Nos4a2

by Joe Hill

  “He kidnapped me when I was seventeen years old. And held me for two days.”

  That quieted the room.

  “Look it up,” she said. “It’s in his file. Charles Talent Manx. And he’s pretty good at not getting caught. I have to change out of these wet shorts and into some sweats. I’d like to do that in my bedroom, if you don’t mind. I feel like Mom has flashed enough skin for one day.”

  VIC HELD IN HER MIND HER ONE LAST GLIMPSE OF WAYNE, TRAPPED IN the backseat of the Rolls. She saw him swatting a hand at the air—Go on, get away—almost as if he were angry with her. He had already looked as pale as any corpse.

  She saw Wayne in flashes, and it was like the hammer thudding into her again, walloping her in the chest instead of the back. Here he was sitting naked in a sandbox, behind their town house in Denver, a chubby three-year-old with a thatch of black hair, using a plastic shovel to bury a plastic telephone. Here he was on Christmas Day in rehab, sitting on the cracked and crinkly plastic surface of a couch, plucking at a wrapped gift, then tearing the wrapping away to show the white-boxed iPhone. Here he was walking out onto the dock with a toolbox that was too heavy for him.

  Bang, each vision of him hit her, and her bruised insides clenched up again. Bang, he was a baby, sleeping naked on her naked breast. Bang, he was kneeling in the gravel next to her, arms greasy to the elbows, helping her to thread the motorcycle chain back onto its sprockets. Sometimes the pain was so intense, so pure, the room darkened at the edges of her vision and she felt faint.

  At some point she had to move, couldn’t stay on the couch anymore.

  “If anyone is hungry, I can make something to eat,” she said. It was almost nine-thirty in the evening by then. “I’ve got a full fridge.”

  “We’ll send out for something,” Daltry said. “Don’t trouble yourself.”

  They had the TV on, turned to NECN, New England Cable News. They had gone up with the alert about Wayne an hour before. Vic had seen it twice and knew she couldn’t watch it again.

  First they would show the photo she had given them of Wayne in an Aerosmith T-shirt and an Avalanche wool cap, squinting into bright spring sunlight. She already regretted it, didn’t like how the cap hid his black hair and made his ears stick out.

  This would be followed by a photograph of Vic herself, the one from the Search Engine website. She assumed they were showing that one to get a pretty girl on the screen—she was wearing makeup and a black skirt and cowboy boots and had her head tipped back to laugh, a jarring image, considering the situation.

  They didn’t show Manx. They didn’t even say his name. They described the kidnappers only as two white males in an antique black Rolls-Royce.

  “Why don’t they tell people who they’re looking for?” Vic asked the first time she saw the report.

  Daltry shrugged, said he would find out, got off the couch and wandered into the yard to talk to some other men. When he came back in, though, he didn’t offer any new information, and when the report ran the second time, they were still looking for two white males, out of the approximately 14 million white males to be found in New England.

  If she saw the report a third time and there wasn’t a picture of Charlie Manx—if they didn’t say his name—she thought she might put a chair through the TV.

  “Please,” Vic said now. “I’ve got some slaw and cold ham. A whole loaf of bread. I could lay out sandwiches.”

  Daltry shifted in his seat and looked uncertainly at some of the other policemen in the room, torn between hunger and decency.

  Officer Chitra said, “I think you should. Of course. I’ll come with you.”

  It was a relief to get out of the living room, which was too crowded with bodies, cops coming and going, walkie-talkies squawking continuously. She stopped to take in the view of the lawn through the open front door. In the glare of the spotlights, it was brighter in the yard at night than it had been in the midday fog. She saw the toppled fence rails and a man in rubber gloves measuring the tire treads imprinted in the soft loam.

  The cop cars were flashing their strobes as if at the scene of an emergency, and never mind that the emergency had driven away hours before. Wayne strobed in her mind just like that, and for a moment she felt dangerously light-headed.

  Chitra saw her sag and took her elbow, helped her the rest of the way into the kitchen. It was better in there. They had the room to themselves.

