by Glen Carter
Another pair of explosions, in quick succession. Bullets suddenly whizzed overhead. The Rangers were getting closer. If only Rutter would stop fucking around and get with the program.
Suddenly, Chongo made for the door.
Rutter fired.
A red splotch appeared at Chongo’s forehead.
Doody ran to him. Fell to his knees and fumbled for a pulse. It was his own heart knocking against ribs. Chongo was dead.
Morgan and Oakley dashed toward the murderous bastard.
There was nothing behind his eyes, not a twitch of humanity. Rutter pointed the weapon and fired once more. Oakley dropped, convulsing in a bloody heap.
A rumbling rage escaped Doody’s throat, muted by the night’s thick air.
Rutter fired another shot. Another fish in the barrel.
Morgan was down. Dead eyes pointed nowhere.
Doody was paralyzed by an icy rage. Their eyes locked. How oblivious he had been to the man’s evil. How blind to his hatred. He wanted to tear Rutter to pieces, to disentangle his DNA. Instead, Doody faced the sky with a horrible, chilling sorrow.
Thunder crashed from low-slung clouds. Lightning flashed, white hot on crimson.
Sarah.
Rutter smiled thinly and then fired again.
39
A roar exploded from Bolt’s gut, drowning out the hell let loose in Olaf’s lighthouse on the sea. When he opened his eyes, the big wooden table was overturned. Books were strewn everywhere. Sarah was frantic. Olaf was wild-eyed, with blood gushing from his nose. The little man ran to a narrow metal staircase, muttering something that was lost in the maelstrom. Up he went.
Sarah knelt at Bolt’s side and placed a hand at his chest. “Are you okay?”
“I think so,” Bolt groaned.
“You were crazy, Samuel.”
“Don’t remember.”
Abe wiped a rivulet of blood from his mouth and nodded at the mess. “Had a night like this once in Rotterdam. Hold him down, Sully.”
Sully dumped his weight on Bolt’s legs.
“Get off me.”
“Not a chance.”
“Samuel. Please stay down,” Sarah pleaded.
Abe stooped for his liquor glass and poured another shot. Olaf was nowhere to be seen.
He made another attempt to push Sully off, but the man had him pinned pretty good. Everyone was still freaked out and treating him like a brawling hooligan.
Sarah snatched something from the floor and fiddled with it for a moment. It was a small digital recorder.
She held it in front of his face and pressed play.
* * * * *
A few minutes later, Bolt sat there shaking, trying to comprehend a rage that wasn’t his and a sorrow he had no right to feel. He took a deep breath and surveyed the destruction in the room.
“Is that the baggage you were talking about,” Sarah asked.
“I think so.”
“One minute you were lying there, and then it was like a tornado,” she said. “You were up. Shouting at the top of your lungs, out of control. It scared me to death. We got you back down, and then out of nowhere you were sobbing, Samuel.”
He was embarrassed by what he was hearing, without any way to explain it.
“Rutter. Lower that weapon.” Sarah spoke the words, slowly, precisely, waiting for an explanation.
Bolt shrugged. He needed to speak to Olaf, but the man had disappeared. Sully released him, and Bolt got to his feet, then stumbled over to the stairs and began to climb, until he was one floor below the massive lighthouse lens.
Olaf was sitting there, head in his hands, still muttering. He looked up. “Please don’t come any closer.”
It was a room full of cobwebs. Ancient equipment, with its gauges and levers and a string of disconnected batteries against one wall. Above them, in the lantern room, a cooling bulb crackled and snapped. “Understood,” Bolt said. After a count to ten, he approached slowly and then eased himself to the floor. “I come in peace.”
Olaf shifted away. After a moment, he pointed at the old batteries. “They’re dead,” he said, eyes still on Bolt. “The place has been decommissioned for years. But the bloody light up there. It came alive. Bright as day.”
“While I was under.”
“Yes. In the middle of your little war.” Olaf breathed deeply. “How do you feel?”
