Текст книги "Equal Access"

Автор книги: A. E. Branson

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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

Chapter Twenty-Three

Surely, if you do right, there is uplift. But if you do not do right Sin couches at the door; Its urge is toward you, yet you can be its master.

–Genesis 4:7

Wally sprinted toward the back of the cab. Some of the wind was knocked out of Shad, but his instinctive tensing left him with enough breath to drop both bags and charge after Wally.

The older man galloped past the rear of the taxi and into the nearby parking lot. Shad, focused so intently on Wally that his awareness of their surroundings had vanished, pursued him and was gaining. He could hear Wally’s gasps as the man hurtled toward a black, mid-size sedan.

Wally had to swerve around the rear of the car to dart toward the driver’s side door. He practically slammed into the vehicle’s side as Wally grabbed the door handle and yanked open the door.

Shad almost clipped the rear bumper of the car as Wally dove inside and Shad leaped toward him. The interior side of the door struck Shad’s hip as Wally tried to slam it shut.

Shad grabbed the front of Wally’s shirt with both hands. With his rage in full force he wrestled Wally out of the sedan in a matter of seconds and shoved him against the rear door of the car.

“Dulsie could have died because of you!” Shad snarled as he hammered Wally repeatedly against the window. “What lies are you gonna tell me now? That it was Dulsie’s own fault? That trying to have me killed is completely normal? That society is too uptight about murder?”

Wally sputtered and tried to grasp at Shad’s wrists.

Shad growled, “You black hearted, dickless coward, you’d better pray for the police to get here before –”

He was ready to try to ram Wally right through the window. Wally looked up as he finally clasped Shad’s wrists. Immediately his mouth twisted into a distorted gape and an odd, strangled moan escaped. His eyes were wide, and Shad realized without a doubt they shone with abject terror.

For a split second his demon rejoiced and poised for satisfaction.

Shad froze as he realized Wally was looking at that demon. Its face had broken through Shad’s own visage, and its darkness was so complete it threatened to smother any flicker of light.

“The only thing that gave you away was your eyes. I swear they got darker.”

Dulsie’s voice emerged from a memory that seemed to come from a lifetime ago. His rage surged again. This cretin deserved to be pounded to a bloody pulp for what he did to Dulsie.

But Dulsie wouldn’t want this. She believed that the man she’d married had a fire in his belly but the fortitude to keep his cool. Shad had already thrown her a curve ball with his affliction and now he was about to make himself even more of a stranger to her. Dulsie couldn’t be won back by a stranger.

Thisisn’tme.

With considerable effort to push back down the raging demon, Shad drew a deep breath as he slowly straightened but kept a tight grip on Wally’s shirt. His focus began to spread again, and Shad became aware that a small crowd of people from the hotel were gathered around the taxi. With another deep breath Shad tried to both steady his hands, which had begun to shake, and remove the hoarseness from his voice.

He looked at the crowd and shouted, “Call the police!”

Shad fully expected to be detained by the police until he was “extradited” back to Osage County. By the time a squad car arrived he was back in complete self-control and calmly and rationally told the officer everything about his run-in with Wally. Shad then practically volunteered to go to the police station where the pertinent paperwork was filed. To his surprise they basically wound up releasing him on recognizance. Apparently the St. Louis police had a chat with the Osage County sheriff, who in turn had probably chatted with Shad’s parents.

That left him with about three hours until time to catch the afternoon train back to Jeff City.

The cab dropped him off at the train station and Shad found a nearby bench to sit at with his satchel and laptop case. His stomach was sore but Shad also realized he was getting hungry. There were plenty of shops in this neighborhood for him to get something to eat, but now that he had some privacy Shad wanted to get back to his call to Eliot. True to his usual luck he got Eliot’s voice mail again, so Shad decided to try calling Monica’s phone.

His luck remained consistent. Shad heard four rings and then the messaging service picked up. So he decided to try Eliot’s home phone.

Shad got the same response.

