I didn’t try to figure this out.
Usually a little after Miriam and I got back to the house Betsy would get back from work. Sometimes we’d eat takeout from the Jump Start or the Chuckwagon. Betsy tried to avoid McDonald’s. “Fat food,” she called it. And sometimes I’d fire up the little grill in the backyard and cook us some hot dogs or hamburgers, and I thought they were pretty good. Then one day Betsy handed me a plastic bag from Wal-Mart. “Thought you’d like this,” she said, and gave me a kiss on the cheek. It was a book called Born to Grill: An American Celebration. I read it, and I guess my cooking was a little better after that.
Betsy and I were going through the motions of being married and doing a better job all the time. But the motions didn’t make us connect. We weren’t accomplices anymore, and we weren’t really lovers. If I touched her she pulled away, and those times when she touched me I felt like, suddenly, I didn’t want her so close. And sometimes she’d just turn to me for no reason I could figure and say, “We’ve got problems, Kurt.” And I wouldn’t say anything, because that was a stone I just never wanted to turn over.
All we could do was keep trying, and we’d had more time to do that than I’d expected. It was mid-June and there were no more calls from Griffin, and no traps had been sprung, and I had learned what I needed in order to do the job at the waterworks, and I was starting to get a few carpentry jobs, too. Sometimes the howling still surrounded me. Sometimes the darkness settled in, especially when I was alone. But the world of Westfield started to look safer and safer, even so, and I started to let down my guard because—well, because you can’t be on guard all the time.
Chapter 31
“Kurt, boy, sorry to bother you.”
“Sam, it’s midnight. What are you doing in the office at this hour?”
“Not business, I’ll tell you.”
“Thought maybe you came to help me change the chlorine cylinders.”
“No,” said Sam, a little surprised. “We don’t usually do that at night. It’s not a one-man operation.”
“I know,” I said. “But people have been using a lot of water, and the cylinders have got to be changed a little more often. And since you’re here—”
“Can it wait until tomorrow?”
“Until the morning.”
“Yeah.” Sam wiped the back of his hand over his forehead. “Long as I been doing this, those cylinders always make me a little nervous. You’re checked out on all the safety gear, right? The masks, the breathing stuff? Yeah. Let’s leave it until tomorrow. There’s something else I want to talk to you about.”
“Shoot.”
“The Fourth of July. We’re looking for a flag bearer.”
“Check down at the VFW. There’s a lot of guys down there who’d love the job.”
“Sure thing, Kurt. But when I talked to some of them, they thought—you know, they wanted somebody who’s been part of the War on Terror.”
“You mean me?”
“None other.”
“Sam, what I was doing, I can’t talk about it, and I don’t want people asking about it.”
“We don’t want to know what you did. All we know, and all we need to know, is that you did it.”
“Sam—” I started, but I couldn’t think what to say. It was just a little hometown parade, but I’d watched it every year I was growing up, and when I went to be a Ranger I probably had an idea in the back of my head that I’d lead it some day. But I hadn’t thought about that for a long, long time. “I’d be honored.” The words came out before I could stop them.
At the end of my shift I drove home and parked in my driveway. The lights were on inside the house, but I didn’t go in because I didn’t know what I wanted to tell Betsy, or even whether I wanted to talk to her. I had this good news, this funny news about the parade, but I couldn’t seem to share it, and sadness surrounded me like someone had cast a spell. I forced myself to get out of the pickup’s cab and put my two feet on the ground. I looked at my gym bag on the seat and my running shoes, my old Ranger technicals, on the floor of the cab. What was happening to me? Why was everything closing in like this? In the wars this didn’t happen to me. Even when I was a prisoner this never happened. And now I was home, and happy to be home. And I was going to lead the goddamn Fourth of July parade. How about that? And some part of me kept saying it’s just time to die, Kurt. It’s over. And I didn’t know what was over. I didn’t know. I clutched my T-shirt and shorts, meaning to put them on, but holding them against me the way Miriam squeezed her raggedy doll.
“Kurt?” Betsy was calling out through the kitchen window.
“Yeah?”