“Like I’ve been run over. What happened to your face?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe the same as the Fresnel.” Olaf pressed a cloth to his eyes. “I had your hand in mine and was knocked over. I think my heart actually stopped.”
Bolt gently pulled Olaf’s cloth away, revealing a mess of caked blood, his eyes a tangle of ruptured veins. The man had taken a beating. Something destructive had surged through him and into Olaf, and the long-dead light at the top of the lighthouse had come to life. Had lightning struck from one realm into another? How fantastical that was, like what he’d heard on Sarah’s digital recorder. Most of it was delirious jabbering. But the voice he heard was undeniably his, spurting a ghastly story in fits and starts, like the visions from his childhood. Bolt had blathered through the regression, but at that moment the victims and villain were clear. He spoke their names. The wide-eyed mystic listened as Bolt recalled as much as he could.
“I’m so sorry, Samuel,” Olaf said.
“You said it wouldn’t hurt,” Bolt groaned.
“There were no guarantees,” Olaf replied. “Of where you would go. What you would experience.”
“Or whether it actually happened.”
Olaf shook his head. “Why would the dead lie, Samuel?”
“The dead usually don’t speak.”
“We do know the events happened,” Olaf said. “Kallum was a witness and, tragically, a victim. Reaching out to us these many years later, he wouldn’t tell outrageous lies. The dead have no need to play the dishonest games of the living. I think that’s why you’re here.”
“A witness.”
“The only living witness.”
Olaf was thinking. After a moment: “Rutter’s destructive energy is palpable.”
Bolt had felt it, too. That day in the homeless shelter.
“He would have done nicely on the streets of Berlin,” Olaf continued. “With his black swastika armband and pockets full of stones. Even as a child he was sadly disturbed. I came upon him in the woods, once. With a dead animal at his feet. A blade dangling in his hand. The routine of killing begins that way.”
“Psychopaths start with animals.”
“Yes. If we are prepared to accept the horrendous testimony from your regression, Rutter, as the only man left standing, was a murderer in Iraq. What’s to say there weren’t others?”
Bolt thought about Sarah. The crushing grief she had suffered in her lifetime. Kallum. Her parents.
“Before he died,” Olaf continued, “Sarah’s father commissioned me to complete a maritime piece to hang in his home. The old passenger steamships fascinated him, and he wanted something in that genre. The SS Morro Castle was a beautiful example, though it burned and sank with a great loss of life. The painting I completed depicted the doomed ship in a ball of flames, with rescue vessels heroically closing in. I delivered it personally to the Vanderson home. The next day, Vanderson sent it back. He was so troubled by the spectre of fire at sea he upgraded the fire-suppression system in his engine compartment. He would not have been blindsided by a defective barbeque.”
It was a theory that wouldn’t carry much weight before a jury.
“What I’m saying,” Olaf continued, “is ambition without means would be extraordinarily painful to a psychopath like Rutter. And make no mistake, I’m comfortable in that diagnosis. Sarah’s parents, like Kallum, were meaningless obstacles to his big, br
ight future. It shouldn’t be discounted.” Olaf studied the bloody rag in his hands. Carefully folded it, before reapplying it to his face.
During his regression, Bolt had experienced the horror of being shot. The unbelievable pain of a bullet tearing through him. He still felt it. Eyes squeezed shut, he waited for it to subside.
“Perhaps this will help us to understand,” Olaf said, with a worried look. “I was a practising psychiatrist once. Lapinlahti mental hospital in Finland. It was a fortress of an institution, beautiful only by its surroundings.”
No diplomas or medical credentials were hung anywhere. What was Olaf doing hiding out in a lighthouse on the sea? “You’re a long way from home.”
Olaf skipped it. “A man’s dastardly deeds are not necessarily driven by the evil festering in just one life. The energy of a transitioning soul has its dark constituents as well. Like a spot of rotten flesh on an otherwise beautiful piece of fruit.”
“Or a worm.”
