by Chaz McGee
He had nowhere to go, nowhere at all, except one hope of escape.
Mullins was still crouched on the concrete overhang, frantically wrapping the chain of his wrench-like tool around the metal bars then pumping the handle, trying to bite through the iron even as the water from the pipe began to gather in strength, rising in volume until he had to wrap an arm through the bars to steady himself as the overflow tore at his legs. The water in the pipe was already a foot deep and the rain showed no signs of abating. Mullins looked up, alarmed, as sounds of Parker’s fury reached him from inside the tunnel.
Parker had regained control by the time he reached the mouth of the pipe where Mullins worked frantically at his task. ‘Move faster,’ Parker ordered him. ‘How much longer?’
Mullins looked up briefly and sensed a weakness in Parker’s surface calm. A flicker of satisfaction crossed his face. ‘You really think that was smart, making all that noise when we’re trying to make a clean getaway?’ he asked. The cutting tool had finally bitten through the bottom of one of the bars and Parker reached impatiently for it, bending it toward him as he tried to widen the opening.
‘You’re only making it harder,’ Mullins said. ‘You screw with the angle and it’s going to take me longer to make the top cut.’
The water was rising steadily in the pipe, but Parker did not notice. He was angry at being deprived of Olivia and distracted by Mullins’ satisfaction at his dilemma. He did not like anyone having power over him. He did not like that Mullins was free on one side while he was trapped inches away on the other. He did not like being told what to do by a man he saw as inferior, weaker and less worthy. In a flash, he had pulled the plastic wrist restraints from his back pocket and clamped one around Mullins’ wrist and the other around one of the metal bars still blocking the pipe.
‘Hey!’ Mullins cried, nearly dropping his tool. ‘Are you nuts? I need that hand.’
‘You’ve got enough movement to finish. Just keep working at this bar,’ Parker ordered him, pointing at the next bar in. ‘Break through at the bottom and I can pull it toward me enough to get through. Hurry!’
Mullins stared at the pipe, then back at the restraint clamped around his hand. He had just enough leeway to reach the bottom of the bar, but the water was rising quickly and, if he didn’t hurry, he’d soon be working underwater, making it that much harder to cut through.
He looked up at Parker. ‘Take the handcuffs off or I’m done,’ Mullins said.
Parker’s temper flared. He was the master and he’d had enough of his sidekick. His hand lashed out as quickly as a cobra’s strike. He grabbed Mullins by the throat and pulled him closer. ‘You listen to me, you little piece of shit,’ Parker said. His voice grew in timbre and deepened. ‘You will obey me. Work faster. You will get me out of here now.’
It was too late. A rumble echoed in the darkness of the pipe, gathering in volume as the rushing waters drew nearer. A wave of run-off was approaching, gathering in momentum as the main flow reached each ancillary pipe and the overburdened system disgorged its flow.
Parker glanced over his shoulder and back at a terrified Mullins. The plumber flailed out, striking Parker with the heavy cutting tool. It bounced off Parker’s skull, leaving a bloody dent. Parker swayed but recovered, tightening his grip around Mullins’ throat.
‘Get me out of here,’ Parker commanded and, for the first time, I heard a hesitation in his voice, the smallest flicker of fear.
The waters behind him rushed closer and the roaring grew louder.
Mullins hit him again with the tool and Parker released his grip, rubbing at the wound on his head in astonishment. How dare Mullins defy him?
Mullins stepped back, eluding Parker’s reach by balancing on the edge of the concrete platform below the pipe. But he was still trapped on the hillside by the plastic handcuff linking his left wrist to the pipe.
‘You’re a dead man,’ Parker told him. He clawed at Mullins through the bars like an animal.
‘You sure about that?’ Mullins taunted.
The waters hit. A dark, roiling wave of run-off barreled out of the pipe behind Parker and hit him with the force of a train, slamming him against the bars. He fought the water and the water fought back, slamming his body again and again against the heavy metal bars crisscrossing the opening. It was brutal in its force. It was magnificent in its power. It was unstoppable as it pinned Parker against the bars and cut off all oxygen, trapping him in place.