“You okay?”
“Yeah, Baby. I thought I would go for a run.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah, Darlin’.”
I stripped down right there in the driveway, put on my shorts and shoes, then started out on my old route, from so long ago, that followed Crookleg Creek toward Jeffers’ Rocks. It was only after about three miles that I started to think I was going to make it. The movement helped to break the spell. I found the energy and the breath I needed. The silver morning on the stream gave me more of whatever it was I had to have. By the time I got to the little stand of cottonwoods around the rocks, which was five miles out, I felt like I could go on running forever.
A car was pulled up near the trees, a Chevy sedan, but I didn’t look too close. I didn’t want to see somebody fucking, or whatever they were doing that brought them to this place at this hour. So I just kept running along among the open fields and was amazed again, like so many times in my life, by the blessing of dawn.
Where to go? I wanted to make a big loop around toward the Route 70 junction. I figured that would give me about a twelve- or thirteen-mile run by the time I got back home. But I really wasn’t sure of the way. I was exploring now, taking a farm road I’d never taken before through a shoulder-high stand of corn. The earth was just soft enough, and easy on my legs, a pleasure to touch, and on the far side of the field was a man-made pond reflecting the robin’s egg blue of the sky. The lake must have been about an acre, and I skirted along the edge, then ran easily up the low hill on the other side.
It was fifty-two minutes since I left the house, which was about seven miles, and I had to figure which way to head back, so I jogged in a small circle on the top of the hill to get my bearings. There were no buildings visible in any direction, just fields and that pond with a big willow on the far edge of it. It was about as pretty and peaceable a scene as I ever remembered. It was, I realized, the place my mind had made.
The morning was bright and hot and I was breathing fire and soaked with sweat by the time I got back to the house. Betsy’s car was in the drive. She’d already dropped Miriam off at the playgroup. I stripped off my T-shirt, my socks, my shorts, and threw everything in the washer. When I got to the bedroom I could hear the shower running.
“Betsy? You in there?”
“I’ll be out in a minute.”
I opened the door of the stall. Her hair was wet and pushed back off her face, her eyes were half closed, and her nipples were hard from the touch of the water. “I’ll be out in a second,” she said, but I stepped into the shower and put my arm around her, pulling her water-slick body next to mine. “No,” she said. “No, Kurt, I’ve got to—” I covered her mouth with mine and felt her, suddenly, almost unexpectedly, opening herself, bending to me, with me, kissing my cheeks and neck and eyes, wrapping her arms around my shoulders, her legs around my hips, my hands on her ass holding her up from behind, my fingers gripping, massaging, entering, until, now, she was up on me and I leaned back against the sweating tile of the shower, lifting her and lowering her on me, rhythmically, my cock swelling inside her as she gripped and pulled me deeper, deeper. “You bastard,” she said, half-biting my shoulder, her mouth open, raking her teeth over the hard-flexed muscle near my neck. “You bastard!” she said sobbing, screaming, biting, fucking, breathless, shivering on me, around
me, over me. I carried her out of the shower and lowered her onto the bed, still inside her hard, framing her face with my hands, kissing her eyes, her lips, thrusting, swelling. “Enough,” she said. “No, Baby,” I said, “there’s more,” feeling the surge rising inside me, inside her, and the gush coming again, again, again. She screamed and shivered, and I thrust crying out some word from before words, so basic, so helpless, spent, and joined, and exhausted with joy.
When I opened my eyes, I saw the message light, but couldn’t remember when the phone had rung. Maybe when we were in the shower. Never mind. I was not going to move from this bed, this moment lying naked and in love with my wife, to hear a recording of somebody who promised to improve my off-peak long-distance service.
“The message light,” said Betsy, her voice groggy, her naked body spooning next to mine on top of the sheets.
“It can wait.”
“Might be Miriam,” she said. “Check it or I’ll worry.”
“All right. Yeah.”
I rolled over and pushed the button. The message started with silence like a wrong number, then the empty clicks of switching circuits, and then a man’s voice. I couldn’t make out the first part of what he said, just the words “Go on.” And then Miriam’s voice, “Daddy?” I stopped breathing.
