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Автор книги: Andrew Gross

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Chapter Sixteen

It took close to two hours, but the trailer’s front door finally opened. Vance saw a woman step out into the night, wearing a tight red halter and a denim jacket hanging from her shoulder, her blond hair all mussed up.

He watched from his perch in the woods. Good ol’ Wayne, the guy Amanda was supposedly in love with, came out, shirtless and in jeans, with a beer in hand. The girl spun around and pressed up against him and gave him a lingering kiss, Wayne’s hand snaking down her back and onto her shorts until it came to rest on her behind.

Vance couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it wasn’t too hard to figure out.

She turned and continued down the steps, a little wobbly, to her car. “You know one thing . . .” she said, turning back, and pointing at Wayne. “Whatever it is you got, it sure does make my register ring.”

“Ring-a-ding-ding,” Wayne sang, and took a swig of his beer, the two giggling like fools.

The girl stumbled to her car and waved as she drove away, passing right by Vance. After a short while, when Vance was sure she wasn’t coming back, he picked up the black satchel from the seat next to him. He got out of his car, lifted the trunk, and took out a heavy lead pipe, the words the responsibility starts now drumming through his mind. Wheat from chaff.

Just no knowing where it ends.

He stepped up to the front door, hearing the TV on inside. He knocked.

It took a few seconds for the door to open. Wayne appeared, with that same shit-eating grin on his face, still holding his beer, surely expecting someone else. “Forget something . . . ?”

“Yeah,” Vance said, staring into Wayne’s shocked eyes. “I did.”

Vance swung the pipe and struck Wayne in the kneecap, probably shattering it right there, and when Wayne buckled on one foot with a yelp, Vance jabbed the butt end into the boy’s jaw, sending him across the floor in a groaning heap.

Vance shut the front door.

Chapter Seventeen

“Where the hell am I?” the boy moaned, groggily, finally opening his eyes.

The room was dark. Vance had turned off all the lights. Wayne was hog-tied, his arms behind him, dangling from a crossbeam on the ceiling. He couldn’t move. He could barely even breathe. He just hung there, his feet bare, blood pooled in his mouth and all over his shirt.

“Who’s there?” Wayne called out into the darkness. “What’s going on? Why are you doing this to me?”

Poor kid had no idea who had even strung him up there.

Vance rose up and shined a flashlight into Wayne’s eyes. The boy squinted, blinded, turning his face away. “Who is that? Mr. Hofer? Why the hell are you doing this to me, Mr. Hofer?” The kid was shaking. “What’s going on?”

“What am I doing here, son . . . ?” Vance said, pulling out a chair and sitting down on it in front of Wayne. “I’m simply here to ask you a few things. And how you answer them will go a long ways toward determining whether you ever walk away from here . . . So you think about what I’m about to say, and then we’ll see. Okay, son?”

Wayne nodded, scared out of his mind.

“Good.” Vance continued to shine the light on him. “First is, what did you do to my girl?”

“I’m s-sorry, Mr. Hofer,” Wayne said, tears and mucus streaming down his face and falling onto the floor. He’d always been scared of Amanda’s old man. The guy was crazy. Even Amanda said so. The stories she would tell of him, when she and Wayne were high. How he had this violent streak. How he would just hurt things—stray cats, squirrels, Amanda’s mom. And what he used to do on the force. How he once busted a man’s wrists with his nightstick while the guy was writhing on the ground. Used it in other ways too, he’d heard. Got him thrown off the force.

“You mean her? Brandee? She ain’t nothing to me. She’s just a friend. Amanda’s still my girl.”

Vance shook his head. “I don’t mean about the girl, son. The girl could fuck you to kingdom come for all I care. You really think this is about her? You want to go on living out that putrid, dog-shit life of yours?”

“ ’Course I do!” The kid was openly crying now, almost shitting in his pants. “Please, let me down, sir. You know I do. You—”

“So then I’ll say it again, how you answer’s gonna go a long way toward determining how we get that done, Wayne. So you tell me . . .” Vance stood up and faced him now. “You tell me where you got the drugs from, son. I’m talking the Oxy. That’s why I’m here.”

“Oxy? We only just smoked a little weed,” Wayne said. “That’s all. We weren’t hurting no one . . . We jus—”

“I don’t mean tonight, you stupid fool,” Vance said, feeling his temper rear. “The Oxy that my little girl was taking. Who just got her life stolen away by whatever it was you pushed on her. That’s where she got them from, right?” Revulsion pooled in his eyes. “The stuff she was on. From you, right, son?”

