“Goddamn it! What kind of game are you playing?”
“Come on, Jason. Let’s get it over with.”
His face went slack. He shook his head and lowered his hands to his side.
“Enough,” he said. “This is insane.”
She held her position, watched for the smallest shift of weight, the giveaway feint. But he didn’t move. Just kept his eyes on hers, his stance soft and vulnerable. Hands loose at his sides. A trick beyond tricks.
It stalled her for a second.
“Look,” he said. “Let’s sit down and talk about this, Alex. Maybe have a sip of that wine.” .
He raised one hand toward her as if beckoning for a dance, then took a step her way, that hand moving toward her cheek.
Alexandra dodged to her right, planted her back foot, and snapped her right heel into his groin.
Jason doubled over convulsively, and she swiveled fast and drove her knee into his face, and it connected full and hard against the point of his chin, a charmed strike, and Jason hung for a moment, bent forward at the waist as if he were seasick at the railing of a swaying ship; then he tottered briefly and dropped backward to the floor, slammed his head against the oak. Eyes shut, breath filled with liquid guttering in his throat.
Stepping forward warily, Alexandra prodded him in the ribs with her toe, but he didn’t move. He had sunk into a black stupor, as lifeless as a drowned man riding the departing tide.
She hustled into the kitchen and pawed through the utensil drawer until she found a paring knife. She marched into Lawton’s bedroom and tore the top sheet from his bed and cut three long strips from the yellow cloth.
Back in the living room, she rolled Jason onto his belly and hauled his hands behind him and tied them with one of the yellow strips. She bound his ankles with the second, then used the third cord to double-tie his wrists.
When she rolled him onto his back, Jason’s eyes were open, foggy and far away.
“My, my, that was quite an exhibition of pugilistic prowess.”
Alexandra looked up.
“I certainly hope you didn’t tire yourself out too much.”
The brown-haired man who’d spoken was lounging in the doorway of her bedroom, arms crossed over his chest, a shoulder cocked against the door frame as if he were posing for a fashion shot.
He wore a tight black T-shirt and blue jeans and a pair of white tennis shoes. His gaudy biceps stretched the cotton sleeves. He had a slightly upturned nose and a broad forehead, and he was staring boldly at her with the caustic eyes of a rabid wolf.
“I see you got my little gift.” He nodded toward the wine. “It’s a tart, underachieving little chardonnay, but with some surprising complexity on the back side. I think you’ll like it if you give it half a chance. It was one of my mother’s favorites.”
It took her a moment before she recognized him without his blue granny glasses and white hair net. She’d never seen his eyes before.
“Junior?”
“Oh, call me J.D. After all, we’re practically family.”
And then she saw it. The Flint bone structure, the knobby cheekbones of his mother, his father’s heavy brow and slightly sunken eyes, that skin with its dull, unnatural pallor, as if he had sour milk coursing through his veins.
“We need to talk, Alexandra,” he said, stepping into the room and looking down at Jason. “Before you die, I want to set you straight on a couple of things. Some small but crucial factual errors you made in that little story you just told.”
THIRTY-THREE
Alex took a half step backward as Junior Shanrahan came out of his pose and sauntered into the living room. In his right hand, he gripped a five-inch shard of glass, holding it casually by his hip. He carried a heavy garbage bag in his left.
“You see, Alex,” he said, “your father did find me that day. When I heard the gun go off, I hid in the linen closet, and he came into the bathroom and swung open the door, and there I was, sobbing, trying to be quiet, down on the floor, wedged in with the plumber’s helper and the Clorox, and he squatted down and looked me in the eyes. You want to know what he did then?”
Alexandra glanced down at Jason. He was awake now, a thick smear of blood on his chin. His breath was noisy and irregular.
“Lawton Collins, this big tough cop that all the kids in the neighborhood were in awe of, he got in my face and he jammed the barrel of his hot, smelly gun into my mouth, and in this evil hiss, he said,”Kid, you either forget this happened or I’ll come back in the night and murder you and your parents and your sisters.”
