Blood Echo

by Rice, Christopher

  Cole reaches out and takes another sip from the beer bottle sitting between him and Donald.

  “That afternoon, my dad knocked on my door. He asked me to get dressed. He told me we were going somewhere. We got in a car with some guys just like the fine gentlemen who came here with me tonight. And he gave me this little pill and told me to swallow it. I didn’t think twice about it. He was handing out pills all the time. That was his business.

  “And then I realized we were driving to the shack where those boys took me. He told me to be calm and that everything would be all right and that he was there for me no matter what happened. And there they were, all three of them. Inside. They’d brought in a little round table and they were all sitting at it, scared out of their minds. But my dad, he just acted like we were there to talk things through. He actually asked them to explain themselves. To explain why they’d raped me, but he asked like he was asking them to explain why they stole five dollars. It was so insane.

  “They just blubbered. They just sat there and they blubbered. And they apologized. And they blamed it on sin and the devil. And my father just nodded sympathetically like he understood. You know, like we can all get so caught up in our sin, we end up raping thirteen-year-olds in the woods. I couldn’t believe what was happening. I’d been in a fog for days, but I could feel rage coming up in me. Pure rage. Was my dad really going to allow these bastards to explain it all away?

  “Then he made all three of them get down on their knees, one after the other, and apologize. And I thought, well, that’s something. I liked seeing them on their knees. Then, we all sat down at the table again and they’re still crying, but now they’re doing it like they’re relieved, you know? Like it’s wrapping up and now that they’ve made it through, they’ll never make the mistake of raping a child for fun again. Promise. And that’s when my dad starts passing around this bottle of Dr Pepper and he says, Let’s share a drink together to show all is forgiven.

  “And he drinks out of it, and then I drink out of it, and then they drink out of it, one after the other. And then, about thirty seconds later, all three of them are dead. The pill he gave me, you see, it protected me from the poison. He took one, too. It was quick, the poison. Real quick. Painless. At least it looked that way to me. I mean, those boys went down like a bag of rocks, each one. No thrashing. No seizures. No foaming at the mouth.”

  Cole reaches out and takes a sip from the beer bottle. Donald’s eyes follow its journey from his mouth and back to the table again.

  “You see, he was trying to teach me two things that day. One, that I would always be his son, no matter what. That he would always protect me no matter who I was on the inside or no matter how long I looked at a pretty boy in a pickup truck. But the second part, that was harder. He wanted me to sit at the table with him and see those boys, hear those boys, remember them as something more than my rapists, so that I could see the weight that would pull on his soul from that day forward. The vengeance that day was his, not mine. He was getting back at them for hurting his only son. But he was showing me what he’d have to remember for the rest of his life after he took theirs. Their sobs, their lies, their pathetic, desperate talk of sin and the devil. Vengeance is always possible, he said, but only if your memory can endure it. My father taught me a lot of valuable things in my life, but that was one of the best.”

  He’s told this story as much for the father of Jordy Clements as he has for Charlotte Rowe. No doubt, she’s watched all of this through the TruGlass lenses sitting in his eyes, hopefully from someplace quiet and private in the closest thing she’s ever had to a hometown.

  He lets the story settle, then he reaches out and pushes the bottle a little closer to the man sitting across from him.

  “Drink your beer, Donald.”

  IV

  The less I know, the better, Cole said.

  Fine.

  But here’s what everyone thinks they know about the men who came to build a tunnel on the edge of our town.

  A black Econoline van registered to their company and carrying Jordy Clements, Milo Simms, Bradley Kyle, Greg Burton, Peter Henricks, and Bertrand Davis was discovered crashed at the base of some cliffs halfway between here and Cambria. Evidence of a wild party, complete with drug paraphernalia, was discovered at a work site just off State Mountain Road 293. The assumption is they got good and wasted and then decided to go for an ill-advised joy ride, maybe to do a little barhopping down in Morro Bay or San Luis Obispo. On the way, they veered off the cliff and plunged hundreds of feet to their deaths.

  According to the descriptions in the Tribune, the nearest local paper, the van was all but destroyed by the fall, and most of the bodies were blown out of it on impact. So it’s assumed that Mike Frasier, Ralph Peters, Manuel Lloya, and Tommy Grover, who are also still missing, were inside the van when it crashed, but it’s possible they were swept out to sea. The Tribune’s coverage has made no secret of the fact that Peter Henricks had recently quit the Altamira Sheriff’s Department and had been seen regularly in the company of Jordy and his crew. The implication is that he fell in with a bad crowd and ended up plunging to his death with them.

  Here’s what I know that the papers don’t.

  Mike Frasier, Ralph Peters, and Manuel Lloya were probably never placed inside the van because it would have been too hard to explain away their injuries by car wreck. Mike was speared by a tree branch, and Ralph Peters and Manuel Lloya were mutilated by technology that most people don’t even know exists.