“No, no . . . It wasn’t from me, Mr. Hofer. I swear.” Wayne was hanging like a side of beef, the blood rushing into his head. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about, sir . . . I—”

“You don’t know what I’m talking about?” Vance humphed cynically, almost smiling. “What Amanda was high on when she killed that poor, young gal and her baby . . . While her husband was serving his country over there. Now, I know it was you, son, so there’s no sense playing this out. The Oxy, where’d you get ’em, boy? That’s all that I want to know. Then I’ll hoist you down.”

“I don’t know . . . I don’t know,” Wayne groaned. “She didn’t get ’em from me . . .” He shook his head back and forth like it was on a pulley. “I promise. I swear that, Mr. Hofer . . .”

“You swear . . .” Vance tightened his grip around the lead pipe, the muscles in his wide forearms twitching. “Son, we both know that’s a damn lie. And lying won’t be the thing to help you now. But here’s a bit of the truth. I lied as well. You’re gonna have to pay for what you’ve done. Everyone is. Everyone up and down the line. Till I find where it came from. No way around that. That’s just where it stands, son.”

Wayne was trembling now, barely able to garble words back. “What I’ve done? What have I done?”

“All those lives you stole, son. The girl and her baby.” Vance stared at him. “My Amanda too.”

“No . . .” Now the boy was squirming and sobbing, tiring himself out twisting all over the beam. Every time he jerked his legs, the rope tightened around his neck. “I didn’t do anything to them. I didn’t give her any drugs! I swear . . .”

Vance went over to the black bag he had placed on the chair. “Son, we can do this two ways, and I’m afraid you’re not gonna like either of ’em, but one surely more than the other. But I think we both know by the time I walk out that door”—Vance opened the bag—“it’s gonna be with those names.”

“There are no names! You hear me, Mr. Hofer, there are no names!”

It was still dark and Wayne could barely see. He just heard things from wherever Vance was moving around. Things that made him scared. Like a sharp hiss—followed by the sweet smell of gas, propane, and then a whoosh, which sent an electrical current of fear jerking through his upended body.

He shat down his pants.

Then Wayne looked up and saw the blue flame from a welding torch in Vance’s hand, coming closer to him.

“Listen, please, Mr. Hofer, please . . . Listen!” he screamed. Suddenly his answers changed, and he began stammering. “These aren’t like regular folk. They’re not from around here. They’re truly bad people. I can’t give you their names. I can’t! They’ll kill me.”

To which Vance replied, chuckling, “What do you think I’m doing, son, just playing around?” He adjusted the flame to high and brought it close to Wayne.

“Now, you can stay up there, whimpering like a child, long as you like. Trust me, I’ve got all night. But whimpering ain’t gonna help you in this situation. I want to hear you talking names, son. Otherwise . . .”

Wayne’s eyes bulged as the flame came close, darting back and forth. “I didn’t do anything to them! I swear. I didn’t.” The heat was close to his face. He began to sob. “I didn’t!”

“Well, that’s just where you’re wrong, son. Where you and I disagree.”

Vance grabbed one of Wayne’s bare feet and put the blue flame against his sole, the boy’s skin sizzling and his leg kicking around like a half-killed bass and a shriek coming out of him that might have been heard in Lowndes County.

“Please, Mr. Hofer, please . . .”

“Where you got the Oxy from that you fed my daughter? You hear me? I can make this last forever, son, or I can make it quick. Either way, by the time I leave, I’m going to have what I want.”

He placed the blue flame on Wayne’s foot again, the kid jerking and crying and howling bloody hell. And a stink going up. “Names, son . . . It’s only going to get worse. I think you must be hearing me now. No one’s leaving here without those names.”

Chapter Eighteen

He got them. Names.

Though it took longer than he’d liked—Wayne thrashing and screaming how these were bad people and they’d come and kill him, which seemed to suggest he didn’t fully appreciate what was happening to him right now.

The lad was passed out now. Still. The whimpering had stopped, though his feet smelled like meat on a spit and were puffed up bloody ugly, swollen, and blistered and blue.

Hell, they wouldn’t be much good to him now anyway.

Vance lowered him from the beam, the ropes still horse-collared around Wayne’s neck. He surely could have saved the kid a lot of pain and aggravation. But he had to pay—that was clear. Just like that girl and her baby had paid.

Just like Amanda had paid. Forfeited half her life just for being young and foolish.

Now Wayne had to pay too.

Vance hoisted up the body by the armpits. He figured as long as he had the apparatus all rigged up, he might as well put it to some use, and cinched the rope tightly around the kid’s neck, placing the noose under his chin. Then he began to squeeze.

Squeeze. With all the strength he had from those years of running that lathe.

All those years on the force and the way they’d pushed him aside without much of a thought to him.

Squeeze.

Wayne jerked awake, his eyes bulging. He made a gurgling noise and twisted to see what was happening. Strangled whimpers emanating from his throat as Vance tightened the noose, the boy suddenly understanding what was going on, his arms thrashing around behind him. Vance telling him in a soft voice, “No point in struggling, son. I told you plainly, you had to pay for what you’ve done.”

