by Rachel Caine
“Gwen?” Sam answers so fast that it takes my breath away. The sound of his voice. The reality of him. I feel him here with me as I squeeze my eyes shut. “Oh Jesus, Gwen?”
“I’m here,” I whisper, and then try again, louder. “Sam, I’m okay. Kez is with me. We’re okay.”
“Where are you? Javier is here. We can be on the road in half a minute.”
“You can’t,” I tell him. “Sam, remember I asked you if you’d—you’d look after the kids? In case anything happened?”
“No.” He does remember, he’s just rejecting the question. “We’re coming to get you out of whatever shit you’re in. Listen to me: the man you caught, the homeless man—”
“I know. Leonard Bay is MalusNavis.”
“He’s—” He takes in a breath so deep it sounds painful. “He’s also the kid who came to talk to me at the airfield, Gwen. He called himself Tyler Pharos. I should have put that together, should have told you . . . Pharos is a lighthouse. MalusNavis is a beacon. Fuck. I could have stopped this, I could have—”
“It’s not your fault, Sam.” I feel okay now. Centered. Calm in a way I haven’t been on this long, hellish trip. “I screwed up too. Look, I need you to convince the FBI that Kez and I are tracking a killer that they ought to be after. Look at my computer. Put it together. Get them moving, Sam.”
“Moving where?”
“Salah Point, North Carolina,” I tell him. “The lighthouse on the bay. But we can’t wait for them. And you and Javier need to stay there. If he decides to come after the kids—” I can’t finish that sentence. “Please, Sam. Please do this for me.”
He’s silent for a long, long minute, and then he says, “I will get people to you, Gwen. If I need to lie, I will. But I will get them there. Damn the consequences.” It’s killing him not to be in this with me, I can feel that. It would kill me in just the same way.
“I love you,” I whisper. It sounds shaky. I don’t want to let go, but I know I need to. We’re out of time. Jonathan/MalusNavis was very clear about that.
I open my eyes once I’ve ended the call. I look at the little, anonymous town, the nonexistent traffic, the lack of human faces on the street. It feels . . . empty. This whole town is a spiderweb, and we’re caught already. It’s a long, long road back to anything like civilization.
“Gwen,” Kez says. “Why would he let us find out who he really is? What his real name is?”
I think about that. About the way MalusNavis has closed in on me. Shown his face. Given me everything, even if in indirect and slippery methods. And I think about what Sam just told me: that he talked this young man off a bridge. That might have been false, just another ploy.
But what if it wasn’t? What if, finally, he’s had enough?
This may be his endgame. Either way, it has to be mine.
“Kez,” I say. “Look at the map.”
“What am I looking for?”
“That shows the bay, the lighthouse, and a house, right?” She nods. I reach into the car and pull out the map I drew from the research I did on Jonathan’s cell phone, before I dropped it. “What’s missing?”
“The cannery,” she says. “Maybe it was torn down.”
“Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe he left it off because he wants us coming straight for the lighthouse.”
She blows out a frustrated breath. “Jesus. Your mind, Gwen. You scare me sometimes.”
“We need to go to the cannery,” I say. “Let’s not keep him waiting.”
Kez grabs me by the arm as I pass her, heading for the driver’s seat. “Or—and hear me out—we wait for Sam to get real boots on the ground here to back us up.”
“He said ten minutes.” I gently pull free. “Ten minutes until there are consequences. Whose pictures did he send you?”
She doesn’t answer. She just stands there, fists clenched, and then nods.
We get in the Honda and drive.
23
GWEN
We see not a soul on the way out of town. Not a single person behind a window, not a car, nothing. The town feels artificial now, like a movie set.
The whole day feels wrong. Sweatily humid, but cool. The reek of rot gets worse as we drive with windows open, and the Honda’s nonexistent suspension bounces on every bump and crack. The sound of seagulls crying rings in the air like bells.
The smell is worse the closer we get to the beach. I wonder if a whale has beached in the area. It’s that bad, a rancid, fishy smell that makes me want to gag. I breathe it deep instead in the hopes I’ll get used to it. Humans are adaptable, that’s our real strength. We can adapt to anything, given enough time and resources. Jonathan—clever, strange Jonathan—isn’t going to give us that.
