No response.
“It was you, Oliver. It had to be. Albert Reilly never set that fire. You did.”
Still nothing.
“Why? Oliver, tell me why.”
Even now he was silent. She feared he had slipped still deeper into the fugue state, to the very bottom of the abyss, where no voice could reach him.
Then, without looking up, he spoke one word.
“Revenge.”
Not much of a reply, but something. She had to capitalize on it, maintain a dialogue. “Revenge—for what?”
“I’d warned her. Warned Maureen never to tell.”
Erin understood. “She waited two years—but in the summer of ’68 she told Lydia at last. That’s why Lydia disowned you.”
“Yes.”
He reached the corner, then continued along the adjacent wall, methodically laying down a trail of fuel along the room’s perimeter. The smell of gasoline, the smell Erin hated more than any other, rose to her nostrils. Nausea coiled in her stomach.
She forced herself to continue her charade of disinterested professionalism. “Tell me about it.”
The noise he made was intended as a chuckle, but came out stillborn, a croak of pain. “An ugly scene. Lydia called me names. Terrible names. I told her she could say the same about the man she’d married. And I told her why.”
Erin nodded. It wasn’t fear for Oliver’s safety that had put Lydia in the hospital with a nervous breakdown, as everyone assumed. It was the double shock of learning the truth about her son and her husband.
The five-gallon can dribbled out its last drops. Oliver tossed it on the floor with a hollow clang. He walked past her, toward the doorway, where the other gas can waited.
Desperately Erin tried to keep him talking, fighting to reinforce the fragile connection she had established. “So you waited five years, then went to Maureen’s house—our house—for revenge?”
“But first I visited Albert at his office.” He hoisted the can by its handle. “He’d thought I was dead. I straightened him out about that ... and other things.”
“You told him you were our real father.”
Remorselessly Oliver began wetting down the opposite side of the room. “Came as kind of a surprise,” he said mildly.
“Weren’t you afraid he’d go to the police?” Erin wished the sound of her voice would cover the low, insidious murmur of gasoline escaping from the can. “You were confessing to rape and murder—”
“There was no risk. If I were arrested, the truth about you and Annie would come out.”
The truth. That they were products of an unnatural union, products of incest. Sideshow specimens. Freaks.
Oliver was right. Neither Albert nor Maureen would have willingly brought that fact into the light. Especially not in a small town like Sierra Springs, where everyone would talk.
He reached the doorway to the hall and continued past it to the living room’s rear wall. The thread of fuel was lengthening, inexorably boxing her in.
“What was Albert’s reaction?” she asked slowly.
“Shame. Grief. Most of all, anger. But not at me alone.”
“Who else?”
“Maureen.”
“My mother? She was the victim in all this.”
“Was she?” Another lifeless chuckle. “I told you, Maureen wasn’t married when she visited the ranch. Wasn’t even engaged.”
“Then when she found out she was pregnant—”
“That’s right, Doc.”
Erin shut her eyes. Her mother, panicky, unwilling either to abort the babies or have them born out of wedlock, had lied to Albert, convinced him that whatever precautions he’d taken had failed, railroaded him into a hasty wedding.
She remembered that nightmarish summer evening when Albert, drunk, wild with rage, had railed at his wife, rejected his children, and finally, in a fit of bellowing fury, had promised they would burn, burn, burn.
“In hell, he meant.” Her voice was a whisper, the words spoken half to herself. “In hell.”
The gasoline gurgled to a stop, the can empty. Oliver threw it aside.
“I let him suffer awhile,” he said. “Maureen, too. They might have assumed I’d done my worst. Then on the night of August eighteenth ...”
“You broke into the house.”
“Yes. Found Albert asleep in the den. Clubbed him unconscious. Soaked the ground floor first, then carried Albert upstairs and finished the job.”
“In the master bedroom. That’s when Maureen woke up.”
“She saw me, screamed. I gave her a good hard slap, just like I’d done in the barn. She was pleading with me when I tossed the match.”
The floorboards shivered under his slow, heavy tread. He moved to the stove and stood before her, staring down.
“You two got out that night.” Cold words. “But not this time.”
Erin gazed up at him, his face as round and pale as a full moon, his gaze still blank, void of compassion, empty of self.
“You’re lying,” she whispered.
Puzzlement flickered briefly in his eyes. “What?”
“Revenge wasn’t your motive. You had another purpose. A purpose you’ve never been willing to consciously acknowledge.”
“Too late, Doc. Therapy’s over.” He began to turn away.
“That wasn’t a fatherly kiss you gave me, Oliver.”
The words stopped him.
“In Sierra Springs,” she said, “you did more than visit Albert in his office. You spied on Maureen. Found out where she lived and observed her from hiding.”
He blinked. “How did you know that?”
“It’s what you always do. When Maureen visited the ranch, you spied on her from the arroyo. And when you came to Tucson, you must have followed me to learn where I live. I’ve got an unlisted address.”
“All right. I watched her. With binoculars.”
“And while you were observing Maureen’s house, you saw her two little girls—your girls. You saw us, didn’t you?”
“I ... saw you.”
“And you wanted us.”
