by JJ Pike
“I go home. I watch the game. I tell Alice I fell on the site and injured my leg and that it’s nothing to worry about.”
“Again.” Arthur kept the door closed.
Bill recited the plan. It was a good plan. It was easy and predictable, with no kinks and no need for contingencies. The hard part was done. Now he got to live his life. He would drive away from Arthur and everything would be fine.
But he wasn’t fine. His mind was in that shack on the side of the road in the countryside in Guatemala, blood on his shoes, a man’s brains on the wall. Mateo sneered and Bill shot him. Mateo laughed. Bill shot him again. Mateo broke the rope that bound his wrists and came at him, laughing and mocking and calling Alice names. Bill shot him over and over and over again.
He almost ran into Aggie, who was riding her bike down the hill. He swerved to avoid her, but she went crashing into the lamp and scuffed her knees and was in bandages and Band Aids for weeks.
He eventually managed to get himself situated in front of the TV to watch the game, just as they’d agreed he would do, but it was all nonsense. He couldn’t concentrate. He’d fumbled the first pass before he’d even made it home. Mateo’s final words played in his head, filling him with rage. If he killed the man a hundred times it wouldn’t be enough.
Alice asked if he wanted a beer. He shook his head.
“You okay?” she said.
Bill smiled. He could never tell her. He knew that now. If those four words, “she was so…compliant,” played in his head, when Mateo Hernandez had no power over his life, what must she hear? No wonder she was half mad. He needed to talk to Arthur, tell him, swear him to secrecy, make sure there were no leaks. She could never know.
He arranged to meet Arthur at a TGIF the next day. It seemed fitting. An American staple with an entirely predictable menu. Bill ordered a domestic beer and a double shot of whiskey for Arthur. He read the menu while he waited, though he couldn’t have said what words were there or what his choices were.
“I wasn’t expecting to see you.” Arthur slid into the booth, his hand on his whiskey before he was even seated. “Not yet, anyway.”
Bill tried to smile. He couldn’t fake it. It veered off his face and left him feeling dirty. There was no small talk, no pleasantries, no beating around the bush left in him. He had to get right to it. “She can never know. Alice, that is. We can never tell her.”
Arthur narrowed his eyes and nodded slowly. “Okay.” He let the word trail off. It was an invitation to say more.
“She just can’t. Ever.”
“I thought the whole point was that she know the man who’d slaughtered her family is dead.”
Bill hadn’t told Arthur the whole story. There was no need. It was bad enough that Mateo had murdered her family. That was reason enough to exact revenge. Arthur had agreed readily enough when he’d recruited him to go down there with him. “Mateo Hernandez took a machete to my wife’s parents. In her sight. Butchered them in the street while they begged for mercy. Alice managed to escape, but no one else in her family did. It has haunted her. She’s never been back. Never wants to go back. I owe her this much.”
“My family fled,” Arthur had told him, “before the militia could take us. My parents longed to return, but they had similar stories. Their aunts and uncles, nephews and nieces, neighbors, friends, colleagues…everyone who stayed was a target. Thousands died. Most lived in terror. The country was awash in their blood. It would be my pleasure to come with you.”
Arthur hadn’t asked any more questions. Bill was relieved. He didn’t want strangers knowing any more of Alice’s business than was absolutely necessary. Not even friends. Or Arthur, whatever he was. When they’d left America, they hadn’t been real friends, but the man had helped him find and kill a monster. They were “something” to each other now.
Arthur sat back on the leatherette seat. “She’ll be glad, surely. I know I would. One of those evil bastards has paid. Sounds like justice to me.”
“She’s in a good place now,” said Bill. He didn’t sound convincing, not even to himself. “I don’t want to throw a wrench in the works by bringing up ancient history.”
Arthur nodded again and sipped his whiskey.
“I owe you. I know I do. I shouldn’t ask this of you, but I must. Under no circumstances must she know what we did.”
“You did.”
Bill nodded. It was true. He’d planned the whole thing. He’d pulled the trigger. It was his doing. He was glad of that at least. Mateo was dead. Dead, dead, dead. He could never hurt another being or speak those terrible words.
Arthur swirled his whiskey around the glass.
“Are we good?” Bill reached for his beer, prepared to toast.
“It’ll cost you,” said Arthur. He raised his glass to Bill and locked eyes. Not quite a friend, then. A business partner.
Bill clinked his glass against Arthur’s. “Name your price.”
The pain in his leg was acting up. Not as much as the pain in his hand, but the injury to his hand was newer. The bear attack. It hadn’t been that long, had it? Just days. TGIF shimmered in and out of focus. Arthur was there, then he was gone.
“Name your price,” he had said. He’d regretted that. Arthur had asked for quarterly payments, year in year out, for his silence. Bill had paid up, because what else could he do? He knew Alice would be a mess if she found out that he’d gone to Guatemala and killed Mateo. Even if he’d been able to get her to understand why he’d done what he’d done, he’d be one of the “bad men.” He couldn’t chance it. He wanted his wife to look at him and see her husband, father to her children, a good man. Not an executioner.
