Blood Echo

by Rice, Christopher

  Please, God, Jordy prays. Tell me there’s a lesson here that will only make our devotion to you stronger.

  “This is too much, too soon, friend,” Milo says. “We don’t even have materials yet, and we’ve only had sit-downs with four field recruits.”

  “In four different states, though. That’s a victory.”

  “A fraction of the dozen we’re gonna need to make the first wave matter.”

  “Still, just don’t . . .”

  “Don’t what, Jordy?”

  “Don’t discount everything too quick, is what I’m saying.”

  “I’m saying whatever this is, we need to nip this in the bud right away.”

  “Didn’t we, though?” Jordy gestured in the direction of Henricks’s body.

  “We can’t keep her alive forever. There’s no bringing her around to this now.”

  “I’m not planning on either.”

  “All right. Then that just leaves . . .”

  “Stop baby-walking me and get to it.”

  “Luke Prescott.”

  They both fall silent, and Jordy’s not sure if he should feel prideful that Milo’s nasally breaths sound louder than his.

  The nearest mountain peak looks like a jagged shelf of granite turned on its side and wedged inside a giant mound of green; orange sunlight reflects off its western flank. Orange the color of flame.

  Milo’s right about one thing: This is too much pressure, too soon. Too much messiness before the first bomb’s been assembled. Hell, the explosives haven’t even been delivered yet. They’ll need to be stored, protected, the reserves distributed to their foot soldiers at points throughout the country.

  Jordy assumed the hardest part would be finding the bombers most committed to the cause, but that’s been easy. Maybe because they’ve set their goals in the right place. They’re after three things that have become a kind of mantra: range, variation, coordination. A gay bar here, an abortion clinic there, a mosque there. All on the same day. A big death toll in each place would be nice, but in the end, it’s just a perk. It’s the calculation and coordination that will truly strike terror into the hearts of the deviants and the godless, that will convince them that every expression of their twisted selfhood runs the risk of split-second immolation. A web of righteousness, stretched wide, will do more to advance their cause than any single crater in the earth.

  “We’re not killing two sheriff’s deputies in a row,” Jordy finally says.

  “I didn’t say we should.”

  “Luke Prescott doesn’t know anything.”

  “Why is she so damn quiet, then?” Milo asks. “Why is she acting like she’s going to get rescued?”

  “You’re doping her up,” Jordy says.

  “I’m jerking her off depressants, then putting her on stimulants to get her gums to start flapping, and it’s not working.”

  “Maybe you broke her,” Jordy says.

  “Bull. She’s hiding something.”

  “Well, we’ve turned over her trailer four times and gone through her computer and there’s nothing.”

  Because she went through my damn computer, Jordy thinks, and I’d rather get beat myself than tell Milo that.

  “There are ways to silence somebody without killing them,” Milo says quietly. “Honestly, breaking people’s more my specialty.”

  For a while, the two men just stare at each other.

  Jordy’s seen enough missions go south to know that there’s usually, not all the time, but usually, a moment of warning coupled with a moment of decision, and someone makes the wrong choice.

  “I fucked up,” Jordy whispers. “I wasn’t careful enough with my computer. She must have seen something. She’d been such a basket case before, I didn’t expect her to get her mind back and start . . .”

  Something cold passes through Milo’s expression, then he closes his eyes and nods.

  “That’s the past. Let’s talk about the future.” His tone’s not as forgiving as his expression.

  “Do what you think’s best,” Jordy says.

  “With Prescott?” Milo asks.

  Jordy nods.

  When Milo nods back, Jordy removes his gun from its holster and strides back toward the clearing. His foot soldiers stand in a loose circle around Henricks’s corpse. The ones that stick out to him are that kid, Tommy Grover, who always looks like he just smelled something foul, and Manuel Lloya, the ex–car thief from Anaheim; they’re Milo’s guys, not his, and their presence now is a reminder that loyalties could shift in dangerous ways if Jordy doesn’t let Milo put this back on course the way he wants.

  All seven men part when they see him coming, but he walks past them, to the spot where Lacey’s still on her side in the fetal position, staring into the dope-smeared contents of her mind.

  Before she can look up into his eyes, he fires one shot into her forehead.

  He turns away before he can be distracted by old feelings.

  He’ll replace her someday. The world is full of victims waiting to be healed, and Lacey wasn’t even the prettiest one.

  III

  33

  Charley’s given Luke a lot longer than the minute of quiet he asked for.

  She kept her mouth shut during the ride back to the house. She let him wander outside into the backyard by himself once they got home. Now, it’s an hour later, and he’s still sitting outside, glowering at the view. In the meantime, she’s held her tongue, stayed out of his eye line, done all the things she figures you’re supposed to do when someone you love suddenly announces they don’t want to hear your voice. It leaves you with no choice but to be assailed by all manner of dark fears about where their little funk might end, but maybe that’s just how adult relationships are supposed to be. She doesn’t know. She’s never had one before.

