Before Cain Strikes

by Joshua Corin

  Esme took the lead. “Nolan? Halley?”

  She wound her way up the stairs, and halfway to the second floor, she saw a hand and knew that wedding ring and rushed the rest of the way and knelt beside her husband. His pulse was weak but steady. Rafe.

  To her credit, Penelope Sue didn’t freak out. She didn’t gawk at the scarlet spatter on the walls and ceiling or tremble at the gory smear of blood and pus that used to be Rafe’s right cheek. She took out her cell phone and dialed 9-1-1.

  “Grover did this?” asked Tom.

  Esme wanted to say yes, but as much as she loathed the dickhead, was he capable of this? Sure, he’d experienced tremendous emotional trauma and perhaps…perhaps…was experiencing a psychotic break, but this? This was just—

  Sophie.

  “Sophie!” she cried out. “Sophie!”

  No response. No sound. Esme peered up through the stairwell and that was when she spotted her father-in-law’s twisted, purpling form.

  “Give me your gun,” she said to Tom.

  “Esme…”

  She held out her free hand. “Now.”

  He gave her his Glock.

  She bounded up the stairs, peeked into her daughter’s quarters, hopeful, hopeful, but knew they would be empty, as empty as the pit deepening in her heart.

  She checked Lester’s heartbeat. He was alive. And he had defensive wounds. At least there was that.

  Still no sign of Grover. Or Nolan and Halley Worth, for that matter.

  She continued up the stairs, closer and closer to the hatch at the top, and the rain, and the lantern room, and answers she was terrified of learning.

  The lantern room occupied the middle third of the lighthouse’s roof, and the middle third of the lantern room was occupied by a first-order Fresnel lens, almost twelve feet in height and rotating at a horizontal arc of two hundred and eighty degrees. The mightiness of the beam momentarily blinded Grover, and he stumbled back against one of the lantern room’s thick glass storm panels. He felt so faint. How much blood had he lost? How much blood was there in the human body? How easy it would be to just sit down for a spell and just nap. No. Think about the girl. Grover rubbed at his eyes and his vision cleared, somewhat, and he looked away from the light at the rest of the roof, which was little more than a bare terrace, perfect on a clear day for sightseeing or on a clear night for stargazing, but tonight was just a wet platform, towering above sea level, and with Nolan Worth standing by the narrow railing beside seven-year-old Sophie Stuart.

  One hand was snaked around the little girl’s arm.

  The other had the hammer raised.

  Grover pushed open the lantern room door and raised the rifle and shouted, “Stop!” and despite the roar of the raindrops Nolan heard him, and faced him, and smiled.

  “I’m glad you’re alive, Grover! You can write another book! How do you like this pose for the cover?”

  He twisted the hammer around so the claw end now faced down toward Sophie’s soft blue eyes, which were only an arm’s reach away.

  Grover thumbed the hammer on the rifle. The rudimentary training the FBI had given him for Saturday’s mock-execution kicked in. He held the edge of the barrel level with the target. Even with his diminished vision and unsteady equilibrium, at this range, he couldn’t miss.

  “Go ahead, Grover. I finally became a man tonight. Can you do the same?”

  Grover could. He had Nolan Worth’s chest in his sights. He pulled the trigger.

  Click.

  What?

  Grover tugged again at the trigger.

  Click.

  Nolan replied with another smile. “You don’t think I’d leave a loaded gun around, do you? This is a family establishment! My grandson comes here!” Then he returned his focus to Sophie, who was struggling to break free. “I’m going to make you so lovely.”

  Grover didn’t lower his rifle, but he didn’t move, either. Perhaps it was his concussion. Or perhaps his heart simply chose that moment to surrender. He didn’t lower his rifle, and he didn’t move, but he also didn’t look away.

  Once again, Nolan brought the hammer back.

  Then…a bass drum thump of thunder: bam! But not thunder, not on a night like this. Nolan looked to the dark sopping skies. Where had that…?

