Thicker Than Blood - the Complete Andrew Z. Thomas Series

by Blake Crouch

  "July twenty-ninth."

  "Thank you."

  Luther stands there for several moments, gazing into the face of the sleeping infant.

  "You’re never going to let us leave, are you?" Vi says.

  "That’s up to my father."

  Luther bends down, hands Max back to Vi.

  "That’s for him," he says, motioning to the stuffed dolphin on the dirt floor.

  "What’s his name?"

  "Dolphie."

  "Thank you, Luther."

  He nods, turns to leave.

  "I saw what you did to that family in Davidson," Vi says. "And their two boys. Why are you nice to my baby?"

  "I don’t know."

  It is one of the rare truthful moments of Luther’s life, and he leaves, trembling.

  # # #

  On a humid summer night, just before bedtime, Rufus walked into the kitchen of his silent house and poured himself a glass of buttermilk. Then he strolled the narrow hallway between the kitchen and the foyer and unlocked the small door beneath the staircase. As he descended into the basement, sounds of retching and agony emanated from the inhabited cells. He took a seat on the bottom step, the dirt floor cool beneath his feet, and sipped his cold, thick milk.

  That would be Andy groaning and Beth sobbing between bouts of nausea. Their heads probably felt like they were imploding. Nothing to do for them really but let them ride it out. They’d be good as new in a few days.

  Rufus wiped his milk mustache.

  Baby Max was screaming now, fighting mad at having been woken again.

  Yesterday, the first of August, Rufus had stopped dispensing drugs. The haloperidol, Ativan, nitrous oxide—it all abruptly ended. Vi had been weaned off the narcotics during the summer leading up to her delivery, but Andy and Beth had, with brief exceptions, been very fucked-up since mid-November. Rufus had never kept anyone on the needle this long, and though he’d anticipated this brutal withdrawal, the payoff would be well worth the risk.

  For the last nine months, he’d dedicated a minimum of six hours per day to working with his patients, and their sessions with the mind machine and drug-enhanced hypnosis had been wonderfully productive. In addition, they’d all watched countless hours of home movies, and with the aid of laughing gas, had begun to see the humor and innocuousness in violence.

  Andy in particular seemed to be moving beyond the illusions that plagued him.

  As Rufus climbed the stairs back up to his bedroom on the second floor, where his angel, Maxine, was already fast asleep, he realized he hadn’t been this excited and hopeful since Orson.

  # # #

  I woke to a gentle, rocking motion. There was light here, more warmth than that awful darkness. I detected the cry of gulls, slap of water falling back into itself, and the imperceptible whisper of wind moving through open space.

  My eyes opened. I found myself sitting in the cramped cabin of a boat, Violet King across from me, a baby in her arms, Beth Lancing at my left.

  Duct tape had been applied to our mouths.

  Vi was awake, Beth still unconscious, her chin resting against her collarbone. I went to shake her awake but couldn’t move, my wrists, ankles, and torso having also been thoroughly duct-taped to the high-backed chair.

  I looked across the table at Vi and raised my eyebrows. She responded with a headshake—she knew as little as I concerning where or why we were here.

  We sat there, immobilized, confused, watching the time on the stove clock creep toward noon. Through an ovular window above, I could see the tinted blue of the sky. Sleeping bags and wrinkled clothing had been stowed in the V-berth.

  Barely audible voices emanated from the deck.

  I tried to think back, to claim some recent memory, but could not.

  The cabin door opened. Luther ducked and stepped down inside.

  "Gonna need a hand with them, Pop!"

  One by one, we were lifted in our chairs and carried up onto the small deck.

  The day was brilliant and hot.

  Maxine Kite lounged in a beach chair, in unabashed oiled nakedness, her face hidden beneath the brim of a straw hat, so emaciated a breeze could’ve lifted her into the sky like a dandelion seed. She was engrossed in a book called At Home in Mitford and seemingly oblivious to our presence.

  Our chairs were arranged three abreast and portside on the deck of the twenty-four foot Scout Abaco 242.

  The clouds—puffy white monsters—went back innumerably into the horizon, land nowhere in sight.

  Luther watched from the cockpit, stretched out in the bucket seat behind the steering wheel and sheltered from the breeze by the wraparound windshield, a bag of Lemonheads in his lap.

  Sweat trickled into my eyes.

  The pasty chicken legs of Rufus Kite propelled him toward us. He grinned, toothless, his pale, hairless chest exposed by a chaotic Hawaiian shirt. We could see ourselves in the huge mirrored lenses of his sunglasses.

  "Been a pleasure knowing you three," he said. "I swear it has."

  I thought I sensed our fate in his tone of voice.

  "Y’all are sitting there looking at me, cognizant for the first time in months, and don’t think I can’t feel your hatred. You think I’m a monster. That I’m cruel and indifferent. Think I don’t have your best interests at heart."

  The sun beat down from its meridian, the air still, salty, so wet it could choke you.