“That’s a lie. That’s a goddamn lie.”
He gave her a scornful frown.
“Of course you don’t want to believe it. Daddy’s a saint with a great golden halo hovering over him. Perfect in every way. No, no, he couldn’t have done such an awful thing. Terrified a five-year-old boy. Not Lawton Collins. Dear, sweet Daddy.”
Junior raised the mirror blade and slashed it back and forth through the air between them as if he were decapi- . tating some ghostly recollection.
Then he stepped closer, two yards away. There was a chaotic spark in his eyes. Emotions shifting so quickly, it was as if he were listening to a dozen competing frequencies at once.
Alexandra’s eyes were working hard, measuring angles, flight paths, trajectories. He was blocking her way to the front door, and behind her the back door was probably twenty feet away, impossibly far. She could leave Jason behind, take her chances through a window, risk the cuts, try to outrun him, lose him in Seaside’s network of back streets and footpaths.
Or she could simply stay put and one way or the other be done with the horror forever.
Junior brushed the blade lightly back and forth across the bristles on his cheek as if sharpening it on a strop. Then he turned and tossed the garbage bag onto the couch. His sour mood abruptly brightened, shoulders lifting, eyes filling with reckless light.
“Two million dollars,” he said. “Just sitting out in the open in one of your neighbors’ houses. Imagine that. Nobody home, door unlocked. Two million greenbacks. That should get me a fresh start somewhere, don’t you think? A condo on the water, a dog, a parakeet.”
“How did you find me?”
“Followed the bread crumbs, dearie.” His lips curled into an acid smirk. “Actually, it was more prosaic. I went over to your house. Kicked in the door. I was a little panicked I’d lost you. And there was a travel pamphlet sitting on your kitchen table. I got on the phone, called to see if you were here, and bingo.”
“What do you want?”
“I think we both know the answer to that.”
He ripped the blade through the air again, grinning as she stumbled out of reach. He took two more cautious steps her way.
“But come on, Alex, relax, don’t be so morose. Let’s have some wine, chat a little. Get to know each other. Catch up on all those missing years. We hardly ever get to talk around the office.”
Alex was backing toward the kitchen, watching him carefully. Over the last few years, she’d seen Junior Shanrahan almost every day, but she had hardly noticed him. He was taller than Jason, probably outweighed him by thirty pounds. Heavily muscled in the chest, with arms covered in coarse black hair. Except for the narrow waist, he was his father’s double. The same fierce brow, a back designed for heavy lifting. For such a large man, he walked lightly and with the limber sway of a cocky athlete.
He halted a foot from Jason’s head and leered at her with his dark, chemical eyes.
The mirror blade in his hand was three inches wide, with one side beveled to a glinting edge and black traces of paint sprinkled across the silvery surface.
As his gaze drifted down to Jason, his leer evaporated.
Bubbles of red foam sparkled on Jason’s lips. Bound as he was and in certain pain, he still managed a defiant glare.
Junior must have read his look, because the vessels surfaced in the edges of his face and he drew back his right foot as if he meant to boot J
ason’s head into the next room.
“No, Junior!” Alex shouted. “Stop!”
Junior dropped his foot and swung around to face her, the glass blade shimmering in his hand as if it were charged with electricity.
“Leave him alone, goddamn it. You want me, not him.”
“You always were such a spoilsport, Alex. Little Miss Bossy, always making us play by the rules.”
Junior gave her a choirboy grin, then abruptly drew the blade back and swooped down to slash at Jason’s throat. Jason quailed away.
And Alexandra was across the room in one step and flinging herself into a roundhouse kick, but Junior was quicker than she’d imagined, quicker than Jason, quicker than anyone she’d encountered on the training mats.
With terrible efficiency, he ducked her leg, and her kick missed his face by inches. When she caught her balance, he was in front of her, and in the same instant he executed a strike so swift, she had no time even to flinch. Only caught the briefest glimpse of the two-fingered nihon nukite as it flashed through the air toward her face.