  And then there’s Lacey. I know they found her body in the same place they found Peter Henricks’s, but for some reason Cole’s men thought it was too big a risk to place her in the van as well. Which probably means she was shot, just like Tommy Grover said. No one seems to be looking for her. Not her family. Not old friends. Not old friends of Jordy’s. The ones that didn’t die with him in that van, that is. On balance, it sounds like she didn’t live what anyone would call a good life. But when she discovered a horror show in her backyard, she tried to stop it, and so she deserves some credit, goddammit. She deserves to have her memory honored even if it’s just by me.

  In a few days, Marty and I are going to go up the mountain and say a few words for her near the shed. Maybe Luke will come, too, but we’re not going to pressure him. Not after what he went through up there.

  But for now, Lacey Shannon has shuffled off to the same place Richard Davies’s victims will have to live thanks to the fact that I ended his life. A purgatory of the missing and the lost who have no graves and no obituaries, who veered out of visible life in a tailspin of addiction and bad choices. Presumed dead by the natural causes of self-destructive destruction, not the hands of a psychopath.

  Back to what the world knows.

  The night after the Econoline was discovered, Jordy’s father, Donald Clements, suffered a massive heart attack at his home in North Carolina. The Tribune speculated that the stress of finding out about his son’s death might have caused it, but I know better.

  I watched him die.

  After the transmission ended, I walked the Med Ranch for hours in the dark, searching for an easy-to-understand reaction to what I’d just witnessed. But the question of why Cole wanted me to see it was foremost in my mind, and so the endeavor felt analytical and cold in a moment when I thought I should be feeling guilt, anguish, or, God forbid, vengeful satisfaction.

  For someone who talks as much as he does, Cole says almost nothing about the things he does that are of actual consequence. I could trick myself into believing I have some insight into how he works, but what benefit is there to knowing that he inherited his immense capacity for psychological manipulation from his father? It’s like knowing where a suspect stores his weapons in a house you can’t find.

  The more important question is, why did he ask me to watch him murder Donald Clements?

  The cynic in me believes he wanted me to feel implicated, partly responsible.

  The optimist wants to believe he was showin
g his devotion. Making up for his decision to leave us dangerously exposed as he scrambled to protect us with the security he’d claimed we’d had all along.

  It’s probably both.

  But maybe, just maybe, it was his response to the things I’d said to him before he flew off in his helicopter that night. Maybe he was saying, Yes, you’re right. We are more the same than he first realized. Thrown together against our wills by a man named Noah Turlington, himself a victim whose every attempt to reject victimhood has claimed more lives.

  Over time, I’ll probably come to regret what I did to save Luke’s life less and less, so long as Luke is in my life, his very presence reminding me of what I was fighting for that night. Luke.

  It’s different with Richard Davies. Try as I might to learn up on them, his victims are abstractions. Words on paper. Social media posts from their few grieving relatives. They’ll never lie beside me in bed, and so when the demons of doubt and self-guilt come for me, they’ll use Richard Davies against me, not Jordy and his men. And if the voices of the demons overpower Cole’s, he’ll have a much harder time getting what he needs out of me.

  Consensually, of course.

  And so, for now, he has to make me think some degree of killing is essential, obligatory.

  And that is what frightens me.

  It’s one thing to become numb to the value of life by taking lives to defend yourself.

  It will be another if Cole succeeds in making other people seem expendable.

  We are on hiatus, Cole says.

  A necessary break.

  It’s such a bland, corporate word. Wholly inappropriate to describe the kind of emotional recovery Luke and I will need.

  In another week, once they’ve finished making it, Cole’s people will bury a vessel just under the earth, off 293, a vessel they claim will be fireproof, earthquake-proof, and possibly even volcano-proof for all I know. Inside of it will be the additional nine pills Noah Turlington directed me to the night of the attack. For now, Cole has allowed me to keep them on my person at all times. Originally, I’d wanted the vessel to be placed at the limekilns so that before I accessed it for whatever reason, I would be forced to remember what I had done there. But even the handful of visitors the place might get in a month poses a risk of discovery. So I’ve selected a spot just uphill from the service road Jordy’s men cut through the woods, not far from where I killed Mike Frasier.

  Beneath several layers of soil will be a keypad for which only I know the code. The catch: if I choose to open it, an alert will be sent to Cole’s people right away, and I will be obligated to either explain my reasons for doing so or ignore their request and simply let their security teams respond in the manner they think most appropriate given what they’re seeing on their surveillance.

  I partly suspect that Cole’s called a hiatus because he needs time to deal with Noah. As for how he’s going to do that . . . the less I know, the better.

  When it came to Luke’s recovery, Cole gave us only one set of instructions.

  Don’t let anyone learn that he’d been burned on the same night the Econoline allegedly plunged over a cliff.

  To do that, we gave Luke the flu. Not a real flu. But a call-in-sick flu and, wouldn’t you know it, he didn’t get the damn vaccine, so it lasted about ten days instead of five and no way could he go into work because the last thing he wanted to do was spread the virus. Apparently, Mona and her boyfriend managed to patch things up, just in time for another brutal round of chemo, so she’d stayed with him in Santa Ynez as much as she could the day everything went down. Her information about the wreck of the Econoline all came thirdhand. But Luke has said, and I agree with him, she’d be a fool if she doesn’t suspect something eventually.