Mullins could not escape, either. He was swept off his feet as the water found the edge of the platform and cascaded over the edge of it to pour down the side of the hill. Mullins sprawled on the ledge, held in place only by the hard plastic handcuff around one wrist. He gasped for breath and grabbed for an iron bar with his other hand. Dangling over the lip of the platform, he twisted and gasped for oxygen in the air pocket under the ledge.
Above him, Otis Parker was dying. The roaring waters bounced him about like a plastic toy. His upper body become jammed in the opening that Mullins had made in the bars, making it seem as if he was reaching for Mullins underwater. Perhaps he was. I had never seen such anger, such concentrated fury as I saw in Parker’s last moments of life. It was as if his body had a will that transcended life itself and was seeking a connection with Mullins even as the rushing waters poured over both men.
Above this strange tableau, lightning flashed and a thunderclap boomed, its echo rolling across the valley with a terrible power that no one, not even Parker, could challenge. It was a cry of triumph from the skies above. Lightning flashed again, illuminating the two men. Their faces reflected a pale light beneath the waters. Then all was darkness again.
THIRTY-EIGHT
I spent the hours until dawn stretched out beneath the pounding rain, feeling the drops bounce through me, enjoying the lingering trace of ions that filled me with a pleasant buzzing. I gave myself to the night and to the pounding rain. I gave myself to the wrath of a world I no longer lived in. She was awesome in her anger.
The rain finally stopped half an hour before dawn. When the sun rose, it spread tentative orange and red fingers across the eastern sky, as if seeking a way to part the lingering clouds so that the day might bloom in all its glory. I heard shouts on the road beneath the hill soon after as city workers, dispatched to check on the flood damage caused by the storm, spotted Mullins sprawled across the concrete lip beneath the pipe. Above him, the water had slowed to a steady trickle. Otis Parker’s body had been pounded into a bloated, gray mass that was embedded between the iron bars and glistened with a thick coating of oily sludge.
Rescue workers and police arrived soon after. Maggie and Calvano were among the first to slide down the muddy slope to see what had happened for themselves. They both looked as if they had been up all night, searching for Eugene Mullins.
Well, they had found him and, astonishingly enough, he was still alive.
Eugene Mullins had found a pocket of air by twisting his head below the concrete lip and escaping the water’s onslaught. He had somehow crawled back on to the concrete ledge when the waters abated and now lay, bloodied and unconscious, across its rough surface.
A crowd of hospital staff had gathered on the edge of the cliff above the pipe. The ground was so soggy and treacherous that they had to hook their fingers around the thick steel weave of the safety fence to keep from sliding down the steep slope.
The orderly with the braided beard was among the crowd, his gold tooth twinkling in the sun. He was at work early for someone who had clocked out so late, I thought. In fact, I realized, he always seemed to be at Holloway, no matter what time of day or night.
At least he always had been there until now. I took my eyes off him to verify that Connie’s fiancé, Cal, was among the crowd and when I looked back at where he had been standing, the orderly was gone.
I would never see him at Holloway again.
It took a while to extract Parker’s body from the bars and to locate a key that could free Mullins from t
he plastic restraints. Parker was covered with a plastic tarp and born away before anyone had stared at what was left of him too long. The emergency medical technicians lifted Mullins on to a stretcher and were about to attempt the tricky maneuver of lifting him up the soaked hill when Maggie stopped the attendants so she could take a closer look. Satisfied that it was, indeed, Eugene Mullins, she nodded and called in instructions to have his hospital room guarded. She was taking no chances that he would elude her again.
Calvano was a squeamish soul, but he was also taking no chances, at least not when it came to Otis Parker. He followed the two men who had lifted Parker’s body up the slope, catching up to them as they were rolling him into an ambulance for the ride to the morgue. He crawled into the back of the ambulance alongside the stretcher, then lifted the thick plastic covering Parker’s body and stared down at it for a long time. He barely looked human, which I thought was fitting. Calvano asked the attendants for help rolling Parker over and sliding down what was left of his jeans. There, on possibly the only unmarred part of Parker’s body – his buttocks – was a colorful tattoo of a cartoon roadrunner kicking up clouds of dust across Parker’s ass. Calvano nodded. He was satisfied. Otis Parker was dead.
