Keeping Watch (40 page)

Allen described in general terms his rushed cross-country trip, the removal of the boy from his foster family, and the drive toward Seattle.

“I had decided that I needed to consult with my . . . I guess you'd call her my partner, on the boy's stability. So even though it was disruptive to everyone, most of all the kid himself, I simply took him. We were on a back road south of Olympia at five this morning when a car pulled up next to us and started shooting.”

“Could it have just been something random?”

“Single occupant, middle-aged male, a guy capable of driving a car at high speed while shooting with some accuracy out the driver's side window at a car in the right-hand lane. He kept after us, too, until I shook him off.”

“How'd you do that?”

“I, er, borrowed somebody's pickup.”

Jerry stood up abruptly to dump the plates into the dishwasher and pour coffee into a pair of mugs. Allen could just imagine what was going through his brother's mind: kidnapping across state lines, illegal surveillance, breaking and entering, car theft. The unreported bullet wound was the least of Sheriff Carmichael's problems.

“I called the truck's owner to let him know we'd be returning it.” If Ed could get some of the blood out of the upholstery.

Jerry didn't say anything, just sat down with his cup and propped his head in his hands. Allen could only wait and see which way things would fall. He didn't think Jerry would turn him in, but it was very possible he would throw Allen out. Just because some cops might be sympathetic to the plight of a trapped victim didn't mean that a man whose law enforcement problems were predominantly summer drunks on boats would be one of them.

“Tell me more about the kid,” Jerry said eventually through his fingers.

“To begin with, there is no doubt in my mind that Jamie was brutalized by his father. Not sexually, as far as I can tell, or if so it was only indirectly, but he was clearly chronically abused, even tortured, both physically and mentally. His father used to take him out hunting and play these horrifying games with him, pretending to hunt him down, driving away and leaving him for hours at a time—this is a child of eight or nine. If you need convincing, there's one tape I can show you, although I wouldn't recommend it. The boy walks into the room where his father is drinking and watching the television, and the father calls him over, picks up the shotgun that's lying on the sofa next to him, rests it against the boy's chest, and pulls the trigger. Empty of course, but how can the kid know that for sure? Father laughs, big joke. Creepiest damn thing I've ever seen. And Jerry? I've seen a whole lot.”

At that, Jerry looked at him. “Jesus,” he said, and in a while, “But why not call the cops on him?”

“Cases like that, sometimes we do. If we can make sure that the abuser goes away for a long time, and can't get back at the victims, it's always best to let the family return to its home, see what life is like in familiar surroundings without the abuser. If Jamie's mother was still alive, we might have tried it. But O'Connell's a manipulator, and rich. More than once he convinced schools that his boy was a liar and a troublemaker. No saying he wouldn't do it again, and then life would really be hell for the kid. And I didn't know about it then, but I suspect that O'Connell had some well-oiled strategies for disappearing once he caught a whiff of the law. Anyway, as soon as I saw that perverse little game with the gun, I knew we had to get the kid away from him.”

“But now you think this kid may be dangerous, too?”

“Violent men are made, not born. Abuse permeates their image of what it is to be an authority figure—what other role model do they have? And at a certain point in a young victim's life—not always, but often—he will turn, and either begin to abuse those he perceives as weaker—animals, younger children—or else strike back at his own abuser. I'm sure you've seen it. And as you know, if the reaction is open, immediate, and reactive to a specific event, there's a feeling that the violence is justified—that's when you see failures to indict, or verdicts of justifiable homicide. But if the abuse victim takes an indirect route, if there's any planning or entrapment involved, well, juries don't like that.”

“And you honestly think that this kid—”

“Jerry, I don't know. Like I told you on the phone, all I heard is that the father's plane went down. Last I knew, the Coast Guard hadn't even decided if the father actually went down in that plane. I heard the news, saw a lot of uncomfortable evidence against the kid, and felt I was running out of time. Before Al—” He caught himself, changed it to, “Before my partner and I could take the boy aside for a closer look, find out how he was ticking, all hell broke loose. I'm working blind here, Jer. And I need help.”

“From me.”