  And Mona’s no fool.

  Luke’s going back to work tomorrow, so tonight we went out to dinner at the Copper Pot for the first time in I can’t remember how long. Most of the talk in town was fear that the tunnel project might get canceled altogether after the terrible tragedy that befell the Clements crew. The company’s big signs had already been taken down at Trailer City and at the site of the first grading on the edge of town. Out of respect, people said. And now, apparently the ownership of the entire company’s in dispute. Donald Clements’s sole surviving heir has no desire to run it, and so he’s considering selling off its assets to another firm. Graydon Pharmaceuticals has used that as cause to cancel their contract and start the search for another tunnel company.

  But Altamira’s been knocked down before, and so people aren’t that hopeful the tunnel will happen now, and there’s a sense of grief hanging over the town that’s shot through with self-interest.

  As our server, Carla, shared these details with us, Luke and I just chewed our food and nodded and made various noises as if we were hearing it all for the first time, what with Luke having been so sick for so long and all. Then, once Carla left, the two of us sat in silence that felt like a strange blend of contentment and astonishment. We’re two people who have seen the giant hand that sometimes moves the earth underfoot. But how long, I wonder, before the hand moves the earth so many times, there’s nothing left for us to stand on anymore?

  During his recovery, Luke has been gentle and needy. It’s as if some of the hard edges have been rubbed off him. They’ll probably mend or grow back, I’m sure. He’s still Luke Prescott. But with Project Bluebird 2.0 on hiatus for the time being, there’s been no further talk of him joining the team. Maybe he’s too tired to discuss it. Or maybe he no longer feels qualified. Or maybe he just doesn’t give a damn after what he’s been through. We’ll see.

  When we make love, the sense of urgency or playfulness has gone out of it. But it’s been replaced by something different. Something steady and intense.

  I could have lost him.

  I realize this now.

  I think, in some sense, I became so fixated on the idea that he would reject me when he woke up that it distracted me from what I was really feeling: the fact that he could have died, or suffered some unspeakable debilitating injury before I managed to get to him, in which case our new life together might have been instantly and forever changed. And so now, when we make love, we take our time. He has to always be on top, of course. Until his back fully heals. But I don’t mind. And when we’re finished, we lie there for a while in such a way that I can breathe, in a way that feels like the weight of him is steadying my breath, not shortening it.

  I can’t remember which one of us said it first, but it’s been said many times over the past few days. And neither one of us made a big deal about it. We’re not teenagers, for God’s sake. What’s the big deal? They’re just three words.

  I was thinking of saying them out loud, right there at the Copper Pot, when Luke’s eyes caught on something outside and his fork froze halfway to his mouth. Then he was rising to his feet and leaving the table, and I had no choice but to follow him. I had to apologize to Carla and swear we weren’t skipping out on the bill, but she looked more worried by the expression on Luke’s face.

  When I caught up to him, he’d stopped just outside the door, and that’s when I saw the little guy about a half block away, holding the straps of his tattered book bag. Short and slender, with Luke’s same color hair but brushed forward over his head in a big, thick mop that almost hid his eyes. It’d been years since I’d seen him. Not quite as long for Luke, but close. And as they stared at each other, I got nervous. I’d never expected this reunion, not this soon, but there he was. Looking bashful and uncomfortable in his skin, which made sense, given he can never stay in one place and rarely steps outside.

  “Hey,” the guy said.

  And then I saw all of it in the little guy’s eyes at once—the fear and the regret and the need for something. At least I hoped there was need. I hoped he’d stay for a while, because as Luke stared, he didn’t seem angry or poised to vent years’ worth of frustrations. He seemed like a man experiencing some great relief, and I wondered if this was exactly what he n
eeded.

  Then he ran to the guy and took him in his arms, and the two of them hugged like straight men always hug when they want it to last for longer than a few seconds, like two bears wrestling.

  And then Luke looked at me with tears in his eyes because Bailey was home.

  42

  When Scott Durham raps on the car window, Cole realizes the plane carrying Noah Turlington has just touched down outside the hangar. He steps from the SUV.

  A few minutes later, the hangar door ascends just enough to allow Noah and his security team to walk under it. Noah’s dressed in the jeans and T-shirt they provided for him and flanked by six of the best security personnel they could find. If he’s excited to have been released from the cell where they’ve kept him for the past three weeks, it’s nowhere in his expression. His stance is another story, however. He walks with a skip in his step, his head erect.

  Then he sees the two large vessels parked off to the side of him and comes to a sudden stop. Like coffins, but bigger, they sit on wheeled platforms, but their bottoms extend almost to the floor, and the low and steady hum of life-support equipment comes from each one. Maybe he’s afraid he’ll have to make the next leg of his journey inside one of them. Cole opens his mouth, preparing to disabuse him of the notion, then decides to hold off for a bit.

  Noah looks from the transport pods to the gleaming, brand-new Boeing 737 parked nearby; it’s painted a blend of silver and light blue, the color of a daytime sky.

  “Nice plane,” Noah says. “I take it we’re back in business?”

  “You think you’d be here otherwise?”