A skeletal hand reached past his face, into the blood-drenched collar of Hamlin's shirt, and pulled out a chain containing a single key.
Gage turned and there was the girl, the one who'd played dead when he'd streaked her chest with his blood. Out of the shadows and up close, he saw her eyes and they weren't skeletal at all. They were deep and dark but full of hope.
With no time to even thank her, he grabbed the keys and fumbled with the lock. They slipped out of his fingers and he cursed. He tried again and this time he managed to unlock the gate. He pulled himself up, arms burning, legs shuddering in protest, and swung the gate inward. Hamlin stared up at them with vacant eyes.
Gage pried the Beretta out of Hamlin's death grip. Ignoring the pain flaring out of his body, he limped out the door. He flipped open the cell phone, tried to get a dial tone, but there was no signal inside the concrete bunker.
Down the hall. Pushing open the big metal door, creaking. Night wind cooling his sweat, darkness painting the forest black. He was going to fall. He was going to go down. Limping over uneven ground, muck sticking to his boots. Clutching the handle of the gun tightly, hoping the pressure slowed his bleeding palm. It was not raining, but the air was so thick that his face was instantly damp, his eyes blurring. Where was his damn cane? A thousand straight shadows criss-crossed his path like pick-up sticks. His cane could have been any one of them. The one time he really needed the damn thing, he couldn't find it. Of course it would be like that.
Staggering into the swaying Douglas firs. The ocean was up ahead somewhere. He checked the phone again and this time he got a bar, a single bar, and he hit the redial button. Praying it worked.
One ring. Two rings. Three rings.
It was too late. She was dead. Gone.
Four rings. A click, and then a voice: "Dad?"
Gage said nothing. He held the microphone away from his mouth, not wanting the kid to hear him gasping for breath, but keeping the speaker close to his ear. He pushed his damn crippled body forward as fast as it would go, hoping the kid was up there somewhere close, hoping it wasn't already too late.
"Dad?" he heard Nathan say. "Dad, you want me to do it?"
Relief flooded through him like ice water. The temptation was to answer, to scream no, but Gage knew that would only produce the opposite. His only hope was that the confusion would lead to delay, and that the delay would give him the few moments he needed to reach her.
"Dad?"
Tripping over the exposed root of an oak. Slipping on a pile of pine needles, catching himself. Kicking at a tangle of ivy. Sweat pouring off his face. The pounding in his ears. The throbbing on his palm.
He heard it—the ocean, a murmur above the wind.
He was climbing, staggering onto a bluff. Out of the jumble of shapes ahead, he saw a bit of solid gray in the gaps between the trunks—not quite black, but close, a matte of ocean and sky. He worried that he hadn't heard Nathan's voice in a while (was she dead? was she gone?), and then he saw him—a man in silhouette, on a sandy bluff where what little moonlight squeezed through the clouds painted his outline a milky white. Scrub grass rippled around his legs like thousands of slender fingers groping his pant legs. The kid was holding a phone to his ear.
He was alone.
The dread that stabbed Gage's heart was almost enough to freeze him on the spot, but he kept going, putting one foot in front of the other, bringing the Beretta to bear on his target. But Nathan must have spotted him at the same time, because he ducked behind a wall of thick ferns.
Gage cast the cell phone aside and limped into the clearing. Exposed, no longer protected by the trees, waves of mist buffeted against him. The bluff ended a dozen yards ahead, the ivy and the scrub grass curling over the edge, into an unseen abyss. The ocean stretched out dark and flat, blending into the sky.
The kid emerged from behind the ferns, this time with the limp body of a girl propped under his arms. Gage blinked away the moisture in his eyes, struggling to see if the girl was who he thought she was, but it was too dark now. He couldn't tell.
"Where's my dad?" Nathan yelled.
"He's fine," Gage said. "He's safe."
"Liar!"
Gage took another few steps. Nathan was so close to the edge, just inches from where the sand sloped into the darkness. One wrong move and they would both go down. They were becoming clearer to him, the kid's dark clothes more distinguishable against the night. He saw the kid's black sweatpants rippling. He saw the glint of the girl's nose ring—it had to be Zoe, it just had to be. Her arms were milky white; she wore a T-shirt and underwear and nothing else.
