by Jason Parent
“Yeah,” the man said. “It’s me. Who are you? And what are you doing down there?”
“It’s Curtis. I’m coming up. Are you alone?”
“Yeah. Matilda was here, but she’s gone now.”
Curtis turned. “Matilda is one of his personalities. Dizmo suffers from dissociative identity, uh, multiple personality disorder. The Dizmo personality is most common, and he’s harmless. But generally, all of his personalities are pleasant. I can’t imagine why he’d have a gun and be shooting at us, but this whole day has been kind of crazy, so... why not?” He climbed the staircase.
“Hi, Curtis,” the man, presumably Dizmo, said.
“Hey, Dizmo. I’ve got some friends with me, but don’t be alarmed. No one here means you any harm.” After a second, Curtis appeared over the opening. “You can come up now. It’s safe.”
Sam looked at the others, then went up. Curtis stood beside a chubby man who looked to be in his thirties. He watched with apparent disinterest as she made it topside. Curtis handed her a pistol, grip end toward her.
As the rest of the group filed up, Sam took in her surroundings and found she knew them well. A dumpster, overstuffed with garbage bags, blocked the view of the basement door from the back lot. Another twenty or so garbage bags were strewn around the basement’s exit. Sticks poked through some of the black bags. Sam picked one up, not surprised to find it as light as a couple of loaves of bread. She ripped it open to find it half stuffed with dry leaves, branches, pine needles, and other forest waste.
“They must have used these to cover the door,” she said to no one in particular, then tossed the bag against the wall. She looked up and to her right, searching the treetops for Dylan’s treehouse. It was probably less than a few hundred yards away.
A rustling came from a bush nearby, another to her right. She handed the new gun to Bruce, and together, they scanned the woods around them.
“Lower your weapons!” A man in full SWAT fatigues and carrying an AK-47 said as he broke cover. “You’re surrounded!”
A quick glance to her left and right, and Sam saw that it was true. Persons with bulletproof armor and semi-automatic pistols and machine guns, all aimed their way, had them encircled.
“Don’t shoot!” Sam shouted, throwing her hands in the air, while Bruce encouraged the others to do the same. “I’m a police officer.”
“Lower your weapons!” A familiar voice repeated, but this time it was the officers around Sam who pointed their guns at the ground.
Frank stepped into the clearing. But Tag rushed past him and into Sam’s arms. “Thank God, you’re all right. I wanted to go right in, but that asshole wouldn’t let me. I’m so sorry, Sam. So—”
“It’s okay, Tag,” Sam whispered, touched by the sentiment but embarrassed by the scene.
Tag seemed to pick up on her discomfort. He straightened and backed away, then he scanned the group and swallowed hard, a look of nausea invading his face. “Is this everyone? Any other survivors inside? We need to get back in—”
“We will, son,” Frank said, placing a hand on the officer’s shoulder.
Tag’s face flared with anger, but he bit his tongue and stepped back, while Frank looked as solemn and as wrinkled as a basset hound. A hint of feeling shook his mask as he took in Sam. His lower lip curled under his upper, but only for a moment.
“As you probably guessed,” Frank began, “the Ward D commotion was a diversion to allow for Wainwright’s escape. When we heard banging and a gunshot over here, we moved in. Now we know how he got out. How the heck did we miss this?”
“It wasn’t on any of the building plans we reviewed, sir,” a man wearing a helmet and a bulletproof vest said. “This shouldn’t be here.”
Before Frank could retort, Bruce stepped between the men. “There may be more survivors inside.” He roared and shook his fists. “Damn it, Frank! How could you let him escape?”
“Easy, Bruce.” Frank sidestepped the accusation, then Sam’s own anger blossomed.
He knew about Bruce? Of course he knew! Frank avoided looking Sam’s way, probably ashamed of the momentous secret he’d kept from her.
Frank smiled shakily. “We’ve got the whole city on lockdown, and we know where to look for him next.” He pointed out to the woods. “As for survivors, most of the inmates are accounted for, and most of the prerelease patients, children, and staff got out. We’ve broken down the barricade and sent in a clean-up crew.” He smiled warmly at Grady and Valerie. “With these two here, only two children remain unaccounted for.”
