by Anne McAneny
Zoey pressed the knife into Jake’s able hands in the hope that he could maneuver it well enough to free himself. Jake looked at her, his eyes widening with dread. “Is it him?”
Zoey met his gaze, nodded, and prayed it wouldn’t be the last time she looked into the eyes of the man she loved.
“Zoey, run. I’m begging you. I can’t be responsible for another death.”
Jake began hacking at his ropes like a sinful man who has seen Satan approaching with a hungry smile.
Zoey stood. With a deep breath, she slowly turned to face Matthew Collette, more popularly known as Mad Dog to his street fans, and to his old military buddies. The nickname fit well. Mad for his military fanaticism, Dog for the dog tags he’d sought so fervently. If only Bernadette had remembered the nickname, but poor Bernadette, with her dyslexia, had mixed up the letters in her memory and seen the name as if in a mirror. She’d remembered it as some sort of a curse word—and had come up with nothing less than God and Dam, so easily confused with Mad and Dog. Maybe her psychic skills had been at work even then, given the literal dam only a stone’s throw away. But who would have thought any of it relevant? Everyone believed that Matthew Collette had drowned in the very river rushing behind them now.
Zoey gazed at Mad Dog’s hands, the skin badly damaged by the grenade that had changed his life. On his finger, he wore the old silver ring with the bull carved into it. All along, Zoey could have figured out who her attacker was. She’d seen Jake toss the entire contents of his pocket, including the ring, into Mad Dog’s guitar case—right after he’d learned about the baby. She remembered Jake screaming something at Mad Dog as he’d done it.
She lifted her gaze from the ring to Matthew’s face—her father’s face. She tried to see past the insanity, the decades of rage, grief and regret that had built up within him. For a moment, she succeeded, and saw a man who had loved her mother, and probably still did.
He took a stilted step toward her. Mad Dog limped? Of course. Matthew had mentioned the injury to his leg in the letter to Susan. All these years, Zoey had only seen Mad Dog at his stationary post, playing his music, including “Little Red Rooster,” played those many times for Zoey, who, if her calculations proved correct, he now mistook for Susan—his dearest Red.
Zoey gasped as she caught sight of the Malay creese in Mad Dog’s hands. He must have stolen it from her apartment when he broke in to leave the GPS unit, and to gain some personal information on Jake, no doubt. The creese caught a determined ray of sun that penetrated the dense netting of tree branches above their heads. It blinded him momentarily and he halted his slow trek toward his prey.
Zoey spoke the only words she possibly could at that moment. “If you kill me, you kill your child.”
Mad Dog looked confused. “But Susan,” he said, “that’s not my child.” He pointed to Zoey’s belly. “That’s his child.” Mad Dog looked toward Jake when he said it, then back at Zoey. “Why are you helping him, Red? He raped you! He got you pregnant!” Tears rose up in Mad Dog’s eyes. “I thought we could finally kill him together, get him out of our lives forever, but now you help him? My God, you looked at him just now the way you used to look at me—before the accident.”
Zoey’s senses reached a hyperaware state and time slowed down to a glacial pace. She heard Jake sawing himself free. She detected the scent of stale blood again and zeroed in on a smeared trace of the red fluid on the back of Mad Dog’s hand.
Zoey pointed to Jake. “Matthew, that man is not the rapist.”
“Oh yes he is. Idiot told me so himself. Last week. Told me he got you pregnant. Ordered me not to play your song anymore—Red Rooster. Even though it’s your song, Red. Said it always drove him crazy. He ranted about how a rooster can’t get pregnant, and you were pregnant, so he never wanted to hear the song again.”
So that’s what Jake had yelled at Mad Dog.
“He’s crazy!” Jake shouted. “Get out of here, Zo!”
Mad Dog sneered in Jake’s direction, then turned his gaze on Zoey. He seemed to be looking backwards, to a different time and place. “He has no idea what crazy is, does he, Red? Crazy is when another man forces himself on your wife and leaves you to pick up the pieces. And leaves you to raise his bastard child.” He shook his head hard. “But now you help him? You try to untie him? I’m beginning to wonder if maybe it wasn’t rape. I saw you hug him and hold him when you first got here. How could you, Susan? How could you?”
