Day One (34 page)

“Stuart finds his own way.” Her words carried the flat inflection of a machine voice. “He moves with the same drive that sends salmon upstream to spawn, and with just about the same self-reflection.”

“I should have known better.”

“You always liked him.”

“That’s no excuse.”

Ellie had no response. It was true. But after everything else that had happened, Luellen’s betrayal seemed almost trifling. And Stuart, ... Stuart got what he wanted, if only he’d known. And where would
she be if he had? Who would she be, which new Ellie? She didn’t know whether to feel angry or devastated or ... relieved.

“Ellie, I know what you must be thinking—”

“How could you ever begin to guess what I think?”

“You’re right. I can’t. Not really.”

“It doesn’t matter anyway.” She wondered how much of Stuart survived in his son. “He’s dead. I killed him.”

Luellen gasped and her hand leapt to her mouth, but before she could speak, a sound drew their attention. A harsh voice.

“Well, look at that. Stuart’s bitch and another one of Stuart’s bitches. A two-for-one special.”

Deputy G strode out from behind the statue of Harvey Scott, his big round face smug and leering. His hands were in his jacket pockets, but when Ellie met his eyes he grinned. Pulled a revolver out of his right pocket. He let the gun hang there for a moment, then raised it and pointed between Ellie’s eyes. “You thinking of rabbiting, dollface, think again. I lost whatever patience I might have had down at the bottom of the hill.”

November 19 - 4:21 pm

B
ig Ed and Myra don’t seem too worried someone might come along and see me all trussed up in the back seat of the Caddy. I guess I should be grateful they haven’t gagged and blindfolded me—or put bullet in my brain. Ed gets out of the car, stretches his arms over his head. His mouth moves. “Long day.” Silent, but I can see the shapes of the words on his lips.

“Ed, I’m asking you one more time—”

Myra twists around in the front seat, her face a mask of wrath. “You can just shut the fuck up!”

But Big Ed is less fervent. He smiles sadly and shakes his head, seems to think a moment. Juggles the electrolarynx in his hand before pocketing it. Then he shuts the door and comes around to my side. He checks the cord on my wrists and feet, satisfies himself I’m not going anywhere. As if his crank-addled crone in the front seat isn’t enough. I’m thinking I need at least ten minutes to get loose, but Myra shows no signs of joining him. He shuts my door, goes around to Danny’s side, motions him out.

“Danny, don’t go. Stay here with me.”

Myra slaps me. “Christ, Ed. Just kill the fucker!” I glare at her.

Big Ed looks me over like he’s considering it, but then he shakes a finger and sorta laughs, the sound a moist jangle. I wonder if he resists the idea only because she suggested it, so palpable is his ambivalence toward her. He lifts the larynx.

“A body is the last thing we need. You know the rules. He will keep till we are done, then he will not matter anymore.” He hands her his cell phone. “We will call you when it is over.” With that, he leans through the open car door over Danny and cracks me, hard, across the jaw. The little guy makes a noise, a startled chirp, as I collapse. The pain is a swarm of black gnats churned up before my eyes. I tilt my head, try to speak, but my tongue fills my mouth like a wet rag. Ed hits me again. I taste metal and the swarm fills my vision until all I see is a curtain of dark points.

I feel rather than see him take Danny out of the car. The sound of my breath thunders in my ears, but I hear other sounds as well. Myra wheezing, Ed and Danny’s footsteps outside the car, the splat of saliva from my mouth onto the leather seat. I blink and the swarm vaporizes. I manage to focus on my bound wrists for a long moment. “Ed ...
goddamn
it ... please.” I’m not sure if I’ve spoken aloud or only in my mind.

The car doors are closed, windows up. I’m trapped in a cage with a creature possessed of all the wiry strength and fury of a longtime meth addict. Through the half-fogged glass I see him walking away, Danny’s tiny hand engulfed in his great paw. I sag, helpless.
Susan, find me.
Or, hell, not me. I don’t matter. Find Danny. My mind fills with a sudden image of Ruby Jane, her hair smelling of apples, her blue eyes gazing at me across the table at Uncommon Cup.
You can call me tonight.
I know I will never see her again, will never get to finish what we started in the glimmer of the fish tank. Myra glowers at me across the back of the seat. Her cheeks are sunken and dark, her teeth cracked and brown behind her thin, chapped
lips. Her face tells me the only reason I’m alive is because Big Ed is still within earshot.

Down the hill, I glimpse a flash of color, blue against evergreen and bark. Myra’s head pivots with my own. A man comes out of the trees a dozen paces from Big Ed and the boy. I pull against my bonds, press against the window. The light is steely and grey, colors shifting and uncertain, but I feel like I recognize him. Red-brown hair, blue pants and jacket. He crosses the path, stops in front of Big Ed. Myra gasps, and I steal a glance her way. She slaps both hands against the window, and her mouth is working, working. “Can’t be, can’t be, can’t be.” I turn back to Ed and the stranger, wondering what she sees, what she knows. The two are a study in contrasts, Ed a side of beef, the stranger muscular but small, almost child-like. They both hesitate and I wonder if this is the person Ed is here to see. Yet the encounter has the feel of happenstance, Ed’s posture uncertain after an afternoon of unrelenting determination. He starts to lift his electrolarynx, but at that moment the man reaches up and grabs him on either side of the head. Ed releases Danny’s hand and lunges backward, without effect. Myra shrieks as the man yanks and twists and throws Ed face-first to the ground. I can see the effort in Ed’s taut arms and straining back, but it’s as if he has no strength, as if he’s the one with the stature of a boy. Danny backs away from the struggle. Ed flails, tries to push himself up on his hands. Myra slaps at the door, the car window, her ululating cries impotent. As I watch, the stranger in blue drops with all his weight, slams his knee into the back of Ed’s neck. I can almost hear the pop. Ed’s limbs flop. Even from here, a hundred feet away, I can see the unnatural twist of his neck.

