We went to her room and I shoved her onto the bed, listened to her laughing in the dark.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE
A FOREIGN BED. The unfamiliar pattern of Susan’s soft breathing. Creaks and groans in the house that I did not recognize from my time sleeping in the basement. I lay awake for hours thinking about Cline, about how he had crept into my life and taken it over. There was no doubt in my mind that for all the terror and heartache he had inflicted on the people sleeping in the rooms around me, I was the one who’d allowed him through the door to our world. I had been the one searching for a purpose. Wanting a fight. If I’d just stopped Winley Minnow trashing his family’s house and not taken things any further, Marni might still have been alive. As would the men Cline had taken out for failing him. When my stirring seemed to be drawing Susan out of her dreams, I crept down to my room in the basement.
I took the backpack full of cash out from under the bed and heaped the stacks on the coverlet. Looked at the note Cline had left me.
Think carefully.
People had died in my selfish pursuit of Cline. Would it be selfish now to leave the battle? The money before me was offered on the condition that I walk away and leave Cline to his own business. I picked up a stack of cash and flipped through it, felt the electric pulse of the power tied to what the simple pieces of paper represented.
“Oh my God.”
I jumped. Susan was standing in the dark behind me, tying the belt of her robe.
“What … what is … ” She looked at the money. At me. I watched emotions flicker across her face, confusion and hurt.
“I got it yesterday,” I admitted, and I handed her the note from Cline. She took a stack of money from my hand and looked at it.
“You didn’t tell me.”
“I didn’t tell anyone,” I said. I let her take in what that meant. A coldness came over her features and she dropped the stack and the note back in the pile.
“You son of a bitch,” Susan said softly. Her eyes were two pinpoints of light caught in the dim blue flooding through the window. “You’re not thinking of—”
“That’s exactly what I’m doing,” I said.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-TWO
“I’M THINKING,” I said. “Listen to me. I’ve been lying awake thinking all night. We’re relying very heavily on the idea that we’re going to stop Cline. That eventually he’ll wind up where he belongs, in a prison cell or at the bottom of a six-foot hole. But how many more losses are we willing to accept before that happens? Marni’s gone, Susan. And it’s because of me.”
“It’s not because of you.” Susan shook her head. “You couldn’t possibly have guessed what Cline would do to her.”
“But what if I’d just walked away in the first place?” I asked. “What if I’d just turned my back? She’d still be alive.”
“This isn’t about what-ifs!” Susan yelled.
“It is,” I said. “That’s exactly what it’s about.” I turned and sat on the bed, picked up a stack of the notes. The admission came slowly, eased through my tight throat. “There’s … there’s something I didn’t tell you about Siobhan and me. The night she was killed, she had gone into town to get things for dinner. That’s what we did after we had a big fight. We’d make a nice dinner, have a couple of glasses of wine. Reconnect with each other. She liked the walk into town and back, but she also wanted that time alone to think through what we’d said to each other during the fight.”
“What did you fight about?” Susan sat down on the bed beside me.
“This house, this town,” I said. “This was her dream, not mine. And I guess when I lost my job in Boston, I was too shocked and numb to really think about what we should do next. We sold our house and found this place and bought it before I’d really stopped to ask myself what I wanted. I missed my job. I missed the city. I didn’t feel like I belonged here, and I blamed her for not realizing that I hadn’t been ready to make big, world-changing decisions.”
Susan leaned into me. Her shoulder against mine was warm.
“I ask myself all the time—what if? What if I’d put my foot down? What if we’d stayed in Boston? Or what if we had come here and I’d just been stronger, taken the change in stride, hadn’t fought with her that night? She’d still be alive. This cash? It’s not just cash. It’s another what-if. We know what Cline is capable of. What if we back off now?”
“I can see what you’re looking at when you look at this money.” Susan nodded. “You’re seeing yourself selling this place. Taking the cash. Setting yourself up comfortably back in Boston. Forgetting Cline. Forgetting what happened here.”
“Maybe. I mean, there are other things I could do with the money. Share it. Give it to someone who needs it.”
“Whatever you do with it, it would be a way for you to stop fighting and pretend everything’s okay,” Susan said.
“Maybe it would be okay, after a while,” I said. I looked at her, and I saw one possible future realized so perfectly. Susan and me in an apartment in Boston, just like Siobhan and me, the circle of time closed and everything that had happened in Gloucester conveniently erased. I could find some kind of law enforcement job in my city. The police department wouldn’t hire me, but someone would.
Susan took my hand and rested her chin on my shoulder. The feel of her and the smell of her was not my lost wife, and I realized I was an idiot to think I could go back in time. I looked at the cash and the backpack and suddenly thought of Malone. Had he been seeing his future when he opened the safe at Ivan Pilkos’s house and started shoving stacks of bills into his backpack? Malone had wanted to take the money, start again, pretend everything was okay. I understood now what had made my friend cross to the dark side. It was his actions and mine on that fateful night that sparked all the tragedy and pain that had happened since.
I put the stack of money I was holding back into the bag. Susan met my eyes, and she knew I had made a decision. She smiled at me in the dark.
