When the meeting broke up, he and Cassie drove home separately. To be with Angela. To wait.
Saturday Afternoon
One o’clock.
Neither the phone nor the doorbell had rung.
At 1:10 Hollis called Chief Reese. Yes, the FBI had been informed on schedule. Agents were on their way from the city; they’d be by to talk to the family within a couple of hours if the status remained unchanged. Reese tried to sound confident; he succeeded only in sounding grim.
Time, accelerated at first, ground down until each minute was like a slow-forming, slow-falling droplet of water. The four of them waited in the house, in the backyard, in the house again. Even after the effects of the sedative began to wear off, Angela stayed more or less calm. Pierce’s presence, even more than his and Cassie’s, seemed to have a soothing effect on her; she sat clinging to his hand and staring at the phone as if willing it to ring. Hollis had called Eric shortly after their return, gotten his answering machine, left a message to call his father’s cell number; that phone, too, remained silent. They drank too much coffee, talked little because the only things left to say were too painful to express. Hollis’s prostate started to bother him; he kept going in to stand at the toilet and dribbling as slowly as the time was passing, unable to relieve much of the pressure.
Two o’clock. 2:15. 2:30. And the phone didn’t sound and no one came and the minutes continued to drip, drip, drip away.
3:05. Doorbell. They all jumped and Hollis hurried to open the door. The FBI, but not to tell them what they needed to hear. One sixtyish Jewish male, one fortyish black female: the Hoover days of young, crew-cut, blank-faced, Anglo-Saxon clones were long gone. Special Agents Feldman and Lincoln. No-bullshit types—polite, businesslike, efficient. Half an hour’s worth of detailed Q & A, all of it recorded. The only information they had to impart was that they’d been in touch with McCone Investigations; there were still no leads as to Burke’s whereabouts, but the profile that had been compiled might prove helpful. Exit Feldman and Lincoln, leaving cold comfort behind.
Four o’clock.
Four-thirty.
Five o’clock.
No word from anybody, including Eric.
Five-thirty. Cassie heated soup, set out a plate of sliced bread. None of them ate more than a few mouthfuls, Angela nothing at all.
Six o’clock.
And Pierce said abruptly, “I can’t take any more of this sitting around, it’s driving me nuts. I’ve got to do something. Drive out by Corona Road, check some of the back roads … maybe the cops missed seeing that BMW. For all we know, Burke’s holding Kenny somewhere around here.”
Hollis thought it was a good idea. “We’ll both go,” he said.
“Together or separately?”
“Two cars cover twice as much territory.”
Angela didn’t want them to leave; the cocooning was what had been getting her through this. Pierce soft-talked her into accepting it. All Cassie said was, “Don’t stay out past dark unless there’s a good reason,” and they both agreed to that.
She gave Ryan her cell phone and Hollis wrote down the number of his so they’d all be connected. Then he and Pierce divided the ground to be covered—Ryan the east side from North Main to the Paloma Mountains, Hollis the west side as far out as Two Rock Valley. They were in their cars and rolling by 6:15.
Saturday Evening
Driving aimlessly was only a little more endurable than the passive waiting. At home there’d been a few distractions; in the Lexus there were none. Drive a random route, stare around at too-familiar sights, think too much. Worry too much. Imagine and fear too much.
Back roads, side roads, motels, campgrounds, even a couple of abandoned farms. Seeing nothing out of the ordinary. Waiting for his cell phone to ring. Praying it would and dreading what he might hear if it did.
Time passed less slowly when you were on the move. Seven o’clock, 7:30. He came back into town to fill the gas tank, headed west again. Eight o’clock. 8:15.
8:20. He was on Roblar Road, west of the Washoe House bar and restaurant, when the phone went off.
The unit was on the seat beside him, the sudden sound like a blade slicing into a nerve. He snatched it up, flicked it on. “Cass? Is there any—”
“How does it feel, Hollis? How does it feel to really suffer?”
His heart lurched. In reflex his foot jabbed the brake and he twisted the wheel. The Lexus slid to a rocking stop at the side of the road.
“Now you know what it’s been like for me,” the voice said in his ear. Calm, steady, no hint of mania—except that the mania was there, hidden but palpable, like laughter behind the walls of an asylum. “Hurt, hurt, hurt all the time. Burning in the fires of hell.”
“Let me—” The words caught; he cleared his throat. “Let me talk to my grandson.”
“No.”
“Is he all right? You haven’t …”
“Not yet. Not yet.”
Hate and fury boiled in him. Don’t provoke her! He forced a plea through the dry cavern of his mouth. “Please don’t hurt him. He’s just a little boy.”
“I had a little boy once. He died before he was even born.”
“Do you want me to beg, Valerie?”
“Oh, so you do know who this is. Good. I want you to know.”
“All right, then I’ll beg—”
“Because it doesn’t matter anymore,” she said. “You’ll never never find me in time. No one will.”
“What’re you going to do?”
“You’ll find out.” In the brief pause between those words and the next, he heard a background noise. It was quiet on the road, quiet in the car except for the purr of the engine, and the connection was clear. So was the sound—a kind of whistling. “Soon, Hollis. Very soon.”