  "Hurts me that you think that. Really does. Can’t you see, I’m letting you operate on free will? I could’ve turned you into little robots. You spent nine months with me. I could’ve kept you in that basement five, seven years. Your minds would’ve gone to mush after two. Think what you want about me, but you can’t say I don’t respect free will. You can’t say it."

  "Sweet-Sweet," Maxine whined, looking up from her book. "I’m so hot. Put up the Bimini top, will you?"

  "Kind of busy, Beautiful."

  It hit me—Rufus was anxious about something.

  "You three," he continued, "you see the world through good and evil glasses. Least you did when I found you. I’ve only tried to help you take them off, and now it’s time to see was I successful. I’ll be honest—I’m nervous. Big day for us all."

  Maxine closed her book and took notice.

  Rufus approached Vi, her baby grasped tightly to her chest. He reached to rip the tape from her mouth.

  "What about the baby, Pop?" Luther asked.

  "What about it?"

  "If she doesn’t—"

  "The baby stays with her, whether that’s back to the house, or down to the ocean floor."

  "But—"

  "Luther, please. Deal with it."

  Rufus removed the tape from Vi’s mouth. There was a hardness in her eyes she had not possessed when I’d first met her back in November. She’d grown rough edges.

  "Violet, you have a very important choice to make. Will you—"

  "I’ll do anything you want," she said. "Just don’t hurt my baby."

  "Good girl. But know that I’m gonna call your bluff tomorrow, Violet. And let me say this. Should I find that you’ve lied to me today, it’ll be bad for you, worse for little Max there."

  She pulled a blanket over her son’s head to shield him from the sun.

  "I’m telling you this for your own good. If you don’t think you’re capable of doing whatever I ask you to do, it would be better for you both to be thrown overboard right now. Because, if you fail, you’ll see things no mother should ever have to see."

  "Said I’d do it."

  He re-taped her mouth, then pulled the tape from mine.

  I drew in a lungful of thick air.

  Saying "no" never even occurred to me. We would get back ashore with our lives and go from there.

  Luther got up and came over. He looked down at me, pushed his long black hair behind his shoulders, and spit the white pit of the Lemonhead over my head into the water.

  "Well, Andrew?" he said.

  "I’ll do it. Whatever you want."
<
br />   "That’s right. You know the drill from the desert. I saw the video of you and that cowboy in Orson’s shed. Maybe this time you’ll do it with a smidgen of composure."

  While Luther silenced me with a new piece of tape, Rufus stepped forward and ripped the duct tape off the soft mouth of Elizabeth Lancing.

  I turned my head, gazed at Beth. Light nourishment and the havoc of narcotics had drawn her once lovely face into a gaunt suggestion of a skull. I doubted if she were even in her right mind. Part of me hoped she wasn’t.

  "Mrs. Lancing," Rufus said. "Tell me—was our time together successful?"

  "I don’t know."

  "Well, there’s a real easy way to find out. Would you take someone’s life if I asked you to? Take it with indifference? Without guilt or remorse? Take it in the face of all those ridiculous values that have been imposed on you your whole life?"

  Beth looked at me. It broke me to see her like this. I thought of all those late nights at my house on Lake Norman, drinking, playing cards, laughing with her and Walter. How did we ever reach this moment? Just tell him what he wants to hear, Beth. Come on.

  "Andy doesn’t have the answer," Rufus said. "Beth, look at me."

  She stared up at the old man, said, "I um…know I’ll never see my kids again. I know that. I don’t remember much of the last nine months. But I remember enough to know what you tried to turn me into. Who gave you the right?"

  "Actually, Beth, I gave—"

  "Well, you failed with me, Rufus. I won’t hurt anybody for you. So now it’s time for you to be a big fucking coward and throw me over."

  Rufus smiled.

  "Course, I’m extremely disappointed to hear you say that. Luth, give me a hand with her."

  The two men lifted Beth’s chair up onto the gunwale.

  She began to cry, and that ignited Vi’s baby.

  "If I were you," Rufus said, still gripping her chair so that it balanced on the side of the boat, "I’d inhale that saltwater just as soon as I went under. I mean you’re going to inhale it eventually, after a minute or two. It’s just a natural response when your lungs are starving for air. Why spend ninety seconds, holding your breath in sheer terror, when you can begin drowning immediately and get it over with?

  "You know, you’re the first person I’ve ever thrown into the sea. So don’t go washing up on the beach a month from now and make me regret not taking care of you in the basement."

  Beth looked at Vi and me.

  "Don’t be afraid to follow me in," she said, crying now. "I’ll be with Walter soon, won’t I?"

  Her chair splashed into the Atlantic. I craned my neck and looked over the edge of the boat. She bobbed in the water, struggling to keep her head above the surface.

  "Andy!" she called out.

  She was on her back, the chair beginning to sink, water rising above her ears. She swallowed a mouthful and coughed.

  "I forgive you," she said and went under.