“Yes, if you like. Better than half a worm, I suppose.” Olaf grimaced upon a smirk. “There was a patient on the forensic unit,” he continued. “His name doesn’t matter anymore, but it did at the time, especially to police. In fact, they had a special name for him. So did the newspapers.”
“Son of Sam. Jack the Ripper. Headline grabbers.”
“The Impaler,” Olaf said. “A name well-earned.”
“Impaler?”
“Yes. Like Vlad, at least in the way he dispatched his victims. A version for the twentieth century. They found the bodies in the forest,” Olaf said. “All young men. All grotesquely impaled on wooden stakes. I was responsible for the Impaler’s psychological evaluation. I testified during his trial.”
“CNN would have been all over it.”
“Who?”
“Never mind.”
“What I told the court was gruesome and complex,” Olaf went on. “The Impaler claimed to have been a farmer in fifteenth-century Transylvania. His family was tortured and killed. The children were roasted. He had been forced to watch. Too horrendous to even think about.”
“Vlad’s handiwork.”
“Of course. Prince Wallachia himself. Can you believe there’s a bust of him in his hometown?”
“So, your tortured patient. What was his point?”
“Revenge,” Olaf replied. “Every one of the Impaler’s poor victims bore a resemblance to a portrait of Vlad Dracula at Ambras Castle. His problems began not long after paying a visit to the castle’s art gallery when he was a teenager. It was his awakening. In his fevered mind, my patient had finally gotten even. Nine times, in fact.”
“So, you’re saying Rutter’s an accumulated evil. Retroactive to whatever wrongdoing he suffered in previous lives.”
Olaf laughed. “I’m not talking about Rutter. That bellicose narcissist. His motivations are not nearly so dramatic.” He shifted to face him. “Don’t you see? My man was compelled by unfinished business. Until the opportunity for revenge presented in another life. His was a karmic twitch on the scale of demonic.”
“Five centuries is a long time to hold a grudge.”
“The blink of an eye in the growth cycle of a soul,” Olaf replied. “When I put the Impaler under, the rage in him was uncontrollable. I had to summon orderlies. The sedative would have knocked down a horse.”
“You sent the Impaler back to his days on the farm. His family’s brutal murder. No wonder he started swinging.”
Olaf nodded. “His past suffering was an obstruction to his mental and spiritual recovery. Even as occurrences in another life, the man who was my patient was driven mad by that medieval horror show. I had already become interested in past life regression as an element of therapeutic protocol. The possibilities still enthrall me.”
“So, you regressed him.”
“Like I regressed you.”
“I’m not comfortable with the association.”
“Don’t worry,” Olaf said. “Your journey has been peaceful by comparison. Unless you’re hiding bodies somewhere.”
“None.”
“How about special abilities?” Olaf pointed to the lantern room above them. “You wouldn’t be the first.”
“I’ve got this thing with electricity,” Bolt told him. “Sometimes it gets out of hand, but I’m okay with it, mostly.”
“Interesting. And nothing I’ve ever seen. We all generate tiny amounts of electricity to keep our heart going and our brain. But in your case, those chemical reactions seem to be way out of whack.”
“There’s something you’re not saying.”
“I will if you wish, realizing it can never be taken back.”
“Reincarnation.” There. He’d said it. Olaf was right. It would never be taken back.
Jürgen nodded. “I believe Kallum is a part of you, and that makes you a sweet gift, especially to that beautiful woman downstairs, but you are still your own man, Samuel.”
“But not all of me.”
Olaf held up a pair of fingers. “I believe two souls are at play in your situation. The output of that electrical activity I was talking about is exponential. Like on a Richter scale.”
It was a lot to take in. A lot to believe, but so many things could be explained by what Jürgen was saying, and in some ways it was a relief, even if it was hard to process at that moment. “Sorry about your face,” said Bolt.
Jürgen inspected the bloody cloth once more. “I’ll live. But I’m sure that decommissioned light could be seen for miles.”