Another pause on the line, almost like it went dead, and then a man’s voice—it sounded like a second man’s voice—very clear, with no accent at all that I could tell. “You have something that belongs to me,” he said. “We will call back in ten minutes to tell you where to find your angel, and where to bring our sword.”
Betsy’s jaw was clenched and her hands were trembling. “The voice. The goddamn voice! That’s the man who was at the door,” she said. “I’m going to check the school, find Miriam.”
“We’re both going.”
“No! You are staying here, Kurt. You’re taking that call, and you’re going to give them whatever the hell they want.”
I nodded and she was gone.
The second call came maybe five minutes later. I picked up on the first ring.
“Yeah,” I said, writing down the number showing on the phone’s display. The rush of adrenaline made my hand shake so badly I could barely read my own scrawl. A 207 area code. I had no idea where that was.
“You know the place they call Jeffers’ Rocks?” The same voice with no accent, like a TV announcer.
“Yes,” I said.
“Bring it there at noon exactly.”
“And you will bring my little girl.”
“We will make a trade.”
The phone clicked off.
The front door slammed and Betsy was in front of me a second later, her face twisted between rage and grief. “She’s not there. Nobody’s there! What have you done?”
“This is the end of it,” I said. “Today. Right here. Right now. But you got to do exactly what I say.”
“Where’s my baby?”
“There’s a meeting.”
“I’m going with you.”
“Miriam won’t be there.”
“What the fuck do you mean?”
“They won’t bring her. They’ll try to take what they want and give up nothing.”
Betsy pushed me back, punching, pounding like she wanted to drive me through the wall. “Who’s got her, Kurt? Some of your fucking ‘friends’? Some of those bad guys you can never tell me about?”
I grabbed her wrists. “You got to go right now to Sam Perkins and you got to get him to give you one of the cylinders. He won’t want to do it. But he’s got to. A chlorine cylinder. Get him to help you. Tell him whatever—do whatever. Whatever works. Then take it to the old Kmart and put it inside there—somewhere it’s half-hidden.”
“What the fuck are you talking about, Kurt?”
“I don’t have what they want. But the cylinder will buy us time and—” I put my hands up on each side of Betsy’s face and I smiled. “—and we’re going to have Miriam back here in time to watch Scooby-Doo.”
I ran for the hall closet, unlocking it, pulling out the shotgun and the Ruger.
“I’m taking one of those,” said Betsy, her voice as cold as I ever heard it. She looked straight into my eyes. “You say Sam’s not going to want to give me that cylinder? I might need a persuader,” she said.
“You sure?”
“The Ruger.” She grabbed the gun out of my hand, popped the clip, and opened the breech. “Ammo?”
“There,” I said, pointing to the box of a hundred .223 rounds. Betsy loaded the clip like it was second nature, like stacking spoons in a drawer. She dumped everything out of her shoulder-strap purse and threw the cartridges in there, then picked up her cell phone and ran through the kitchen to the garage. “One cylinder. In the old Kmart,” she said, slamming the door of the Saturn, burning rubber out of the garage and wheeling, tires screaming, out of the driveway.
I watched until she turned up toward Garth Road. As far as I could tell, nobody was following her. I put the Mossberg and a box of shells behind the seat of my pickup, and a boot knife under my jeans, then headed for the Route 70 culvert over Crookleg Creek.
Was Griffin watching? I wondered. Did he see the bad guys take my little girl? Or what happened to her playmates? Was he sitting in a van somewhere, or maybe in one of the empty new houses a couple of blocks away just watching it all on a little video screen, listening on earphones, sipping a cup of Chuckwagon coffee? Or maybe he gave up? Maybe he was nowhere near, and neither were his people. Maybe he had a grand plan that was vetoed by the bureaucracy, and then forgotten, along with me, and Betsy, and Miriam, and our lives.
There was no one in my rearview mirror; no sign of a tail. “Happy now, Griffin, you motherfucker?” I shouted. “They took the bait. Yes, indeed. Now you gonna help me get Miriam back?” The mirror was still empty.