We had lain on the bed in each other’s arms, our heads together on one pillow, for only a second or two when I smelled the smoke.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-THREE
SUSAN AND I couldn’t find the source of the smoke anywhere inside the house, so we crept to the front door. The night was still and silent, silver and blue in the light of the moon. The smell of burning wood was unmistakable. I looked at the clock in the entryway; it was 4:00 a.m. I ran to the basement to get my coat and gun while she ran up to her room to get hers.
We met at the door, and the air misted at my lips as we crept across the porch and down the stairs. The eeriness of the stillness before me set my teeth on edge. My mind turned a hundred shapes into the silhouettes of men with guns. I wanted Susan to follow me, to let me guard her, but she walked ahead, her gun out, following the smell of the burning. I looked up as we passed beneath Effie’s window and saw her thrust open her curtain, the smell having reached there, her enormous rifle tracking me as she identified my shape in the dark. I waved at her to stay where she was. She nodded.
In the darkness, I spotted the firepit on the east side of the house. The fire was lit. On the bench in the light, a man sat with his arms resting between his legs, his head down. Shadows picked at his shoulders and the dark pattern on the front of his dress shirt.
Susan stepped to the side and we stood before the man, our guns trained on his head.
“Don’t move,” I said. I kept my voice low. All I needed was for the household to wake in panic at another attack in the dark hours. I didn’t know who else was out there in the night watching. Had this man come alone, or was his presence and the fire a decoy for an ambush? I noticed Susan’s pulse was hammering in her neck.
“What do you want?” Susan asked.
The man didn’t answer. I stepped closer and realized the dark pattern on the front of his shirt wasn’t a design.
It was blood.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-FOUR
“HE’S DEAD.” SUSAN shuddered. Her hand fluttered near her m
outh, but she regained her composure quickly. We rounded the fire on opposite sides and went to the man. He was small, thickly built. His head was bruised and scabbed with wounds at least a day old, but a huge, smiling gash across the front of his throat was new, still wet. I looked out into the dark forest, saw no one. There were drag marks in the dirt and leaves leading up to the bench. I fished in his back pocket and drew out a small leather wallet.
“Stanley Turner,” I said. “This is one of Cline’s guys.”
“What is this?” Susan was out of breath, on the verge of panic. “A sick present?”
“He’s been dead a little while.” I ran a hand over the body. He was cold in the back and warmed in the front by the fire. “Killed somewhere else. There’s no blood on the ground.” I looked back at the house, thinking, oddly, of Angelica. The sight of a body with a gaping neck wound propped up a few yards from her bedroom would send the fragile author into conniptions. A strange, detached consideration in the peak of my terror; I supposed my mind was seeking safe ground.
“What do we do?” I dragged Susan out of the light of the fire in case we were being watched. “Is Clay here?”
“No, not that I know of,” she said. “I think he was going back in tonight to work on the case.”
“We’ll do a lap of the grounds, see if—”
“Hey!” A voice in the blackness. Susan and I turned, training our guns on a figure emerging from the dark. Nick put his hands up. He held a pistol in one of them. “It’s me. It’s me.”
“Jesus,” I said. I wanted to grab Susan to me, shield her, shove her inside the house. But that was more of my over-protective bullshit. She had told me she could take care of herself.
“I smelled the smoke, saw the stiff, and did a patrol of the area.” Nick glanced toward the forest, his eyes wide. “There’s no one out there. Not that I can see.”
I was so angry it was hard to unclench my jaw. “He’s trying to intimidate us. Scare us. Dropping one of his guys on our fucking doorstep. He’s a coward.”
“Are we absolutely certain this is one of Cline’s guys?” Susan asked.
“He’d had his head bashed in pretty bad, and not tonight. This is probably the guy Clay stomped on in Dogtown,” I said.
“Cline hasn’t even stuck around to watch us freak out.” Susan was breathing deeply, trying to calm her nerves. “I don’t understand.”
“It’s not about watching us be scared,” I said. “I think it’s about sending the message. These guys, they’re just commodities. They’re disposable. If I can do this to my own men, imagine what I can do to you.”
We stood, all of us lost in thought. Nick was tapping his gun against his thigh, his eyes searching the ground. I looked at him. The muscles in his shoulders were ticking with tension.
“I’m going to go inside and call Clay,” Susan said. “This is a crime scene.”
“Yeah, you report in,” Nick said. “We’ll take care of things here.”
Susan frowned slightly at the comment, then jogged back toward the house. Nick walked a few paces away from me, turned to the forest, and murmured something. He shook his head as though telling someone no.
“Nick, are you all right, buddy?”
“He’s not going to give us anything. We’ll have to find out ourselves. Tell Rickson to load up and you cover the door. I’ll take care of this.”
“Tell … who? What are you talking about?”
Nick raised his pistol and shot the body on the bench twice in the chest.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-FIVE
MY EARS WERE ringing. The shock I had already been experiencing suddenly ramped up, the volume cranked high, all my nerves electrified. I snatched the gun from Nick, but he was in a dream state, yawning, rubbing his head, turning and murmuring to people who weren’t there. The body had bucked twice as the bullets entered it and now slowly flopped to the ground before the fire like an oversize doll. I felt a wave of nausea, the lifelike twitch of the body for an instant making me think of zombies, monsters, dark things.