This was starting to buffalo him. Shad stared at his cell phone for a while, and then decided somebody would surely try to call him back while he was on the phone with anybody else. The people he most wanted to talk with, besides Dulsie, were Mam and Pap.

Incredible. Nobody answered at home, either.

Shad glanced around at the other patrons milling around the stores that lined the streets and half wondered if he’d missed out on the rapture. All right, he decided to try Karl’s cell phone.

Shad finally got a break. Karl answered the phone and immediately sounded quite cheerful.

“We got to bring Dulsie home today.”

Shad’s stomach fluttered, which also reminded him of its other issues. “That’s great. She’s doing fine, then?”

It turned out Mam and Pap were at the Wekenheiser home as well, so Karl loaned his phone to Pap. Shad was brief about his escapade to St. Louis and confirmed he’d be home that evening. But the matter with Charissa nagged at him, so Shad cut the conversation shorter than he preferred.

Well, that trick didn’t work. Nobody tried to interrupt his dialogue with the family. Shad decided to try Monica’s phone number again.

Answering service. Shad stared at the phone for a minute, and then on impulse decided to try her a third time.

After the third ring, just as he was certain of getting the answering service again, Shad heard the line pick up and Monica’s voice seemed a bit groggy.

“Hello?”

“Monica? It’s Shad Delaney.”

“Oh, yes. What did you need?” Monica still sounded only vaguely coherent.

“I’m sorry to keep you waiting so long, but I need to talk to you about Vic. We won’t go into it over the phone, but are you going to be free this evening?”

“Vic?” Monica was apparently still trying to process only the first half of what Shad had said. “He should be around here somewhere.”

A chill flashed through Shad that actually competed with the humid summer air. “Say that again?”

“Vic should be here. I’m surprised he didn’t answer the phone.”

“Monica....” Shad’s heart began to hammer. “Vic wasn’t supposed to be there today. Didn’t Tess call you?”

“Oh yeah, that. Vic came later, said there’d been a change in plans. He would still watch Charissa until after I’d slept.”

The tone in Shad’s voice dropped. “Where’s Charissa?”

“She should be around here, too.” Shad heard the soft crackling of the receiver being muffled while Monica called, “Charissa?” Then her voice became sharp and clear again, and Monica seemed a little more alert. “Just a minute.”

Shad heard the thump of the receiver set down. For what seemed an eternity he listened to silence. A couple of times Shad thought he could hear a voice in the distance. It seemed like a lifetime passed before Monica returned to the phone.

“I can’t find him.” There was tenseness in her voice. “And I can’t find Charissa either.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

There is mother’s heart in the heart of God.

– Hebridean proverb

If Shad were a swearing man he could have made the nearby pedestrians scatter with their hands over their ears. He told Monica to call the sheriff and that he would do the same. Shad knew he had the information the enforcement agency would need, and the rather long conversation he had with a deputy involved Shad doing a lot of explaining.

The battery of his phone quite low after all that use, Shad dropped it into his pocket and had that sensation again of needing to crawl out of his own skin. He sat on the bench for a few minutes with his arms propped on his knees and head held in his hands.

Why was this happening? How was this happening? Apparently Tess did call Vic, but the man decided to show up at Monica’s anyway and hang around until Monica needed to lie down and take a nap. So why would he, today of all days, decide to take off with Charissa? Why wouldn’t Vic have tried harder to cover his tracks?

Perhaps Shad should start with what he did know. Vic was the one who got the recommendation about Shad as an attorney for Monica. As part of the family and with his medical training and work hours, Vic was selected to help out with Monica and Charissa. Vic was familiar with the activist website. Vic was the go-between for Wally and the hired gunman.

Vic was already an accessory to attempted murder. Why add kidnapping to his rap sheet?

Kidnapping ... children abducted by relatives were at high risk for both abuse and murder.

Shad had to get to his feet upon that thought. He snatched up his satchel and laptop, and simply started walking because he felt compelled to move.

