Steel Breeze

by Douglas Wynne

  The wound was painless at first, but Bell soon felt a scorching sensation spreading through his leg as he brought the blade down. The kick that had caused Pasco to buckle at the waist had also presented the back of his neck like a gift. Bell brought his foot and blade down in synch, and sliced through it.

  Pasco’s head hit the floor before the rest of him. Twin jets of blood sprayed from the severed neck as the body collapsed.

  Fournier was screaming. He had witnessed the decapitation with his good eye and was now scrambling across the floor, trying to retrieve his gun with the hand that wasn’t holding his sliced eyeball. Blood burbled over his trembling lip, spattering out ahead of him onto the floor, propelled by his ragged shrieks. The crawling man was an even easier target, and Bell took the second head off with a leisurely sweep, sending it tumbling across the slick crimson floor, the hair and mustache picking up thick arterial blood.

  The samurai surveyed the carnage and listened for the sound of sirens. The street was quiet for now, but he knew he would soon hear them. Casting his gaze over the blood trail, he made eye contact with Pasco’s lifeless head where it had rolled up against the wall and now stared into eternity. What had the man said about killing the wrong people? Weren’t all victims the wrong people from a cop’s point of view? There was no time to linger here. If one of them had called for backup, or if other police knew that they had been heading to this address, the place would be swarming soon.

  He had to leave the house, had to get back to his car, back to the boy.

  The paper crane.

  He couldn’t just leave it here now for Sensei to find. The kanji would mean nothing to the police at first, but it wouldn’t take long for that to change. It was a coin toss now, who would arrive at this house first: Sensei or more police.

  Bell limped to the workbench and popped the latch on the little metal first-aid kit. He splashed some Betadine on the bullet hole in his calf and then pressed a square of gauze against it. Blood poured down his leg, but it didn’t look like Pasco had hit an artery or shattered the bone, and fortunately the slug had gone straight through. He doused a second gauze pad with the disinfectant, pressed it to the exit wound, where it adhered to his bloody skin. Forgoing medical tape, he rummaged through a cardboard box of rags for a flannel shirtsleeve to bind the dressing. The wound didn’t hurt as much as he thought it should until he tied the rag tight.

  He walked to Fournier’s body, rolled it over, checked the pockets, and found a cell phone in the fat man’s khakis. A quick scroll through the Recent Calls list showed nothing within the past hour. Little reassurance, when the shots might have been heard by a neighbor. Bell popped the battery out of the phone, aware that he was leaving fingerprints but too hurried to care. His prints were all over this house, and the game would soon be over. Moving to Pasco, he found a notepad, another phone, and a folded sheet of printer paper in the inside breast pocket of the man’s sport coat, along with an FBI card in a slim wallet. In this phone’s memory, Bell found a more recent call to someone named Drelick. Recent enough to have been made after Fournier fired the shots in the stairwell? He didn’t know. This was a more expensive phone and the battery wasn’t accessible, so he walked it over to the tidy little workbench in the corner where two blows from a ball-peen hammer rendered it untrackable.

  He left the sword where it lay on the mat, stuffed the folded paper from Pasco’s coat into his back pocket with the origami crane—the thing that had brought him here in the first place and that he could no longer risk leaving behind—and climbed the stairs.

  There was no sign of police on the street, and Bell didn’t think it would be subtle when they arrived; they would come in howling and blazing.

  I have proof, Pasco had said.

  Bell couldn’t wait. He needed to know. He tugged the paper square from his pocket and unfolded it. It was a printout of an obituary from a newspaper archive dated December 6, 1953. Rear Admiral William Sterling “Deak” Parsons. Bell skimmed over what he already knew: Parsons’ tenure in the Manhattan Project and his role in the flight of the Enola Gay over Hiroshima on August 6, 1942. His eye shot down to the last line of the article, which had been underlined in wavering blue ink: “He is survived by his father, brother, half-brother and sister, his wife Martha, and daughters Peggy and Clare.”