The daylight flickered. The blood in her ears roared.
As she was going down, she tried to roll, duck a shoulder, but there were chairs in the way and she clipped one of the oak seats with the back of her skull, lost a couple of seconds of daylight as she tumbled to the floor.
Above her, the ceiling was cockeyed; a lazy fan circled out of whack. Junior came into view, standing high above her, a wavering image.
“Now we know whose magic is superior,” he said. “So let’s don’t have any more of these outbursts, shall we? Obviously, I trained harder at my dojo than you did at yours.”
Kneeling down, he gripped a handful of her hair and held the silvery glass inches from her face. She peered at the reflection of her desperate eyes, at the careful black script hand-printed along the shard of glass: Yea, though I walk …
He tipped the blade out of view and teased its razory edge across her cheek, a stinging line, and down to her throat. He might’ve been drawing a thin trail of blood, but she was too woozy to tell.
With her hair clenched in his fist, Junior hauled her up and dragged her across the room and dumped her on the couch.
She squinted up at him, the light dazzling her eyes. A dizzy eddy of blood spun in her head. She took a measured breath, tried to blink her eyes clear, but a fine mist hung in the room, a dazed, uneasy rocking in her gut. She could feel a warm lump rising in her cheek, left eye beginning to squeeze shut, and Alex knew it was going to take several minutes at the very least for the fog to lift, for the blood to return to her muscles, before she would have half a chance against this monster. Every minute she stalled was a minute more to recover.
“You saw it happen, didn’t you, Junior?”
“Saw what happen?”
He whisked the wine from the ice and stepped beside her and set it on the coffee table.
“You peeked in the playhouse that day and saw Darnel raping me. That was you, wasn’t it, in the mirror? You were watching.”
He reached across the couch and picked up the two wineglasses.
“Oh, yes, I was there. It was quite the enthralling scene.”
He sat down beside her, a foot away. The blade burned in his right hand. With his left, he reached out with the bottle and poured two glasses.
“Oh, but come now, Alexandra, let’s don’t ruin our first date with a lot of psychoanalyzing.”
He offered her the glass of wine. Kept it in front of her face until she took it. Then he clinked the lip of his against the lip of hers.
“To us,” he said. “To our long, complicated past, our exquisitely tortured history.”
She took a taste and watched him swallow deeply. He let out a gasp of pleasure, then settled back on the couch. His shoulders were wide, chest thick. Even his face seemed muscled. When he grinned or spoke, the sinews in his jaw and temple strained and twisted.
“Now what happens?”
“Just this,” he said. “We luxuriate in the moment. Bask for a while in the beautiful symmetry of our lives.”
Across the room, Jason groaned and twisted against the restraints.
Junior set his wineglass down on the coffee table and peered across at her as if trying to penetrate the haze of years. Bring the two images into alignment, the girl he remembered, the woman he faced.
She felt the spreading warmth inside her. A growing calm and sureness, as if that gaseous cloud that had escaped her so long ago as a child were finally sifting back, settling again inside her flesh, where it had once belonged. And her dizziness had mostly cleared, as well. A debt she owed to Jason, the morning training sessions with him, full-contact fighting, learning to process the pain more efficiently. To move past it, keep her focus as she fought her way back to clarity.
“How’d you work the fingerprints, Junior? Yours are on file in the AFIS. What’d you do, break into the files, switch someone else’s prints for yours?”
“Always the cop, aren’t you, Alex? Yes, yes, of course I removed my prints from the files. I’m not some idiot.”
Outside the north window, a cluster of white bougainvillea fluttered like a thousand small white butterflies feasting on the branch. For a moment, Alex let her eyes rest on those quivering blooms.
“So tell me, sweetheart, where is he? Where did you stash dear old Dad?”
Alex watched a blade of sunlight inching across the hardwood floor.
“Might as well fess up. I’m going to find him anyway. If I have to go house to house through this entire silly little town. If I have to turn over every bed, dig through every closet, and kick down every door. I’m going to find him.”