"Stay back!" Nathan cried.
"I'm not going to hurt you," Gage said.
"I'll throw her over, I swear!"
They were separated by less than twenty feet, a sliver of sand and grass, with all that endless black ocean all around them. Gage stopped, still pointing the Berretta at them, knowing they were too close together to get off a clear shot.
"Put the gun down!" Nathan cried.
Gage knew that the Beretta was his one advantage, that if he had to fire to stop the kid from throwing Zoe over the edge, he would do it. The chances of her surviving the fall were slim to none. He might hit her, it was true, but at least she would have a chance.
"You don't have to do this, Nathan," he said, edging a little closer. "It's not too late for you. You—"
"Stay back!"
"You can put her down. You don't want to hurt her. Look at her, Nathan. Do you know her name? Her name's Zoe."
"I'm warning you!"
"Zoe didn't do anything to you. She's a good kid. She's sixteen years old. She listens to heavy metal bands on her iPod and she's good at algebra and—"
"Stop!" He made a motion toward the edge, as if she was a sand bag and he was preparing to throw her onto the dike. "You don't know! You don't know anything!"
His voice sounded frantic. He looked at Gage and back at the edge, jerkily, with lots of false starts and wasted movement, like a drug addict in the first stages of withdrawal. Gage tightened his grip on the walnut handle of his Beretta, psyching himself up, reminding himself what this kid had done to Abigail Heddle and the girls back at the concrete bunker. And who knew how many others? Gage was no natural born killer, but this kid was a disease. It would be no waste to kill him. But if he hit Zoe . . .
Then it occurred to him that there was one last tactic to try. "Zoe's a lot like you, you know. She lost her mother, too."
"Shut up!"
"In fact, Zoe lost both her parents. Can you imagine what that's like, Nathan? She's all alone in this world. Zoe is alone. She always feels alone."
"I know what you're doing!" he cried. "I know what you're doing and it's not going to work! Put the gun down!"
"Zoe even lost her grandmother yesterday. That was why she was crying on the beach. She lost the one person she really loved. You don't want to kill her, Nathan. You don't want to kill someone who's suffered like that. Put her down. It's okay. Just put Zoe down and we can walk out of here. All of us."
The kid's jerky movements, all the twitching and trembling, stopped. He stood tall and silent, a dark outline against a dark sky, his sweatpants and his jacket wrinkling in the wind. The air had turned cool, heavy with the smell of salt and the pungent odors of seaweed and kelp. Nathan held Zoe's limp body as if he was making an offering, and he looked down at her, gazing into her face. It caught what little light there was just right, and Gage was close enough now that he could really see her, those pale white cheeks, those dark full lips. Still as she was, her face not contorting with sarcasm or disdain, she seemed much younger to him, a child. She wasn't grown up yet. Not yet.
"You know I loved her," Nathan said. "I loved all of them."
It was in that moment, when Nathan seemed the most distracted, that Gage lunged. The kid realized at the last second what was happening, but by then Gage had clamped down on Zoe's bare arm.
A fierce tug-of-war ensued; they grappled and pus
hed and shoved, the boy cursing, Gage staying focused on keeping his grip. Zoe moaned.
Hamlin had been right. The kid was stronger than he looked—no way Gage could win this fight, especially in his present condition. They teetered close the edge, the grass rippling over the abyss. Then Gage swung the Beretta. His positioning was awkward, so only managed a glancing blow on Nathan's chin.
It was enough. The kid, stunned, relaxed his grip and Gage managed to tug Zoe free.
For a moment, Nathan teetered on the edge of the cliff, eyes bone-white. He flailed his arms frantically like some kind of crazy bird. For one brief moment, Gage actually thought the kid was going to fly. He would fly up into the darkness, carried away by the ocean winds, disappearing forever.