  Daughters. Only daughters. No son, no direct descendant to carry on the family name, no connection to Phil Parsons, or Sandy or Lucas. The daughters, and any children they may have borne, were the last branches of the Admiral’s family tree.

  He and Sensei had been pruning some other Parsons tree.

  Sensei had boasted about the years of research he had done, but for all Bell knew he had selected his targets by flipping through the nearest phone book.

  And how carefully were the victims at Hiroshima chosen? The women and children who were grateful to drink the radioactive black rain to quench the thirst in their roasted bodies. Hiroshima had been chosen over another city at the last minute because the weather there was clearer. Better for the cameras. But the United States had warned the local population, had urged them to evacuate one of the last cities that hadn’t already been immolated in jellified gasoline by a relentless flock of B-29s. Yes, he had studied the history, but maybe he hadn’t read enough, and now he was out of time.

  I killed the wrong man. Phil Parsons. He could see the man’s intestines spilling out in a coil of bloody rope on the freshly cut grass, the look of terror in his eyes like an animal cornered in a slaughterhouse. His own guts twisted at the memory, but the fasting of recent days had left him with nothing to vomit. He put his hand against a support pipe for balance, folded the paper in his hand, and shoved it back into his pocket. He climbed the stairs, hurried out the front door, and limped down the sidewalk to his waiting car, his mind reeling, his breath accelerating. Was the Tibbets family that Sensei had butchered in Ohio even related to the pilot, the man who, in naming the bomber after his mother and in naming the bomb Little Boy, had once and forever identified himself with the murder of eighty-thousand people? There was nothing a Spirit Warrior could do to rival that act. No number of innocents slain by the sword would ever stir the needle on that black scale.

  Bell pressed the button on the key fob and heard the mechanism in the door of the black Saturn sedan turnover as he approached. Maybe it had been fate that led the detective and the FBI agent to him and prevented him from leaving the crane. He could still free Lucas Carmichael.

  He scanned the street, north and south. Nothing stirred. The warm air was silent, the neighbors all at work or school. Listening for sirens, he could hear the faint purr of an engine approaching; and taking cover behind a tree, looking at the crest of the hill where a mirage of liquid vapors pooled on the pavement, he saw a white car rising into view with a HERTZ frame around the license plate. It slowed to make the turn into the driveway. Bell ducked into his own car and slid down low, his head concealed by the seatback. He put the key in the ignition, but wouldn’t dare start the engine until Sensei was inside the house.

  Only, Sensei didn’t make the turn into the driveway. Watching the car in the side mirror, Bell imagined the old master sniffing blood on the air, sensing some wrongness in the scene. The white rental car crawled forward, leaving the house and driveway behind. Without pausing to think, Bell cranked the key, revved his engine, and gunned it out into the street ahead of the other car before it could block him in.

  Chapter 23

  “Mr. Masahiro, it’s Desmond Carmichael. Thank you for helping me again. Forgive me for being brusque, but have you seen the image yet?”

  “Yes. I heard about your son on the news. Do you think this kanji was sent by his kidnapper?”

  “I do. Please don’t talk to anyone about it. It could be my only chance of finding him.”

  “Of course. There are two words this time. Castle and Maze.”

  “Castle and maze. What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know.”
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  “Okay. Thank you. I have to go.”

  “Good luck finding your son.”

  Desmond paced the kitchen. He wanted to run out the door, wanted to get in his car and burn rubber, wanted to punch something, anything, and break it. The restless need to move, to overcome this ignorant impotence was too much for him. He had to focus, had to think. Castle. He and Lucas called the playground “the castle playground,” but that wasn’t the name on the sign. Still, their stalker might know what they called it. Lucas might have even told him about the place. If so, that was maybe a sign that Lucas was still alive. But what was the maze? There was no maze at the playground.

  “Where is there a castle and a maze?” he said to the ceiling.