  But that question of his went unanswered, because the bullet Esme had shot, the bullet which had penetrated Nolan Worth’s heart, at that moment snapped off the blood to his brain, and he fell face-first to the wooden floor. The hammer clanged free from his hand and lay beside him, a small metal corpse in the rain.

  Grover watched Esme pass him and run to her daughter. She collected Sophie in her free arm and held her so very tightly. It was a lovely sight, he decided. He placed the rifle down on the floor, not far from the hammer, and sat with his back against the storm wall of the lantern room. It was time now for that nap. Yes. His head had been cracked like an egg. Ha, ha. That needed to be written down. He took one final look at the mother and her child. A lovely sight indeed. He thought about his mother. He thought about many things in that half second before his eyelids finally fluttered shut forever.

  Tom watched Esme disappear up into the lantern room, and then returned his attention to Penelope Sue.

  “They’ll be here as soon as they can,” she said.

  He nodded. Still, there had to be something they could do to help Rafe, perhaps ease his bleeding.

  She must have read his mind. “They’ve got to have a first-aid kit,” she said, and the love of his life, head-strong and gung ho, went toward the open doorway of the Worths’ living quarters but never made it all the way there because Cain42, pale, brown hair a mess, leaped out at her and slashed her carotid artery with Halley Worth’s sewing scissors. Habit drove Tom to reach for his gun, but it was gone, it was upstairs, and Cain42 stared him down, and the ever-perceptive sadist inside of Cain42 concluded from the look of sudden utter despair on this man’s face that leaving him alive would be far crueler than cutting him down. Tom tried to stop the madman’s rush for the stairs, but overwhelming emotions dulled his tactics, and Cain42 easily evaded, descending down the lighthouse’s spine and out the front door, into night light and freedom.

  30

  “I told you two weeks,” said Dr. Rosen. She had a cold, and each of her throaty coughing fits was now punctuated by a ten-second concerto of snotty sniffles. “But given recent events, perhaps we should table that deadline.”

  “No,” replied Rafe. He was the one in the hospital bed. His cheek was thickly bandaged. The painkillers kept him from screaming. Screaming would have ripped open his stitches.

  Beside him, Esme sat in a folding metal chair. Her left arm was no longer in a sling, but her fall to the tracks still left a constellation of slowly healing cuts and bruises on her face. “No,” she echoed.

  Dr. Rosen, all four feet eight of her, was standing awkwardly by the far wall (so as not to spread her germs to her injured clients). Decisions made in crisis were seldom positive, and she wanted to tell them that, but didn’t. The truth was, with what they’d just been through, any advice that popped into her mind seemed in contrast flimsy and inadequate. So she remained silent, and waited to hear the verdict they’d reached on the matter of their marriage.

  “It was about security,” Rafe began. “But that’s what it’s always about, isn’t it? The maintenance of a pleasant and safe status quo. The white picket fence, etc. We achieved it, and then, six months ago, we lost it. Esme had compromised the security of our family. That is what I believed.”

  Esme pursed her lips and looked away

  “I blamed my wife. I blamed the FBI. I even blamed our house for not shielding us from the outside world. That was its job. This is what we’re told. I relocated myself and my daughter to a different home. I retreated.”

  “Fight or flight,” muttered Esme.

  Rafe glanced at her and nodded. “Yes. Live to fight another day. I was only thinking about the best interests of my family. It’s something, isn�
��t it? How selfish we can be when we’re trying to do what’s best for other people…how naive we can be when we’re trying to be mature. What’s the psychoanalytical catchphrase for that? I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be hostile. I’ve had a rough two weeks.”

  He took a break and reached for the flimsy plastic cup of water on his small mobile table. Since he couldn’t open his mouth very wide, he had to drink it from a straw. When Sophie had been in earlier, she’d asked the nurse if they had any bendy straws to give him, because bendy straws were more fun. She even had a red bendy straw that went around and around and around like an upside-down roller coaster. Rafe thought about Sophie and had to close his eyes for a moment.

