ember burned back to life, illuminating a sliver of face – edge of chin, cheek, temple. And a uniform collar. A police uniform. The man went with the cop car. She didn’t recognize his face and didn’t know what he was doing there in the dark.
No one can know anything about you.
The cherry died, the face vanishing back into the deep dusk.
Kat took a quick step toward the house, her sandal catching on a bulge in the asphalt. ‘Oh.’ She laughed nervously, trying for casual. ‘I didn’t see you for a long time.’
A voice came at her from the darkness, calm and low. ‘Longer than you think.’
The words froze her.
‘It’s okay, sweetie. I’m a cop. I patrol this area. Make sure everyone’s safe. You’re new here, right? What’s your name?’
She forced her mouth to work. ‘Katherine Smith.’ She managed a polite smile and took a step back, and then another.
‘Now, smile pretty.’ A camera flash blinded her.
She turned and broke for the house, breath firing her lungs. Something in the act of running stoked the terror, and she sprinted blindly, with abandon, her ankles throbbing, her chest burning. The trail up to her lawn, fifty yards away, might as well have been a mile. When she reached the rear door, she stopped, panting, and finally risked a look back. The yard was still.
An instant later the cop car roared to life at the curb. It pulled out, its headlights strafing the fence and casting a swath of broken light across the now-empty space between the tree trunks.
Chapter 56
First there was sensation. His head pulsing, filled with so much blood it seemed it might explode. Dust on his tongue. A slab of cushioned plastic shoved to his face, mashing his features to one side. A scent of decay, drawn into his mouth with each rasping inhale.
Then sound, strained as if through a filter. Water sloshing. Shuffling boots. William’s voice – ‘I got the technique down. I been rewatching that C-SPAN Senate inquiry. Why? What do you prefer?’
And then Dodge. ‘Fingers.’
‘Knuckle by knuckle, like Sharky’s Machine? No, we should give this a try. I mean, military-perfected, right?’
None of this seemed to be related to Mike; it was as though he were listening to an old-time radio show, fictitious characters discussing fictitious outcomes. He forced his eyelids to part. The movement, however minuscule, sent daggers of pain back through his head. But finally: sight. It was like being reborn, acquiring one sense at a time.
The room rotated on its axis for a while, and slowly it dawned on Mike that he was lying supine on a downward slant, his face turned to one side. It took a few minutes longer for his eyes to adjust to the dimness and sharpen the focus on the whitish blob five feet away, staring at him. It was Hank’s face, paled to an ashen white. His lips were bruised and mottled, puckered out as if for a last kiss.
His daughter’s name roared into his head: Kat. I have to scrub the memory of her location from my brain so no matter what they do to me, I’ve got nothing to tell them.
When he shifted, fire roared through his chest and arms. His bound hands were a knot in the small of his back and his head screamed. He twisted his wrists and noted through his mind-numbed stupor that the restraints rubbing against his raw skin felt like cloth. He appeared to be at a forty-five-degree angle, his knees visible above. His thighs burned, and his calves and feet were installed into a contraption of some sort. Gradually, he recognized that he was hooked into an incline sit-up bench.
The voices continued, a calm rumble. Dodge and William were behind him?
With great effort he rolled his head, the dark ceiling scanning by, and faced the other direction. He was in a big concrete box of a cellar, the only light thrown through the open door at the top of a splintering wooden staircase. Standing between Mike and the stairs, visible only as a slice of shoulder, cheek, forehead, was Dodge. Mike blinked a few more times, the cellar coming clearer, William resolving from the darkness at the big man’s side. They were huddled, conferring. Mike’s gaze pulled to a square of burlap spread on the concrete floor, various tools laid out like devices on a medical tray. Beyond the burlap was a large, old-fashioned dunking-for-apples wooden tub. The water filling it to the brim looked black and forbidding.
Dust trembled in the column of light thrown from the open door above.
‘Oh, you’re up.’ William came toward him, making lurching progress, an empty plastic milk jug floating in each hand.
Mike turned his head away, the only movement he could muster, bringing him again face-to-face with Hank. His sprawled body lay at an odd angle to his neck, a plastic drop cloth already cocooning his lower half. One foot protruded, the worn black dress sock incongruous here, in this context. The line of flaking white skin showing at Hank’s ankle underscored the awful tableau, the frailty of this life, of any life, which, despite all the sweat and work and best-laid plans, could end in a windowless cellar, half rolled in a strip of plastic sheeting.
Beside the body was another drop cloth, which Mike realized had been reserved for him.
When he turned back, Dodge loomed above him, winding a piece of terry cloth the size of a gym towel around his hand. His shirt was unbuttoned, curled back from a wife-beater worn to near transparency. William crouched, letting out a little pained moan, and began to fill the gallon jugs with water from the tub. The bubbles gave off a faint, comic-book repeat: glug glug glug.
‘Okay,’ Mike said, still trying to grasp what was happening. ‘All right.’
William stood, a bottle dripping in either hand. Staring up at the faces overhead – Dodge’s drawn back, glinting eyes set in the wide skull, and William, stooped to favor his left side, all wisps of facial hair and bunched lips – Mike felt something break open inside him and spill heat.
‘I heard about you years ago,’ William said, ‘from my Uncle Len. You were the one who got away. The Job. But Boss Man, he woulda let it lie. Finding you. He stopped looking. Stopped caring. Figured whatever life you’d made, you’d never put it all together. But then your buddy Two-Hawks kicked the hornet’s nest, found out about your name on that genealogy report. Boss Man caught wind, and guess what? You were back on the table.’
He neared. ‘These are glossies of Ted Rogers, the guy who did the stealing for Two-Hawks.’ He produced some photographs from a back pocket and held them for Mike to see. The soft pink skin of a middle-aged man in various forced contortions. William fanned through several taken within these same cellar walls before Mike turned his head and gagged. William leaned over him, breathing down. ‘My uncle worked on your dad some. What yer daddy went through? Made this’ – a shake of the photos – ‘look like a tickle. You know what? Why’m I talking so much when I can just show you.’
Horror came on like a toothed blade, sawing its way through the shock.
‘Okay now,’ William said gently, and Dodge let the small towel flutter down over Mike’s face.
Mike jerked in an instinctive breath, the towel adhering to his mouth. He sensed William lean in close, and the cloth grew wet and heavy. Water moved up his nose, a slow trickle at first, and then soaked through the terry, sealing out oxygen. The effect was instant, comprehensive. Mike jerked and screeched, shaking his head, but the towel clung to his face like a film. His lungs and throat spasmed uselessly. Just when he thought he might go out, the towel peeled back and he found himself gasping and gagging, Dodge staring down at him, the towel dripping onto the floor.