The Ninth Dominion (The Jared Kimberlain Novels) (32 page)

Kimberlain’s breathing stopped. Lauren Talley had been found in the cabin where Peet had been living. He could picture it all now: Leeds must have uncovered his whereabouts and lured Lauren there, after intercepting Kimberlain’s phone call to her. Then he had arranged the evidence so all indications would point to the Ferryman as her assailant. Kimberlain read on. There was no mention of Peet in the article. Fingerprints would be checked, of course, and once Peet’s were identified even more accusations would come Kimberlain’s way.

But where was Peet now?

The only possible answer chilled him to the bone. Peet was with Leeds. Perhaps Peet had been Lauren’s assailant; the way the wounds were described certainly made it seem possible.

What have I done?

Kimberlain looked at it all and blamed himself. Blamed himself for involving Peet in the first place. Blamed himself for letting Lauren Talley see inside the dark world he inhabited when the ultimate costs should have been obvious.

The Ferryman went back to the article. He was considered armed and very dangerous, the object of a massive national manhunt. He lowered the newspaper and handed it to Chalmers.

“There’s nothing about the Towanda Family Resort, though,” Hedda noted, “nothing about Tiny Tim. That means we’ve still got a chance.”

Kimberlain walked away, speaking with his back to her. “Seckle will see the story. He’ll strike tonight while I’m still at large.”

“Why?”

“Because if I’m dead or captured, there’s no sport.”

“There’s more,” Chalmers said. “This … is Leeds’s insurance.”

“We get off the island and Tiny Tim kills us,” Hedda followed.

“Or we get caught somewhere along the way trying to stop him at the resort.”

“Either way Leeds wins.”

“No, because there may be something he failed to consider.”

Kimberlain called Captain Seven from a phone near the parking lot. It rang and rang. Which meant the captain was gone, out of the picture at least for now. Leeds had indeed considered him.

“We’re in this alone,” Kimberlain told Chalmers and Hedda.

“Without a single weapon, except my pistol.” She pulled her gun from under her jacket. “One clip left. Fourteen shots. Not much of an equalizer against Tiny Tim.”

“Then we’ll have to get creative.”

Garth Seckle’s van sliced through the rain. Night was coming fast, the sky was already dark gray from the storm. The lights of approaching cars barely made a dent in it. Seckle shifted uneasily.

He had redesigned the driver’s seat to accommodate his bulk. Too often in the past he’d had to squinch at the shoulders to keep the top of his six-foot-ten-inch frame from rubbing the roof. Seckle hated feeling confined; he liked to leave himself as much breathing space as he possibly could. He figured he had it coming to him after all those wasted years.

His home in the stockade had consisted of a single eight-by-eight windowless cubicle. Not that lacking a window bothered him. No. There was plenty to see inside his own soul, and it was there that Seckle’s vision turned during those long years of incarceration.

Sometime in those months the passage of time lost meaning to him, at least in the conventional sense. He measured it not in hours and minutes, but rather in thoughts and visualizations. People were going to pay for San Luis Garcia, for his father.

His father had been a great man, misunderstood but wonderfully gifted. He had possessed a vision that allowed him to see what others could not. The island of San Luis Garcia was proof of what one man could accomplish.

Then The Caretakers had come, and Garth Seckle shivered every time he recalled the bloody battle. He had badly wounded one, he was certain of it, when the room exploded all around him. He was blown through a wall and covered in debris. Unable to move, heaving in pain, he nonetheless never lost consciousness. He heard the screams, gunshots, and explosions, feeling each bullet as if it had penetrated him. The world of his father was crumbling around him, and there was nothing he could do.

Garth Seckle supposed the planning had actually begun then, in those stretched-out moments when he needed something to take his mind from the pain and loss. When it was over, there was no one to help him. His last reserves of strength were spent dragging himself from under the debris that had buried him. His wounds were much more serious than he had thought originally. It seemed certain he would die. The left foot, of course, was the worst, a chunk of it gone from the second toe across diagonally to the front of the arch. Pulp, sinew, and bone protruded where part of his foot had been.