  The kitchen windows looked out on the dock and the lake. The dock was lit up by more of those big tripod-mounted spotlights. A cop with a flashlight had waded into the water up to his thighs, but she couldn’t tell to what purpose. A plainclothesman watched from the end of the dock, pointing and giving directions.

  A boat floated forty feet offshore. A boy stood in the front end, next to a dog, staring at the cops, the lights, the house. When Vic saw the dog, she remembered Hooper. She had not thought of him once since seeing the headlights of the Wraith in the mist.

  “Someone needs to . . . go look for the dog,” Vic said. “He must be . . . outside somewhere.” She had to stop every few words to catch her breath.

  Chitra looked at her with great sensitivity. “Do not worry about the dog now, Ms. McQueen. Have you had any water? It is important to hydrate yourself.”

  “I’m surprised he isn’t . . . isn’t barking his . . . his head off,” Vic said. “With all this commotion.”

  Chitra ran a hand down Vic’s arm, once, and again, then squeezed Vic’s elbow. Vic looked at the policewoman in sudden understanding.

  “You had so much else to worry about,” Chitra said.

  “Oh, God,” Vic said, and began to cry again, her whole body shaking.

  “No one wanted to upset you even more.”

  She rocked, holding herself, crying in a way she hadn’t since those first days after her father left her and her mother. Vic had to lean on the counter for a while, wasn’t sure her legs had the strength to continue to support her. Chitra reached over and, tentatively, rubbed her back.

  “Shhh,” said Vic’s mother, dead for two months. “Just breathe, Vicki. Just breathe for me.” She said it in a light Indian accent, but Vic recognized her mother’s voice all the same. Recognized the feel of her mother’s hand on her back. Everyone you lost was still there with you, and so maybe no one was ever lost at all.

  Unless they went with Charlie Manx.

  In a while Vic sat down and drank a glass of water. She drained the whole thing in five swallows, without stopping for air, was desperate for it. It was lukewarm and sweet and good and tasted of the lake.

  Chitra opened cupboards, looking for paper plates. Vic got up and over the other woman’s objections began to help with sandwiches. She made a row of paper plates and put two pieces of white bread on each, tears dripping off her nose and falling on the bread.

  She hoped Wayne didn’t know that Hooper was dead. She thought sometimes that Wayne was closer to Hooper than he was to either her or Lou.

  Vic found the ham, coleslaw, and a bag of Doritos and began to make up the plates.

  “There’s a secret to cop sandwiches,” said a woman who had come in behind her.

  Vic took one look and knew this was The Guy she had been waiting for, even if The Guy wasn’t a guy. This woman had frizzy brown hair and a little snub nose. She was plain at first glance, devastatingly pretty on the second. She wore a tweed coat with corduroy patches on the elbows and blue jeans and could’ve passed for a grad student at a liberal-arts college, if not for the nine-millimeter strapped under her left arm.

  “What’s the secret?” Vic asked.

  “Show you,” she said, and eased herself in, took the spoon, and dumped coleslaw into one of the sandwiches, on top of the ham. She built a roof of Doritos over the coleslaw, squirted Dijon mustard on the chips, buttered a slice of bread, and squished it all together. “The butter is the important part.”

  “Works like glue, right?”

  “Yes. And cops are, by nature, cholesterol magnets.”


  “I thought the FBI only came in on kidnappings in cases where the kid has been hauled across state lines,” Vic said.

  The frizzy-haired woman frowned, then glanced down at the laminated card clipped to the breast of her jacket, the one that said over an unsmiling photograph of her face:

  FBI

  PSYCH EVAL

  Tabitha K. Hutter

  “Technically, we’re not in it yet,” Hutter said. “But you’re forty minutes from three state borders and less than two hours from Canada. Your assailants have had your son for almost—”

  “My assailants?” Vic said. She felt a flush of heat in her cheeks. “Why do people keep talking about my assailants, like we don’t know anything about them? It’s starting to piss me off. Charlie Manx is the man. Charlie Manx and someone else are driving around with my kid.”

  “Charles Manx is dead, Ms. McQueen. He’s been dead since May.”

  “Got a body?”