“Matthew, I am not Susan. Susan is dead.”
“You’ve always been my Susan. Susan the Red.”
“I’m Kyra. I’m your daughter.”
“Kyra?” His face contorted. He shook his head again, this time in small, convulsive movements.
“That’s right. I’m Kyra. And I’m your daughter. The baby I’m pregnant with is your grandchild.”
“Susan, you never lied to me before. Don’t do it now. I can’t let you go through with it again. I can’t let you have his baby. Not again.”
“Susan died of a stroke, Matthew. Years ago. You remember that. I know you do. I’m Kyra. And I’m your daughter, not the rapist’s.”
Matthew jerked into some sort of tightly controlled frenzy. He stepped toward Zoey again, but his eyes were blinking at a furious pace and he was trembling all over, the knife in his hand quivering. Again, he shook his head violently as if to keep Zoey’s words from penetrating his mind. “Even if that were true, even if you were Kyra, you aren’t my daughter. You’re his!” Matthew pointed at Jake, a visceral hatred flooding his eyes. But at least he had come around to believing that Zoey might not be Susan.
“I couldn’t get Susan pregnant,” he said. “I knew that. I wasn’t stupid. That grenade….” His voice became a desperate whisper. “It made me… then this bastard got her pregnant. And Susan loved that baby.”
Matthew stepped to within two yards of Zoey, his eyes tearing up, his knife poised for a murderous plunge.
Zoey stood her ground and spoke with a firm voice. “Matthew, I’m your daughter. Yours and Susan’s. You did get her pregnant. I have the DNA results to prove it.” Suddenly, Zoey remembered her trump card. “The man you want, the animal who raped your wife, is right over there.”
Zoey pointed to Corbin Black, who lay unmoving several yards to her right, though it seemed the position of his body had changed ever so slightly. Impossible. But subconsciously, she glanced toward the ground in search of a potential weapon.
Matthew slowly swiveled his head to where Zoey had pointed. When he spotted Corbin Black’s body, he began trembling like a drinker going through DT’s, though his addiction went much deeper. His was an addiction to a story he’d been concocting in his head for decades. Zoey watched as the tale in Matthew’s head engaged in a cage match with Zoey’s logical words, set in a mind that hadn’t thought rationally for a long time.
She persisted. “That’s Corbin Black, the man who raped Susan. But he did not get her pregnant. I belong to you. You helped raise me until I was almost four. You’re my father, Matthew, and you’re about to become a grandfather.”
Matthew turned his head and narrowed his eyes at Zoey, desperately searching. For what, she didn’t know. Proof? A clue that she could be trusted? All she could do was project the truth with her entire mind and body, and when she did, a startling tightness gripped her abdomen, nearly making her bend double. It disappeared instantly, but coincident with the sensation, Matthew’s demeanor changed. His deep resentment seemed to melt into an aching sorrow. And Zoey knew that he believed. The truth had somehow reached him.
Matthew glared again at Corbin Black, a tentative expression of hope filling his thin features. He took several halting steps and covered the remaining few yards until he stood above the diminutive, bleeding figure. He got down on one knee, leaned over the body, and examined it in detail. The scar near the lip. The shape of the face. The height. Those details—plus a hundred others he’d searched for on his lonely evening walks—must have all fit, because a serenit
y seemed to settle over him.
But father and daughter saw it at the same time. Black’s chest rose and fell. The bastard was still alive.
Matthew’s nostrils flared. He raised his knife.
“No!” Zoey screamed. “Don’t kill him!”
Matthew head swiveled. He scowled at her as if she were the crazy one.
“You just came back into my life,” Zoey pleaded. “I can’t have you put in jail.”
“For murdering this?” he spat out in disgust. “This animal that took your mother from me?”
“Please,” she pleaded.
Zoey heard rustling behind her, accompanied by something hitting the inside of the boulder. She hoped it meant Jake was free and had tossed his bindings, but she dared not turn around and break her fragile bond with Matthew.