Jimmy and Curtis both stepped forward. Jimmy deferred to the orderly. “Please, sir. We have injured patients inside, in the unused hospital rooms in the old section behind the adult rec area.” He handed over his keycard. “Hopefully, they are still safe behind that door. If so, they’ll need immediate medical attention.”
“One of them is Tessa!” Jimmy blurted. “She’s been shot... right here.” He pointed to his chest. “She needs help fast.” His gaze fell to the earth.
Frank radioed his men to apprise them of the injured inside and their location. After that, he looked from Sam to Bruce to Michael. “Now, what should we do with the three of you?”
CHAPTER 31
Only three days had passed, and Michael was ready to pull every hair out of his head. Instead, he suffered in silence and tried to stay out of everyone’s way. He’d even taken to reading Moby Dick to busy himself and was slowly getting into it once he started skimming over the endless particulars of whaling. He particularly liked Queequeg, though he had no idea how to pronounce his name. The irony of rooting for the tattooed cannibal wasn’t lost on him, given that his kidnapper had supposedly practiced cannibalism in Fall River before Michael had been born. But based on the beginning of the novel, he was pretty sure his favorite sailor was going to bite it.
But Wainwright was no Queequeg. If only I had a harpoon...
The safe house Frank had landed them in was in a downtrodden area just outside the financial district in the “redevelopment area,” as the mayor preferred to call it. Despite all the heavy construction equipment lying around the neighborhood, the projects remained unchanged as far as Michael could see.
On a sofa with stained cushions that weren’t infested with bedbugs but made him itch every time he thought they could be, he turned the page of his book, excited to find himself on chapter forty-nine. He dog-eared the page then flipped toward the end. When he discovered the book had more than one hundred thirty chapters, his enthusiasm faded.
Looking up, he saw Sam, tapping her foot and chewing on a thumbnail in the middle of the room. Her gaze bore a hole through the wall. Agent Matthew Pike, truly the late Detective Bruce Marklin, sat still as a statue in a mismatched chair in the corner, his head buried in his hands. Neither said a word.
Michael sighed and returned to chapter forty-nine. “‘There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life,’” he read aloud, “‘when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own.’” He looked up. “Huh.” He chuckled. “I guess the joke’s on us.”
Neither Sam nor Bruce paid him any attention. He went back to reading, though distracted by the others’ silent presences sucking the air and life out of the room.
The safe house—more of a safe studio apartment—didn’t leave him much space to be on his own. And with Bruce and Sam sharing the cramped space, he never knew when the fireworks would erupt.
They hadn’t yet, and that was almost worse. It appeared neither Sam nor Bruce were ready for the blowout, apparently content to let their tension fester until it swallowed up everyone and everything around them. Michael did his homework diligently for the first time in his life, having little better to do, his assignments coming from Dylan and Robbie through Officer Tagliamonte and one or two other officers Sam trusted with their location.
&n
bsp; The silver lining was that Michael had found a genuine friend. Sam had received birth certificates verifying both Dylan and his father, Tobias Jefferson, who worked as a med-tech buyer for the hospital, as well as a host of employment documentation, references, and proof of residencies that supported the man’s long career in the field. Officer Tagliamonte himself had visited their home, recorded the interview for Sam, and triple-checked the Jeffersons’ whereabouts against Carter Wainwright appearances, finding no link—and sometimes hundreds of miles—between them and the killer.
Still, neither Dylan nor Robbie were allowed to see Michael or even know where he was. Other than the trusted officers, only a few key persons at the FBI knew about the safe house. But there was no doubt Wainwright’s cult wouldn’t hesitate to torture them to find it. These strangers and the threat they posed kept Michael in a constant state of unease. Rest didn’t come easy. Not for anyone, it seemed, by the sullen looks and darkened eyes of his... foster parents? Bruce and Sam did seem a lot like passive-aggressive lovers in a tiff. He chuckled at the thought.