His hand was a screaming mess of pain. But it wasn’t his bear hand. It was his other hand. Bill opened his eyes and tried to orient himself. He was in the dark with his hand jammed into the wall. Why was that? He was thirsty, hungry, and in agony. He wasn’t supposed to fall asleep again, Aggie had been adamant about that.
It came back in pieces. He was in Manhattan. Alice’s office building had collapsed. He’d come looking for her. He could never leave her, not when he knew how hard won her stability was. She might be made of steel on the outside, but steel can only withstand so much. She’d be great in a crisis because she’d been forged in fire, but only up to a point. Dr. Moore had been clear about that. Alice could have a relapse at any time. Someone given to dissociative states didn’t simply snap out of it. They worked their way out, were on alert for anything that could prompt them to vacate their mind, were vigilant. When he’d seen that footage of the collapse in Midtown West on Jo’s TV, he knew instantly that he had to come find her.
He pulled his hand, but it didn’t budge. It was wedged tight. He couldn’t feel his fingers. What he could feel was the water on his thighs. It was cold. That wasn’t the worst of it. It was moving. He tried to visualize where he might be. He’d been close to where Alice’s building had once stood when he started falling. He might be in the subway, but that didn’t account for the water. He sniffed the air. There was sewage in the mix, but that wasn’t the dominant smell. This water was cleaner than that. The fire department had to have blocked off the gas and electric. Was there a way to shut off an entire city block’s water supply? There had to be. He knew he had the answer somewhere in his mind, but he couldn’t find it. He had to wait. If the water rose, he’d have his answer.
He couldn’t wait. Waiting was for losers. Alice must have told him that a million times. “You don’t wait, you act. Everything is data. Look, look, look around you. See what’s there, not what you hope is there.”
He was underground. His face was slapped up against a hard surface. That surface was uneven, cracked in places. His right hand was inside one of those cracks. His body was pressed against both rock and something less solid. A cushion or a dog bed. The memory flicked at him but didn’t fall into place. His feet were on solid ground. Or at least a surface that felt relatively solid, given how little he could move. His mind returned
to the softish mass between his stomach and the wall. He reached around with his left hand and investigated what was cushioning him.
The memory was like a bucket of freezing water to the face. He pressed his spine, trying to arc away from the disgusting truth, but his anchored hand kept him in place. Get back to the facts, Bill. Stick with the facts. He was trapped in a sliver of earth, water around his thighs. The mass in front of him—firm but yielding to the touch—was the torso of a human being. He’d managed not to think about that until this very moment. This building collapse had taken lives. This man had been severed limb from limb. Only his chest and stomach remained. There was no head, no arms, no legs. The cuts weren’t clean. He’d been dead long enough not to be bleeding any more. What did that tell him? There had been people dying for days. That fact had not made the news. He turned the information he’d gathered together over and over, looking for any angle that might help him, but there was nothing. Sometimes people died horrible deaths and there was no sense to be made of it. This man had died, but not to save Bill. There was no causal relationship. It just happened that his body had prevented Bill from further injury. Bill offered up a word of thanks and tried not to think about the fact that he was already entombed with the dead.
He turned his brain back to his present situation. If this wasn’t water from the sewers and it wasn’t from the water company, there was only one other place it could have come from. The river. That was so implausible it was laughable. The Hudson was several blocks away. It didn’t run under the city. He’d seen such destruction above ground. Could it have extended that far?
The Lincoln Tunnel ran under the Hudson River from Manhattan to New Jersey. It was a marvel of engineering; one of the busiest roads in the country. He’d read an article about the currents of the Hudson eroding parts of the Lincoln Tunnel after Battery City had been built. The problem ought to have been predicted. The Hudson’s currents had, historically, swirled around the southern tip of Manhattan. With Battery City jutting out into the river, those currents were diverted. As of 2009, at least 25% of the topsoil above the Lincoln Tunnel had been eroded. That meant more had been eroded since and if buildings were collapsing that far west, there was every possibility the tunnel itself had been compromised.
The decision was made. Bill needed to get out. If water from the Hudson had made it into the subway system, it was only a matter of time before the entire place was flooded. He tried to wriggle his arm free. It didn’t move. No choice, then. Good thing Alice was obsessed. He’d seen the film. He knew how to free an arm from a place it could not be freed from.
He patted the dead man’s torso with his left hand, feeling for buttons. He had no sense of time, but he knew that it was ticking away from him, echoing over the tracks that had once ferried New Yorkers to and from their homes, their jobs, their clubs, their theaters. If he was right and the water was coming, all of that would be gone. Manhattan would sink beneath the waves and there wasn’t anything that could be done about it.
The shirt came loose. Once again, Bill thanked the nameless dead man as he wound the scrap of material around his own forearm, pulling it as tight as he could. He was going to cut as close to the rock face as he could manage.
He knew what he needed to do and in what order. The hiker and survivor Aron Lee Ralston had spent six days figuring out how to free himself from his rocky prison after he’d fallen and gotten his arm trapped by a boulder. Bill planned to do it in under an hour. He felt in his waistband for his knife. It was sharp. He kept it that way for a reason. It wouldn’t fail him now. He didn’t want to get it out too soon. He might drop it. He was about to unleash a world of pain on himself.
