by Mark Stone
“This thing is encrypted six ways from Sunday,” Jonah sighed, looking over at us.
“What does that mean exactly?” Boomer asked.
“It means there’s a reason the person using it left it here,” he answered quickly. “It’s locked up tighter than Davy Jones’ treasure chest. It’ll take a while for me to crack, and even if I can get into it, there’s no guarantee that there isn’t some failsafe program that’ll wipe the entire hard drive once I do.”
“It sounds like you’re telling me that this computer is a dead end,” I said, shaking my head.
“I’m telling you I think it’s a dead end,” he answered.
“Then break down the wall,” Boomer answered. “I don’t believe in dead ends, Jonah. At least, not as much as I believe in you.”
“If that compliment was intended to make me work harder, it might have actually worked,” the whiz said, grinning. “I’m not going to stop. I’m just telling you guys not to either.”
“I wouldn’t dare,” I answered, turning and looking back at the room. “I’ve always been more comfortable with the ‘feet on the ground’ type detective work anyway.” Grabbing a bowl, I looked at the contents. It was dried up melted ice cream. As I leaned closer to the white mess, trying to see if it smelled as though it had turned, I caught a whiff of something else entirely.
“Is that hot sauce?” I asked, my eyes widening. “What sort of lunatic eats ice cream with hot sauce?”
“The same sort of lunatic who is brazen enough to live in someone else’s house without their knowledge. The same kind who records everything an innocent woman does,” Jack said, shaking his head. “The crazy kind.
“Crazy doesn’t scare me,” I said, sitting the bowl down and noticing something under the table, pushed against the wall. “Crazy is emotional. Crazy makes mistakes.” Leaning down and grabbing the thing, I saw that it was a pill bottle. “Boomer. You should get people in here to dust for prints. I’m going to check this out.”
“Check what out,” Boomer asked, eyeing the bottle in my hand.
Reading the name and the address of the recipient sprawled across the pill bottle, I glowered at my friend. “One of crazy’s mistakes.”
19
“What do I tell them I am?” Jack asked, looking over at me with something like a gleeful grin on his face. The last few days were almost certainly the worst of my life, but it seemed like he was having the time of his. It wasn’t that he wanted Charlotte to be missing. Of course, he didn’t want that. Still, it was clear that the former Coast Guard member was doing what he was passionate about again, and because of that, he was fulfilled. “I’m not exactly a police officer,” he continued.
“That’s for sure,” I muttered. Shaking my head, I offered a suggestion. “Don’t tell them you’re anything. Let me do the talking. They’ll assume, because of your proximity to me, you’re also here on official capacity. Which isn’t untrue.”
“Sounds good to me,” he answered, looking forward as my car pulled up to the address I’d found on the bottle of pills. It was a tall, aged looking brick house. The worn dirt path leading up to it had grass growing along it, making me believe it wasn’t used too much anymore. Still, there was a car pulled up in the yard, and the grass was otherwise cut. This place was lived in, and if the name on the bottle was accurate, it was inhabited by someone named Gregory Talbot.
“What kind of meds are they?” Jack asked, looking over at me with curious eyes as he popped a breath mint into his mouth.
“Alprazolam,” I said, eyeing the bottle that sat in my cup holder.
“That mean anything to you?” Jack asked in response.
“Not a damn thing,” I answered quickly. “But it meant something to my wife. I asked her, and she told me it was a pretty common medication used to treat anxiety.”
“So, we’ve got ourselves a nervous kidnapper?” Jack asked, shaking his head.
“I’m not quite sure what we’ve got just yet,” I admitted as a sense of uneasiness rose in me.
As it turned out, Jack didn’t share my doubts. “Why the hell not?” he asked, almost chuckling at me. “His medication was sitting right there. We’ve got everything but a smoking gun.”
