by Bill Floyd
“There must be security cameras in the parking lot at the grocery store. Maybe we can find out what kind of vehicle he’s driving, and—”
I put both hands on her shoulders. “Carolyn, stop. If I have to, I’ll find a way to duck you and the police, both. Carson isn’t demanding any ransom, he isn’t asking for anything. He doesn’t intend to let us live. I know that. But you remember what Randy said? He said I should take Carson seriously, and I think this is what he meant. This is my chance to do something, and I need your help, but I can’t risk anyone else fucking it up. You’ve already given me more than I ever could’ve asked you for, but this is the single most important thing you could ever do for me in either of our lives, the thing that will erase your helping Pritchett find me and everything that’s come about because of that. Help me save my son. Don’t tell anyone. Not Duane or the cops.”
She hung her head and I saw tears falling, but she didn’t make a sound. Finally she went to her overnight bag and pulled out a handgun that looked as though it must weigh fifty pounds. “If you’re determined, you’re taking one of these. And I’m going with you, at least until you’re at the house. I can wait by the end of the driveway if you want, but I’m going. That’s not negotiable.”
“I want you to go,” I assured her. “But right now we need to go unload the groceries from your car before the cops realize something’s wrong.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
1.
“If you insist on going through with this, I insist on you wearing it,” Carolyn said. “Duane and I both carry them in our cars, in case of confrontation. After what happened to him …”
As part of her efforts to keep me from going through with answering Carson’s summons, she’d spent a good deal of last night telling me, in lucid and excruciating detail, about how Duane’s career as a cop had ended. He’d been a detective by then, after serving his time on the street in a patrol car. He and his partner had gone to arrest a crooked councilman; the councilman had been tipped that they were coming; he responded to the knock on his door by politely inviting the men in, then shooting them both from three feet away. Duane’s partner was killed instantly; Duane sustained wounds to the chest and head; the councilman then turned the gun on himself. That was how Duane Rowe had left the Reston, VA, police department with a full pension plus disability, and how he’d had the cash to start his own business. She’d met him while covering the story for the local newspaper, and the rest, as they say …
Carolyn reminded me of grave details now as she pulled the straps tight across my ribs and buckled the sides. She made her point with numbers: Duane sopped up nearly twenty pints of blood in the ER, underwent eight different surgeries over a period of twenty months, and endured four years of painful physical therapy during his recovery. The hair never grew back over the entry wounds in his scalp and that’s why he favored a baseball cap to this day.
I let my arms fall back. The Kevlar vest was bulky and uncomfortable, and I’d told her I didn’t want to do anything that might make Carson suspicious, but she wasn’t taking no for an answer. “His note didn’t place any specific restrictions on you protecting yourself,” she advised me, for the umpteenth time.
There was little point in reminding her that we weren’t dealing with a person who would be likely to consider whether or not I’d breached the prescribed etiquette; she knew. She was feeling impotent and frightened, because this wasn’t how she’d have scripted it. She wanted SWAT teams descending from helicopters, snipers in the tree line. I only wanted my son safe and alive in my arms. It was my responsibility to get to him, even if it was only so that neither of us would be alone when Carson made his final move against us.
Carolyn helped me put my coat on and then she stepped back and appraised me. “If he frisks you, he’ll know right away.”
“But it won’t matter, because you’ll be watching out for us.” I realized, dimly and remotely, that I had no expectations of survival at this point. Hayden was all that mattered.
“That’s the plan,” she said with a sigh. “You know, we’re doing all this without really knowing what we’re walking into. Every one of our assumptions could be wrong. He could be working with a second party. There could be booby traps at the house, he could see me when we drive in—”
I stopped her. “You’re right, we don’t know. So we better get moving with what we’ve got.” It was seven thirty. The drive would take between a half hour to forty-five minutes, and I wanted to have plenty of time in case we hit traffic or any other impediments.
Carolyn wore one gun in a shoulder holster, and another on her belt. She had a short knife clipped onto the belt as well. I carried the revolver she’d loaned me in my right front coat pocket.