The stranger stands with apparent deliberation, his gaze fixed on Ed’s unmoving form. He doesn’t seem to notice as Danny runs off. At that moment, I find my voice, my real voice, or maybe I found it earlier. All I know is now I can hear myself screaming, as loud or
louder than Myra. Beating my bound hands against the seat back in front of me. The man turns to face the car and in a heartbeat I go quiet.

For a moment he’s motionless, his gaze fixed on me, or Myra, or the car, or—I don’t know. I feel like I should know him, but I don’t want to know him. I want him to go away, to never have been. I don’t know where Big Ed was taking Danny, who he was taking him to, but while I’m sure it was not for Danny’s benefit, this is not the way I would have interrupted Ed’s plan. This stranger out of the trees, dressed in dusty, mud-stained blue, eyes deep points of shadow in a slack, incurious face. He looks around, his head swiveling on his neck like an owl’s. As he rotates his gaze around to his left, I see a strange darkness on the right side of his head. It takes me moment before I realize a divot is missing from his skull, an oval as deep as my fist.

“Oh, Jesus ...” He moves up the slope. In the front seat, Myra turns and crawls toward the driver’s side door. For an instant she tangles herself in the loop of my bonds, jerking me forward against the seat back. But then she pops the door latch and falls out of the car, staggers to her feet and runs. I yank on the ropes, but don’t have time to free myself. Big Ed tied them too well. By the time the stranger reaches the car door beside me, my hands have lost all sensation. I push myself away from the door as he pulls it open, ducks his head. Looks in at me.

My ass tightens, a hot, wet pucker.

“Silly, silly.” His voice is soft. He looks me up and down, two eyes rolling independent of one another. He reaches out and touches my face, my neck, my arms. The rope on my wrists. He traces it with his fingertips.

“Stuck.” His mouth curls, a strange and alarming smile. “S ... s ... s—ahhhh.” I can’t take my eyes off the cavity in his head. It’s as if a section of skull and brain have been gouged out. A thin down
grows from the skin in the depression. I force my gaze away from the hole, meet his misaligned eyes. In that moment I recognize him. From earlier today, outside my house among all the chaos of Mitch’s porch front fiasco. A figure in blue with a dirty white cloth wrapped around his head, staring up at Tabor summit. Now the cloth is gone, revealing too clearly what it hid.

“Stupid.” He runs his hands back down the rope to my wrists, feeling the tension in the cord. I jerk and pull and hear the mewling inside my head. Suddenly he grips my arm with fingers like steel springs. I can’t pull away, can’t move. There’s a scent on the air like electricity and acid. For a second I fear my bowels will let go, but he raises his finger to his lips. A glimmer of light from the setting sun glints off his wet, rolling eyes. “Shhhh ...,” the whisper is just at the threshold of sound, “... stop.”

I stop.

He holds my wrists for a long moment, eyeballs a pair of loose marbles. His breath smells of licorice, his skin of leaf mold. I can see his shirt under the open denim jacket, see stitched lettering on the left chest.
Upper Basin Center for Cognitive Medicine.
No shit. He jerks suddenly and the rope tears through the seat back. Then he stands and laughs into the wind.

“Skedaddle!”

Three Years, Three Months Before

B
ig Ed moved up the north stairway toward the summit of Mount Tabor Park. Eager spotted him from the steep path that rose from the playground west of the stairs. Only the shoulder of the grassy slope and a few trees shielded him from his old man’s view. Eager scurried behind the trunk of a Douglas fir. Big Ed climbed slowly, pausing every few steps to look around, to cock his head and listen. All Eager could hear was the wind in the tree tops. Overhead, clouds had dropped low and dark over the park. He knew it would start raining soon. Moms in the playground were already scooping up their kids when Eager ran past.

Once Big Ed was out of sight, Eager headed south along the grain of the hillside, skateboard tucked under his arm. Soon he came to another path, which forked upward. As he moved up the exposed west face of the hill, he felt the feathery touch of drizzle wet his cheeks. Far below, people fled ahead of the rain to cars parked along Reservoir Loop Drive. In the distance, mist cloaked the West Hills.

At that moment, the sky opened.

Within seconds, dozens of rivulets poured through the grass and scrub and over the path. Raindrops struck his head and neck like falling walnuts. He ran along the exposed hillside, checking above for signs of Big Ed. The path dipped when it reached the trees and forked again, the trail right descending to the southwest, leftward curling around to a short flight of concrete steps up to the top. There, at the south end of the long tree-covered oval stood the statue flanked by a pair of concrete benches. The sodden ground alternately pulled at his shoes and gave way beneath his feet.

In the rain, the trail down the steep south side of Mount Tabor functioned as a long sluice cleared by sliding rocks and runoff. Climbing through the torrent, he heard the shouting before he saw anyone. He gripped his skateboard in both hands and pushed upward through rain and flowing mud.

“For Christ’s sake, girl, stop with the bawling already.”

“No no
no no no
—”

Eager sidled sideways up the path, carving his heels into the muck to keep from slipping back down. When he reached the steps, he paused to catch his breath and peer over the rim of the summit drive. Across the roadway, his girl and another stood next to the statue, both dark-haired and shivering. A baby stroller beside them. Big Ed was pointing a gun at his girl. He recognized the FFA jacket.