But of course he didn't. He fell. He fell like everyone who's haunted by such demons must fall, a black stone plummeting past the sand and the crabgrass, out of sight, to the boulders hiding under the shallow waters. He fell out of Gage's life and out of everyone's, to the death that awaited him below and beyond, falling farther, still falling, to some private hell that only the most miserable on Earth could ever understand.
Chapter 26
After the police and the medics arrived, after Gage had been assured that Zoe was going to be okay, and after he'd answered all of Quinn's questions, Gage asked Carmen to stop at The Gold Cabaret on the way to the hospital. She wanted him to get stitches pronto, but he told her it would only take five minutes. When he told her to wait in the car, she protested, but she quieted down when he said he'd answer all her questions when he returned.
The rain soaked his hair, stung in the cuts on his face. A dozen waterfalls poured from the overhang, aglow in the neon orange LIVE NUDE GIRLS sign. The bouncer raised his eyebrows at the bloodied bandages on Gage's hand, but Gage offered no comment. The music pulsed in his ears. A pasty-faced girl was giving a lap dance to a fat guy sitting at one of the tables. There was a new bartender behind the counter, a Hispanic man with glassy eyes and tattoos all over his neck. He didn't stop Gage from heading to the back office.
When he stepped inside, Sue looked up from behind her desk, pausing in the middle of counting a stack of twenties. She wore a white bookie cap, her orange hair flowing out the top. Instead of a Betty Boop T-shirt, today she wore a Minnie Mouse one; her big breasts made Minnie's ears look massive.
"A knock would have been nice," she said, and then, noticing his appearance: "Jesus, what happened?"
Gage shut the door. His knee was killing him, so he settled into the folding chair across from her even though he didn't plan on staying long. He could still feel the pulse of the music through the thin walls.
Sue must have seen the seriousness in his yes, because she swallowed. "What is it?"
"I've been doing some thinking," he said.
"Oh?"
"Yeah. You see, I know you told the police you had no idea what was going on with your bartender. I just don't think it's true."
She stared. He noticed that her gaze flitted briefly toward the gun cabinet before returning to him.
"What are you talking about?
"I don't have any proof yet, but I think that will turn up soon enough."
"You're insane!"
There was some rainwater dribbling into Gage's eyes and he wiped it away. "You won't get much argument from me on that one. I'm pretty sure I am insane. But that doesn't change anything. You see, I got to thinking about this place, about what you told me. How you've had to struggle to keep from going under. I got to thinking about it and I wondered. I wondered if maybe you knew a bit more about what was going on with your bartender and one of your former dancers than you were willing to let on."
"That's nonsense! Why would I do that? I—I don't want to hurt anyone."
"Maybe not. But staring a pile of bills in the face can make people do funny things. I got to thinking, you know, what would have happened if Sue went to Hamlin and demanded some money to keep quiet. That sure would have made it easier to keep her doors open when it was obvious to the world she didn't have the business to justify it. I figure once the cops start digging through Hamlin's financial records, they'll find some strange checks from his Inn to your bar. Because, you know, Hamlin was kind of a stickler about pretending all the stuff was above board. I played poker with him once and found that out first hand." The color drained from Sue's face.
"Oh yes," Gage said, "I know all about Hamlin. Just came from talking to him. Though he won't be talking much anymore. Neither will his son. What a pair those two made, though it sounds like your bartender and Nathan were more than just friends. Who would have thought it, huh? Though I bet you knew about that, too."
"I—I don't know—I mean—" she stuttered.
"Time will sort this out, but I figure Nathan met Abby over at the Northwest Artist Colony. She managed to get away from him that time, but then she came to work here. Nathan came in one time and recognized her, and the next day she was missing. Good old Bartender Bob probably knew who Nathan was—unlike your bouncer—and he put two and two together. Only instead of turning him in, he wanted a piece of the action."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"You probably didn't. At first. I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt, of course. I'm assuming you weren't in on the actual raping and imprisonment."
"Get out!" she cried.
