by Alex Grecian
A light went on in the kitchen.
“Hello!” A voice carried through to the living room, deep and masculine, with a faint German accent. “I’ve come alone and unarmed. Don’t shoot me.”
A moment later an old man stepped into the light and stopped, framed in the doorway. Travis recognized him from his photograph in the church hallway. He was using a cane to steady himself and his shoulders were stooped a bit, but he seemed strong and healthy in all other ways.
“The right Reverend Rudy Goodman,” Travis said. “Or should I call you Rudolph Bormann?”
“No, no, I haven’t been called that in many years. May I come in? This knee gives me fits in wet weather. I’d like to sit.”
Travis gestured at the plastic-covered couch against the wall close to Rudy. “By all means.”
“Thank you.” Rudy sat and rested the cane beside him against the cushions. He put up his hands and smiled. “You aren’t going to shoot me, are you? I assure you, I’m as harmless as I look.”
“I doubt that.” Still, Travis lowered the gun back to his lap.
“You know my names, but you haven’t introduced yourself.”
“I am Dr. Travis Roan.”
“Like the horse.”
“Like the Noah Roan Foundation, which sent me to find you.”
“Well done, boy.”
“Where is Rachel Bloom?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Rachel Bloom. These boxes are all from her mother’s house.”
“Ah, may I?” Rudy reached for his jacket pocket, and Travis tightened his grip on the Eclipse. “Just my phone,” Rudy said. He pulled out a flip phone and opened it, peered down at the tiny screen. “The Bloom woman is getting on a plane even now. I’m . . .” He shook his head and smiled again at Travis, then patted his chest and found a pair of reading glasses in another pocket. “The vision goes along with the hearing at my age.” He put the glasses on and looked at his phone again. “I’m mistaken. Her plane took off an hour ago, almost. On her way to New York, to her husband, and good riddance.”
“On a plane?”
“Yes, her husband works for my law firm. I should say, it’s not my firm, but this church is one of their biggest clients.”
“You are lying. Why would you have kept her mother’s things?”
“What a boring woman she must have been. I haven’t found a single thing of interest in these boxes. But I’ll keep looking.”
“I do not believe you let Rachel go.” Travis pointed the gun at Rudy and waved the barrel in the direction of the front door. “Stand up. You and I are going to move this conversation somewhere less private.”
“Not necessarily. Are you, by any chance, related to someone named Ransom Roan?”
Travis hesitated.
“I thought as much. There’s a resemblance.” Rudy sat back and folded his hands over his small belly.
Travis lowered the Eclipse back to his lap. “Is he still alive?”
“Yes.” Rudy snorted and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “Well, not by much, but he is among the living.”
“How did you catch him?”
“It was surprisingly easy.”
“I do not believe you.”
Rudy shrugged. “I really don’t care whether you believe me.” He leaned forward and picked up his cane, passing it back and forth between his hands as he talked. “You’ve met my son Heinrich? He’s currently keeping Ransom Roan company. In a few minutes, he will kill him. He will do this unless I arrive, alone and unharmed, at their location.”
“Call him. Tell him to bring my father here.”
Rudy shook his head. “That would be foolish of me. No, we’re working on a deadline here, and my knees are no longer what they once were. It will take me a bit to get there and give him the order to stand down. So we ought to get down to business.”
“How long? How much time?”
Rudy glanced at his watch. “We have roughly fifteen minutes.”
Travis calculated quickly. His father had to be somewhere within the church compound, but there was no way to check every room of every surrounding house in fifteen minutes, much less the church building itself. Unless Rudy was lying and Ransom was already dead at the bottom of the lake.
“What do you want?”
“Not much. I’m an old man, Dr. Roan. May I call you Travis?”
“No.”
“Petty of you. Anyway, I don’t have long to live. I’ve made my peace with that. The lightning showed me what waits beyond all this.” He waved a hand at the stark room, indicating the world outside its walls. “It will be glorious. And this place, this existence has given up all of its secrets to me. There’s nothing left for me here.”
“Then end it. Kill yourself. You can use my gun.”
Rudy chuckled. “No, thank you. I have loose ends to tie up before I go. Family matters, mostly. Miles to go before I sleep, isn’t that what they say? I would like to walk those miles unmolested. I want you to leave here, go back to your Foundation and tell them their witness was wrong. There is no evidence left anyway. Ruth Elder is dead, her daughter is under my control. Everyone else you might have talked to is dead now. Every single strand of your case against me has been cut. You have nothing. So go home, Dr. Roan. Go home and live your life and let me live mine. That’s all you have to do. Absolutely nothing. In a month or a year, perhaps five years, I’ll be dead of natural causes. And this will all be over. My church will continue on, but I will not. The slate will have been wiped clean. Maybe you’ll even come to my funeral, just to be sure it’s really me in the coffin.”
“And what about your victims?”
“Which ones?”
“You were responsible for the deaths of thousands in that camp.”
“Ancient history. Did you know them personally? No, of course not.”
“They deserve justice.”