“That’s what concerns me,” I admitted. “We’re talking about a man who was smart enough to hide in a family’s attic for who knows how long. And Charlotte isn’t stupid. She’s definitely not what I would call any easygoing woman, especially when it comes to her son and his safety. She would have been meticulous about that house. Nothing would have been able to be out of place. Nothing would have been able to have been touched without her knowledge.”
“Except that it was,” Jack said. “Look, I know you’ve got this woman on a pedestal, and maybe she belongs there. Hell, I know, but that dude was eating ice cream.” Jack shrugged. “Sure, it was ice cream with hot sauce, for whatever reason, but that’s not the point. The point is, there wasn’t a fridge up there, which means he had to sneak down and get the damn stuff, stuff that would had to have been stored there. So, either Charlotte wasn’t paying as close attention to the level of vanilla goodness in her fridge as she was everything else, or-”
“He’s been there since she’s gone missing,” I said, finishing his sentence for him.
“That’s not what I was going to say,” Jack answered. “I was going to say that either she wasn’t paying attention to the ice cream the same way as everything else, or she wasn’t paying as much attention to anything as you think she was.” He nodded at me. “My vote is for the latter.”
“The latter isn’t possible,” I said, as sure as I could be about that. “I know that woman.”
“The same woman who tried to give away the rights to her son?” Jack asked me. “You’re talking about that woman?”
“That did not happen,” I said, quickly, my pulse rising.
“Now you’re calling your lawyer friend a liar?” Jack asked.
“Of course not,” I shot back. “I’m not saying it didn’t happen at all. I’m saying it didn’t happen the way he thinks it did. Something else was at play then. Someone was forcing her to do that.”
“Maybe life was forcing her to do it,” Jack answered. “I don’t want to burst the bubble of whatever Madonna complex you’ve got happening with this girl, but maybe things got to her. Life can be hard.” Jack blinked hard. “When our son died, it changed me. More than that, it changed my wife. I watched her become a different person before my very eyes.” He looked away from me, staring out the window at the house we were sitting in front of. “Before that happened, I would have sworn to you I could have told you exactly what she was capable of, and in a weird way, I would have been right. She wasn’t herself anymore, though. Hell, maybe I wasn’t myself either. The point is, because I didn’t know her anymore, I didn’t know what she was capable of. I didn’t know what she was doing, and when she packed her bags and left, I never saw it coming.”
I took a deep breath. Jack had never really talked to me about his past like this. Sure, it had come up a time or two, but never with this sort of deepness, never with this stark nakedness to his words. I couldn’t let that slip by.
“I’m sorry that happened to you, Jack. I’m sorry it happened to both of you,” I said.
“I appreciate that,” he answered. “But I didn’t tell you that because I wanted you to feel bad for me. I told you that because I wanted you to consider everything. You know Charlotte as well as anyone can know another person, I guess. I just want to remind you that no one can ever really know everything about someone else, even somebody they love. So, look at the evidence. Look at all of it.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said, trying to stay reverent, but knowing full well that I couldn’t back off of this in the sort of way Jack was getting at. Charlotte would never have done what she did in Justin’s office if she wasn’t being forced to. I knew that, and surely that was evidence too.
“Good,” Jack said. “That’s all I’m asking.” H
e pulled the door open. “Now, how about we get into that house and find out what this guy has to say for himself.
As the words left Jack’s mouth, another sound piqued my ears. It was a clicking sound, loud and precise. It came from inside.
Looking over at the house, I somehow knew what I had just heard. I wasn’t sure how, because it didn’t sound like it did in the movies or even the way I’d heard them before in life, but I knew what I had just listened to was the arming of an explosive.
“Jack get down!” I screamed, but it was too late. Looking over at the man, who was standing outside of the car I still sat in, my eyes widened as I heard the sound of the explosion, as I watched from the corner of my eye as the house blew up in front of us.
20
My ears rang as I threw my body down flat against the passenger seat, moving my hands up to my head to help shield against the blast in some small way. As I did, the idea that I had been rocked by explosions twice in as many days filled my mind, ringing every bit as loudly in my ears as the sound of the explosion.