"Maybe you told yourself Abby was already dead," he said. "Or maybe you told yourself that if she wasn't dead, there wasn't much you could do. I don't know. Honestly, I don't care. I figure most of the blame is on Nathan Hamlin and Robert Pence, but you know, they were rotten to the core. It's when people who know better convince themselves to stand on the sidelines when something awful's happening that really gets to me. Personally, I'd like nothing better than to haul you down to the police station."
She didn't move.
"But you're old," Gage continued. "You're banged up and decrepit, kind of like me. I don't know how you'd fare in prison. I'm thinking not well."
"You're telling—you're telling me to run?"
"Oh no. You wouldn't get far. I'll be calling this in as soon as I get to my car. I just wanted you to have this information so you could . . . ponder it a bit."
Just as he expected, her gaze drifted to her gun cabinet. Gage waited to see what she would do, and when she didn't do anything, he rose.
"I could be wrong, of course," he said. "Maybe there's no paper trail leading from Hamlin to you. Maybe I just came in here and upset you for nothing. If that's the case, well, pretend I was never here. It should be easy for you. You were pretty good at pretending Abby Heddle was never here—at least not in any way that mattered. Even if nothing else I said is true, you're going to have to live with that. And if what I said was true, well . . . I don't know how anybody with a conscience can live with doing something so callous."
She had the kind of numb expression of someone who'd just survived a terrible traffic accident. He left without another word, hobbling back through the strobing lights and thumping bass. He stopped and briefly watched the gyrations of the young girl on stage, this pencil stick kid with the plastic purple hair and dirty snow eyes, wondering who she was, wondering where she'd came from and whether she was running or hiding—and then with slumped shoulders headed outside. He might be able to find somebody's killer, but he was no good helping someone who was alive. That was something he was going to live with.
When he was standing on the stoop, he heard the roar of the shotgun deep within the bar.
Chapter 27
Two weeks later, at the agreed-upon time, the three of them climbed the trail under a tinfoil sky. It was a bright and colorless gray, the sun invisible but still somewhere present, burning off the last of the mist that clung to the ferns and the blackberry bushes. They had not seen the sun in days. At the peak, almost to the bluff, the ivy rippled in an unseasonably warm breeze, and fine particles of sand pebbled their faces and made them squint.
A month earlier, Gage would h
ave been annoyed at the sand in his eyes, but now he didn't care. It made him feel alive.
The previous two weeks had been an exhausting whirlwind, but it was finally beginning to calm down. Besides food and rest, the two girls who'd been held captive mostly needed counseling. Lots of counseling. The cut on Gage's hand turned out to be the most serious medical condition among them, requiring seven stitches. He'd had worse.
Hamlin was pronounced dead at the scene. His son's body washed up on the beach three days later.
The press, both local and national, descended like vultures. Gage refused all interviews, hoping it might preserve what little anonymity still remained for him in Barnacle Bluffs, but his name and face were all over the news anyway. The two girls in the bunker were both runaways, one missing for four months, the other nearly a year. The police found three more girls buried near the bunker, and there was speculation there might be more. One of the girls, an autopsy determined, had been dead for five years.
Forensics matched the pants Dan the Can Man was wearing at the time of his death with the fibers found on the bumper of Winston Hamlin's white Cadillac. Beyond that, most of the major press ignored Dan, but Carmen ran a nice article about him, doing a fair amount of research to dig up his past—a schizophrenic who'd lived with his aging mother until she'd passed away five years earlier, then ended up on the streets. Carmen turned it into something of an expose on the growing homeless population on the Oregon coast. The writing was good enough he figured she'd win a Peabody.
The financial records confirmed what he'd suspected about the owner of The Gold Cabaret. The place had closed down to clean up the mess in her office and still hadn't reopened. He wasn't betting it ever would.
Climbing the bluff under a gray sky, Gage was the first to the top. He rammed his cane into the sand like a mountain climber planting a flag, his bandaged hand throbbing, then turned to help Carmen. She gladly took his hand, smiling up at him, blonde hair billowing around her red windbreaker. He'd been looking at that blonde hair a lot lately. He'd been looking at those blue eyes, too. He'd been getting used to them, starting to count on them.
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