But none of that mattered. Finding the bodies of his mother and two sisters, in addition to his father, tore his insides apart. Soldiers all, the way his father had made them in a dream come true. He found them broken and bloodied. A nightmare.

He supposed he would have died, too, if the mop-up team hadn’t come upon him. The doctors put him back together in sloppy fashion, and he was taken to the stockade. Never a visitor. No one came except the stooges with his meals.

Garth Seckle didn’t care. He took charge of his own rehabilitation, lived and breathed off the pain. They said his foot wound would make normal walking, much less running, impossible. But Seckle was walking about the cell in a month and running in place eight weeks after that. The sweat would pour off him in the stifling heat, and his mind would fight back the pain with the planning. He never considered for a single minute that he wouldn’t someday be leaving the cell. To accept lifetime incarceration was to accept death.

Still, the means of his ultimate departure surprised even him. Strangers had simply come to his cell late one night. He was drugged and dragged off. When he awoke, a small man with eyes that looked pushed back into his head was looking down at him.

“Hello, Garth.”

“Who … ?” he gasped. His mouth was too dry to speak.

“Who am I? Why, I’m the man who’s going to give you back your life. And then some.”

The man had sent him on his way with no conditions. He called it a test, insisted they would meet again another day. The files of the original Caretakers were provided to Seckle, and he began reconnoitering the sites where the closest relatives of The Caretakers lived and worked. It was the isolated nature of so many of the sites that led him to consider going beyond vengeance. After all, they hadn’t just killed his father, had they? The entire world he knew had been destroyed. So it would be for the closest relatives of those who had brought it all on. He had done the same thing in Vietnam and felt fulfilled by the act.

But tonight was going to top that and all the others, because tonight Kimberlain was going to pay. Seckle wondered if the Ferryman would ever figure out that this visit was meant for him. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that Seckle knew.

The van’s windshield wipers pushed aside the pelting rain; fresh torrents hit the glass. Seckle liked the symbolism, for no matter how many lives he took, there would remain lives that demanded taking. Lightning threw shadows at him that disappeared instantly into darkness. Thunder crackled through his ears.

Tiny Tim drove on through the night.

Because of Kimberlain’s fugitive status, the only completely safe means of transportation for them was by car. He detailed the elements of his plan after they had set out in the first of the four stolen vehicles that would take them up Route 81 to the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania.

“We’ll have to make do with what we can salvage from gun and hardware stores,” Kimberlain said in the end, “maybe a few—”

“No!” Hedda broke in. “A high school, even a junior high!”

“The chemistry labs,” Kimberlain realized.

“And since it’s summer, what we need will be neatly put away, stored and ready for the fall. Just a lock to pick, maybe an alarm system to bypass. Takes time to assemble what we need, though,” she added. “No matter where we get it.”

“There are shortcuts, less stable, but we’re not in a position to nitpick.” The Ferryman hesitated. “We’ve got other limitations facing us.”

“The resort’s layout, for example.”

“We’ll be coming in blind. He could have been there all day long, waiting for midnight like he always does.”

“And we’ve got to assume Tiny Tim’s going to be wearing state-of-the-art body armor, so regular bullets aren’t going to stop him. Have to take that into account when we start assembling our wares.”

“More than that, we’ve got to take him out surgically,” Kimberlain reminded. “We can’t unleash weapons that will help him do his job.”

“No victims from among the vacationers.”

“We won’t do Tiny Tim’s work for him, Hedda.”

She seemed to relax. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For calling me Hedda.”

“You’re not Ellen Kimberlain any more than you’re Helena Cain or Lucretia McEvil today. The only life you know is your life as Hedda, and that’s who I’m talking to right now.” He hesitated and gripped the steering wheel harder. Chalmers was dozing in the backseat. “And Hedda has no son. Lucretia McEvil does, and she’s dead, isn’t she?”

“Her son isn’t.”

The rain caught them as they drew ever closer to Honesdale, Pennsylvania. The pounding downpour attacked the windshield wipers every inch of the way.

Hedda jotted down notes on paper salvaged from the car’s glove compartment while Kimberlain continued to drive.