Shit. The cops and the Secret Service would have seen it, too. Time to go. Bolt helped Olaf to his feet and pulled him to the staircase. When they reached the bottom, Bolt grabbed Sarah and headed for the door. The next second, wood splintered, and the room exploded in a blinding light. Boots pounded around them. Powerful arms wrestled Bolt to the floor.
“Everyone down!”
Abe and Sully dropped. Olaf did the same, swinging while he went.
A boot slammed into Bolt’s back. His arms were jerked back and handcuffs snapped. He looked up just in time to see Bert and Ernie grab Sarah, lift her off her feet, and run her from the lighthouse.
40
The senator was informed that his wife had been located, rescued, and was being returned to the safety of their home. Four men were under arrest. Apparent nobodies. The Secret Service was waiting to interrogate, but it was being held up while the locals played the jurisdiction card. It was their case. Their perps. Besides, the sheriff and his force of Mayberry morons already knew three of the four. The fourth was more interesting and likely the ringleader. His name was Samuel Bolt.
The 747 was at thirty-five thousand feet ten minutes after taking off. Senator Rutter fixed his eyes on a strobe light at the wing tip while his campaign chairman spoke.
“What does he want?” Rutter interrupted. “Money?”
“No demands were ever made,” David Stoffer replied. “Her protective detail claims they were just following orders. She visited Diana Doody first. Then a man named Abe Power. Bolt was with Power on the boat where Sarah disappeared. Would you like to speak to your wife, sir?”
Rutter shook his head. “What’s our ETA?”
Stoffer told him.
“What does the media know?”
“Nothing yet.”
“Stay away from the reporters on board,” Rutter said. “If you’re cornered, say it was all just a misunderstanding. The wife of the candidate was spending a night with friends when two overzealous Secret Service agents got signals crossed and made a bad call. They’re no longer with us, I presume.”
“Already replaced,” Stoffer said.
Rutter nodded. “Get those assholes out of jail before the media goes looking for them. Force them into signing some kind of non-disclosure agreement in return for our forgiveness. O
ffer money, if you have to.”
“Done. What about Bolt?”
Rutter stared out the window, gazed down upon the unending cloud cover. “Everyone’s a goddamn victim these days,” he said after a moment. “And me, too, David. Before it was something that schools and parents gave a shit about. I was bullied. Plenty. One kid I can’t forget. Dunphy. I can still see his face, the way he smiled when he had me cornered. Big, ugly Johnny Dunphy. His old man was a bully, too. Shit, the whole family was a waste of skin. They were poor as dirt, and when Dunphy wasn’t swinging at me, I was looking over my shoulder.” Rutter went quiet. The engines spooled back as the aircraft changed altitude. “It was years later, my first term, and I’m in Harbour Rock getting in my car, and this bum comes out of nowhere and tries to put the touch on me.” Rutter was grinning now. “In a flash, I realize it’s that fucker Dunphy, with that same stupid grin. Anyway, after a minute he recognizes me, and he gets excited. He starts talking about the good old days, like we’re a couple of school chums with lots to remember. It turns out he needs help with his welfare. Can I get involved? Push some buttons. Can you imagine the gall?”
“Real gall,” Stoffer replied.
“So, I look around and we’re all alone.” Rutter chuckled. “You wanna know what I did? I cold-cocked the guy. Down he went, a heap of burlap and shit. Out like a light. I kicked him in the guts twice just for good measure. Fuck, it felt good.”
Stoffer was stone-faced. “Senator, is this man going to be a problem?”
“Don’t worry about Johnny Dunphy,” Rutter said smugly. “The whole family burned up in a fire.”
Stoffer showed his relief.
“The thing you never forget, David,” Rutter continued, “is that feeling when you were a kid, never knowing when someone’s gonna sneak up behind you and knock your lights out. The day I put Dunphy on the ground, I decided I’d never feel like that again.” Rutter paused. “This Bolt creep. I think he’s a lot like that fucking Dunphy.”
Stoffer simply nodded. Bolt would be dealt with. Ryan had texted him an hour ago. We need to meet. Stoffer had texted back a time and a place.