“You’re going to have to kill me first, Junior.”
His smile hardened.
“You don’t understand, do you? You don’t realize what the two of you did when you murdered Darnel. You destroyed my goddamn family; you twisted us into a festering mass of disease. You and that old man. The two of you caused the death of eight innocent women.”
“Bullshit.”
His eyes emptied and the blade jerked forward as if he meant to open her throat. Alex surged to her feet, flung her wine in his eyes, and shot a left jab at his chin. But Junior Shanrahan snatched her fist from the air, gripping it with such brutal force that she heard the gristle crack, felt the burning rip of ligaments. She couldn’t breathe as he levered her back to the couch.
He glared into her eyes and wiped the wine from his face. But then his gaze strayed past her, out toward the porch, and he broke into a bitter laugh.
“My, my,” he said. “Speak of the devil and up he jumps.”
Alex twisted out of his grip.
“Dad! No! Don’t come in here. Run, Dad! Run!”
But Lawton was on the porch and through the front door.
“I’m just here to get my camera,” he said. “Go on with what you’re doing.” And he marched quickly through the living room, nodded at the two of them, stepped over Jason’s bound body, gave him a quick, curious look, then strolled into his bedroom.
Junior reached out and pressed the cold edge of glass against her throat.
“If you so much as move, I’ll open you up right now. I won’t wait another second.”
With his free hand, he gripped her by the jaw and peered into the depths of her eyes, a look meant to chill her into submission. The touch of his hands was so rough and careless, he might have been handling a chunk of broken rock.
“Okay, you two, say cheese.”
Lawton was standing beside Jason, ten feet away. In his hands was the Brownie Reflex. He was looking into the pop-up viewfinder, aiming the camera at Junior.
“Come on, you two. Let’s see a smile. Memories for a lifetime.”
“Dad! Get out of here. Go!”
Junior rose and stepped around the couch.
“Hold still,” Lawton said. “Don’t want a blurry picture.” He glanced up from the viewfinder and said, “Hey, I remember you.”
“Yes, I’m sure you do.”
“You’re Frank Sinatra. The bastard who’s been dogging our every move.”
“What?”
Lawton dropped the camera and it smashed on the floor beside Jason’s head. The old man brushed his shirttail aside and reached into the waistband of his shorts and drew out a black .38 revolver.
Junior held his place in silence, the insolent jut of his jaw still firm.
“Hands in the air, Frank. And you, too, pretty lady.”
He sighted the .38 at Alex.
“Dad, it’s me.”
“Don’t play games. Let’s see those hands now. Both of you.”
“It’s me. It’s Alexandra.”
Lawton peered at her for a moment, then took a nervous swallow. He caught a glimpse of Junior inching forward, and he swung the pistol back to him.
“Don’t think you can hoodwink me, you two. I’ll shoot you both if I have to. I know what you’re up to. A couple of thieves, here to steal our hard-earned cash. And you can’t be my daughter. My girl’s only eleven years old.”
Alex stared into the dark barrel that was sighted on her heart.
“Dad. I was that little girl, but I got older, I grew up. I’m a woman now.”
For a moment, Lawton’s eyes flicked back and forth between these sudden strangers. He licked his lips, working on the problem.
“And me, Lieutenant Collins,” Junior said with cloying courtesy. “I’m the kid next door. The Flints’ youngest child. The one you found in the closet. J. D. Flint. You remember me.”
Lawton squinted hard at Junior, the pistol tightening in his grip.
“I don’t have to remember any damn thing I don’t want to remember. Now get your dirty hands up in the air, Sinatra, and cut the double-talk. Up, up, where I can see them.”
Junior raised his hands, the mirror blade in his right fist, an overhand grip. He took a casual step forward, then another. Alex was on her feet, moving like a shadow toward Junior. In her right hand, she gripped her empty wineglass.
Lawton thumbed back the hammer and waggled the gun at Alex.
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