  She had years of experience watching Marty and Luanne go about their relationship with casual ease—spending time together on the weekends, giving the other football fields’ worth of space whenever they wanted it. But then there’s the specter of Abigail Banning, who through a series of jailhouse interviews has tried to cast her gruesome life’s work as a testament to the idea that if you don’t help your man indulge his darkest instincts, you’ll be alone forever. She knows how repulsive and wrong Abigail is, of course. But she’s afraid her early exposure to the idea in practice might have produced in her a neurotic fear that today makes her far more indulgent of Luke’s mood swings and outbursts than she should be.

  Whatever the answer, she’s sick of this routine. She’s sick of pacing the kitchen, sick of waiting for Luke to put on his big boy pants and come back inside and talk through his feelings like the modern man he thinks he is, but sometimes isn’t.

  She’d love to lose herself in obsession over the mysterious disappearance of Lacey Shannon, but with the flash drive gone, that’s not really possible. There’s always Google and social media, but the wrong search terms will probably set off an alert in some secret Graydon office somewhere, and within minutes Cole will knock on her door so he can explain, once again, what a good person he is for taking away her privacy and serving as a constant reminder the world is run by a largely corrupt cadre of billionaires.

  The house around her used to belong to an old classmate of theirs, Emily Hickman. Emily’s folks once owned and operated the only drugstore in town, a gleaming white tile–filled place with an old-school ice cream counter and vintage drug ads on the walls. When Charley visited Luke here as a grown-up, she’d been instantly struck by the absence of the cast-iron fence that used to encircle the property, the same one the Hickmans would tie balloons to every time they had a party for their only daughter, which was often.

  A few months later, shortly after Charley moved in, Marty and his crew replaced the fence free of charge. It mars the expansive views from the backyard more than the old one ever did, but the spokes are widely spaced enough that it doesn’t wreck them entirely. The gnarled oak tree’s still there, as thick and solid as it was when they were you
ng. But the old play set’s gone, along with the tire swing.

  Again, Charley thinks about getting in touch with Emily; maybe dropping her a note about how they live in her old place now and by the way she’s shacked up with Luke Prescott and isn’t that crazy, all things considered? But then she remembers she’s leading a double life. And with the stress of it pitching her boyfriend into a long, brooding silence, new friendships, even basic correspondences, seem like an unacceptable risk.

  Still, Emily was one of the few classmates who was actually nice to Charley back when she was Trina; unlike Luke, who’d bullied her almost ceaselessly about her dark past.

  They were different people then, she reminds herself. Maybe Emily grew up to be someone not as nice. Kind of the way Luke’s grown up to be more mature and reflective, but with vestiges of that old sharp tongue and hot temper. The point, she tells herself, is that those were different times. Memories of them come and go, but mostly they go.

  But the longer Luke sits out in the backyard in sullen silence, the stronger those memories become. And the more high school feels like yesterday, the more she fears the return of the Luke she used to loathe.

  It’s not fair, or rational. He’s not acting like the guy he was back then. Not really. More like an injured animal. But deep down, is there really that much difference between the two? And if all this becomes too much for him, will the old Luke return, if only for the purpose of driving her away, cutting himself off?

  She’s not interested in waiting to find out.

  He’s got to hear her footsteps crunching the grass, but he doesn’t turn or even sit up.

  Not good, she thinks.

  He’s slouched in one of the cheap Adirondack chairs that used to form a ring around his old chiminea. Then Mona dropped by for a visit one day, took one look inside the chiminea’s ash- and branch-filled cavity, and asked Luke how long he’d dreamed of starting a wildfire. Luke threw the thing out the next day, and Charley made a mental note: If I ever need to really get through to Luke, go through Mona.

  Provided, of course, the topic doesn’t have anything to do with Graydon Pharmaceuticals.

  “This is longer than a minute,” Charley says.

  “Have a seat.” He gestures to the empty chair next to him.

  Oooo, can I? she wants to ask, in a voice as sarcastic as the one he used to use with her back in high school. But she knows that’s a childish, defensive reaction; she’ll save those for later if she needs them.

  “I’m not mad at you,” he says.

  “OK,” she says.

  Good, she thinks.

  “I’m mad at myself.”

  “OK,” she says.

  “I fucked up.”

  “How?”

  She’s ninety percent sure he’s about to say he screwed up by getting involved with her, so when he says, “Cole’s right,” she sits forward in her chair with surprise.

  “How?” she asks.

  “The whole time you were gone, I was wound so tight I was ready to pop. Lacey walking into that station . . . it popped me, I guess.”

  “How does that make Cole right?”

  “I handled it badly, and now we’ve got a mess. Mona thinks the same thing; she just won’t say it directly.”

  “And you think you handled it badly because you were worried about me?”

  “Partly, yeah.”

  “Well, personally, I’m glad you were worried about me. It’s nice to have someone worrying about me.”

  She smiles. He doesn’t.

  “I don’t regret that part,” he says. “It’s the other part that’s got me going.”

  “What other part?”

  “This isn’t the easiest thing to say, Charley.”

  “Well, maybe if you’d just say it, it will be easier.”

  “You’re not going to want to hear this.”

  “Then say it faster. I don’t know. But please . . . just say it.”