“I can do it,” he said. “I am an Everlee. We never give up. Aggie said I would do it and I am going to do it.” He was stalling. Had the water climbed higher? “Do it. Now.”
He closed his eyes and conjured up his kids. They’d expect him to be brave. They didn’t know he’d almost chickened out when faced with real evil. If Mateo Hernandez hadn’t insulted his wife, he might have walked away, left him there, returned to his life without that blood on his hands. But he hadn’t. He’d done what had to be done. It was his secret, but it was also his strength. Alice might think him a monster if she ever found out, but he knew differently. To kill a monster you need not become a monster. You can be the monster killer.
Bill knew the angle had to be right, in order to break his own radius and ulna. Torque. It was all about torque. He would break his arm, then cut himself free. Once he started cutting, it was going to have to be fast. How long had Ralston lived after he’d liberated himself? Four hours. He’d been picked up by rescue crews four hours after cutting his own hand off. Bill knew he had it in him. He lifted his feet and twisted himself hard, using his entire bodyweight.
The cracking sound alone would be enough to drive any sane man mad. But Bill was beyond those categories. The pain shot through him in massive, crashing waves. It didn’t stop when his feet hit the ground. This was his “new normal.” Pain. Unutterable, indescribable pain.
He felt for his knife. The horn handle felt good in his hand, even though it was the wrong hand. He let the blade bite deep into his skin and pressed until he hit the bone.
“Stay with me, Daddy. Don’t pass out. I’m here for you.” Aggie. Dearest Agatha. I let you down. Do you forgive me? “Keep cutting. Cut yourself out of this mess.”
Bill sawed at his flesh. Concentrate on your breathing. Breathe through it. You can do this. He’d been there for all of his children’s births. He’d said those very words. He could use that knowledge now and breathe through the pain.
He gripped his tourniquet with his teeth and pulled it tighter. He had to be bleeding like a headless chicken.
“Don’t give up now, Pops. Don’t be a slug. Be a one-armed bandit. Come on. I’m here for you. I will always be here for you.”
Bill felt the last of his muscles give. Were there still tendons in there, doing their damndest to keep him attached to his old self? That man was over. This was a new Bill. This was a Bill who survived, no matter the cost. He sliced through the final inch of flesh and pulled. His bones were jagged at the edges, but fully de-gloved. He staggered back. He was free of the wall.
The water had reached his hips now. He needed to get out. He raised his bloody, tattered arm above his head, the better to slow the bleeding. All he had to do was find a way out. “Follow the water, Daddy, don’t fight it. It wants to pick your bones clean. Don’t let it.”
Bill wove away from the wall, leaving the hand that had killed Mateo Hernandez behind. He was free.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Jo knew that the best—perhaps the only—way to handle the mess she’d made was to fall on her sword, admit her error, and ask for assistance.
Her Manhattan office had been moved to New Brunswick, New Jersey. New Brunswick was a university town, so it had the prerequisite number of restaurants and bars, as well as office buildings and storage facilities. The Bureau had rented, or perhaps already owned, a series of buildings in a non-descript, run-down part of the city. She flashed her credentials at the door, made her way through the metal detector, and checked her phone for her boss’ instructions. Her boss was housed in the “Green” section, Room 222.
She had her strategy ready. Stick with the plain facts. Make no excuses. Take full responsibility. Michael Rayton was a CIA operative. She should have spotted it right away. He’d identified her as an FBI agent, possibly blowing her cover upstate. In Jo’s line of work, the truth was malleable. When it came to dealing with her boss it was not.
The halls were stocked with familiar faces, each of them nodding in greeting and going on their way. Everyone was on edge. The situation in Manhattan was getting worse by the hour. This was no time for pausing by the water cooler and catching up.
She found 222 without any trouble. She straightened her collar, checked her shirt was tucked in, and knocked on the door.
“Enter.” Her boss, James
Tatchet, was one of the good guys, if a tad pompous.
Jo opened the door and entered. She stopped. Michael Rayton stood with his hand outstretched. She took it, shook it, swallowed her pride, and sat in the empty chair.
This was not the way she wanted this to go, but that’s the way of the world. Not everything pans out the way you hope.
“When did you know?” she said.
Rayton smiled. He was easy, confident, in his element. She’d never seen this side of the guy. “The way you handled yourself at the hospital. You couldn’t have done that unless you were connected.”
He wasn’t wrong on that score.
Rayton pulled out a chair and made himself comfortable. “You were six steps ahead of everyone. There’s nothing you can’t do, apparently. You had to be part of the intelligence community. Nothing else made sense.”
James leaned forward in his chair. “We’re convening a joint task force, Jo. Michael will be joining you in our efforts to understand what happened at K&P and what can be done about it.” He had his “welcoming” face on. Jo smiled to herself. That was never a good thing. James Tatchet was a hard-nosed son of a gun. He didn’t welcome other agencies muscling in on his turf. “I’ve reserved a conference room for you, so if you’d like to head on down to Room 109, you’ll find coffee has been provided.”