“I didn't have anywhere else to turn.”

“Do you think the boy killed his father?”

Allen heard a faint
tink
in the back of his mind, saw a grenade bouncing down a cave floor, looked into a pair of mad, triumphant blue eyes. Then he blinked, and his brother's calm brown eyes were waiting.

“I hope to God he didn't, for his own sake. But like I said, we don't even know if the bastard is dead.”

“Okay. Let me make some phone calls.”

“Jer—”

“Don't worry. I won't give you away, or the kid. Not until we both know more.”

“Thank you.”

Jerry studied his older brother, pale and hurting as he had been the last time desperation drove him to the door, in the spring of 1975. “You've spent your whole life doing this? Kidnapping children?”

“Rescuing them. Usually with their mother. Almost always.”

“Why?”

Jerry wasn't asking why it needed doing: He'd seen enough cases where abused kids were not taken from their parents to know why it needed doing. Rather, Jerry was asking,
Why you?
And it all came down to that, Allen knew. Not just whether or not Jerry would help him now, but whether Jerry would have anything to do with him when this episode was over. Allen wished he wasn't so nearly out of words.

“When I got to Vietnam, early on, I had a conversation with this guy who did long-range recon. He'd been in the bush for years, knew everything there was to know, all the ways to survive. I'd been in-country for about two minutes, so I asked him for advice, anything he could tell me that would help me make it out alive. What he said was,
Don't trust the children.
He was right, of course; in a vicious war like that, even small kids carry grenades or can sell you a Coke with ground glass in it. But I listened to what he said, and I believed him, until one day I killed a whole cave full of children.”

Something moved in the back of Jerry's eyes, and Allen waited, dreading the growth of revulsion, the final wedge that would split his brother from him forever. He waited, and saw Jerry review both the statement and the way in which he had said it. He saw Jerry deliberately put aside immediate judgment. He saw his brother choose to trust him.

Shaken, it took Allen a minute before he could start again.

“It took me seven years to get around to how I might make up for that act. And even then I didn't know what I was doing, just that I had to do it. Eventually it came to me, that what it boiled down to was,
Trust the children.
Since then, I've spent my life trusting children. Listening to them and having faith in them. I owe them that. Even this one. Jer, I don't know if Jamie's a killer or not. I do know he's a boy who's had the most appalling things done to him, and he needs my help. I promised I'd give it to him. I'm not asking you to make phone calls or to help me with this. All I need is shelter until I'm strong enough to take him away.”

In the end, it was Jerry who turned away. “Let me think about it,” he said.

Allen returned to the sofa for a couple of hours and woke to voices in the kitchen, Jerry and Ed talking about food. He rubbed his face and craned to see the clock on the front of the VCR. Nearly midnight.

Getting up was damnably awkward, and he still couldn't get the button on his jeans done with one hand, but he felt more like a three-dimensional man and less like a flattened carcass along a road. Jamie looked up when he came into the kitchen, his face open with pleasure.

“Hi, Allen, how's your arm? Ed and I saw some killer whales and a bunch of dolphins, and we went swimming and made a campfire on a beach and cooked s'mores, and he let me pick the music. Ed's got some way cool music, for old stuff.”

“Hey, boy,” Ed protested, “who're you calling old stuff?” He winked at Allen, who suddenly felt shaky with relief over a worry he'd not known he had: Ed liked the boy. Yet another person on the kid's side—and Jamie knew it, too; Allen had never known him so effusive.

Either that, or he'd inherited his father's ability to con.

“I mean your music. That guy without the teeth, and the song about something that came out of the sky.”

“Creedence,” Ed explained, although Allen had been out with the man often enough to identify the musicians.

While Allen had slept, Jerry was cooking, and now produced a large pot of meaty spaghetti. Jamie ate two servings, and suddenly looked as if he'd been clubbed. Allen glanced at Jerry.

“I think we'd better continue this in the morning,” he suggested. Jerry started to object, then looked more closely at the state of his two houseguests, and backed down.

“You're welcome to tie up overnight, Ed,” he told the boatman.

“I'll do that, thanks. Give me a whistle when breakfast is on.”