“I’ve made a kind of shopping list,” she announced as they approached the Pennsylvania border with daylight a memory. “I figured we could divide it in half, save some time.”

“Read it to me.”

She did.

“Wow,” Kimberlain responded. “I’m not sure we’ve got enough time for all that.”

“It won’t take as long as you think. There’s nothing on this list I haven’t worked with before myself.”

“Under better conditions, I trust.”

“Not always, not by much anyway.”

Kimberlain flashed the highbeams to see if they improved his visibility. When they bounced back at him off the pounding storm, he went back to the lows.

“The key thing, if and when Tiny Tim shows up, is to keep him away from the families. Make this a fight between him and the three of us.”

“That’s not what he’ll want.”

“Which is why we’ve got to dictate the terms.”

Hedda was checking the map. “Carbondale is coming up in ten miles. Should have everything we need.”

Hedda and Kimberlain decided that they would drop her at the Carbondale Area High School, located right on the Scranton-Carbondale highway thirty minutes from the resort. Then they would move into Carbondale under cover of darkness to obtain the rest of the items on her list.

Not a single car was visible in any of the one story, brick building’s parking lots, and other than the outdoor floods no light burned. They dropped Hedda near a door at the school’s rear out of sight of the road. She dashed through the storm’s torrents and was soaked to the skin by the time she started on the lock.

Chalmers and Kimberlain waited until she had gotten the door open and vanished inside before they headed back down the drive.

“Eight-thirty,” Chalmers said. “Most of … the stores we need … will still be open.”

“A locked door and a closed sign in the window isn’t about to stop me tonight.”

“Because of … your nephew?”

“Because Seckle—Tiny Tim—has to be stopped. Period.”

Chalmers gazed at him with his drawn eyes for a long moment. “The other … Caretakers … are all dead… . Not you.”

“Luck.”

“Not luck—under … standing. You lived … because you found … a way to live.”

“It controls me.”

“It saved you.”

“From the world, Chalmers, but not from myself. In the end that’s the only person you’ve got to learn to face, and I can’t do it yet.”

“Do you want … to?”

“Maybe not. A friend of mine tried and ended up the worse for it.”

“A friend?”

“Winston Peet, Chalmers.” Kimberlain continued as a gasp emerged from Chalmers’s speaker. “I thought you’d remember him. He was on Leeds’s original list, but he ended up on my side. He saved my life, and I paid him back by giving him some land, a place to hide.”

“Where they found … the woman,” Chalmers realized.

Kimberlain nodded. “Leeds got to him. Leeds brought Peet back to the other side, which means I’ll have to kill him this time.”

“Like you should … have done before?”

“No, I did the right thing then. The wrong thing came much more recently. Peet is with Leeds now because I involved him. He didn’t want to help me. He knew what it would mean, and then he did it anyway. So it’s my fault.”

“No.”

“Yes. I gave him a place to live to pay him back, and then I wouldn’t leave him alone. You see, Chalmers, I did the same thing to Peet that you did to me: I used him, and it stinks. I tried to convince myself that I did it for him. But it was for me. I’m the reason he’s with Leeds.” Kimberlain gulped down the lump in his throat. “I’m the reason Lauren Talley is almost dead.”

“What would you … change?”

“I need to stay alone. You’re the one who cut me off from everyone, and now I see it was for the best. That’s when it all started, when I was made.”

Chalmers shook his head. “You were already … made. That’s why … we chose you… . We could have had … anyone, but we … chose you.”

“I guess I should feel touched.”

“Feel what you … want, but accept … it.” Chalmers tapped the socket wedged into his flesh. “Is what you did … that night made … less worthy by … the truth?”

“Not less worthy, only less meaningful. I thought I was acting for myself. Now I see I was acting because someone else who had pushed the right buttons wanted me to.”

“You got revenge … on your … parents’ killers… . That does not … change.”

“Then I spent over three years working for the same people who had hired them.”

“People you … brought down in … the end.”

“What’s your point?”

“You beat them… . You got even… . Another payback … perhaps the most … fitting of all.”

“Without pleasure. Without satisfaction.”

“But with success … You don’t fail… . You
won’t
fail.”