I park the Honda near the back fence of the cannery. Kez looks at me, and I look at her, and neither of us speaks. We finally just get out. Kez opens the trunk and hands me a shotgun; she keeps one for herself. We’ve each got our usual sidearms, but she gives me a hunting knife, and I snap it on my belt. She’s got two police-issue body armor vests, and we put those on too. The weight feels smothering, but comforting too.
“Just so we’re clear,” she says, “this is the end of both our careers if we do this and it turns out we were wrong. And that could be exactly what he wants too.”
“We’re not wrong,” I tell her. But she’s also correct. It probably is the end of her career as a detective, regardless; she’s out of her jurisdiction, armed to the teeth, ready to kill. And so am I. I’ve skated out of a lot of close calls. I’m due for a bad fall.
“Okay. Just wanted to be clear about it. Stay together. We don’t split up.”
“Agreed. Kez?”
She slams the trunk and gives me her attention.
“You don’t have to do this. Please think about the baby.”
She shakes her head. “I love you, too, Gwen, but fact is, the next person he comes after could be Javier, since I came this far. I don’t want my baby growing up without a dad because I backed off. Besides . . . it might be you he really wants. But I want him. Prester deserves that much.”
Choices. I’m not sure it’s right, if any of this is right. But in one sense, Jonathan’s correct: everything is a choice. And everything we do will have consequences.
“You got any bolt cutters?” I ask her, and she shakes her head. “Ladder in your pocket?”
“Shut up and pop that hubcap,” she says. “Y’all don’t know how to improvise.”
I smile and use the knife to get the Honda’s hubcap off. She catches it and goes to the fence, kneels down, and starts digging. The soil’s soft and sandy, and she scoops out a big pile, then flips on her back and slithers under. “Good thing about body armor,” she says. “It also keeps you flat for things like this.”
Not that I need a ton of help in that department. Kez and I are otherwise of a size, so the hole she’s dug works for me too, with some creative wriggling. I roll up to my hands and knees and take a step onto the bare ground. It’s harder packed here, but it was used as some kind of outdoor lunch area; there are still a few rusting metal tables and some yellowed plastic molded chairs scattered around. I can’t imagine it would have been too pleasant out here in the summer, but no doubt better than inside the cannery.
There’s no door on this side, so we head around to the parking lot, which faces a loading dock with six roll-up doors. The pavement is buckled and cracked like dry mud; we watch our footing and head up the steps at the loading dock. Kez tries the metal back door. Locked. We work our way down the line of dock doors. One moves, but not much. Maybe six inches up before it sticks fast. It’s a gap, but it’s tight. I don’t ask, I just go first, and push myself underneath. My belt catches, and for a second I panic, thinking that the door’s coming down, that it’s automatic and going to crush me, cut me in half . . . but then I suck in my breath and fumble at my belt buckle and am able to fit through. I roll to my knees, shotgun heavy in my hands, and scan the area.
It’s empty. An empty wareh
ouse that once would have held pallets of canned food shipping out to the area, if not the country. Very still, concrete the shade of mist and ghosts. It’s been cleaned out completely. I don’t even see spiderwebs or broken windows. There are windows, up high toward the ceiling, which is a blessing because it’s otherwise dark. I have a flashlight, but I’d rather save it.
My heart’s pounding. My head’s throbbing. The reek of dead fish is stronger in here, an almost tangible odor, like it’s radiating from the bare concrete. How did people stand it, day after day? They must have never been able to wash the stench out of their hair, their skin, their clothes.
Kez slips under the door and joins me in silent appraisal for a second. “Well,” she says. “This might have been useless.”
“This room is,” I say. “But let’s take a deeper look.”
She coughs into her elbow. “Should have brought Vicks. This is as rank as any crime scene I’ve ever been to.”