  It’s over, she thinks. Whatever this rare, special, unexpected thing between them was, it’s over. He’s stepping back. Stepping out. Whatever you want to call it. She’d never expected to find someone who could handle her past. Now that her future’s twice as insane, how can she expect any man to hold up under the stress created by both? Her mind’s spinning with fearful thoughts of what Luke walking away from her could mean, given everything he knows about her current situation. How will Cole respond? But this is a distraction, she’s sure. A distraction from the rejection that’s about to hit her like a body blow from which no pill can protect her.

  “Yes, I was worried,” Luke says. “I was worried sick. And the only thing I wanted was for you to come back. But there was another part of it, a part I’m ashamed of.”

  “Just don’t . . .”

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t give me some speech about how you just want a normal life. If you wanted normal, you should have found yourself a sorority girl.”

  “Normal?”

  “Yeah. Stress-free. Easy. Whatever.”

  “You think I want a normal life? You gotta be kidding me. I’ve wanted out of this town since I was a kid. You think I went after a job at the FBI because I wanted to . . . what? Be Father Knows Best and run a feed store? Come on. Charley, I wasn’t just worried. I was jealous. I wanted to be there, and not just to make sure you were OK. I wanted to take down another guy like Pemberton.”

  “Luke, it wasn’t the same.”

  “Even so, I didn’t want to be here, corralling drunks and counting the minutes until you came back. So at the first sign of something, anything that would make me feel like I was making the world a better place, I jumped at it. But I jumped too damn hard, and now we’re in the middle of this crap because of me.”

  “Lord,” Charley whispers.

  “What?”

  “I thought you were breaking up with me.”

  “What? No!”

  “Why didn’t you say any of this before now?” she asks.

  “Oh, come on. We both knew. Cole said I couldn’t be part of the team, and you didn’t fight him on it so I backed down.”

  “I didn’t fight him on it because you didn’t fight me on it.”

  “I know, but still . . .”

  “Oh, please. We’re supposed to read each other’s minds now?”

  “Maybe not. But we’re supposed to know each other, aren’t we? I mean, come on, do you really think I want to spend the rest of my life as a sheriff’s deputy in Altamira? I came home with my tail between my legs because my dreams were shot and I didn’t want to become some consultant with my business degree. And then . . . you and I. We did something amazing. We found that guy, Charley, and you stopped him. And then all of a sudden my job was to stay home and wait for you and not talk about everything you’d done.”

  “This isn’t just about what I said about Bailey?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The fact that he’s working for Cole now. You’ve tried so hard to make him be a family with you. I just worry that you think if you go into business with Graydon, too, it’ll bring you guys closer.”

  “It won’t.”

  “I know it won’t. I mean, I’ve been working with Graydon for months, and I’ve never laid eyes on him.”

  “It’s not about him, Charley. I know it might seem like it, but it’s not.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “It’s about me. That’s why I didn’t want to say it. Because it’s really just about me and what I want, and it feels selfish. But it’s the truth. I want to be part of something. That’s what I’ve wanted all my life. I want to do something that makes the world a better place. But it’s too damn easy to give up on that dream, because the older you get the more you realize the world’s worse off than you thought.”

  “You do make this world a better place.”

  “Charley, don’t greeting card this.”

  “Luke, if you pull over a drunk driver on your shift, you could be saving a school bus full of kids later.
You’re not giving yourself enough credit.”

  “You’re part of something that could change the world. I’m screwing up basic law enforcement work.”

  “This wasn’t basic. You were being played by someone unstable who’d just discovered a massive criminal conspiracy she didn’t know how to handle or even report. You were doing the best you knew how to do. And if you really thought Jordy Clements was a woman beater, good. I’m glad you threw him in a cell.”

  “You’re just being generous,” he says.

  “That’s bad?”

  “It’s not, I guess,” he whispers. “I meant to say biased.”

  “Still. Everyone deserves at least one person who’s always biased in their favor.”

  “Marty?”

  “No, my grandmother used to say that one.”

  “So many sayings, so few of them knitted on things. Missed opportunities all over the place.”

  “I actually think Cole’s idea that Marty start a bumper sticker company isn’t that bad. You think we could get him to fund it?”

  He laughs, then he brings her hand to his mouth and kisses her fingers. “You’re not just telling me what I want to hear?”

  “No.”

  “OK. Will you keep being honest while I ask you something else?”

  “Promise.”

  “What if I asked Cole if I could . . .”

  “If you could what?”

  “Join the team. Or whatever you guys call it.”

  Suddenly her right hand feels like he’s no longer holding it, even though he just took it in his own. After a few seconds, whatever expression’s on her face has brought a stony, distant one to his.

  When his cell phone rings, they both jump. “It’s Mona,” he says.

  He stands and walks to the other side of the yard. And after a moment or two, she realizes she’s still holding her hand in the air where he let it go, as if she’s reaching out to him across the yard.

  She’s feeling too many things at once to give voice to any single one. But they all have one thing in common: they generate the kind of full-body flush she’s always associated with shame. A sense that she’d been suddenly exposed without her consent.