  And then a little miracle happened right there in the apartment kitchen, in the deepest ditch of despair. His associative mind kicked in and started flashing connections at him, the way it did when he was solving a problem in a book: maze, maize, corn, corn maze. And a shadowy corner of memory was illuminated. He had taken Lucas to a corn maze last year. They had almost gotten lost in it. It had been around Halloween, at that old farm with the apple orchard and the haunted house that Lucas was too young for. Palace. Pain Palace, or something. And wasn’t palace another word for a castle? Now he did start to run. He swept up his keys from the kitchen counter and bolted for the front door but stopped short when he saw the sheathed katana poking out of the old milk can that held their umbrella. An officer had returned the sword to him shortly after the FBI agents had left. Now he stared at the cursed thing. He had never cut so much as a watermelon with a sword. But this was the only weapon in his possession. He would call the cops on his way to the farm, but he needed to leave now.

  He wrapped his hand around the hilt. These people who had Lucas were trained, and he was an overweight desk jockey who got winded when he mowed grass. But he took the sword anyway because it was all he had, and he hoped that desperation might trump skill when it mattered most.

  He was locking the door behind him with the sword nestled between his elbow and torso when he heard the slow gravel crunch of a car rolling to a stop. He looked up but didn’t recognize the vehicle: a little silver Scion. Then he saw the veil of reddish-brown hair swinging around as the driver climbed out, and there, striding briskly across his lawn, her white shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows and her gun at her hip, was Erin Drelick, taut determination in her eyes. Desmond was surprised by the slight sexual charge he felt when she stepped up close to him and her sapphire eyes pierced him. Maybe his ruminations on vengeance had sparked an infusion of testosterone.

  “Hey, Joe,” she said, “Where you goin’ with that sword in your hand?” And Desmond could hear the next line of that modified Hendrix song: goin a kill my old lady. But he hadn’t killed his old lady with this sword, and she knew it.

  “You came back,” he said.

  “I changed my mind at the last minute.”

  “Why?”

  “I think today is a significant date for the killers.”

  “Killers…plural?”

  “The more I think about it, the more it makes sense that there are two of them. I think one got everyone he was after in Ohio, but today is important to them, and Lucas needs me here.”

  “Follow me,” Desmond said, unlocking his car.

  “Seriously, Desmond, where were you going with the sword?”

  He hesitated for a couple of heartbeats, but she was quicker than that. “They sent you another message, didn’t they? Was it haiku, or calligraphy?”

  “Calligraphy. A clue about where Lucas is.”

  “Where? Where is he?”

  “I won’t let anyone tell me to let other people handle it. Not the cops, not you.”

  She looked at the sword. “We can ride together, but I can’t let you bring that.”

  “Then you’ll have to follow me, because I’m bringing it.”

  She sighed. “Desmond, you’ll get yourself killed. Have you ever cut anything with a sword, like ever?”

  “No, but I’m not going unarmed.”

  She patted the sidearm at her hip. “Consider yourself armed.”

  “Not good enough.”

  She laughed. “Read much history? The gun beat the sword a while back.”

  “I’m going with a weapon. You can follow or not.”

  She squeezed his shoulder as he tried to step past her and looked him in the eye. “There is no time for this,” she said. “I have information about what’s motivating these people, and there’s a chance I can divide them against each other because even by their own sick logic, they’ve made horrible mistakes. Now you can waste precious time and risk Lucas’s life by keeping me at a distance, or we can ride together and I’ll fill you in so you understand what you’re walking into. But you have to leave the sword behind.”

  Desmond looked at the wretched thing. How many people had it killed in the war before it came into his life? Now he wanted to kill the men who had taken Sandy with it. Sandy, who had used the breath in her lungs and the blood in her veins to do good, to nurture her child and support her dysfunctional husband and help perfect strangers. Those men had taken her breath and blood and spilled them out irretrievably into fathomless darkness for nothing. Desmond wanted more than anything to kill them, and if they had taken Lucas from him too, God forbid the glimmer of that possibility, if they had taken his son…then he wanted them to take him too, and he didn’t need to be a samurai to charge into death, he just needed to make them bleed before he followed his family over the horizon.