Taking a deep breath, I thought about my life in the instant before I knew whether or not the blast or the fragments it created were going to collide into me. I thought about my grandfather, about Isaac and his future. I thought about Rebecca and what she’d do if I was gone. Then I thought about other things. I thought about my mother. She always said she’d be waiting for me on the other side. As she lay dying, wasting away from that horrible disease, she promised me she’d be there to greet me.
“Smiling and wearing white,” she said. “And I won’t look like this, either. I’ll be better there. I’ll be free of all of this.”
When I was a kid, listening to that as I watched my mother slowly slip away from me, the idea seemed ridiculous. My faith had been strong to that point, but it was a child’s faith. It was untested. As it butted up against the circle of life and the idea that a loving God could take away a mother who wanted nothing more than to watch her son grow up, it broke a bit.
I healed it, of course. I made my peace with my mother’s death and understood that it was the way of the world. Even if I didn’t agree, even if I thought it was unfair and unnecessary, it was the way it had to be.
Still, as I lay there in that car, with my eyes closed tightly, I wondered if the thing I saw when I opened them would be my mother. Would she be dressed in white? Would she be smiling? Would she be free of all of it?
As the sound of the blast passed, leaving me unharmed, I did open my eyes. I didn’t see my mother. Instead, I saw the feet of Jack Lacey. I had hoped he had gotten down when I told him to, but the positioning of his feet gave me cause to worry. They were pointed straight up, which meant he was lying flat on his back. In all my years of seeing people run and duck for cover (both in real life and in the movies and television shows that people watch all the time), I had never seen anyone do it like that.
Crawling across the passenger seat, the rest of Jack came into view. He had not been able to get down in time. That much was for sure, because as I took him in, I saw a shard of glass sticking out of his chest.
“My God,” I muttered, my heart leaping directly into my throat. He was lying there, blood coloring his shirt around the wound, with his eyes open and looking over at me.
“It’s hot,” he said, glancing down at the piece of glass, obviously a shard that had been blown from one of the windows by the blast, before turning back up at me. “It’s so damn hot.”
I didn’t know whether Jack was talking about the glass itself or if he just meant that he was hot because of the weather or whatever. Either way, the comment led me to believe he was in shock, a completely understandable reaction to what I was seeing right now.
“It’s okay,” I said, taking a deep breath and trying my best to stay calm. “It’ll be okay.” Sliding out of the seat and landing on the ground, I saw that the glass which hit Jack wasn’t the only bit of debris here. The ground was littered with glass and wood. Looking over, I saw most of the front of the structure had been blown to bits. Fire raised up from the rest of it, licking at the sky and destroying everything it touched.
Scrambling for my phone, I dialed 911. Crawling over to Jack, I got a man on the other end of the line.
“911, what’s your emergency?” he asked in a voice that seemed insanely calm to me right now. Still, he didn’t know what I was looking at. He didn’t know what we were going through. If he had, he would have understood why I didn’t answer the first time and why I made him repeat himself. “911,” he said again. “What’s your emergency?”
I was staring at the glass in Jack, at the wound that look very life threatening to my untrained eyes. As I did, all I could think about was everything Jack had been through, all the pain, all the hurt. He had been up there, snuggled safely along the banks of the Savannah River until my grandfather called him, and now look what happened. He was hurt. He was hurt very badly. If he died today, would his son be waiting for him like my mother promised to be waiting for me?
“Is anyone there?’ the man on the other end of the phone said, knocking me out of my thoughts.
“I’m here,” I said, my voice stammering as I tried to gather myself. “I’m at 1542 Oakwood Farm Lane. There’s been an explosion. At least one person has been injured. He has a piece of glass jutting from his chest.”
“Am explosion?” he repeated, his voice piquing up into a question at the end.
“Yes,” I repeated. “A damn explosion. Send an ambulance!”