The technicians stared at him, waiting for an explanation.
‘Don’t ask,’ Calvano told them. ‘Don’t even ask.’
I returned to the top of the hill where Cal was talking to Maggie away from the crowd. ‘What happened?’ he asked, his voice making it plain that he feared her answer. It would be up to him to put Holloway back together again.
Maggie shook her head. ‘I don’t really know,’ she confessed. ‘But Otis Parker is dead and I think we have the man who was killing for him. It’s over.’
Behind them, silhouetted by the morning sun, Gonzales was striding toward Maggie with an expression of intense frustration laced with a non-specific anger. Cal saw him coming and wisely hurried away, leaving Maggie to take the heat.
‘Don’t say a word,’ Gonzales told Maggie. ‘I want to see for myself.’
‘Sir, I was just going to say to be care—’ Before Maggie could get her warning out, Gonzales hit a patch of mud and went down hard, sliding over the lip of the cliff and bumping down the slope to an ignominious stop by the concrete ledge. He clawed frantically for purchase and managed to right himself inches from a startled crime scene specialist, who froze in position above Eugene Mullins’ toolbox, too shocked to do anything but stare at her suddenly arrived commander. She held a pink cell phone in one hand.
‘Well?’ Gonzales asked her.
‘Sir,’ she said, holding out the pink cell phone. ‘I think this belonged to Darcy Swan.’
Before Gonzales could react, shouting broke out on the roadway below Holloway. Two frantic men in a yellow municipal pickup truck had flagged a squad car responding to the crime scene above. Both men were waving their arms and pointing down the road. Other squad cars were pulling over to see what the excitement was about.
Belinda Swan had turned up. Concealed only by a shallow grave too close to the river’s edge, her body had been uncovered by the floodwaters, tumbled across meadows and fields, slid around boulders and shot through newly carved sluice channels until, finally, it lodged in the brush by the side of the road barely a hundred yards from where her daughter’s body had been found. A crew dispatched to survey the flood damage had discovered her while clearing an access path of debris. Her miniskirt was pushed up over her thighs and her low-cut blouse was caked with mud. Her mouth gaped open at an odd angle and the responding officers soon discovered why: a thick wad of dollar bills had been shoved down her throat. Belinda Swan had choked to death on money.
I knew who had done it. I had seen the scratches on Eugene Mullins’ face. He had probably used her, telling her that his son had killed her daughter and enlisting her help framing Adam for the attack on the school. But Belinda Swan was Belinda Swan, after all. She had been smart enough to figure out what really happened – and stupid enough to try and extort money from Mullins for her knowledge.
They would get Eugene Mullins for it. There was no doubt in my mind. Belinda Swan was a fighter and I knew she had gone down swinging. They would find his skin under her fingernails. They would make the connection and they would nail Eugene Mullins for murder. His career as a killer was over.
Otis Parker had been right after all – the man lacked a sense of style.
THIRTY-NINE
Eugene Mullins recovered. Indeed, he thrived. As the weeks to his trial passed, he grew larger and more imposing by the day. He was being strengthened by forces I did not understand – nor would I seek to understand them. My part in the battle had ended.
It was up to Maggie now. She made it her personal mission to ensure that Eugene Mullins did not get the free ride that Otis Parker had enjoyed. Whatever time Mullins had spent at Holloway, meeting with Parker in the recesses of the common bathroom, recognizing a kindred spirit, was over. Parker was dead and there was no way anyone was going to let Mullins end up at Holloway instead of prison.
Adam’s grandmother turned out not to be as out of it as Eugene Mullins had assumed. She could confirm fights with Belinda Swan, that he had lied about his whereabouts the night Darcy Swan died and much more. She was a font of information on her son and she showed no hesitation in telling the police everything she knew. Unfortunately, the old lady also seemed to blame herself for what her son had done and she apparently could not live with that knowledge. She died a few months after Eugene Mullins had been convicted of both Swan murders, as well as the killing of Otis Parker’s shrink.