She’s right, but we push on. We cross the bare concrete to the far-left wall, where a broad double door stands, big enough to admit forklifts. It’s closed. I try it, and the knob turns easily in my hand. When the door swings open, it doesn’t make a sound. I’m ready. Ready to fire on him if he’s standing there. I will not hesitate.
I’m so focused on that, it doesn’t occur to me to wonder why the door moves so smoothly. And then I’m blinded by a white-hot glare of light and a wall of sound so chaotic, so loud that it stuns me like a physical blow. The noise is crippling, astonishing; it drives me to my knees. I’ve dropped the shotgun and clapped my hands to my ears and I don’t care, anything to stop the noise, though even that doesn’t stop it, only muffles it the slightest bit. I can’t see either. Blinding strobes in my eyes. By that time, I realize I’ve triggered a trap and drop flat, which I should’ve done in the first place, and try to roll away. The farther I get from the doorway, the better I feel, but I can’t see. My ears are bells ringing with incoherent noise. Kez. Where’s Kez?
Someone’s pulling me away from the chaos, hands under my arms. Taking me farther from the torture. Thank you. Thank you, Kez. I try to say it, but I don’t know if I’m actually speaking, shouting, screaming. My ears don’t work yet.
I can’t see anything. Just blindingly white ghosts of strobes that persist and twist and move.
The noise gets fainter. The strobes get less blinding. I feel myself being pulled into a dark, quiet area, and I suddenly need to throw up. I roll on my side and do that, horrified and ashamed and wildly out of control, and I can hear myself sobbing and gagging now, but as soft and distant as a memory.
“Kez,” I whisper. Or think I do. “Kez—”
A shadow moves in front of my blurred vision and leans close. I try to focus.
It’s not Kez.
It’s him.
Empty, bland face, expressionless eyes. One side of his head is crushed in, but healed over. It’s been years since the day his sister was taken. Years for him to learn how to pretend to be normal, or some approximation of it.
The fumbling uncertainty of Leonard Bay is gone as he searches me, finding and collecting my weapons. I feel a tug at my pants legs, and then he flips me onto my face. Zip ties tug my hands together behind me. Fast, efficient, merciless. I can’t get to the ankle gun, if it’s even still there.
“It’s for your own protection.” I hear the words indistinctly, like they’re coming from the surface and I’m far, far underwater. “Trust me.”
He flips me over again. I’m trying to get control, but I just manage an uncoordinated flail with my legs before he has the collar of my jacket and is pulling me relentlessly onward. I can’t see anything but what we pass, and that’s just shapes and shadows that resolve into concrete columns, padded iron supports. The acoustics of the room shift, or my ears do, and I realize that we’re passing a silent, still sculpture of a processing line. The smell is horrific here. A physical presence forcing itself down my throat.
But everything is so clean.
“I knew you’d choose this,” he says. His voice is faint under the constant ringing. “Clever people always do this to themselves. You just can’t help it.”
“Kez,” I say. “Where’s Kez?” I try to fishtail, slow him down. It doesn’t work. He’s strong, and when I manage to hook a foot onto a passing support, it just slides free at his next tug. “What did you do to Kez?”
“She’s fine. I didn’t want to hurt her, you understand that? She’s not the point. I admire what she does.”
He’s pulled me through most of this assembly line, I think, but no, it just keeps going. Conveyor belts and metal bins, snaking off in all directions. The guts of the machine. Millions of fish passed through here. Billions. All bled and gutted and filleted and packed for easy consumption. And now it’s me being processed.
“You said there’d be choices!” I manage to shout it, and now, finally, my voice sounds nearly normal to my ears, though there’s a constant loud, sizzling hiss I’m not sure I’ll ever lose again. “This isn’t a choice!”
“We haven’t even started,” he says. “Do you know how much time it takes to destroy a life? One second.” His voice is strangely flat and unaffected, like he doesn’t know how to communicate emotion or doesn’t care to try. If he had an accent, he’s lost it with time and training. “Sometimes it takes longer. It took my sister a lot longer to die. Minutes.”
I don’t know how to answer. I can’t tell if the knife is still on my belt. The shotgun’s gone. I don’t know if I have anything left to use at all.
“Three,” he says. “Two. One. We’re here.”