A muscle twitched in his cheek. He said nothing.
“Even though we were little, only seven years old, you wanted us, just as your father had wanted you, just as you’d wanted your mother’s sister. Love and incest—you’ve never been able to separate the two. You wanted us.”
“If I did ... so what? So what?”
“That’s why you set the fire. Not for revenge. You meant to wipe out all three of us—Annie and me and Maureen—so we wouldn’t be there to tempt you anymore.”
“It would have worked. If you’d died—”
“Nothing would have changed. You still would have had the same needs, and you would have responded the same way—by burning other women. Women who reminded you of us, because they were Catholic or they were young or they had the same color hair. The details wouldn’t matter. You would have gone on killing no matter what.”
“I wouldn’t. Dammit, it wouldn’t have been like that.”
“It would. It would have to be. It always will. You think that by killing the object of your desire, you can kill the desire itself. You’re wrong. What you’re trying to destroy is within you, not outside you. It’s part of you. It is you.”
“It’s not.” He shook his head blindly in a last, desperate effort at denial. “You’re the problem, not me. You and Annie. Filth. Whores. I’ll get rid of you, and then I’ll be free, God damn you, I’ll be free.”
“You can never be free that way—”
But he wasn’t listening anymore. A ripple of spasms in his shoulders, and he pivoted away from her, moving fast toward the front door. Helplessly she called after him. “Oliver? Oliver?”
At the door he turned. Something trembled in his hand.
A matchbook.
“I’ll be free,” he said once more, his voice muted and faraway.
He took a backward step, removing himself from the flash zone. A wisp of orange light
flared between his fingers.
Flick of his wrist, and the match traced a slow arc through the darkness.
The gasoline vapors ignited even before the match hit the floor, triggering a split-second chain reaction that engulfed the lower portion of all four walls in a flexible sheet of flame.
“Oliver!”
Her scream didn’t reach him. Nothing could reach him now.
Cymbal crashes of shattering glass. Every window in the room disintegrated simultaneously, blown out by the rapid expansion of superheated air.
“Oliver!”
Still no response, though he must have heard her. He had not moved from the doorway.
Erin had spent her life studying fire and fire starters. She understood what happened next only too well.
The upward rush of intense heat kindled the walls, boiling off the wood’s most volatile contents. In a heartbeat the mist of outgassed turpentine, resin, and oil achieved its flash point, feeding the flames even as the gasoline vapors were consumed.
Convective updrafts teased the fire relentlessly toward the ceiling. Indrafting air from the front door and the broken windows flung exploratory firebrands across the floor.
“Goddammit, Oliver, talk to me!”
The fire cast a ruddy, wavering glow on his face. He stood motionless, gazing transfixed at what he had done, what he had finally brought himself to do after so many years.
His eyes were wide and glassy. The sparse hairs of his head rustled in the fire’s hot wind.
Flames reached the first of the rafters, caught hold, then hopped from beam to beam. Churning fumes collected along the ceiling, forming a noxious mushroom cloud.
The smoke was what would kill her and Annie. That, or the stinging heat, or the collapse of the roof.
“Oliver!” She had to make him hear her. “Oh, Jesus, Oliver, don’t leave us here, please don’t, for God’s sake, don’t!” Each breathless shout seemed to jerk the chain tighter around her midsection, the wicked links chewing hungrily at her stomach, her lower ribs. “Don’t let us burn, it’s not the way to solve anything, it’s not the way!”
The noise around her was thunderous, the Niagara roar of the flames competing with the moans of tortured wood, the pops of metal fixtures springing free of bolts and screws, the sizzle of sparking wires, the whoosh and howl of eddying air currents that spun pinwheels of soot and embers across the room.
Oliver shambled backward, still watching spellbound.
“Oliver!” she called for the last time.
Abruptly he turned, and then he was running, running into the night.
Gone.
Erin struggled with the chain, knowing she could not free herself, knowing she would be dead very soon, as the lethal heat pulsed around her and the roof beams began to groan.
58
“I did it.”
Gund spoke the words between gulps of air as he sprinted to the barn.
He threw the double doors wide, climbed into the Astro, started the engine.
As he backed out into the open, as he swung the van toward the open gate, as he pulled out onto the side road, he felt strange tics and twitches in his face, peculiar muscular contractions at the corners of his mouth—and in his eyes, beads of dampness, blurring his world.
In the sideview mirror, the receding ranch house glowed with a red, feverish light.
Another ripple of his facial muscles, and the shape of his mouth changed. It took him a moment to understand that he was smiling, really smiling—the first smile he had worn in years, decades—almost the first he could remember.
This, then, was happiness. That word he so often had heard and never comprehended.
“I did it,” he said once more as he eased his foot down on the accelerator pedal.
The smile remained fixed on his face even while the water in his eyes spilled over, warm droplets tracking slowly down his cheeks.
* * *
Walker led the three backup units off the freeway at Houghton Road. He headed north, maintaining a steady speed of seventy.
Behind him, the patrol cars switched on their light bars, red and blue dome lights pulsing. The sirens stayed silent.
Ravine Road must be directly ahead. Walker pumped the brake pedal, slowing in preparation for a sharp right turn.