She inclined her head toward mine and we stood there touching while her lips moved silently. When she said, “Amen,” I said, “Amen.”
We’d spent part of last night searching the Net and then going over satellite photos of the property Carson had specified in his directions. It was a small house in the middle of five acres of land, the title still owned by the bank but the mortgage held by one Mr. Abraham Locke. We found his number in the phone book. Carolyn included it, and directions to the house, along with a summary of our intentions, in a note we left behind for the cops to find, in case things went bad. We were operating on the assumption that Mr. Locke wasn’t a party to the kidnapping; he was most likely out of town or dead. Locke was seventy-eight years old, a widower for more than a decade. His one grown child lived in Florida.
The blueprints available online gave the impression of a small, cozy house, albeit one with few hiding places. There were closets and a workroom, but the whole place was just the single ground floor and a basement. Carolyn thought the basement was the most likely place for Carson to be holding Hayden; the photo had certainly been taken there. I agreed, but I couldn’t look at that picture for more than a few seconds at a time without feeling sick. Carolyn kept forcing me back to it. She asked what I saw. Where were the possible exits? How would we get downstairs and find Hayden and get him out? We went through scenario after scenario; all the outcomes seemed hopelessly bad.
But now there was no more time, so we went into the garage and I didn’t lock the door behind me. I told Carolyn I planned to bring Hayden back home before the day was out.
2.
She stopped briefly and got out to chat with the cops parked on the street. “I’m going to get her car serviced,” Carolyn said, leaning on their cruiser and talking through their window. “She set up an appointment for a brake job before everything happened, and I need some fresh air anyway. Don’t bother her, though, unless it’s important. I made her take a Xanax. The lady needs sleep.”
After we’d driven out of the neighborhood, I crawled up from under the blanket where I’d hidden in the rear floorboard. “I hate that you had to do that,” I said.
“I do, too.”
It was a cold, cloudy morning, overcast, right on that frosty verge of heralding either a cold rain or a wet snow. Traffic on the interstate was fairly heavy, typical for a weekday. I stared out the window at the commuters in their cars, babbling into cell phones or crooning along with whatever song was playing on their radios. I thought very clearly: My God, they have no idea. No idea that I may be on my way to see my son for the last time. No idea that traveling this same road with them was someone like me, who’d once been among their cheery and clueless ranks but was now fighting for the very life of the one she loved most. I wished I could tell them all to slow down—didn’t they know how easily accidents happen, all the unintended consequences that could come from taking your eyes off the road to answer that phone or adjust the station? I wanted to warn them to hold the people in their lives extra-tight, especially the children, to overlook those nagging everyday nuisances and celebrate each moment they shared. I’d come up short with Hayden, hadn’t watched over him as closely as I should have, hadn’t encouraged his passions, hadn’t memorized his eyes or his
laughter as he grew. You do all those things when you’re a new parent, but as time goes on, you forget that they’re changing and every day is one less day you’ll have with them. Oh, God, my dear sweet son.
I prayed for him to be all right. I prayed that all these rushing motorists, who appeared to me as clever imitations of the living, closed off from everything outside their speeding vehicles, would get smart and become more diligent, so that they’d never feel this gnawing terror I felt inside. How many of them were at this very moment suffocating from denial of unspoken suspicions, some vague unease perhaps driven by the behavior of someone close to them? How attentively did they watch their own children, and how many were hiding their own secrets? A part of me wanted to envy them in their obliviousness, but now, at this late stage, I recognized that impulse as the most dangerous of seductions. It was my own resolute refusal to face reality that had led me to this very moment.
As soon as we got off I-40 and wound our way past Chapel Hill and into Chatham County, the number of cars dropped off and the roads became narrow two lanes threading through the rolling fields and forests. I kept checking my watch; last night, it felt like time was moving so slowly that it was maddening, but each second elapsed far too quickly now.