I should have felt bad for Adam, but the truth was that I was relieved that he was freed from that dark, unhappy home that smelt of urine and beer and sorrow. Instead, I prayed that the old woman had gone to a happier world.
Maggie had never been big on loose ends. Even though Eugene Mullins ended up where Otis Parker had always belonged – in a tiny cell on a lonely hall in a dark corner of a prison where people spent each day waiting for their lives to be over – she reopened the investigation into the death of his wife. She was going to nail him for everything she could. She found that Adam had been right all along. His mother had not, in fact, left this world either willingly or by her own hands. She had been his father’s first victim.
I suppose you could argue that finding out about his mother’s death cost Adam Mullins his father, but Eugene Mullins had never been much of a prize in that department and, in a way, the truth was that it helped Adam regain his mother. He knew now that she had not left him by choice. I hoped it would be enough.
I thought the kid would be OK. Not once did Adam visit his father, not in the hospital nor in prison. I had no argument with that. His father’s arrest and involvement with Parker hurt, I knew, but it could not have been much of a surprise to Adam. He had been trapped with his father in the little house they shared for years. He knew, better than anyone, what his father was capable of.
Besides, Adam had people who loved him and would see him through. He had Connie, who welcomed him into her house without hesitation, converting the guest bedroom into a sanctuary that Adam could make as tidy as the tiny space he had left behind. The room once designated as my place of banishment on drunken nights was transformed into a place of hope for a boy who had finally caught a break in life. And Adam’s English teacher, Mr Phillips, was there for him, too, to be his advocate with Social Services and to make sure that Adam got the scholarship he had been hoping for.
In the end, Adam Mullins – who had been born on the wrong side of the tracks and, by all prescribed conventions of our town, doomed to die there, too – escaped Helltown.
My son Michael found himself while helping Adam through the difficult weeks of his father’s trial. I think that all the months of being the boy whose father had been killed during a drug bust, under murky circumstances, had left Michael feeling like a character in a movie he did not want to see. Adam gave Michael himself back. He gave him a way to disc
over strength and compassion within himself and he gave Michael something bigger than himself to worry about. People call these byproducts of our suffering ‘blessings in disguise.’ But I think they represent so much more than that. I think they prove that there is, indeed, an evening outside of the Universe, one that takes place in a hundred different ways in a thousand different places each and every hour of every day that passes in the plane of the living. It is a constant taking back of the world from the forces of darkness. Who or what oversees this balance, I cannot say. But it is an awe-inspiring power once you notice it.
The house where I had once lived was transformed into a noisy, teenage boy headquarters where Connie reigned supreme and sports equipment cluttered every room, and my youngest son, Sean, delighted in having another older brother – one who was actually nice to him.
They would all be OK, most especially Michael. He had left the darkness behind.
Connie continued to see Cal, but something had changed between them forever. Connie no longer needed Cal as much as she once had and Cal had seen Connie’s astonishing inner strength, strength she had earned during her years with me. Whether they would stay together, I could not say. But I did know that, at least for now, I’d had enough of watching them and enough of contemplating what I did not have. I was constantly leaving Connie and returning to her, drawn by the need to spy on the life I had wasted. Enough. From here on out, I would fight that urge. It keeps me here, in this place, and I know that, no matter what, my mission now is to move on.
Holloway survived. It survived the murders and the chaos and the macabre sight of Otis Parker’s body being toted across the lawn and disposed of like the garbage he was.
Holloway survived because it had to. My town, like all towns, needs a place like Holloway – a place where people who are lost can find their way back to a tentative truce with themselves; a place where people can make peace with the minutes that mark their days and find a way to go on living through the years. Those who remain at Holloway lead the simplest of lives. They walk, they see, they eat, they sleep. Maybe that is all the world can ask of them this time around. I have seen what thoughts they hold, what sorrows they harbor, what fears – often rightly – they run from. I understand. They need Holloway every bit as much as Holloway needs them.