Then, with the phenomenal slowing of time that Zoey had been experiencing all morning, the next two seconds stretched into minutes.
As Matthew’s need for revenge fought with Zoey’s pleading, Corbin Black yanked Farnham’s gun from where it must have landed beneath his back. He somehow found the strength in his arm to aim the muzzle point-blank at Matthew.
Zoey reached down and grabbed a rock she somehow knew was there. It fit her hand as if it had been carved for her.
Corbin Black, weak from blood loss, took another half-second to send enough force to his finger to pull the trigger—and that was all the time his trio of punishers needed. In a simultaneous instant, Zoey hurled her rock at Black’s head, while Jake’s knife—formerly Black’s—flew off his fingertips in a perfect spiral whirl to find Black’s gut, just as Matthew, honing years of military training and mental preparation, plunged the Malay creese deep into Black’s heart.
Zoey, flooded with relief, fell to her knees, patted her flat stomach and whispered, “Thanks, Mom.”
Chapter 52
Over by the huge boulder, Zoey chatted with Cesar. In the background, a swarm of policemen and CSI’s buzzed around the dead body of Corbin Black. Zoey had already given her statement. An overwrought Matthew had voluntarily gone downtown to answer more questions, and Jake was holding an animated conversation with an officer of his acquaintance. Cesar was slated to be dragged in for questioning, too, but at Zoey’s behest, the officers had granted her a few minutes alone with him.
She had filled Cesar in on everything after he’d recounted his last few days to her.
“So Keeks,” Cesar said, using the moniker he felt most comfortable with, “I have a wife and kids—”
“I spoke with your wife,” she said with a teasing smile.
Cesar grinned. “She’s a barrel of dynamite, that’s for sure, but I love her more than anything in the world. And as much as I’ve enjoyed my stalking of you, I’m going to have to ask you to leave me alone.”
“Well, if that’s not the pot calling the kettle black.”
“Not my fault that someone from the netherworld cared enough about you to send me here.”
Zoey got a distant look as she calculated, then posed a question. “When did you say the voices started this time?”
“Four weeks ago.”
Zoey lit up. “I know who the voice is.”
“Great. Could you tell it to shut up?”
“I will, in about eight months,” she said, patting her abdomen.
“Oh right. I’m supposed to believe your baby was the one screaming at me to come save you.”
“No,” Zoey said, using Bernadette’s matter-of-fact tone, “you’re supposed to believe that my mother was. A psychic friend of hers knew, without my saying so, that my mother’s foretelling blacked out at the end, because if my mother had seen me killed, she would have been seeing her own death—inside of me. And foretellers can’t see their own deaths—or the deaths of their future incarnations.”
Enlightenment dawned on Cesar. “So I guess that makes it easy to pick out a name for the baby, then?”
“It makes sense now. My mother knew the foretelling was imminent and that I was flitting through life without a clue, so she got down here and lined up her own dominoes. She chose me as her mother and, believe me, she got in through the narrowest of openings.” Zoey took a moment to wrap her head around her next thought. “But ironically, my getting pregnant got this whole thing rolling.”
“How was that?”
“If I hadn’t gotten pregnant, Jake never would have said anything to Mad Dog, and we never would have ended up here where I could reunite with my father.”
“And serve up justice for Corbin Black.”
“That’s right. And if my mother hadn’t warned Elena Baxter about her attack, Elena wouldn’t have survived, and the police would never have arrested Corbin Black in the first place. Without his arrest, the Philly police wouldn’t have come to find me, and Black never would have gotten wind of my existence.”
“And you and I would have continued in our blissful little worlds, unaware of any of this.”
A shadow of sadness crept over Zoey’s features. She glanced at Jake, then back to Cesar. “I don’t know if I’d call it blissful. But at least I can handle my future with more perspective now.”
Cesar spread his arms out wide and pulled Zoey in for a hug. “I think you’re gonna be okay, Keeks.”
Zoey enjoyed the comforting security of his bearlike embrace, but grimaced at the blaring siren of an ambulance pulling away.
