Blind Fall

by Christopher Rice

  Because it seemed likely the only option available, John took a seat for a second time and said, “Do you have family here?”

  “My mother retired here.”

  “You’re staying with your mother?” John asked, but Oster’s attention was focused on Dean’s suicide note, which he slid across the table toward John.

  “My mother died three years ago,” he said. “My sister and I have been trying to sell her place, but we haven’t had much luck.” But there was a tense edge in his voice now, which suggested he had noticed the change in John. When John looked up, Danny Oster, aka Charles Keaton, blinked rapidly and cleared his throat. Then he said, “Well, I need to get going.” He stood up and started to leave.

  And John said, “I’ll walk you to your car.”

  And John saw a shiver go through Oster, saw the man glance at John over his shoulder with pursed lips and a crease above the bridge of his nose, then continue toward the entrance to the diner without another word. Behind him, John matched him step for step, even as Oster quickened his pace. With his left hand he reached up and undid the knot in the sling that held his cast close to his chest. As the two of them stepped out the door one after the other, he let the sling slip free and fall to the pavement behind him.

  Outside, Oster started walking toward the spot where John had parked Eddie’s truck. Alongside it was a blue Econoline van and a battered maroon Honda Accord. “Which one’s yours?” John asked. But Oster didn’t answer, just kept walking toward the cars, pretending to be oblivious that John was barely a foot behind him the whole way.

  “The van,” Oster finally said without looking back.

  “Gotcha.”

  And Oster went for the driver-side door. When John saw that they were out of sight of the diner, he swung his cast out from his body and delivered a blow to the back of Oster’s head. Oster slammed face-first into the side of the van, but that’s when John saw his hand had dipped inside his vest before the blow had been struck. The pain sang through John’s body, and as he took a step back, preparing to deliver another blow, Oster rolled over onto his back, hit the asphalt ass-first, and raised the pistol he had pulled from his vest.

  “It’s not what you think,” Oster said, gasping.

  “Maybe this time it is!” John replied.

  Oster shook his head madly, blinked rapidly, desperately trying to clear the effects of the blow to his brain cavity. “No, John. No!”

  “What then? What? What was Alex Martin doing up here? Why did they find the car he was driving ten miles down the road?”

  Oster gasped for breath, but he held the pistol steady. “Anything I say you’re going to think is a lie.”

  “Yeah. So where the fuck does that leave us?”

  “Start walking. I’m done talking. I’ve got something to show you.”

  20

  The milky cloud cover that had moved in while they were inside the diner started to shed frail snowflakes that looked like ash. Oster ordered John to walk several yards in front of him, left arm at his side. They came to a narrow asphalt road that curved up a pine-covered slope.

  “Your sister said you thought someone was following you,” John finally said, loud enough to be heard without turning around. He had no idea how far behind him Oster was. Far enough, he assumed, to have a good aim, and far enough to run if he missed.

  “She said you thought it was me. Did you?”

  “Keep walking,” came Oster’s response.

  John did, but he kept talking as well. “You know what I think? I think you started following me.”

  “Left up the driveway,” Oster said. John did as he was told, even though the driveway snaked uphill through dense woods.

  John said, “I think you were following us for most of the time. You must have followed us to Arizona, and then when he left, when he went off on his own, you…”

  Now that he had arrived at this point, he had trouble getting the words out. Oster must have sensed the rage building inside John because he ordered him to place his left hand on the back of his head. “What a stupid fucking move, Oster. You wanted to get back at me and you killed someone just like you.”

  Behind him Oster barked with laughter that had a tinge of madness in it. “Like me, huh?” he gasped. “How’s that? A rapist? A child molester? Your fucking punching bag when you couldn’t accept who your brother was?”

  John could see they were approaching a house up ahead—a dark green cabin that stood on stilts twenty feet above the slope, so that its front porch had a view across the treetops. The stilts were painted the color of bark, as if the entire house were meant to be camouflaged by the woods. The staircase that climbed all the way to the front porch had high railings and made two turns. As he made the second turn, paused on the landing for a few seconds holding his cast in front of him to keep his balance, he saw that Oster was making the first turn twenty steps below him, keeping more than a safe distance.

  John stopped at the top step, tried to gauge how many steps it was to the front door. But Oster ordered him to move forward. John practically had his nose to the front door when heard something hit the porch floor and slide toward him. A key ring bumped against his right shoe.

  “Open the door,” Oster said in a trembling voice.

  John dared a glance back, saw Oster holding the pistol on him in a two-handed grip that looked steady and sure. Behind him, the snowcapped trees descended the horizon until they lost their definition inside the fast-moving white clouds that had blown in over the entire mountain. “Promise me that if you shoot me, you won’t do it in the back,” John said.

  Oster groaned and screwed his eyes shut, as if John were a stubborn child. “Open the goddamn door, take ten steps, and then turn to your right.”