He stops pulling me, and I immediately roll right to try to twist his wrist, break free, but he isn’t surprised. He lets momentum carry me over to my right side, and I feel myself sliding forward as he throws me, like a bowling ball. I try to stop myself, but he steps back, and I feel his foot land firmly in the small of my back. I feel a tug and a small, sharp nick of pain. My hands are free. I try to push myself up.
He kicks me hard, so hard I feel all the air forced out of me, and then I’m sliding forward again.
Into the dark.
I hear the door slam behind me and locks being thrown. I hear my own panicked breathing, the frantic slap of my body flopping against the floor. Tile, I think. Burning cold. It’s absolutely black in here, except for the pallid strobe afterimages my eyes are still remembering in chemical traces. I force myself to go still, to relax. He stayed outside. I’m alone in the dark. I just need to breathe and think.
My hands and ankles are free. I can stand up. I just need to be careful not to bash my head against something, trip, break bones . . . I’ve always had a low-key fear of the dark, but this is nightmarish. I don’t want to move. I just want to curl into a ball and hide. Instead, I force myself to take inventory. I’ve been cut, just a little. I can feel the wound throbbing on my wrist, but it doesn’t seem that deep. I feel for the knife, but the sheath’s empty. So is my shoulder holster. I reach for the backup ankle gun that I strapped in place, and remarkably, it’s still there. He didn’t find it. It’s a small .38, lethal at close range. I feel miles better with the light weight of it in my hand.
I look for the burner phone I stuck in my jacket pocket. It’s gone too.
It reeks in here, even worse than the last room. So bad I cough and choke and nearly throw up again until I steady myself.
It isn’t fish this time. I know this smell, this particular smell that the fish odor covers so well.
I’m in the room with death. Something large.
The lights suddenly blaze on, brighter than hope, and I find myself scooting violently backward until my back hits the metal door behind me, unable to take my eyes off what I’m seeing.
I’ve found Sheryl Lansdowne.
I scream. I can’t help it, it just bursts out of me like a blowtorch’s flame, piercing and desperate and horrified. My first thought is that she’s been broken like a china doll, only china dolls don’t bleed when their a
rms and legs come off. Her limbs are separated a precise distance from her torso. Her head’s still attached. She’s still dressed in a flannel shirt and jeans; the cuts to remove her arms and legs were so precise that the fabric was sliced clean.
It takes me a few horrific seconds to realize what else I see. Sheryl’s fingers and toes have a lifeless, bluish tinge to the flesh, and they’re actively decomposing, like they’ve been severed from her for hours, maybe as much as a day.
But her face and the exposed skin on her neck still look pink. Pale, but alive.
She opens her eyes.
“Hello?” She sounds drugged. Calm. Her pupils are enormous, like black holes. “Tyler?”
She’s alive. Somehow. Impossibly alive. And then I force myself to look at her body, at the places where the limbs were severed. The wounds are covered with some kind of plastic bandages. She’s still bleeding at the edges in a steady flow. There’s an IV hooked up to her body, line embedded in her neck. She’s getting plasma and some kind of clear liquid in a bag.
It’s painkiller. It has to be. Because she’s not screaming.
She smiles, like she’s been told a joke. Then her face twists, and her eyes fill with tears, and she says, “I didn’t want to.” As if she’s having a conversation with someone who isn’t there. I slowly, slowly work my way out of my paralysis and push myself up to a crouch, then to a standing position. I make myself look away from Sheryl and toward the rest of the room. It’s just a small, white room—tiled on all four walls, on the floor, even on the ceiling. There’s a drain in the floor. Her blood is dripping down into it.
The only way in or out of the room, other than the small drain, is the door I came through.
There’s a small electrical outlet on the far wall, and—weirdly incongruous—a small speaker plugged into it. I catch a glint of glass sitting at the top of it: a camera.
Jonathan is watching.
“You have a choice to make,” his voice says. “You can sit in this room and watch Sheryl die. It’ll probably take a while. Her painkillers will run out soon, and her blood supply. It’ll be an agonizing way to go.”