“I should have done more shopping,” Jerry muttered, and led Jamie away to the guest room.

That night, the boy made no excursions to the computer downstairs.

Dawn came early in the islands, finding Jerry already gone. He returned before the sun had chased the mist from the water, dressed in his uniform and wearing his gun—which only meant that he'd had a meeting with one of his deputies and wanted to make it official. Weintraub came not much after Jerry got back, to loose Allen's arm from its sling and poke around with what seemed to Allen an unnecessary degree of curiosity before pronouncing himself satisfied that the foolish decision to avoid the hospital wasn't going to mean the loss of the arm. He changed the dressings, replaced the strapping with an adjustable sling, and left, saying that his wife was expecting him back for breakfast.

Allen shaved, using Jerry's electric razor so as not to leave his face looking as if it had been drawn through a blackberry patch, and came downstairs to the rich scent of browning sausages.

“Jerry, you're going to make a fine wife for Nikki.”

The younger Carmichael glanced down at the frilly apron that one of their aunts had left behind after a Thanksgiving dinner. The sprigged cotton barely reached his thighs. “Cute, huh? I thought I'd make some chocolate chip pancakes. You think Jamie'd like them? Nikki's kid can eat more of them than I can.”

“Twelve-year-old boys will eat anything,” Allen said, helping himself to coffee. The sun was pouring through the east window overlooking the sound, and after glancing down at the dock to see if Ed was on his deck, he settled with his back to it. The smells, the warmth, the sense of safety and comfort washed over him: home. “Mom used to make chocolate chip pancakes,” he told Jerry, surprised by a sudden memory.

Jerry turned with the spatula in his hand. “Really? I don't remember that. Aunt Midge mentioned them one time, I thought they sounded like a good idea. She didn't say Mom made them.”

She had, though; on a late summer's morning just like this, thin already with the cancer that would kill her before Christmas. She'd been standing at the same place as Jerry, using an earlier stove but probably the same cast-iron griddle that Jerry was watching so closely, filling the sun-bright kitchen with just the same odors of hot butter and spicy sausages. Allen had been thirteen and Jerry six; later, Allen went to California with their father, and that had been the end of home. This man bending over the griddle, his brother, was both the closest person to him and a relative stranger. He couldn't even tell which way Jerry was going to go when it came to helping Jamie.

Jerry put a laden plate down in front of Allen, poured four more circles of batter into the pan, and then shed the apron to stride down to the dock and tell Ed that there was food when he wanted it. Allen's eyes followed his brother, as they used to do when he watched from the trees on Sanctuary, when Jerry would come to visit Rae the year she moved here. Jerry gave no more sign of knowing he was watched than he had on the island, and Allen reminded himself, as he had ten thousand times before, that normal men did not twitch with jungle sense.

At the end of the dock, Jerry leaned over the side of the
Orca Queen
for a moment, then turned and came back, not waiting for Ed. Nor would Ed hurry to respond to his summons: He had spent eight months in jail thanks to Jerry, and Sheriff Carmichael had no doubt that Ed continued to break pretty much any law he could get away with. Not, Allen reflected as he returned to his plate, a match made in heaven.

But Jerry cooked Ed pancakes and talked easily about the most recent proposal to expand one or another of the yacht harbors and about the
Elwa
's latest exploit and why it always seemed to be that particular Washington State ferry that plowed into its dock or tried to circle the wrong way around an island or . . .

All very relaxed and friendly, with the serious issues placed on the back burner. Ed pushed back his plate and his chair, Jerry moved the griddle off the flame and was carrying his own plate to the table when Jamie appeared in the doorway, hair rumpled, the mark of a sheet pink along one cheek, and an expression of blossoming horror in his eyes.

Before any of the men could react, the boy turned and bolted. Jerry, already on his feet and the resident expert on apprehending fleeing suspects, was after him in a shot, followed rapidly by Ed and, trapped by infirmity on the far side of the table, Allen. When Allen got to the front door, his brother was holding Jamie by the back collar of his shirt, bemusedly trying to avoid the flailing fists and kicking feet. He looked like a veterinarian with a furious kitten.