* * *
Gund reached Houghton Road, and abruptly the newfound smile faded from his face.
To his left, three squad cars, rooftop flashers twinkling, with an unmarked Ford Mustang in the lead.
Arrest.
Punishment.
No.
With a snarl of rage he steered the van hard to the right.
As the Chevy swung onto Houghton, Gund reached under the dashboard with one hand and released the sawed-off Remington from its mounting.
* * *
Walker had run an M.V.D. check on Harold Gund during the drive to the ranch. He drove a Chevrolet Astro van.
The same make and model as the van that now squealed out onto the road, directly ahead.
“That’s our guy,” he said over his walkie-talkie.
Three sirens blared at his back.
He sped up, closing on the van.
* * *
Gund thrust the shotgun out the driver’s-side window, muzzle pointing backward.
Under these circumstances he couldn’t possibly aim. Fortunately, he didn’t have to. The wide spray of shot would cut apart anything in its path.
He spun the steering wheel, barreling onto the shoulder, leaving the Mustang completely exposed in the middle of the road.
A single blast would tear the driver to pieces. With luck, the careening coupe would wreck one or more of the other pursuit cars in a deadly pileup.
He wedged the shotgun’s stock against the windshield pillar and pulled the trigger.
* * *
Walker saw the van slide to the right, glimpsed a flash of metal near the driver’s window.
Gun barrel.
He swerved onto the shoulder as the gun bucked with a booming report.
His windshield starred but didn’t shatter.
Shotgun. He’d caught only a couple of stray pellets.
Accelerating, he rammed the rear of the van.
* * *
Damn.
The other driver had been too quick for him.
Now Gund couldn’t see the unmarked car. It was directly behind the van’s windowless cargo compartment, out of the side mirrors’ field of view.
He released the steering wheel momentarily to pump another shotgun shell into the chamber.
Impact. From the rear.
The wheel spun crazily, the van skidding out of control.
He dropped the gun in his lap. Seized the wheel.
Too late.
The Chevy screamed off the shoulder, through a waist-high wire fence, and plunged down, the front end tilting almost vertically, the lone headlight beaming into a sandy pit ten feet below.
The arroyo.
He was a hundred yards north of Ravine Road, at the point where the dry wash passed under Houghton. With the fence ruptured, there was nothing to stop the van as it plummeted headfirst into the gully.
Rushing up at him, a dry parcel of ground, pitted and whorled like the surface of some wind-scoured alien planet. For a timeless moment there was no sense of distance—the scarred landscape might be a yard away or a mile—and he was conscious only of inertia shoving him roughly against the seat as a high, keening protest escaped his open mouth.
With a howl of metal, the front of the van met the ground and crumpled in a mist of sparks and sudden smoke, the windshield exploding, the dashboard popping free as the lights of the gauges went dark, steering wheel wrenched loose, horn jammed, its blare ear-splitting and continuous.
Gund waited for the van to tip over, to crash down on its roof or on its side.
Nothing happened.
Dimly he understood that the chassis still leaned on the roadway above, propped against the overpass like a ladder ag
ainst a wall.
He coughed. Something harsh and foreign scratched his throat.
Smoke.
Clouds of it. All around.
Red glow from the ruined engine. Heat underneath the floor.
The van was on fire.
“Hell,” he whispered dully. He groped for the door handle, turned it, but the door wouldn’t open.
Wedged shut.
He remembered how the door frame had buckled slightly in last night’s crash, how he’d had to hammer it back into shape. This new trauma had undone his work, sealing the door again.
Out the window, then, or through the shattered windshield.
But he couldn’t. The dashboard, punched backward by the crash, trapped his legs.
Hotter now.
He coughed again, and this time found it hard to stop.
Smoke rose on both sides of him, billowing up from under the driver’s seat.
He had seen people burn.
Couldn’t die that way. Not him.
Wildly he pounded the dashboard, fighting to shove it free, like an animal clawing at the metal teeth of a trap.
Pain in his feet, his legs.
Downward glance. Caldron of black smoke where his lower body ought to be. Glinting in the smoke, malevolent pinpoints of fire.
The blare of the horn went on, and for a moment he didn’t even hear the new sound overlaid on it, the piercing wail of his own scream.
Get it off me, he begged without voice, as if the fire crawling up his pants were some kind of ravenous animal. Get it off, get it off, get it off—
He was beating his pants with both hands, trying to slap the fire down, and screaming, screaming, screaming.
Had it hurt this much for the others? Were his daughters screaming with the same agony right now?
Impossible. There never had been this much pain before, not in all the world.
He was drowning in smoke, being eaten alive by flame, and now he couldn’t scream anymore; he had swallowed too much smoke and could only wheeze, light-headed with pain and fumes, as he writhed and twisted, head whipsawing frantically, arms flapping, and then his hand touched hot steel, smooth and cylindrical, the barrel of the shotgun, thrown onto the passenger seat in the crash.
He thought of Lincoln Connor, of the real Harold Gund, their bodies sprawled together in the woods, a sawed-off Remington 870, like this one, clutched fast in Lincoln’s hands.
Blind Pursuit Page 28