Bruce never laughed. And he never took off his bandages, so Michael assumed they weren’t part of his undercover identity. But what unnerved Michael most about the man, beyond his constant scowl, contemptuous gaze, and standoffish demeanor, was the fact that he always carried his gun. He thought the man must sleep with it at his hip. It made him wonder if Bruce knew something they didn’t.
It had been a few days, and Frank’s team had found little—unless he was hiding something from them, which Michael doubted. Together, they’d made a list of potential Indians, piecing together their individual and group encounters with the masked puppets. Three were in custody and undergoing extensive psychological evaluation: Harlan Bowes, the man who’d first shot at Sam and Frank; Dizmo, who voluntarily surrendered to the orderly, Curtis; and Laura Vark, a young lady who’d been a patient at Brentworth but had supposedly been released a couple of weeks prior. If not for Frank, she would have ended Officer Tagliamonte’s life in the woods outside the hospital, but he’d managed to sneak up on her and subdue her while she’d dawdled with a knife in her pocket.
A fourth Indian, Monica Berube, was dead, killed by another brainwashed cohort. The other two who’d attacked Michael and Dylan were still at large, disguised as police officers and apparently in possession of an actual police cruiser, though Fall River records showed all vehicles accounted for. FRPD was looking into decommissioned vehicles as well as bulk mask sales as possible leads into the whereabouts of Wainwright’s crew, but if they had found anything, Sam hadn’t shared it with Michael.
Tessa and Bruce rounded out the party of Indians. The former barely clung to life, unable to breathe without the assistance of a respirator. Though not predicted to pull through, she had no one to sign off on pulling the plug. The latter had been sidelined for no other discernable reason than that a madman got off on using him as a plaything and befuddling his mind. By Michael’s count, that left a minimum of four Indians to complete the “motif,” as Wainwright had put it.
Michael frowned. If the orderly they’d found gutted in the bathroom had been one of Wainwright’s Indians, the Ward D patients had eliminated him from the playing field. Wainwright himself had taken out that nurse, Francine. And Jimmy had been relocated to a halfway house, apparently no longer considered a flight risk after exhibiting no signs of Horvat’s brand of hypnotherapy, while the powers that be decided where to send him next. Only a handful of staff and patients remained unaccounted for.
So there were anywhere from two to four Indians, plus Horvat and Wainwright and whoever had helped them escape. According to Dizmo, actually named Scott Collins, there had been no one else except a kid with them. At his tip, Frank’s team had found an abandoned cabin where the fugitives had rested briefly before driving off over uneven forest trails. The tire tracks they left belonged to two Jeep Wranglers that had purportedly been left waiting for them at the cabin. The tracks had ended at the street, with just enough dirt left on the pavement to indicate the direction they’d turned. Where they had gone from there was anyone’s guess. They had avoided all CCTV cameras, at least as far as the footage the FRPD had reviewed could reveal, which had been a lot. Wainwright and Horvat were in the wind.
Checkpoints remained at all ins and outs of the city. Everyone whose opinion apparently mattered believed Wainwright was still somewhere in Fall River, lying low and forcing Michael, Sam, and their grumpy old roommate to do the same. Michael wasn’t convinced but had no real reason to doubt their assumption.
He finished his chapter and dropped the book open across his chest. He thumbed back a few chapters to a line he liked so much he’d highlighted it: “I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.” He sighed, wishing he could be like that—to face whatever might come, no matter how grave, with a light heart. Maybe the problem was that he knew more than most what would come. He sighed again, loud enough for the others to hear him, turned to where he’d left off, then started into the next chapter as he waited for one of his roommates to explode.
Finally, the bomb went off. “You know something? You’re such an asshole!” Sam pushed Bruce, sending him staggering back against the wall. “How could you? How could you not tell me a damn thing?”
Michael raised the book to just under his eyes. He blushed and would have left the room had there been another room to go to. He supposed he could hang out in the bathroom—
“I’m sorry, Sam,” Bruce said meekly, and at once Michael understood that all of the man’s hostility and detachment had been born of his own failures. He didn’t hate them. He hated himself.