“It’s on its way,” the man said. “Are there more people inside of the effected house, sir?”
“I-I don’t know,” I said, my eyes widening as I remembered exactly why we had come here in the first place. Evidence had led me to believe that Charlotte had been here, that she had been taken here. “I’ll find out.”
“No, sir,” the man said. “Don’t do that. Stay away from the building.”
As the man on the other end of the phone spoke, I stood up and looked into the building, into the gaping, burning hole.
Then I heard a scream…a woman’s scream.
21
“There’s someone else,” I said, my eyes widening and my heart thudding to a stop as I brought the phone back to my ear. “There’s at least one more person in the house, kid.”
I had no way of knowing the age of the guy on the other end of the line. For all I knew, he was as old and wizened as my grandfather. I wasn’t sure why I referred to him as kid. Maybe it made me feel better, like I was in control of the situation that was, right now, spreading out in front of me. I wasn’t, of course. What I was looking at was the makings of a tragedy, one that I would be standing squarely in the middle of.
“Sir, I’m going to ask you to step back from the building,” the man on the other end of the line said. “Please get to safety and, if possible, get your friend to safety, but do not attempt to enter that building. Alright?”
I stared at the fire for a long moment, thinking about Charlotte and about how last time fire separated us, she was the one that helped me get out. I probably wouldn’t have been alive right now if not for her. I’d rather be dead than let her die like that. I’d rather both of us go down. At least, if that was the case, I wouldn’t have to stand flat-footed in front of Isaac and try to explain how I let his mother die.
“Just get someone out here,” I said into the phone. Then I hung it up. Pulling the walkie from my hip, I spoke into that too, letting any surrounding officers know what was going on here. I used the phrase ‘officer down’ to describe what happened to Jack, not because I thought of him as a police officer, but because I knew what those words meant. Having them spoken would put a stop to everything in Naples that didn’t have to be done. Cops would be here in instants and that was what Jack needed right now. Besides, he’d earned that.
I knelt down to the man, looking with wide eyes at the shard of glass that jutted from his chest and noticing how white his face was beginning to get.
“Are you co
ld, yet?” I asked, looking at him and remembering what Rebecca told me once about blood loss and what happens to the human body before it succumbs to death because of it.
Jack looked up at me, confused at first. Suddenly, like a Gulf wave washing over him, he seemed to snap out of it. His face became animated and his jaw ground together.
“Who gives a damn whether I’m cold or not, Storm? You heard a woman screaming in there. So, why isn’t your lanky ass rushing to get her out? Don’t tell me the big bad Dillon Storm is afraid of a little fire.”
“Fear has nothing to do with it,” I said quickly, getting thrown back into the moment myself. “You were in the Coast Guard. You know that much. Only an idiot wouldn’t be afraid of running toward a blazing fire like that, just like only an idiot wouldn’t be afraid of tossing his body into the ocean during a storm. You don’t do what you do because you’re not afraid. You do what you do because it has to be done, and you’re the only person who can.”
“Then why aren’t you?” he asked me, his voice getting weaker.
I blinked hard, looking back at the fire, and then back at the man who helped me get to this point, the man who’d helped me more than I cared to think about at the present moment.
“Because I’m pretty sure you’re about to die, Jack,” I said, nodding at him. “And you’ve done too much for me to let you die alone.” I cleared my throat so that he didn’t hear my voice shake. “I’ll get in there after.”
“Are you out of your mind, Storm?” he asked, his voice pepping up just a little, though that might have been because of his agitation with me. “First of all, you’re not giving me enough credit. I’ve survived worse than this. Some splinter made of glass isn’t going to be what ends Jack Lacey.” He glared deeply at me as he continued. “Secondly, if I do die today, I want to know it wasn’t for nothing. I want to know that you at least got to save the damn redhead out of it.” He motioned toward the house, wincing in pain as he did. “Now stop staring at me, and get the girl!”