  Feeling a little better, he let the straw drop from his lips and watched it bounce a bit in the water. He returned the cup to the table and looked their marriage counselor in the eye.

  “Do you believe in security, Dr. Rosen?”

  “Do I believe it’s important?”

  “No,” he replied. “Do you believe it exists?”

  Now Esme looked her in the eye, as well. She opened her mouth to answer, but once again censored her kneejerk reductionist response. These two people deserved better than that.

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “I like to think so. Otherwise, what’s the alternative?”

  Esme replied, “Living in fear.”

  And there it was. That was the alternative.

  “You’re not getting divorced,” said Dr. Rosen.

  “No. We’re not. We’re going to live our lives in our house and if tomorrow the sky comes crashing down, that’s where we’ll be when it happens.”

  “Fight or flight,” Esme repeated, and intertwined her fingers in Rafe’s.

  “That still doesn’t resolve the issue you had with your wife returning to her job.”

  He shrugged. “We’ll figure out a way to make it work.”

  “That doesn’t sound very definitive.”

  “Show us a marriage that is.”

  Their session lasted another ten minutes, and then Dr. Rosen said goodbye and left to return to her own home. She couldn’t wait to crawl into her own bed and let two tablespoons of NyQuil cast their narcotic spell. They all agreed to have another session in two weeks, but Dr. Rosen had a feeling that would be their last. For better or worse, her clients had reached their own solution.

  Esme chatted with Rafe another half hour before he, too, was ready for sleep. Given the level of painkillers being pumped through his IV, she was impressed he’d lasted this long. She kissed him good-night, smile to smile.

  As she went to leave, he gently touched her wrist. “Check on my dad before you go, okay?”

  Lester was on the fourth floor, in ICU. The doctors had done their best to repair his shattered ribs, but his lungs had also suffered significant concussive damage, and at his age… But he would recover. She knew he would. If anyone was a fighter, it was Lester Stuart. No, he would recover if only so he could continue to make her life as agonizing as possible. She watched his frail body through the glass. He would be fine.

  She hoped he would be fine.

  It was nearly 8:00 p.m. Monday’s rain had tapered off sometime mid-Tuesday, but now the Doppler radar geniuses were predicting overnight snow showers. Apparently, it was going to be a white Thanksgiving. Esme buttoned up her coat and took the elevator to the parking deck. Her cell phone rang as soon as she started her car engine.

  “We’ve cracked the pass codes on the servers.”

  “Hello, Karl.”

  “As of an hour ago, Mineola Wu became the new owner of Cain42’s web page and, as such, has access to the names and addresses of every single one of the members. The list will be distributed nationwide in the morning. By tomorrow afternoon, I imagine we’ll have at least half of them in custody pending further investigation.”

  “Are we sending them to a gulag in Siberia, Karl?”

  “Excuse me?”

  She shifted into Reverse and pulled out of her spot. “Never mind.”

  “I thought you’d be happy.”

  “I’m ecstatic.”

  “Funny. That’s not the word that I was thinking of.”

  “English is a flexible language.”

  “Have you finished the paperwork yet?”

  Sigh. “No, Karl.”

  “It’s not optional.”

  “I’m aware.”

  “There are the health forms, the insurance forms, the tax forms,” he said, “not to mention the AAR justifying your use of lethal force in the field.”

  “If anyone wants to question my shooting of Nolan Worth, let me send them a picture of my daughter. If they still aren’t convinced, send me their pictures so I can show them in explicit detail how they can go fuck themselves.”

  This time Karl sighed. Oh, how she enjoyed that deflating sound.

  She paid her five dollars at the gate and made it fifty whole feet before braking for a red light. Wasn’t that always the way.

  “Karl, you said you got all the members’ names and addresses?”

  “Yes.”

  “Even Cain42’s?”

  Pause.

  “No.”

  “God knows how much it cost him to maintain a server in Switzerland. There has to be a money trail.”

  “We’re looking into it.”

  But it would be another dead end. She was sure of it.