“You’re sorry?” Sam pushed him again. “Is that really all you have to say for yourself? We were partners, and all this time...” She gasped and covered her mouth with her hand. Her eyes shimmered in the incandescent light. “You let me believe you died that day!”
“I did die.” He reached for the bandages around his face, tentatively tugging them at first, but soon tearing at them feverishly. It was as if he’d finally decided to shed his false persona, his lies and deceit, to face up to who he was and what he’d put her through. “My heart stopped half a dozen times. I was confined to a hospital bed for months. Then came the physical therapy.” He raised his right hand. “My fingers were melted together like a damn flipper! If it weren’t for my hate, my desire for revenge, I would have given up and stayed dead.”
More gauze and bandages fell to the floor as he thrashed. “Look at me, Sam! Look what that man did to me!”
Sam swallowed, but she didn’t look away.
A tear fell down the left side of his face, which looked much like it always had, if not more wrinkled and sallow than the picture Michael had seen of Bruce. On that side of his face, color came to his cheek, and he stared at the floor. On the other side, no tears or color appeared. Uneven, hairless flesh was mottled with parts burned pure white, others charred, but mostly blotched with varying shades of purple that might have resembled a birthmark if not for its leathery texture. His eyelid was missing, the scar tissue climbing up the side of his scalp and over a curled, blackened cauliflower of an ear.
Michael studied him over the top of his book, slightly repulsed but more fascinated than anything else. Bruce would never be called handsome, but he was no Phantom of the Opera either. He looked more like the comic book villain, Two-Face, but even that was an exaggeration. Still, it might be a good origin story if the agent turned out to be one of the bad guys. Or maybe even one of the good guys, like Deadpool or Darkman. Michael studied him closely. Hero or villain, the verdict was still out on Bruce.
He chewed on his lip. When did my life become so much like a comic book?
Sam softened, but just a little. “I’m sorry for what happened to you,” she said quietly. At least she’d stopped pushing him. “But it doesn’t excuse letting me think you were dead all this time.”
“No.” Bruce shook his head. “I know. We thought it was the
only way for me to go undercover. I’m a special agent with the FBI now, on the books as Matthew Pike. Only Frank and one or two of his superiors know who I really am. We needed it to look convincing, and we needed you and others to help sell it. The best way to do that was to make you believe it was true.”
“Damn it, Bruce. I went to your funeral. All three of your ex-wives went to your funeral.”
“Then I guess I wasn’t all that bad, after all.” He chuckled.
Sam crossed her arms. “None of this is funny.”
He showed her his palms. “I know, I know. I’m sorry. But if I’m being honest, I’d do it all over again if it gave me another shot at Wainwright.”
“Yeah.” Sam scoffed. “Some shot that was. He knew who you were all along. Probably got it right from your own lips when he had his doctor bimbo brainwash you. Frank’s been looking for a mole this whole time. And come to find out, his inside man is a double agent.” Sam laughed then, but there was no mirth in it.
“And that’s not the worst part.” Bruce looked away and began to pace. “Don’t you see? I’m the reason he came back here. He just wanted to play another game with me, show there were so many more ways he could still get to me. Had I just walked away after Texas, he may never have set up base here again, targeted you and Michael—”
“Stop.” Sam clenched her jaw. “I don’t and I won’t blame you for the actions of a psychopath. I—”
A car backfired somewhere outside. Bruce’s hand hovered over his gun.
Sam frowned. “Can you cool it with the gun, Bruce? You’re keeping everyone on edge.” Then softer, she said, “He’s just a kid. He’s been through enough already.”
Half of Bruce’s lips curled into a sinister grin, the burned half remaining in its perpetual scowl. “Well, if he’s smart—if you’re smart—you’ll be ready. There is a mole, Sam, and I’m pretty sure Wainwright has already found out about this place. He’ll send his lackeys soon enough, and when he does, I plan on capturing one and having him lead me straight back to Wainwright. And this time, I won’t hesitate.”