We followed Carson’s directions onto Old Lystra Road. An empty, crumbling farmhouse, overgrown by kudzu, marked the turn. Just over a mile farther on, we saw the border of Abraham Locke’s property. A beige metal mailbox stood among the trees at the end of a gravel driveway. Carolyn drove past it at speed and continued down the road until we found a suitable side road where we could turn around. The landscape out here was thick with dense stands of trees, and all the homes seemed to be set well back from the road. Only a few miles behind us, sprawl was eating away the countryside, but out here the natives were so far holding fast.
Which was too bad for us, because once we turned down Locke’s driveway, we’d largely be out of view from the road. Carolyn put the car in park and we traded places. She lay down under the same blanket that had hidden me as we left my house. My hands felt cool and clammy inside my gloves, even though we had the heater blasting. I reversed out of the turnaround and started slowly back down Old Lystra toward Locke’s driveway. It was ten minutes before nine. I kept telling myself I’d have Hayden back soon.
“One more time,” Carolyn said from behind me.
We’d been over it more times than I cared to count, but I recited what I knew she wanted to hear: “If he comes out to search the car and Hayden isn’t with him, you’ll shoot him right there and we’ll hope for the best.” I couldn’t help but sound skeptical of our half-assed contingency plan. “Otherwise, I go in alone. You’ll wait ten seconds after I’ve entered the house, and then you come in behind me. If Hayden isn’t within Carson’s reach, I’ll say, ‘Where is he?’ loudly. You’ll go around and check the basement door, which should be accessible from the backyard if the blueprints were accurate. But Carson will most likely have Hayden with him if he means to negotiate his release.”
“Which he doesn’t, or he’d have indicated it in his note.”
“We don’t know anything for sure.”
Carolyn decided it was time for tough love. “Yes, we do. He means to kill you both. I won’t move in until we know Hayden is alive, but if either of us gets a clear, unobstructed shot at Carson Beckman, we need to take it. Don’t shoot to wound him. Aim for the dead center of his chest or forehead. The chest area is a much bigger target, so go for that if you can.”
She’d made these points over and over. “What if he’s wearing a Kevlar vest?” I asked.
“Then aim for his fucking eyes.” Her voice was flat and cold and exactly what I needed to hear. “Is your safety off?”
I checked for the third time. I told her I was good to go. In a lifetime of lies and denial and willful blindness, it was among my biggest ever.
3.
At five minutes until nine o’clock, I took the turn into Locke’s driveway. It was as though we could hear each individual shard of gravel grinding beneath the tires. The narrow drive bent slightly toward the right, then the house came into view. It was exactly as we’d imagined from the blueprints; a one-story ranch with trees close in the yard, in some cases with their branches brushing the weathered shingles. The driveway terminated in a two-car garage. A Toyota Land Cruiser and a Lincoln town car shared the bay. Carolyn, still hunched down in the rear, asked me what I was seeing. I described it to her through tight lips.
“Lane Dockery owned a Land Cruiser,” she recalled.
“Carson must’ve changed the plates, then.”
I cut the engine and tried to swallow but my throat only clicked dryly. I took off my gloves, put one hand in my pocket, and took hold of the pistol grip. A door was visible in the garage past the Land Cruiser, or I could take the brick walkway leading around the garage to the front door.
Carolyn asked, “Do you see him?”
“No.”
“I’m sure he can see you. Get moving.”
I finally managed to unlock my muscles and climb out of the car. My breath streamed past my face and I thought I might be sick. Stillness shrouded the world, with only that impersonal, arctic sound of wind moving the tree branches high overhead, the brittle creaking and clattering as the boughs bent and scraped together. I walked stiffly around the garage, down the walkway out front. The curtains were tightly drawn across both sets of windows I could see. Off to my left there was only a thick encroachment of trees, intermittent views of the road fifty yards away. No cars passed.
At the unadorned front door, I lifted my hand to knock when a voice came clearly from the other side: “Who were you talking to out there?”
“Myself,” I answered without hesitation.