  That gave Hutter pause. She pursed her lips, said, “He has a death certificate. There were photos of him in the morgue. He was autopsied. His chest was split open. The coroner took his heart out and weighed it. Those are convincing reasons to believe he didn’t attack you.”

  “And I’ve got half a dozen reasons to believe he did,” Vic said. “They’re all up and down my back. You want me to take my shirt off and show you the bruises? Every other cop in this joint has had a good look.”

  Hutter stared at her without reply. Her gaze held the simple curiosity of a small child. It rattled Vic, to be observed so intently. So few adults gave themselves permission to stare that way.

  At last Hutter shifted her eyes, turned her gaze toward the kitchen table. “Will you sit with me?”

  Without waiting for an answer, she picked up a leather satchel she’d brought with her and settled at the kitchen table. She peered up expectantly, waiting for Vic to sit with her.

  Vic looked to Chitra, as if for advice, remembering how the woman had, for a moment, comforted her and whispered to her like her mother. But the policewoman was finishing the sandwiches and bustling them out.

  Vic sat.

  Hutter removed an iPad from her briefcase, and the screen glowed. More than ever, she looked like a grad student, one preparing a dissertation on the Brontë sisters, perhaps. She passed her finger over the glass, swiping through some sort of digital file, then looked up.

  “At his last medical exam, Charlie Manx was listed at approximately eighty-five years old.”

  “You think he’s too old to have done what he did?” Vic asked.

  “I think he’s too dead. But tell me what happened, and I’ll try to get my head around it.”

  Vic did not complain that she had already told the story three times, start to finish. The other times didn’t count, because this was the first cop who mattered. If any cop mattered. Vic was not sure one did. Charlie Manx had been claiming lives for a long time and had never been caught, passed through the nets that law enforcement threw at him like silver smoke. How many children had climbed into his car and never been seen again?

  Hundreds, came the answer, a whisper of a thought.

  Vic told her story—the parts of it she felt she could tell. She left out Maggie Leigh. She did not mention she had ridden her motorcycle onto an impossible covered bridge of the imagination, shortly before Manx tried to run her down. She did not discuss the psychotropic medication she did not take anymore.

  When Vic got to the part about Manx hitting her with the hammer, Hutter frowned. She asked Vic to describe the hammer in detail, tapping the keyboard on her iPad’s screen. She stopped Vic again when Vic told her about how she had gotten up off the ground and gone after Manx with the tappet key.

  “Tapper what?”

  “Tappet key,” Vic said. “Triumph made them special just for their bikes. It’s a spanner. Kind of wrench. I was working on the motorcycle and had it in my pocket.”

  “Where is it now?”

  “I don’t know. I had it in my hand when I had to run. I was probably still holding it when I went in the lake.”

  “This is when the other man started shooting at you. Tell me about that.”

  She told.

  “He shot Manx in the face?” Hutter said.

  “It wasn’t like that. He clipped him in the ear.”

  “Vic. I want you to help me think this through. This man, Charlie Manx, we agree he was probably eighty-five years old at the time of his last medical exam. He spent ten years in a coma. Most coma patients require months of rehabilitation before they can walk again. You are telling me you cut him with this tapper key—”

  “Tappet.”

  “—and then he was shot but still had the strength to drive away.”

  What Vic could not say was that Manx wasn’t like other men. She had felt it when he swung the hammer, a coiled strength that belied his advanced age and gaunt frame. Hutter insisted that Manx had been opened up, that his heart had been removed during the autopsy, and Vic didn’t doubt it. For a man who’d had his heart taken out and put back in, a nick in the ear wasn’t that big a deal.

  Instead she said, “Maybe the other guy drove. You want me to explain it? I can’t. I can only tell you what happened. What is your point? Manx has got my twelve-year-old in his car, and he’s going to kill him to get even with me, but for some reason we’re discussing the limits of your FBI imagination. Why is that?” She looked in Hutter’s face, into Hutter’s bland, calm eyes, and understood. “Jesus. You don’t believe a fucking word, do you?”