  “You’re not a character in one of your books,” Drelick said. “This isn’t some hero’s quest.”

  She was right. He wasn’t a hero. He was a sad, middle-aged man who had squandered precious years with a family who loved him because he was off chasing windmills in his imagination, and maybe he deserved to die for that. And maybe he’d get to see Drelick pop one of the bastards before it happened. She pinched her left pants leg and pulled it up to reveal another small gun strapped to her calf. “If we’re in a firefight, I’ll arm you, but anything less than that I will handle myself.”

  Desmond trotted up the steps, opened the door again and dropped the katana back in the milk pail.

  * * *

  Shaun Bell knew how easy it would be to get lost on the back roads where a dead end could trap him. The low speed limits in this sleepy, hilly neighborhood where small farms and schools were the only things to break up the long stretches of wooded suburbia would draw attention to him if he sped through, and the last thing he needed was a series of calls to the police with descriptions of his car and partial plate numbers. With this in mind, he made his boldest maneuvers right at the outset, hoping to lose the old man and then blend in on the longer stretches of road. He raced through the first few empty residential blocks, blowing the stop signs and pushing the pedal to stretch the distance between his car and Sensei’s. Then, with a cut across a baseball field, he veered onto the route that would take him east to a juncture where he would have to choose between the Palace of Pain and the highway.

  He glanced at his eyes in the mirror: they were feral, electric. At least he had an American face and no sword in the car. His sword was hidden in the corn stalks, waiting. He felt sweat prickling in his armpits, and he marveled at how none of these fight-or-flight reactions had plagued him while dispatching the two cops. It was the presence of his master bearing down on him. The old man wasn’t much of a driver, but he had more than enough reckless bravado to make up for it. Bell could see him now, roaring out of the baseball field, dragging a cloud of brown dust onto the pavement.

  He remembered that his driver’s license showed Sensei’s address. He fished his wallet out of his jeans pocket, arching his back and pushing the accelerator down in a burst of speed, then tossed the entire wallet out the window into the trees. He crested a hill and, throwing caution to the wind, gunned the engine into the trough, flying forward on a surge of gravity and gasoline.

  The juncture
in the road was coming up at the yellow blinker a half-mile ahead, in front of the fire station. Left to the old country road that would take him over the river and out to the Jensen farm, or straight for another mile to the I-95 entrance ramp. Was there any chance that he could make it all the way into the back roads of rural Maine before the police discovered the bodies and barricaded the interstates? He punched the radio on and scanned for news channels. With a gas-station map and a little luck, he could burrow into the woods two states away, break into a vacant cabin, and wait for things to settle down while he plotted a course for the Canadian border.

  The radio was finding only music and letting the controls and the noise scatter his attention wasn’t worth the trouble. He spun the dial down, slowed just a little at the blinking light in case a cop with radar was hidden in the brush—slow but not slow enough for Sensei to think he might be turning—and cruised straight through the intersection, past the road to Lucas Carmichael, and on toward the highway.

  His hands were shaking on the steering wheel. Sensei had been close enough to see that the boy wasn’t in the car, unless bound in the trunk. Bell watched the mirror and almost ran off the road into the ferns and the litter-strewn gravel gutter when he saw Sensei slow at the blinker and turn onto 110 toward the bridge over the river, toward Heather Road, toward the maze where Lucas was bound and waiting.

  He knew! Just as he knew every feint, every strike and parry when they sparred, he knew his apprentice and could anticipate Bell’s moves. “Don’t look at my blade,” Sensei had taught him. “Look at my eyes and you will know where the blade is going.” Bell gunned the gas and launched the little car forward, scanning the trees for a turnaround.

  * * *