“I’ll do anything you want,” he said. “Trade myself for the boy. You can kill me if that’s what you—”
“No. That would be too easy.”
“Tell me what isn’t too easy. Tell me what it’ll take for you not to harm my grandson.”
“You don’t understand, do you? I already have what I want and I’m going to do the only thing that’s left to do.” Another pause, and he heard the background noise again. Louder, even more distinct: a whistling and then a shrill howling. “I told your wife and now I’m telling you. You took David away from me, you and that bitch daughter of yours. You made me kill him. You destroyed my life. Well, now I’m going to take someone you love away from you. Now I’m going to destroy all your lives.”
“Wait, listen to me
“Suffer like I’m suffering!” And the line went dead.
She means it, she’ll kill Kenny, and she won’t take long to do it. Tonight, after it gets dark.… Evil needs the dark.
The phone rang in his hand.
Cassie, he thought, to report Burke’s call to her. Instead of answering he turned off the unit, threw it on the other seat. He could not talk to her now; couldn’t talk to anyone now. He put the car in gear, came down hard on the accelerator, the tires squealing as he pulled away. Driving this time with urgency and purpose. Praying he’d get there in time.
He knew where they were, Kenny and that crazy woman. The freakish whistling and howling had told him; they were sounds like no other he’d ever heard, sounds high winds made in an old, warped chimney flue.
She’d taken the boy to the one place no one had thought to look: the cottage at Tomales Bay.
25
Saturday Night
FIFTEEN miles.
So close, so far away. Driving too fast and not fast enough on the two-lane country roads, doing all the road-rage things—tailgating, flashing his lights and sounding his horn—that he despised in other drivers. Kenny’s image luminous in his mind: pocket-sized, defenseless, so full of laughter and innocent mischief, saying, “I love you, Granpa,” saying, “Who’re we afraid of now?” And himself looking down into that shining little face and vowing, not once but twice, with stupid, hollow a
rrogance, that he wouldn’t let him or anyone else in the family be hurt.
Fifteen miles.
Valerie Burke. He hated her intensely, yet it was a different kind of hatred than he’d felt—still felt—for Rakubian. Tempered with grains of pity. She was another of that bastard’s victims, an instrument of his vengeance as well as her own—as if he really were reaching out from the grave. Sick, shattered woman, but cunning. As cunning as Rakubian. She’d picked the perfect spot to take the boy. Knew about the cottage from his conversation with Rakubian … found out exactly where it was located from public records, the same way she’d gotten his cell phone number … found out it was seldom used anymore by going there, looking around. For all he knew she’d been squatting there off and on since giving up her apartment in the city.
Fifteen miles.
A small, insistent voice kept urging him to call the FBI, the county police, or to call Cassie and have her do it. He didn’t listen, could not obey. Explanations, the grinding of official wheels—he’d be out to Tomales Bay himself before deputies or Agents Feldman and Lincoln had time to respond. And the law would go in announcing their presence, with bullhorns and drawn weapons, or else take too much time to mobilize a more stealthy approach. There was so little time. And he knew the property, the whole area, far better than anyone else.
Fifteen miles.
Time, time, time …
Two Rock Valley, the Coast Guard training station, Tomales, the narrow coiling stretch of Highway 1 leading to the bay—the last few miles a fragmented blur like the drive across San Francisco with Rakubian’s body in the trunk. Almost dusk when he saw the gleam of water off to his right, gunmetal gray flecked with gold from the last rays of the sun, the trees and rocks of Hog Island bathed in the same golden glow. Fantasy, illusion: darkness waited, eating away at the light.
He was focused again, intently aware of his surroundings, when he passed Nick’s Cove. The cottage was a half-mile beyond there. He made himself slow down, take the sharp curves along this stretch without having to brake hard and fight the wheel. Time, time! The bay was dark gray now, all the gold bled away, the sky over the hills above Inverness a fading salmon pink. Full dark in fifteen or twenty minutes.
Ahead, at long last, he saw the trees that separated the highway from the cottage. He was alone here, no other cars; he slowed even more, hunching sideways to peer through the screen of pines. First glimpse of the cottage: no lights showing, no sign of the silver BMW. But that meant nothing one way or another. There was only one window on this side, and from the highway you couldn’t tell if the shutter louvers were open or not. And the BMW could be hidden inside the garage. Burke would not have had much difficulty getting into either building. The locks on both were flimsy; there had never been a break-in here and he’d seen no reason to replace them. A kid could have smashed them open with a rock or a tire iron.
He fought off the impulse to turn into the access lane. He’d be too exposed approaching the cottage from this direction; she might be at the kitchen table, the louvers open so she could look out toward the highway. When he rolled on past he had one last, partial view of the place. Still nothing to see.
He accelerated through the two short uphill turns beyond, the longer one downhill through a patch of thick woods. At the bottom was a grassy verge broken by deep grooves that led in to a closed gate. Past the gate and below the woods was a peninsula, short and humped in the middle—land that belonged to a dairy rancher and that was used for cattle graze. He stopped crosswise on the ruts, leaned over to unlock the glove compartment. He tore the chamois cloth off the Colt Woodsman and jammed the gun into his jacket pocket.