The culvert where I parked was about a quarter mile from the stand of trees and Jeffers’ Rocks, but on the far side of a low rise. The creek bed made a deep cut in the ground and gave pretty good cover up to within the last sixty yards or so. I crept forward, stalking the stalkers until I had a clear view of their positions. The Chevy Impala I’d seen at dawn was parked in the shade of the cottonwoods. No other cars were visible. Whoever was there had been there for at least four hours—and before Miriam was taken. It looked like one man was seated behind the wheel. Another was smoking a cigarette about fifteen feet away from the car, waiting.
There had to be at least one more, maybe two.
There—I saw a flash like a shiny coin in the sun and knew it was the lens of a telescopic sight down near the ground among the cornstalks, just about a hundred yards away from the trees. That shooter was in prone position with a good field of fire. And was there another? Where?
A pair of crows soared over the treetops, dancing angrily through the air, cawing and diving, then suddenly breaking away, then coming back on the attack, like they were protecting a nest. There—high in the biggest cottonwood, a man crouched easily in the branches like a frog on a stick, but with an AK at the ready. So the site was covered. And it didn’t look like Miriam was anywhere near it.
The time was eleven forty-eight. I worked my way back to the truck. I left the shotgun and ammo behind the seat and put the knife in the glove compartment. Then I jogged out to Route 70 and walked up to the turnoff for Jeffers’ Rocks. Unarmed and empty-handed I approached the trees.
The guy with the cigarette saw me coming a long way off. He was short and dark, wiry, maybe Indian or Pakistani, and clean-shaven with features a little like a weasel. When I got close enough to see his black eyes, he pulled an automatic pistol out of his belt and walked toward me. “You bring it?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “Where is my little girl?”
“Did you bring the Sword?”
“No. Did you bring my daughter?”
“The Sword. Now!” He pulled a cell phone out of his pocket and held it up with his left hand. “I call and your child dies,” he said t
hrough a veil of smoke.
“And innocent blood is on your hands,” I said, “and hell shall be your portion.” For a fraction of a second I saw the bloody living remains of Abu Zubayr, remembering what I had done to him when he threatened my baby. The vision gave me a grim sense of assurance.
“Where is the Sword?” said the guy with the cigarette.
“When my daughter is safe I’ll take you to it.”
He stared at me blank-eyed and spit the cigarette onto the ground. He looked around at the open fields, maybe realizing how visible we were, and motioned toward the trees with his pistol. As we walked he put the cell phone to his head, waiting for a number to go through, waiting for a connection to a connection, I thought, electronic cutouts rerouting the call so police couldn’t track it. That was why I hadn’t recognized the area code. It was probably just some coin phone in a filling station parking lot in some state far away from me and from the caller.
“Hands on your head,” said the smoker as I walked in front of him. We were passing the car. The driver had a round, dark face and the untrimmed beard of a Salafi Muslim fundamentalist. I didn’t look in the direction of the cornfield or up at the tops of the trees. No need. I knew both shooters had me in their sights.
Chapter 32
The wolf-eyed man Betsy saw at the door, the man whose voice she recognized on the answering machine—I didn’t think he was here at Jeffers’ Rocks. And he was the man I wanted to see. He was the one I figured was giving the orders. He was the one who was on the other end of this little chain-smoking Pakistani creep’s cell phone, maybe just down the road, or maybe halfway around the world.
“Let me talk to him,” I said. The smoker looked at me half annoyed, half puzzled, and kept jabbering in Arabic. Then he listened, his face twisting in an effort to hear and understand the phone.
“Let me talk to him,” I said again. The smoker waved his gun to make me back away. “I know what you want,” I said.
Still the smoker concentrated on the phone, but now his eyes focused more clearly on me, and the gun in his right hand was raised with more purpose, pointed straight at my face. Reflexively, I backed up against the tree—the same tree, I thought, where the AK shooter was up in the branches. He wouldn’t be sitting so solidly if he was trying to keep me in his sights. Hard to aim past all those branches. And with us here in the trees, the sniper in the cornfield wouldn’t have a clear shot either.
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