  Twice he almost dropped the keys because the cast forced him to use his left hand. Then the key slipped in the lock. He turned it, then released it so he could turn the knob. Inside he saw cheap Oriental rugs, wooden French country furniture that looked like it could be snapped into kindling without much effort. Just as Oster had ordered him to, he took ten steps and turned to his right, found himself facing a closed door. He looked back and saw Oster standing in the front door to the cabin, pistol still raised. John opened the door.

  The room had once been a home office. A small secretary was pushed against one wall, its top shelf stuffed with tattered paperbacks. The window had a lace curtain and a view across snowy treetops, and on an air mattress on the floor, Alex Martin lay wrapped in a plaid comforter, sleeping with his mouth open, his nose still swollen and bruised from their last fight, his chest rising with breaths that sounded pained. The floor next to him was a veritable nurse’s station: rolls of Ace bandages, cold compresses, a few prescription medicine bottles.

  “I told him you were coming,” Oster said. “He said you were probably going to try to hurt me. He told me not to meet with you, told me to wait until he was back on his feet so he could be the one to tell you.”

  John waited for Oster to elaborate on the preposterous statements he’d just made, but instead Oster turned to the secretary and opened his fist on the desk, keeping his hand in place so the six bullets he released onto its surface didn’t roll to the floor. John assumed he had taken them out of the pistol he had used to subdue him.

  “He followed me from Redlands up the mountain, three days ago,” Oster said. “But he didn’t have chains on his tires, and it was snowing hard. He went off the road. I almost called the police, but I went back for him first because I was sure he was hurt. Then I saw who it was—his face was all over the news by then. He begged me not to take him to the hospital, but I think he broke a rib. The pain pills are my mother’s, from an old surgery. But they’re almost out, and I’m not about to try to refill a dead woman’s prescription. Not with my history.”

  “Why did he come up here?”

  “Ask him,” Oster said.

  “Does he know anything about what happened? Has he seen the news?”

  “No,” Os
ter whispered. “I wouldn’t show it to him, and when he asked me, I lied. I thought if he knew, he would be too afraid to go to the hospital. A lot of good that did.”

  John sank down next to the mattress and laid a hand on Alex’s shoulder. It took a light shake to wake him, and when Alex saw who had pulled him from his stupor, he screwed his eyes shut. Tears spilled from them. John assumed it was physical pain, drew the comforter down, and then pulled up Alex’s T-shirt. The bruise looked like a bag of ink that had burst around his lower rib and then been driven up the right side of his body by a powerful wind.

  “What are you doing here?” John asked.

  “You can’t rape a man on his back, John.” At first, John assumed it was the medication talking. But after a deep breath, Alex continued, “It’s not possible unless he’s tied up. And your brother wasn’t tied up. You didn’t see what you thought you saw that day. I thought if I found Ost—if I found Danny, I mean, I could find out what really happened. I could make you understand. I thought what happened to your brother was the reason you hated Mike.”

  “I never hated Mike.”

  “Maybe not. But I wanted you to accept him. And I thought you would do that if you knew what really happened to your brother.”

  He took a moment to digest this. Then he said, “You knew how to shoot. You didn’t need me to teach you how to defend yourself.”

  “No,” he said. “Mike taught me when we moved into the cabin. I needed…” He lost hold of his words, clenched his teeth, and looked to the ceiling, as if the exertion of his honesty and the physical pain he was fighting were too much in combination.

  “You were right, John. I was the reason you never came to our house.” He gave John a moment to process this. “He asked me if he could invite you, and I told him I would leave him, because I was afraid of you. I was afraid of what you could make him do.”

  It was the very accusation John had leveled against Alex back in Arizona a few nights earlier, and looking back now, he could see how the truth in it had sent Alex off the rails.

  Alex continued, “I didn’t know I was taking away his last chance to show you who he truly was. And I can never take that back, but I thought if I could make you accept him then it would be okay.”

  John sat back, brought his knees to his chest, and tried to get control of his breathing. Since their first meeting, John had assumed that Alex’s only real desire was to punish him for his own failings. But now he could see that Alex had been driven by a need to repay a debt to Mike Bowers that exceeded the one John owed.

  “He knew, John,” Alex said. “He knew why you screwed up that day. You told him, but he pretended to be asleep so you wouldn’t have to deal with it. He knew and he understood.”

  John turned his head away from Alex so the guy couldn’t see his tears, but Alex reached out across the carpet and laid his fingers gently on one of John’s knees. “I know you won’t give up until someone tells you your mission is done. It’s done, John. Mike was right. He used to say about you, ‘There is a hero wherever he walks—he just don’t know it yet.’”

  “He said that?”

  Alex nodded.

  John turned his face away from Alex so the man wouldn’t see the emotions he could no longer control. Alex had just given him permission to grieve Mike as he would a brother. “And where are you going? Now that I’m done,” John asked.

  “When I start to feel better, I’m going to go away for a while. Danny—I’m sorry, Charles—is going to show me how. He has experience. And friends. Maybe I’ll go to Mexico just like he did.”

  John had to remind himself that Alex had not seen the news for the past three days, didn’t know that both his mother and Ray Duncan were dead, had no idea that he was about to inherit millions of dollars that had almost been stolen from him. For all Alex knew, Duncan and men just like him walked the world with impunity.