  Hutter deliberated for a time, and when she spoke, Vic had a sense that she was choosing words carefully. “I believe that your boy is missing, and I believe you’ve been hurt. I believe that you’re in hell right now. Other than that, I’m keeping my mind open. I hope you’ll see that as an asset and work with me. We both want the same thing. We want your boy back safe. If I thought it would help, I’d be out there driving around, looking for him. But that’s not how I find the bad guys. I find them by collecting information and sorting out what’s useful from what isn’t. Really, it’s not so different from your books. The Search Engine stories.”

  “You know them? How young are you?”

  Hutter smiled slightly. “Not that young. It’s in your file. Also, an instructor at Quantico uses pictures from Search Engine in his lectures, to show us how hard it is to pick out relevant details in a clutter of visual information.”

  “What else is in my file?”

  Hutter’s smile faltered slightly. Her gaze did not. “That you were found guilty of arson in Colorado in 2009. That you spent a month in a Colorado mental hospital, where you were diagnosed with severe PTSD and schizophrenia. You take antipsychotics and have a history of alcohol—”

  “Jesus. You think I hallucinated getting the shit kicked out of me?” Vic said, her stomach clenching. “You think I hallucinated getting shot at?”

  “We have yet to confirm a shooting took place.”

  Vic pushed back her chair. “He fired at me. He fired six bullets. Emptied his gun.” Thinking now. Her back had been to the lake. It was possible every single bullet, even the one that had gone through Manx’s ear, had wound up in the water.

  “We’re still looking for slugs.”

  “My bruises,” Vic said.

  “I don’t doubt someone fought you,” said the FBI agent. “I don’t think anyone doubts that.”

  There was something about this statement—some dangerous implication—that Vic couldn’t figure out. Who would’ve fought her if not Manx? But Vic was too exhausted, too emotionally spent, to try to make sense out of it. She didn’t have it in her to work out whatever Hutter was stepping around.

  Vic looked at Hutter’s laminated badge again. PSYCH EVAL. “Wait a minute. Wait a fucking—you’re not a detective. You’re a doctor.”

  “Why don’t we look at some pictures?” Hutter said.

  “No,” Vic said. “That’s a complete waste of time. I don’t need to look at mug shots. I told
you. One of them was wearing a gasmask. The other was Charlie Manx. I know what Charlie Manx looks like. Jesus, why the fuck am I talking to a doctor? I want to talk to a detective.”

  “I wasn’t going to ask you to look at pictures of criminals,” Hutter said. “I was going to ask you to look at pictures of hammers.”

  It was such a baffling, unexpected thing to hear that Vic just sat there, mouth open, unable to make a sound.

  Before anything came to her, there was a commotion in the other room. Chitra’s voice rose, wavering and querulous, and Daltry said something, and then there was a third voice, midwestern and emotional. Vic recognized the third voice at once but couldn’t work out what it was doing in her house when it ought to be on a plane, if not in Denver by now. Her confusion delayed her reaction time, so that she was not all the way out of her chair when Lou came into the room, trailing an entourage of cops.

  He hardly looked like himself. His face was ashy, and his eyes stood out in his big, round face. He looked like he had lost ten pounds since Vic had last seen him, two days earlier. She rose and reached for him, and in the same moment he enfolded her in his arms.

  “What are we going to do?” Lou asked her. “What the hell are we going to do now, Vic?”

  The Kitchen

  WHEN THEY SAT BACK DOWN AT THE TABLE, VIC TOOK LOU’S HAND, the most natural thing in the world. She was surprised to feel the heat in his chubby fingers, and she looked again at his washed-out, sweat-slick face. She recognized that he looked seriously ill but took it for fear.

  There were five of them in the kitchen now. Lou and Vic and Hutter sat at the table. Daltry leaned against the kitchen counter, squeezing his alcoholic’s nose in a hankie. Officer Chitra stood in the doorway, had hustled the other cops out at Hutter’s command.

  “You’re Louis Carmody,” Hutter said. She spoke like the director of the school play, letting Lou know who he would be playing in the spring performance. “You’re the father.”

  “Guilty,” Lou said.

  “Say again?” Hutter asked.

  “Guilty as charged,” Lou said. “I’m the dad. Who are you? Are you, like, a social worker?”