  The light turned green. She accelerated, made it two blocks and then promptly braked again for another red light. Goddamn it.

  “Anyway, please fill out the paperwork. I wouldn’t want to have to hold your paycheck.”

  To her left was a bookstore.

  “Karl…”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t forget to send flowers to Grover’s family.”

  Silence. Then: “Anything else, Special Agent Stuart?”

  He emphasized her title. She wasn’t sure if he was offering respect, mockery or both. She didn’t care. The light turned green and she told her boss good-night and she drove home, where Tom was babysitting Sophie, and vice versa.

  For Sophie, the events of Monday evening were a blur. She remembered coming home from school. She remembered playing cards with Grandpa Les. But everything after that was mercifully locked away in some closet of her mind. Someday, though, that closet door would open.

  When Esme returned from the hospital, she found Tom and her daughter at the kitchen table, playing Go Fish. The little girl was wiping the floor with the old man.

  Half a pizza pie lay in an open box on the counter. Esme grabbed a lukewarm slice and joined them in the next hand. Ten minutes later, Sophie was wiping the floor with her mother and the old man.

  “Had enough?” she asked them.

  “Little girl,” Tom grumbled, “I’ve been playing cards since before your mother was even born.”

  “Then how come you’re so bad at it?”

  Sophie grinned at him.

  “Deal the cards.”

  “I think maybe it’s time for Sophie to go to bed…” said Esme.

  “After this hand,” replied Tom.

  Esme shrugged, snatched another slice and watched the two of them go at it one more time. Tom dealt: seven cards each, same as everywhere in the world. By the time Esme finished her slice, Sophie had all of the twos, sevens and queens laid out in front of her, and was arranging them into a little house, which ticked off Tom even more.

  Oh, how she loved her little girl.

  But eventually it was time for bed, and Sophie hugged Tom good-night, and Esme escorted her to her room. They talked about this and they talked about that and mother and daughter exchanged I-love-yous, and then it was time for eyes to close, and for sleep.

  Tom was still at the kitchen table, shuffling the cards.

  Esme put on a pot of coffee.

  “Did you let her win?” she asked.

  “You know me better than that,” he answered.

  “I do. I just wanted to hear you say it.”

 
“You Stuart women are ruthless.”

  “Damn straight.”

  She sat down at the table and shared with him the news about the case, and Cain42. Through it all, Tom listened without speaking. When she was finished, he just nodded his thanks and returned to the cards, shuffling them back and forth in his weathered hands.

  She filled them each a mug of coffee.

  “I spoke with Penelope Sue’s brother,” he said. “The body got there okay.”

  “Good.”

  “He wanted to know if I was going to speak at the funeral on Friday.”

  “Are you?”

  Tom glanced up at her, quick, then back to the cards. And that was the only answer he gave.

  She sipped her coffee. Then: “So I was thinking about tomorrow morning.”

  “Tomorrow morning,” he echoed.

  “It’s Thanksgiving.”

  “Want me to teach you how to deep-fry a turkey?”

  “Sure, why not. Since we’re spending the afternoon at the hospital, anyway…”

  A smile flickered across his lips.

  Esme mustered her courage and continued. This was not going to be easy. “I want to take Sophie into the city. For the Macy’s Day Parade. I want you to come with us.”

  He stopped shuffling.

  “Tom, I think it’s what she would have wanted. Isn’t it?”

  He stared intently at the cards, as if he were anatomizing them for dissection.

  “Tom?”

  He put the cards down and found her with his eyes. “You are something else. You know that?”

  “I think it will be cathartic.”

  “Is that so?”

  “What’s the alternative, Tom?”

  “When I have my gun pressed up against that bastard’s face and he begs me for mercy, mercy only I can give to him, and in that moment I make a choice…that will be when I get closure.”

  “So, what, you’re going to isolate yourself from the rest of the world and go hunt down your white whale?”

  “I don’t have to do it alone,” he said.

  “That’s right,” she replied. “You don’t. And that’s why you’re going to come with us tomorrow to the parade.”