Susan came running out from the house at the sound of the gunshots. I ran and grabbed her before she could get to the body.
“No, no, no, no.” I turned her around. “Stop them coming out. The others. They’ll have heard the shots.” I grabbed the body and dragged him out of the light of the fire. In the searingly cold night, I could hear Angelica’s frantic questioning in the wind, Susan’s placations. I saw Nick’s tall, straight frame walking around the side of the house.
It seemed an age before Susan joined me. There was blood on my arms, my hands. I stiffened to try to stop the shaking in my limbs, but that only made matters worse.
We were both thinking the same thing, but neither of us wanted to say it. In time it was she who broke the silence.
“The shots—they’ll know they’re postmortem,” she said. “But they’ll want to check every gun in the house, and that’ll mean any registered to Nick.”
“There’s blood all over the firepit area now,” I said. “Drag marks in the dirt. They’ll know he was here and that he was already dead.”
We looked at the body. Without speaking, Susan took Stanley Turner’s arms and I took his legs.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-SIX
DOGTOWN. OUR HEADLIGHTS picked out the winding roads. Now and then the gold beams flashed on an ancient stone foundation of a house long gone. On huge boulders by the roadside, carved and painted with black letters. They were supposed to be motivational slogans for the unemployed and desperate in the failed town, but their meanings changed as I watched them roll by.
Never try, never win.
I shouldn’t have tried to stop Cline. I would not win against him.
A local vandal had spray-painted a boulder with his own words: Save yourself.
“Cline wanted us to come into his world,” I said. Susan glanced at me. She looked sick. I couldn’t blame her. In the trunk of the car, a body lolled and shifted as we drove through the night.
“What do you mean?”
“If we’d reported the body, we’d have had the house searched. Our people would have been questioned and our home invaded again, not with his men this time but with cops. If we didn’t report the body …”
She looked out the windshield at the night.
“This,” she said. “The night. Dogtown. Cline’s own dumping ground. His guys were out here only days ago dumping a corpse, and now we’re here. He must have known we’d be forced to choose the same spot. It’s the best place for a mission like this, isn’t it? We already know it’s been scouted out!” She laughed, a crazed, angry sound. “He wants us to sympathize with him. To understand we’re not that different. He’s sure pulling out all the stops to get us to back off.”
“I’m not backing off.”
“Look at us.” Susan jerked a thumb toward the trunk of the car. “That’s someone’s son back there. We’re Cline right now. We’ve become him.”
“We’re not him,” I said. “We’re nothing like him. He did this to us. We’ll move the body and then call it in. There’s no sense in sacrificing Nick because of what Cline did. He’ll never pass a psych evaluation, not in his current state. He’ll be implicated in the shooting, and who knows where it will go from there?”
Susan was quiet for a long time. “We have to do something about him.”
“Cline will—”
“I don’t mean Cline,” Susan said. “I mean Nick.”
“What exactly are you proposing we do with Nick?”
She didn’t have an answer. “He’s not safe to have around the house.”
“He’s not a dangerous dog, Susan. He’s a person.”
“I get that,” she said. “Don’t you think I get that? I’m here, aren’t I? Doing … doing this. Nick needs treatment. He needs to talk to someone about what happened over there, on his deployment. He can’t keep it locked away anymore. It’s killing him.”
We drove on in silence. I watched the roadside as I drove, looking for a discreet tr
ail to dump our evil secret.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-SEVEN
I HADN’T SLEPT after Susan and I returned from Dogtown. The former FBI agent had lain awake beside me, the warmth and love and security of our connection at the beginning of the night soiled and forgotten. At sunrise I gathered up our bloody clothes and bagged them, and she stood watching, numb.
“We had no choice,” she said. “But I’m still disgusted with us.”
“You and me both,” I said. I had walked to Nick’s room and knocked on the door, found him sitting on the bed. We agreed to meet on the porch later that morning and go to the psychiatry clinic at the VA hospital.
I made coffee in the kitchen. Vinny and Angelica were at the dining-room table together, Vinny’s leathery cheeks glowing pink as he jabbed at the laptop between them.
“Not there, there,” Angelica said, pointing at the screen with her broken finger. She tried to move the laptop mouse but Vinny swept her hand away. “The little envelope symbol. Mail. Sign in.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve got a new job, Vin.” I smiled, blew the steam off the coffee I’d made. “Angelica’s personal assistant. Are you going to take dictation of the novels?”
“I’m trying to check this vegan-activist-bullshit-provocateur’s e-mail for her,” he growled, swiping Angelica’s hand away again. “You ask for my help and then you don’t want it. What’s wrong with you, woman? I know how to use this piece of crap.”
Angelica let her hand fall, rolled her eyes at me. There was something comforting in the bickering of the two people at the table. Susan had told them that last night’s gunfire was due to Nick getting a little confused again, shooting in the dark. With all that was happening with Cline, they seemed to take the incident in stride. This was what my household had become.
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