  “My mission is not done,” John said. “Everyone knows what Ray Duncan did. It’s over, Alex. But Mike’s body is lying in the Hanrock County morgue because his parents won’t claim it. That means you have to do it. That means I have to see that you do it. We don’t leave our dead behind. After you claim his body, you can set me free all you want. But not until then, okay?”

  He gave Alex several minutes to process this, expected more questions, but none came. “Can you walk?” he asked him.

  “I walked some yesterday,” he said.

  “Good. That’s good.”

  As if to prove himself, Alex sat up slowly, wincing slightly before he shifted his weight onto the left side of his body. He stopped and took several deep breaths, then looked up into John’s eyes and he saw that John was intently watching his every move. Then he asked for a little while to get ready, as if he had simply been roused from a nap.

  Danny Oster was leaning against the rail of the front porch, smoking a cigarette and watching the parade of snow clouds move over the treetops. “You’re going to drive me back to my truck,” John said.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “He has something he needs to take care of.”

  “He needs to go to the hospital.”

  “He’s needed that for days!” John snapped. Just this tiny outburst had them both staring at their feet, a small but potent reminder of the violence that had flown between them in the past.

  “He needs to claim Mike’s body before his parents have a change of heart. They’re big-time Bible thumpers, but the longer they look like assholes on television, the better the chances they might reconsider. If they claim that body, Alex will never get to pay his last respects.”

  Five minutes later, they were pulling into the diner’s parking lot in Oster’s Cadillac Seville, inherited from his mother. John gripped the door handle, then felt the words coming up out of him, too fast to stop. “You’re not to blame for everything my brother did to himself, but you had no business with him. No, it wasn’t rape, but it wasn’t love, either. Maybe inside you were the same age as him back then. But I hope you’re older now, Danny. I really do.”

  He looked at Oster, saw him staring dead ahead with a defiant set to his jaw and both hands holding the steering wheel. John got inside his truck, and they both drove back to the house. They were pulling into the driveway when John saw that Alex had walked halfway down the steps by himself, but the half grimace on his face and the flush in his cheeks suggested that he had been halted by pain. John parked his truck as Oster mounted the steps five at a time and began leading Alex down the rest of the way, with one arm wrapped tightly around the guy’s lower back.

  Alex was loaded into the passenger seat, and John was about to step behind the wheel when Oster called out to him. John looked up, saw Oster was ten steps from the bottom, a safe distance between them once again. “Where is he buried, John?”

  He wanted to break the guy’s nose again. But he was learning not to trust these full-body reactions to short sentences. Hiding the location of his brother’s grave felt akin to hiding the fact of his death. So instead he told Oster the name of the cemetery in Cherry Valley that had been emblazoned on his memory ever since his sister had mailed it to him upon his return home from Iraq.

  John had just turned onto Highway 129 when Alex said, “Where did you think I was?”

  “I didn’t know. I tried to find you. I thought you were hiding.”

  “Why?”

  “I thought you were going to kill Ray Duncan.”

  Alex turned to look at him without lifting his head from where it was resting against the window. “Why, John?”

  “Because if I had been through what you’d been through, it’s what I would have done.”

  Four hours later, they reached Boswell. As they approached the squat stone building that housed the Hanrock County morgue, John saw that Patsy had followed his instructions to alert every television station in the state of their imminent arrival. When the shouting reporters moved in on their truck like a tide, Alex gave John a fearful look, but in such a short time John had be
come so accustomed to crowds of reporters that he knew he could lead Alex through the crowd without fail.

  With his left arm wrapped around Alex’s lower back for support, John walked them toward the glass doors to the building’s lobby. Patsy was already inside, standing before several uniformed sheriff’s deputies who didn’t seem happy to see her, the reporters outside, or the two new arrivals who had become the center of the storm. He had instructed Alex not to respond to any questions, which left him to do the talking.

  Why were they there today? What were they trying to do?

  John shouted over the reporters’ questions, “We are here to claim the body of Michael Bowers, former captain in the United States Marine Corps. His body has been in the morgue for three days now, like a John Doe, due to the bigotry of his family members. He should be released to the man he shared his life and his home with, and that man is Alex Martin.” He tried to ignore the reporters angling their tape recorders at his mouth and the hot glare of the news cameras blocking their path.

  It took them fifteen minutes to reach the front doors of the building. Several times Alex almost lost his footing, winced in pain when John’s attempt to readjust him brushed up against his injured side. If two of the deputies hadn’t come out of the lobby to guide them through, they might not ever have made it inside.

  Patsy made no move to welcome either of them. Her pale, wide-eyed expression suggested that the cops had threatened to beat her with their nightsticks before John and Alex showed up. The cold look she gave Alex was for show; she had cried when John had told her where he finally found the man and how he had ended up there. The miniphalanx included the white-haired sheriff, whom John had not seen since those frozen seconds before Charlotte Martin had been fatally shot.

  For a few seconds they all stood there, frozen, listening to the clamor of reporters outside. Finally the sheriff said, “This was not the way to go about this, Mr. Houck.”