“Oh, they got justice. Perhaps it’s not the justice you would prefer. Maybe I was always on the right side of things and you are a self-righteous child who doesn’t understand the ambiguities of history. Who’s to say you’re right and I’m wrong?”
“There is no gray here. You are a murderer and a monster. And I think you have continued your murderous ways, even here and now.”
Rudy sighed and pushed himself up from the couch. “Be that as it may. We will agree to disagree about my level of responsibility. We won’t talk about all the people I’ve helped through my church and my charitable acts, the people I’ve rescued from starvation, cured of illness and disease, the wounds I’ve healed, the bones I’ve knitted back together. Who’s to say how it all balances out in the end? I won’t be judged by you. I’m going to walk out of this room and you’re not going to stop me unless you want your father to die.” Rudy looked again at his watch. “He has less than ten minutes left. If you’re thinking of shooting me and rescuing him, I should tell you that you’ll never find him. At least, not in time.”
Travis sat unmoving and watched Rudy limp away. From the kitchen, Rudy’s voice came again. “Go home, Dr. Roan. Go home.” The back door opened and then closed, and Travis heard a latch catch. He picked up his gun and put it in his shoulder holster and stood. He put the chair where he had found it against the wall and left by the front door.
The rain had stopped while he was in the house, but sheets of water still poured off the porch overhang. Travis walked through it, stepping carefully on the slick steps. A thick fog had rolled in with the breeze, and he felt the icy cold all down his spine.
He put up his collar and ran to the neighboring porch. There were no cameras he could see under the eaves, and he crossed the porch, peering through the windows next to the front door. A man sat on a sagging couch watching TV, the blue light casting demonic shadows across his broad face. He had a single bushy eyebrow that ran the width of his face a
nd wore the same sort of brown shirt that Deacon Heinrich had been wearing. Travis guessed the man must weigh three hundred pounds, and a fair amount of it looked like muscle. There was no sign of anyone else in the house, but Travis didn’t like his odds against the giant.
He jumped down and ran toward the next house, slipping on the wet grass, but keeping his feet under him. He didn’t have a plan yet, and his mind was churning through the possibilities. He knew he could get back into the compound through the main gate, but he assumed that would be guarded now. He needed to find a way back onto the church grounds without being discovered, and he hoped one of the other houses would be empty. He was certain Rudy Goodman had lied to him, but his lies might be mixed with kernels of truth. Purity First might indeed be holding Ransom Roan captive, and it was possible Rachel Bloom was on a plane bound for New York. But Travis had no intention of taking the Nazi’s words at face value.
A pair of headlights switched on halfway down the street, the beams diffuse and otherworldly. The driver’s-side door opened and a figure stepped out onto the blacktop, his face concealed by the wide brim of his hat.
“If you go back in alone, they’ll kill you,” the man said. “Come on. It’s cold out here, dammit.” Illustrating his point, he got back in the car and slammed the door.
After a moment’s hesitation, Travis walked out to the street and got in the car. The driver turned to him and nodded like he was picking up an old conversation.
“We got a lot to talk about, Doc,” Sheriff Goodman said.
PART THREE
RANSOM
OCTOBER 2018
I eat right, sleep well, and keep my conscience clear.” That was Rudy’s stock answer when people asked him how he had remained so well preserved. Of course, he also believed the lightning was responsible for his vitality. It healed others, but it had always lived in him, even if it was aging as he aged.
For a ninety-four-year-old man, he was remarkably fit and flexible, and his face was unlined so that in a certain light he looked almost childlike.
He rarely left his house behind the church. He didn’t give sermons anymore or walk the few yards across the compound to heal the sick and injured. Every once in a great while Heinrich would bring someone to his kitchen door who was afflicted with arthritis or shingles or cataracts, usually someone who had donated a lot of money to Purity First and in return had demanded to see Reverend Rudy. In those rare instances, he would lay his hands on them, but the energy that passed between them was always weak now, a mere shiver of lightning, an echo of thunder.
Sometimes, in the early morning, Rudy would get one of the church boys to take him out for a spin in the church bus. The original Volkswagen had been replaced by a newer van around the turn of the century, painted in the same bright colors and polka-dot pattern as the first bus. But he had made some improvements to the inside.
Everyone thought it quaint that Reverend Rudy liked to ride around in his folk-band-church-social-clown van as if it were still 1976. People smiled as he passed them, and if they were members of his church they waved at him. Sometimes other people threw things at the van or yelled curse words at him. Those people were outsiders, and they mattered to him not at all.
For a long time he had been careful, driving the Skylark, never having anything on him that could help the police identify him or trace him back to the church. But over time he realized that the church bus gave him protective coloration. Purity First wasn’t well liked, he knew that, but Midwesterners were raised to treat a church and its trappings with deference, and that courtesy extended to the van. He had been pulled over only once while driving it, and only because a taillight had burned out. The trooper had never looked inside, never asked him to open up the back. The Christmas-colored bus had cloaked him in respectability and made him feel safe, free to go about his business in peace.