If Vic was associated with somebody who was willing to kill for hire, Vic was also very dangerous – birds of a feather. But if he was a situational offender who had been violating oblivious patients or anybody who couldn’t report his activities, why kidnap Charissa when everybody would know it was him?

Did Vic know the jig was up? When Tess called him this morning, what did she say that might have tipped him off? Shad had told Tess so little. Unless.... Shad hesitated and stared down the street.

Did Vic know that Shad had been Wally’s target? But that didn’t make sense. Why kill off the lawyer that was practically providing new victims for him? Shad felt a little sick to his stomach and knew it had nothing to do with injury or hunger. Then again, Vic might not have known the identity of the hit until ... until Dulsie’s attacker showed up with a gunshot wound he needed medical attention for.

The thought spurred Shad back into striding down the sidewalk.

Even if that were the case, why wouldn’t Vic just make a run for it and try to start a new life elsewhere? Then again, why should Shad assume that anybody who hung out with killers and could easily be a killer himself would think like a person who valued life? There were too many unknowns for Shad to get a solid grip on Vic’s motivation.

And about motivation ... Shad noticed that he didn’t know or care where he was going, but he was making good time. Shad was also headed away from the train station, but that didn’t matter much because it was well over two hours before the train would arrive. Here he was, stuck in St. Louis, trying to puzzle out why Vic would snatch Charissa and where he would take her.

Where? If Shad could only answer that question, he could send the authorities swooping down upon Vic and they would whisk Charissa to safety. But Vic could be anywhere. Shad didn’t know enough to even begin guessing where Vic would hide out. And Vic probably had at least a good thirty-minute head start before Shad roused Monica from sleep.

Shad proceeded to mentally thrash himself for not doing things differently this morning. If only he could have talked to Eliot or Monica, Shad might have been able to keep Charissa out of danger. After a few minutes of this Shad realized it wasn’t getting him anywhere. But what could he possibly come up with here in St. Louis that would be of any help to Charissa?

Shad hesitated, drew a deep breath to try to reorganize his thoughts, and then noticed he had stopped in front of a car rental agency.

He could rent a car and leave St. Louis now instead of later.

Now why on earth would Shad want to do that? Not only was he practically phobic of St. Louis traffic, getting back to the Jeff City area wasn’t going to help Charissa. If he did come up with any brilliant ideas a phone call was much faster than a road trip.

But he really wanted to leave St. Louis. Now.

This didn’t make sense. Shad wasn’t going to discover anything about Charissa’s abduction by heading home any sooner. Was he?

Shad stared at the rental company and felt an odd sensation that his need to keep moving hadn’t been random. Of all the directions he could have headed, Shad had managed to wind up here.

But that was ridiculous. He was uncomfortable in crowds and mortified of vehicular congestion. Under those circumstances it was even crazier of him to consider driving.

But if there was any chance at all Charissa might be saved if he headed toward home now, Shad should do it. This was insane. He couldn’t do it.

In the depths of his memory Shad heard Charissa’s trembling voice. “And if I don’t make you stop the divorce, something bad will happen to me, too.”

This had to be the right action to take precisely because it was so hard to do. Hoping against hope that the variety of madness Shad was experiencing was truly divine, he drew another deep breath to steady his nerves.

Don’tbeacoward Shad told himself, and he walked into the establishment.

Chapter Twenty-Five

I would agree with St. Augustine that “An unjust law is no law at all.”

– Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Luckily the interstate access was only a few blocks from the rental agency, but it was many miles later when Shad was able to exit onto a two-lane highway that led to Jeff City. Only then was he able to go off high alert and begin to ponder again about matters other than traffic.

Shad’s first thought was that Dulsie was going to tan his hide in the literal sense and sell it to the highest bidder in order to recoup from his recent spending spree. The medical bills they would be facing soon wouldn’t help, but at least they had good insurance so they shouldn’t wind up in the same straights Mam and Pap did when Pap had the tumor.