“Sorry about your detective friend,” Cesar said as he, too, realized the significance of the siren. “That’s why I was so slow getting down from the ledge, by the way. I stopped to help him, and man, was I ever surprised to see that he was already bandaged up professionally.”
Zoey sighed. “Let’s hope Mad Dog’s survival training paid off.”
Chapter 53
Two days later, after endless interviews with the police and the district attorney’s office, and meetings with Matthew’s lawyers and psychiatrists, a spent but joyful Zoey approached the oversized, hollow door of Detective Farnham’s hospital room. She knocked.
A hoarse voice said, “Come in.”
“Hey, you can talk!” Zoey said to the detective who managed to look robust and intimidating even while reclined on a thin mattress, wearing only a skimpy hospital gown.
“They finally took that damn tube out,” he said.
Zoey noticed more than a dozen bouquets crowding the room. “So there is more to know about you than meets the eye, Farnham. I didn’t think you knew twelve people who even liked you.”
“Enough small talk,” he said. “Every time you’ve come by, you’ve been damn scarce with the details and I haven’t been able to ask anything. Now give me all the updates.”
“Can’t. The nurses told me not to upset you.”
Farnham grinned. “I live to be upset. Start talking.” He patted the edge of the bed and Zoey took her indicated seat.
“Apparently, Mad Dog’s—I mean Matthew’s—”
“You mean Daddy?”
“I’m not quite there yet,” Zoey said with a smile. “Anyway, Matthew’s intervention when he found you probably saved your life.”
“I owe him. Big time.”
According to the surgeons, Farnham had lost one kidney, while his punctured left lung would heal and put him back at a hundred percent within a few weeks.
“He was the one who broke into my apartment,” Zoey said. “That’s how he got Jake’s new cell phone number. He called Jake with a fake lead on the meth story and set up a meeting. Then he waited for him, jabbed him in the neck, and the rest is history.”
“What’s going to happen to the poor guy?”
“He’s not going to be charged with kidnapping because Jake’s not pressing charges. He told the police that he went with Matthew to help arrange a reunion between father and daughter. Matthew’s definitely a little crazy, but he’s agreed to get help. Lots of it. It’s like a balloon has popped, though. He knows who I am, and he’s very remorseful that he missed out on my childhood.”
“What abou
t his supposed suicide?”
“Someone else must have jumped off the bridge that same week. Jake’s trying to uncover the person’s real identity. Matthew had considered jumping but couldn’t go through with it. Instead, he shed all his belongings on the riverbank, abandoned his car, and survived in the woods near Wissahickon Creek for two years. Case of mistaken identity.”
“It happens. At least it used to. Before the wonders of DNA.”
“Do you know when Matthew first saw me?”
Farnham shook his head.
“I drove to Philly after sophomore year of college, just after my grandmother died. I had decided to pay tribute to him at the place where he’d jumped. I went there three days in a row. Apparently, he returned there often to reconsider his suicide decision.”
“At least he made a decision every day to live.”
Zoey smiled. “You’re right. Anyway, on one of the days I was there, he spotted me, and he convinced himself I was Susan. He’s been keeping an eye on me ever since.”
“Time for a blood donation, Mr. Farnham,” boomed a voice belonging to a young nurse almost as wide as she was tall. “You got some for me?”
“I’d better go,” Zoey said.
Farnham reached out and gently gripped her hand. “Not so fast, young lady. What about you and Jake?”
Zoey sighed. “I’m not sure. I’m meeting him in half an hour.”
With that, Zoey flashed a smile that would give any ailing man the strength to recover. She blew him a kiss and slipped out the door.
Chapter 54
Zoey ordered a second ginger ale at the outdoor bistro on South Street and checked her watch. Jake’s tardiness did not mesh well with the anxiety building inside of her. The frenzy of the last two days had kept them from having a real discussion about their future, but today was it.
Jake finally appeared at the table, tossing down a clump of papers topped by the Newark, NJ, police department logo. “Sorry I’m late,” he said. “I was halfway here when I realized you’d want proof, so I ran back to my place to get this stuff.”