In the old days he would keep an eye out as he drove and pull to the curb when there were no adults nearby and the group of children was small. He preferred one or two kids at a time, and girls were better than boys; girls with olive skin and dark hair were best of all. His little princesses. He had kept candy in a box behind the front seat and had given it to the children indiscriminately. Sometimes he would invite a child to ride with him around the block or through a park. He would watch carefully to see if anyone had observed him from a window or a shadowed doorway. And if he felt safe, he would take the child back to the church with him.
Everyone kept secrets within them, but children had the best secrets of all.
He had taken women, too, given them rides to his special basement room. And there had been men as well, a handful over the years. Gary Gilbert sprang to mind. The secrets men kept were bitter and hard, and men didn’t make the right noises when fear overtook them, when they lost all hope for mercy or rescue. No, children were always preferable.
But lately he had slowed down. Now he only ventured out once or twice a year, and there was no real urgency about his trips. In fact, he was likely to give away all his candy and come back home with an empty van, and that was all right with him. His headaches weren’t as bad as they used to be, but he didn’t have much energy these days.
The business with the old woman bothered him. He had grown a beard when he got to America, lost his hair after the first lightning strike, started wearing glasses in the seventies when his eyesight had begun to grow weak. When he looked in the mirror, he saw no trace of the man he had been, the failed doctor, the reluctant administrator. His German accent was faint beneath the acquired drawl of his western Kansas dialect. But the woman had recognized him nonetheless, and she had told her friend, the teacher. And the teacher had told her son. So many threads that still had to be cut or the cloth would come unraveled.
And that singular coincidence had brought back memories that he had thought dead and buried. He was experiencing lost time, and he found himself coming awake in strange places, in the bathtub or standing in the middle of the basketball court or down in his secret basement room, with the taste of ashes in his mouth. For the first time, the church and the family he had built from nothing began to feel like a prison.
He wondered how many years he had left.
So when the vibrant blues and greens of summer faded to brown and yellow, Rudy decided to take a trip, maybe find a new distraction to bring back home with him, something to ease his cabin fever. Donnie Mueller had proven himself trustworthy, and although Rudy hated the fact that he could no longer drive himself, he enjoyed the man’s company. He sent for Donnie and waited impatiently for him to open the gate and nose the van down the alley and out onto the street. Rudy got in and they meandered around the neighborhood, waved at some of the passersby there, taking their time, and then drove to the turnoff for US-283 and headed south.
Traffic was light and they left the highway in WaKeeney earlier than Rudy had expected. Donnie drove around the little town, stopping at the parks and schools, but never lingering. There was a Pizza Hut where the high school kids sometimes hung out, and Donnie pulled the van into the parking lot late in the morning. The place had just opened up for lunch, and there was only one other car parked with its nose facing the main door. But there was also a bicycle in the rack around the side of the building. A single bicycle, pink, with tassels hanging from the handlebars.
Donnie parked at the opposite end of the lot from the car, a rental with Texas plates. Rudy got out and went inside, leaving Donnie to mind the van. They had been there a few times before. Every few months Rudy sat at the back of the big dining room and had pasta from the buffet and watched the high school kids horse around with one another. His scars itched, and he tried not to scratch them as he ate. And the children were so caught up in their private dramas that they didn’t notice him.
He recognized one or two of the employees who were bustling about, getting the buffet ready for the lunch rush. There was a young Hispanic girl waiting at the counter. She was h
olding a crumpled dollar bill, and Rudy guessed she might be waiting to get change for the video games that were located in a small alcove beside the front door. The pink bicycle outside would belong to her.
The door opened behind him, and an older man walked in with a New Yorker under his arm. He looked around the room, then went to a corner table, sat, and opened his magazine. He was dressed impeccably in a sharkskin suit that set off the silver highlights in his long gray hair. Rudy felt mildly self-conscious in his red track suit, but after a moment’s reflection decided he looked all right. At least he wasn’t drawing attention to himself as an outsider.
Rudy stepped up to the counter and stood behind the girl, watching the cooks pull pizzas out of the ovens and slice them with a big rocking blade that reminded Rudy of a scythe. The girl turned around to look at him, then turned away again. She looked like she might be anywhere between twelve and fifteen.
Rudy could remember a time when there were no Hispanics in the area, no blacks, no Jews. In the early eighties, a black family had moved into Paradise Flats. But they hadn’t stayed long, and they hadn’t changed anything about the community. Rudy had known, though, that they were merely scouts and there would be more. Like ants who sent out one or two or three at a time to establish scent trails. Once you saw the first ant, it was too late. The swarm was coming. Now there were six black families living in the area around Paradise Flats, and Rudy had stopped counting the spics.
“They’re pretty busy,” he said to the girl’s back. “Might be a while.”
The girl shrugged.
“You need change for the games?”
She shrugged again. The talkative sort.
“I’ve got change,” he said.
At last she turned her head and squinted at him. She shook her head. “I don’t mind waiting.”