The wind was strong here, whipping in off the bay with enough force to billow his coat and bend him at the middle as he hurried to the gate. The highway was deserted; he climbed over quickly, ran along the overgrown ruts until they petered out into a single-groove cow track near the top of the hump. Prostate pain and back pain surged with every step; he blocked his mind against it, against the fatigue he felt. Functioning now on urgency and adrenaline.
On the far side, short-cropped grass and clumps of gorse sloped down to the water’s edge. Earthquake fissures showed like dark scars among the green. He followed the longest of them, still bent by the thrust of the wind, the smells of salt water and tide flats sharp in his nostrils. Halfway down he veered away at an angle to an inlet on the north side. The mudflats there had once been the property of a long-defunct oyster company; decaying bed stakes jutted out of the mud at oblique angles like rotting teeth. He skirted a strip of beach and a fan of discarded oyster shells, followed the outward curve of the shoreline.
It was almost dark now, only a faint band of light showing along the horizon, the rest of the sky a velvety purple. He had to slow down, because he could no longer see more than a few yards in front of him. The flash from the car would have helped, but he hadn’t brought it because he could not afford to risk showing light. It wasn’t far now anyway to where he’d be in sight of the cottage—just around a gorse-covered neck of land ahead.
A gull came swooping in over the tide flats as he cleared the neck; its thin shrieking made him grit his teeth. The only other sound was the beating of the wind. The cold had numbed him, raised gooseflesh on his arms. He kept his hands in his coat pockets, his fingers loose and restless around the handle of the .22.
Now he could make out the cottage, sixty yards away, dark and squatty between the pines and the faintly gleaming surface of the bay. It was directly in front of him and there were no windows in the south-side wall; even if Burke were looking out toward the bay, she wouldn’t be able to spot him in the darkness at this angle. He expected to see light glowing behind the deck doors—the drapes were old and a bad fit, leaving gaps at the edges and in the middle—but there was none. A hollow churning started under his breastbone as he slogged ahead. Wrong about the whistling and howling, and she hadn’t brought Kenny here after all? Or had she been here and gone because she’d already carried out her threat? Both possibilities were intolerable; he blocked them out as he blocked out the pain and fatigue.
The shoreline became a wide stretch of gravel and mud, and he cut inland onto firmer ground. An unseen rock caught the toe of his shoe and he stumbled, nearly fell. It was like moving in a dream, the darkness closing down, objects losing definition, shadows gathering into grotesque shapes. Sweat flowed and chilled on his body. The cottage seemed no closer, no larger, as if he were stepping in place instead of progressing forward—a delusion that lasted until he could make out the dock, the attached float where Pop had died. Then it was as if the building were too close, too large, a hulking presence in the night.
A faint petroleum smell came to him as he reached the dock. He glanced out over the water; there were no powerboats in the vicinity, no running lights anywhere. The old wood landing at the foot of the stairs creaked when he climbed onto it, but the gusty wind was loud enough to hide the sounds he made from anyone other than himself. He paused halfway up the stairs to listen. Just the wind. Even the gulls were quiet now.
When he reached the top he detoured away from the cottage, around behind the sagging garage. In the wallboards back there were gaps where they’d buckled and separated; he bent to peer through the largest of them. All he could see were layers of black. He took out his key ring, poked its mini-flashlight through the gap, and flicked it on just long enough for a quick look.
The BMW was parked inside.
Burke was here, Kenny must be here too.
But why hadn’t she put the lights on? Holed up in the cottage in the dark … he didn’t like that. Nerving herself? That must be it. She wouldn’t still be here if she’d already harmed the boy, would she?
Quickly he went back the way he’d come, approaching the cottage at a diagonal, his footfalls on the dry pine needles muffled by the wind. The shutters were closed over the kitchen window; he couldn’t see in, she couldn’t see out. He edged up to the door. His breathing came short and ragged;
he sucked air in openmouthed drags as he unpocketed the Woodsman. The wind shifted, moaning, and then gusted as if it, too, were having trouble with oxygen. He caught another brief whiff of petroleum.
He could not just stand out here and wait for something to happen. Get inside fast and as quietly as he could, put a light on right away, do whatever the situation dictated. Point and shoot, Hollis—literally, if that’s what it takes. He knew he could pull the trigger this time, without hesitation or compunction.
He laid his left hand on the doorknob. If the lock was on, he’d use his key.
The lock wasn’t on.
He turned the knob, heard the latch click, eased the door inward. And the petroleum smell came rolling out at him as if released, strong and pungent, flaring his nostrils, closing his throat.
Gasoline.
A lot of it, spilled around inside.
Oh God, no!
He let the wind take the door, blow it inward until it bound up tight halfway on the uneven floor. He stepped in past it, fighting panic. The gasoline stink was everywhere in the clotted darkness, overpowering, nauseating.
There was no wall switch; the nearest light source was the pullstring to the globe over the kitchen table. Every inch of the interior was burned into his memory—the table three steps to his left, no obstructions in between. He took one step, two—
In an Evil Time Page 22