Pap’s tumor. That one event changed the course of Shad’s career. No, it wasn’t just the tumor. If anything, the final blow for Shad’s intentions of going into computer science was Jill’s revelation of what his parents had sacrificed for him. Opinionated, outspoken, wonderful Jill. There were several ways Dulsie was like her.

Shad’s discovery that Jill had unwittingly referred to his hidden affliction one day emerging again made Shad more appreciative of Jill’s intuition. But even with the gift of insight that ran deeply in the women descended from Margaret Leeds, none of them had guessed why Shad was brought among them. Erin was the first to sense he shouldn’t go into state custody, and Mam followed through. They didn’t know why it was important, they simply obeyed. Shad hoped they would never find out, at least not before the day they stood before God.

He could have been born with his affliction, but the darker demon had been nurtured through Shad’s suffering. Without serious intervention the two would have combined to make Shad into a predator of dreadful stature – of this he was certain. Mam and Pap had no idea the meek child they brought into their lives harbored a pestilence that grew as Shad grew older. It wanted Shad to accept his affliction because through it the demon would prosper.

So until Shad’s senior year in high school he struggled back and forth with the pedophilia, which seemed to match his struggle with accepting faith. Sometimes he mastered it as wrong, but more often he flirted with the notion this was the way he was made, so Shad should allow that impulse to eventually be satisfied. Had he gone into foster care, Shad knew he would have remained in an urban or suburban atmosphere. He would have been where little girls would be accessible. He would have given in.

Mam and Pap provided more than a stable, loving home life, which even a foster family could have given him. The gift that kept Shad from becoming a monster was the isolation that their rural lifestyle and peculiarly old-fashioned ways enforced. School, church, and Boy Scouts comprised Shad’s social life. Otherwise he was with his family or alone. Never, ever, did the opportunity present itself for Shad to give in to his baser self, and thus he was able to say that he had never inappropriately touched a child ... thank God.

Shad was more Jungian in his approach to psychology, but there was one aspect of Freud’s theories he had to admit wasn’t so nuts, after all: The fabric of society all boiled down to sex. Culture was the main difference that separated humanity from the animals, and culture existed because primitive women gave birth to the most helpless infants of all Earth’s creatures. Survival of the fittest meant she who selected the man who consistently dragged something back to the cave was able to rear their children to adulthood, who in turn would have children of their own. And by giving herself exclusively to that man, guaranteeing the children he provided for were his, relationships became based on bonding and trust. Families expanded into societies that flourished through cooperation, not by submitting to the will of the guy who could beat everybody else up. Virtuous women kept men civilized. Shad knew he was no saint, yet he made many improvements in his life in order to meet the standards Shad knew Dulsie would have, and there was no measuring his gratitude that he was the one she selected.

Back in the mid-eighteen hundreds Quaid promptly married Grace because it was scandalous for him to otherwise remain under her roof after he healed from his wounds. And while it was true people had misbehaved throughout history, it was also true that expectations had changed. Today the denizens of popular culture saw nothing wrong with cohabiting before marriage, assuming they bothered to marry at all. Physical intimacy was quickly wrested from its practical, more evolved application, and became demoted to recreation or self-realization. Thus began the slide back to the “Dark Age” as each variant of sexual misbehavior accepted by society led to another, unraveling its very fabric.

Today most people were scandalized by the thought of adults having sexual relations with children. But Shad could see how in another century or two the efforts of the activists could pay off. “Child Love” might be the last aberration admitted, but once every other “alternative” became approved, why not? Their plea for tolerance would become accepted in a culture that had already decided sex was just another commodity anybody could enjoy in any form they could imagine.

The consultation in Charissa’s bedroom had been the most challenging event for Shad in regard to the pedophilia, and he felt an extra dose of self-loathing as he reconsidered her dilemma now. But what about all that time she had spent with Vic before today? After an initial flash of panic, Shad consoled himself that if there was any intuition he did possess, it was the ability to pick up cues from abuse victims. At least as of the last time Shad was with her, the only symptoms of abuse he noticed were those imposed by her father.