  Because the sea was calm, I could see her descending, writhing violently, down, down, past five feet, ten. Then the Atlantic swallowed her into its warm navy darkness. Fifteen seconds passed, then a herd of air bubbles ascended to the surface and broke beside the boat and died.

  They left Vi and me to roast in the sun, stunned and horrified for Beth, for whatever was coming tomorrow.

  Maxine returned to her book.

  Rufus and Luther fished off the bow for several more hours, catching three sea bass and a baby shark.

  # # #

  That evening, Vi and I reclined in lawn chairs in the Kite’s backyard, in the shadow of the great stone house, sunburned from a day at sea. Across the Pamlico Sound, we could see storms ravaging the mainland. It was cool now, going dark, the tree frogs screaming.

  We’d been allowed to change into fresh shorts and T-shirts prior to being chained to the lawn chairs. Torches and citronella candles perfumed the air with a pungent smoke that did little to protect us from the plague of mosquitoes. While Rufus dumped charcoal into a grill, Luther finished cleaning the last sea bass. Tonight was for us, they’d said. A celebration, a sendoff for tomorrow.

  When the meat was cooked, Maxine (now mercifully clothed in a hot pink sweat suit) brought me a paper plate, steaming with ivory steaks of grilled shark and coleslaw and potato salad. Luther handed me a bottle of Dergy’s beer and sat down beside me with his plate.

  The shark was excellent. Night came on before I finished eating. It was very still, the sound as smooth and black as volcanic glass. I did everything I could not to dwell on Beth, sitting in her chair, several hundred feet down on that ocean floor.

  When Luther got up and walked toward the rotten dock, I glanced over at Vi who was nursing her baby.

  "When did you have him?" I asked.

  "Couple weeks ago."

  "Jesus. Where’d you get baby clothes?"

  "Hand-me-downs. Used to be Luther’s. Isn’t he beautiful? I named him Max, after my husband."

  "You gave birth in that basement? On that dirt floor?"

  "Yeah."

  "And he’s okay? You’re both okay?"

  "I think so."

  "I’m sorry you had to—"

  "I left you stuck in that trap on Portsmouth. My fault."

  Rufus had been roasting a marshmallow over the remnants of the glowing charcoal. He glanced back at us and said, "Who’s up for some s’mores?"

  "None for me," Vi said.

  "Andy?"

  "I’m full."

  "Alrighty then. More for me."

  He lifted the flaming marshmallow out of the grill and joined it with the graham cracker and Hershey square. When the s’more was assembled, Rufus strolled over with his dessert and plopped down beside me in Luther’s lawn chair. He took a large bite and groaned with pleasure.

  "Tell you what, Andy," he said, a string of marshmallow dangling from his bottom lip, "tomorrow’s either going to be the very best or very worst day of your life. Goes for you, too, little lady."

  "Rufus, you’ve got some marshmallow on your face," I said.

  As he wiped his mouth, I gazed down at Luther, sitting at the end of the dock, staring off into the cooling darkness.

  "Tell me about Orson," I said.

  Rufus beamed proudly, as if I’d inquired after one of his children.

  "You think you made him into that monster, don’t you? Well, I hate to piss in your coffee, but my brother was fucked-up long before he ever met you."

  Rufus laughed and laughed.

  "What’s funny?"

  "I think I know where you’re going with this, Andy. You’re on the verge of telling me how Orson was raped when he was twelve. And you, too, perhaps. Did he include you in that fantasy?"

  "What are you talking about?"

  "You can imagine how guilty your brother felt at first, in light of the things I asked him to do. I was afraid he’d kill himself. So I sat him down one day, said, ‘you were raped when you were a child.’

  "He looked at me like I had four heads. I told him, I said, ‘Imagine how good it would feel if you could hurt people the way you like to, and it wasn’t your fault. If you only did these terrible things because someone hurt you a long time ago.’ I didn’t think he’d go for it, but he got this sly little grin—I’m sure you know the expression—and he told me the story of, ah, what was his name? Oh, yes. Willard Bass."

  "You’re a liar."

  "Andy, Mr. Bass did exist. And he was found dead in a tunnel under the interstate behind your house when you were twelve years old. But he didn’t rape you. He was just a homeless drunk. You and Orson, you never even saw him. You only glimpsed the policemen running through your backyard on the Fourth of July, the day they found his body. I have the newspaper article somewhere in the library if you’d like to read it."

  I reached into my shorts, whipped out my dick.

  The old man’s eyes widened.

  I pointed at the head.

  "That scar is from a cigarette. I branded myself after that fucker burne
d Orson."

  "No, that’s a birthmark. Orson had one, too. It was his idea that the man burned his penis with a cigarette afterward. How imaginative, him including you in all this. You really bought it, didn’t you?"

  I pulled my shorts back up, head swimming.

  "What interests me most of all," Rufus continued, "is that you’re upset your brother wasn’t raped. That you need the comfort of knowing something awful made Orson what he was, you what you are. It’d be the end of the fucking world if someone were evil, purely from their own stock, own volition, and no external influence was to blame. I think that would truly frighten you."