“Come in with your hands up, where I can see them.” Tremors all through the words, like whoever spoke them was as frightened as I was, although I didn’t think that was possible. I was so intensely terrified that I felt high, removed from my physicality, liable at any moment to disintegrate into a clutch of ghosts.
The front door opened onto a dim hallway, with a large living room off to my right. An absence of lighting and the drawn curtains cast the scene in an underwater gloom, and it took my eyes a moment to adjust. But the smell was rank and immediate. As the shadows resolved themselves in the dimness, I saw a body lying in the hallway that led back into the confines of the house; it was wrapped in a clear plastic tarp, so I couldn’t see any features, but it was man-sized, not child-sized. Blood coagulated along the edges of the liner, and a pair of yellowed feet with long, curling toenails was exposed at the end of the roll. I briefly wondered how Abraham Locke had died, whether Carson had simply knocked on the door and greeted him with a slashing fury, or if he’d broken into the house during the night. Had the old man come awake in time to see the blade descending toward him? And had he retained his eyes, did they still peer out from within that opaque shroud?
I remembered Randy’s letters to Carson, advising him to prey on the old and weak because they were isolated and more likely to go without being reported as missing for much longer than a younger, more connected person. Locke had probably met his death for no more reason than that his home was far enough off the beaten path to suit Carson’s designs.
The floors were hardwood, the walls papered in a pale beige pattern that might have been cheery in the years before it had faded to a dingy jaundiced cast. The stucco ceilings showed water stains and cobwebs clung in mossy strands in the high corners. It was chilly in here, the temperature not much warmer than outside. Somewhere back in the farther rooms of the house, a clock ticked loudly.
I turned to my right and saw Carson Beckman seated in the living room, perched on a worn faux-velvet easy chair in front of a cold, empty fireplace. He was watching me with rapt attention in the gloom, evaluating the degree of my fear, and a flash of pleasure tightened his face when I gasped at seeing him there. A sizable bass was mounted above the mantel behind him, a twisted silvery fish
shape with gaping mouth and empty marble eyes. Framed family photographs on the walls, Locke with his late wife and child, all dressed in the fashions of an earlier decade. A couch underneath the curtained windows, an old gray blanket or quilt stretched across the cushions. Carson wore a body harness and my son was strapped across the front of him. It was obviously a makeshift contraption, as Hayden was too large for it, but as Carson stood up, it became apparent that it was also effective; my son’s body moved in concert with his captor’s. Hayden’s hands were taped together in front of him, and he was wearing the same tape across his mouth. Both of his eyes were covered in gauze. His feet were free, though, bare and kicking, and a soft involuntary moan escaped me at the sight of his utter vulnerability. Hayden heard it and started squirming, screaming against his gag. Carson carried a sawed-off shotgun, which he now leveled at me.
I kept my hands up. Carson beamed, a shark’s smile from the bottom of the black ocean floor, and gestured with the shotgun. “I can’t buy one of these in Illinois, because of my mental health background. Good thing the homeowner kept this one in his closet. I fired it a couple of times yesterday, out in the backyard. Thing will cut a tree in half. So don’t fuck with me.”
I couldn’t look away from Hayden. He was struggling and Carson wove an inch or two to either side, trying to keep his balance against the fifty pounds of child trying to pull away from his chest. “Oh, God, baby,” I breathed. “Mommy’s here.”
This was not the same Carson who’d been in court the last time I saw him. Not the same even as the haunted loner on the ID badge Matthews had shown me. He was more gaunt, lankier, reduced somehow despite his height, like he’d been eaten away at the center and might snap in two if he tried to bend over at the waist. He wore jeans so baggy they threatened to trip him up, and unlaced hiking boots too large for his feet. Probably he’d found them in the same closet as Locke’s shotgun. His face in the shadows was ravaged, lined and pitted with traces more pronounced than those of men twice his age. Blackened pouches surrounded eyes that held entire dead worlds of swirling ash. He stared at me, a sad, serious smile spreading across his face like the fissure in a mountainside giving way.