So what had Vic been waiting for? Shad felt distinctly uncomfortable trying to analyze this criminal’s mind. He was still convinced Vic’s motivation was rooted in entitlement, not attraction. In other words, Shad was dealing with somebody like Brody, not Wally. That urge to crawl out of his own skin swept through him again.

Vic had obviously been one to play it safe if he chose victims who were unable to divulge his activity. His initial interest in the ring’s website was probably just to indulge in another genre of pornography. But he would have recognized Charissa’s vulnerability and most likely found it provocative. Maybe Vic had been biding his time, waiting for Charissa to reach some opportune moment that would keep his assault hidden.

For Vic to break out of his routine he had to decide this action was worth the risk. If he figured the police were going to come after him anyway for his involvement in a murder conspiracy, Vic might have decided to take Charissa with him as “consolation” while he went on the lam. Shad berated himself for his knee-jerk reaction of trying to keep Vic away from Charissa. His request had probably alerted Vic that the secret had been uncovered.

So many secrets and so little time. Everybody including Shad had something to hide. Secrets were really such a simple thing, but they added complications in so many ways. As often as they were used to conceal something dark and despicable they were also useful in plans to share joy and celebration.

Secrets....

Charissa’s voice drifted to the surface of his memory. “Vic is gonna take us to his friend Drake’s houseboat one day. But he said not to tell Mom because it was a surprise.”

Charissa had told him one of Vic’s secrets. Could that be the clue Shad was looking for?

But what houseboat? Like any other vehicle it would have to be registered, but in a region with two large rivers and a nearby reservoir, that meant there could only be, what, a thousand or more? And who was this friend named Drake?

If Vic decided to lay low for a while, maybe wait for the cover of darkness, he would need somewhere private to stay. Could it also be possible that as the accessory Vic would hide out with the actual triggerman? Shad felt the rage stir and pushed it back down.

It was a long shot, only one of many scenarios Vic might decide to play out, and one that law enforcement might not be able to investigate immediately. Even if Shad tipped them off, he’d never forgive himself if that trail proved to be cold while the police missed the one that led to Charissa. Let them follow the more promising leads, but Shad owed it to Charissa to ensure no stone was left unturned.

Hopefully a name like Drake would prove unique, but Shad needed access to the internet. Everything metropolitan was behind him – there were only small towns on this highway from here to Jeff. Restaurants, book stores, and hotels were few and far between. Shad pulled the car off on a little side road long enough to unpack his laptop and open it on the seat beside him. He was about to give the term “drive-by download” a whole different meaning.

When Shad neared the next town he turned the computer on and monitored it while he coasted the car well below the speed limit. His gamble paid off. The laptop connected to a signal and Shad immediately turned the car toward the building that had to be its source. Parking was located right in front of the shop, and as Shad looked up while he turned off the engine he noticed it was an antique store. The irony didn’t escape him.

Shad diverted full attention to the computer while he hacked into the website that would give him the information he needed. On one hand it didn’t take long because it was a domain he’d trespassed many times, and the Department of Revenue would probably be the highest bidder for his hide if they knew how often he’d been here. On the other hand the connection was a bit weak and Shad had to endure frustration as the computer occasionally stalled.

It didn’t take long at all for the car to heat up. Shad rolled down the windows and continued to scan the listings for that one name. After several more minutes he had to pull out his handkerchief in order to dab his brow occasionally.

Nothing, nothing, nothing.... Time kept ticking by and still Shad didn’t see the name he was looking for. The sweat was beginning to soak through his shirt and his mouth was unquestionably getting dry. What if he never found it? What if he missed it?

And then there it was. Houseboat owner Drake Anderson lived in the next county south of where Monica lived.

Shad copied the address and switched to his favorite map program to locate how to get there. He did make a quick stop at a nearby convenience store to get a drink of tea and a bag of peanuts before Shad drove toward the residence with the car’s air conditioner on full blast.