Wayne, grasping at Vance’s sides, jerking his head back and forth in some desperate, futile effort to say, “No, please, no . . .” But that just made Vance squeeze even tighter, spittle seeping out of the young man’s mouth and onto his chin. His fists striking with diminishing force against Vance’s thighs. His words barely even intelligible . . . His eyes stretched to the back of his head.

Please.

Vance didn’t let up. Not until there was no more fight in the boy. Or gasping for air. Not until he fell back on the floor in a curled-up heap.

He’d told him it had to be done.

Then he loosened the noose from Wayne’s blotched neck and undid the makeshift winch and pulley and set them aside. He wrapped the long rope over his arm into neat circles, unscrewed the propane tank from the welding torch, and put them carefully back into his bag.

Not much blood, he thought, pleased with his work. Just a few drops of spittle on the floor, which he wiped with a cloth and disinfectant. Then he put his arms under the dead boy’s armpits and lifted him up over his shoulders. Young Wayne was a sizable lad, though Vance had expected more of a fight out of him. Vance carried him outside and into the woods to the spot he had prepared. He’d already dug the hole, about forty yards in, amid a thicket of brush and brambles no one would ever find. Sweat picked up on Vance’s back as he carted the heavy weight in the humid night.

When he got to the hole, he was wheezing a bit. He dropped Wayne faceup, and puffed his cheeks so as to catch his breath.

He thought, Maybe I ought to say something, staring down at the young face. You probably weren’t a totally useless fool, though my daughter liked you, so who knows . . . Still, events don’t happen of themselves. They have a cause, and you were part of that cause, son. So here you lie . . .

He rolled Wayne’s torso inside the ditch and then kicked in his legs, which didn’t seem to want to go in. Then he started to fill up the hole with the shovel he had hidden here in the bushes.

When he was finished, he smoothed things out as best he could, but no one would ever find him here. No one but that tramp Brandee would even miss him likely.

Wheat from chaff, he said to himself, leaning on the shovel. The lowest rung on a tall ladder.

But he would do what he had to do and find his way to the top.

Vance took the shovel and headed back.

He had names.

Part II

Chapter Nineteen

Carrie drove to her parents’ house in Atlantic Beach after work that day. Raef had just come back from the physical therapist.

It was a small, three-bedroom ranch backing onto a public golf course near the beach, but it was near the Wolfson Children’s Hospital, where Raef went every day to the rehabilitation center. He’d gotten most of his major muscle movement back, along with the majority of his speech. The therapists were still working on the fine-motor movements, such as writing and catching a ball; running was yet to fully come. But it was all improving. The doctors thought that in a couple of weeks’ time Raef would be able to move back in with her and, after the summer, be back in school.

They were hopeful that one day he wouldn’t even show the slightest sign that his brain had been deprived of oxygen for almost two and a half minutes.

“Hi, Mommy!” He ran up to her like any happy nine-year-old, maybe showing just a little weakness on his right side.

“Hey, Tiger!” Carrie exclaimed, lifting him in the air. “Ooof, you are getting to be a real handful. You know that, guy!”

“Roberta said I was very good today.” Roberta was one of his therapists at Wolfson. “We played catch. Look . . .” He picked up a blue-and-red, soft-cushion baseball, tossed it in the air, and caught it in his right hand, his lagging one. Papa and I have been practicing!”

“Pretty soon we’ll see him pitching for the Marlins.” Nate, Carrie’s dad, the ex–New Hampshire police chief, walked in. Then his face became more serious. “So how’d it go, baby? Some first day back. We saw the news.”

“I’ll tell you about it,” Carrie said, with a roll of her eyes. “I’ve got quite the story. But first . . . I want to see my Number One Dude here in action. See if he can handle my best heater.” She took the cushiony ball and pretended to rub it up like a real pitcher. “What do you say, A-Rod . . . ?”

“If you throw it slow, Mommy.”

“Slow it is. Just the right hand, Raef.” She went into a windup and tossed it to him underhanded from around four feet away. Raef plucked it out of the air.

“Whoa!” Carrie said, eyes wide. “Awesome job!” She turned to her dad, who was nodding with a glow of grandfatherly pride. “You’re not joking. I think he might well be filling out that pitching rotation pretty soon.”

Raef grinned proudly. Every time Carrie looked at his freckled face, she saw Rick’s smile. He surely did have her husband’s will and determination. He never once felt sorry for himself. Most of the tears he shed were when he was trying to comfort her. Even now, her thoughts roamed to the incident that had taken Rick, and as always, the memory seemed to come to her against her will.

She was down in St. John’s County. At the opening of a JSO-sponsored youth center there. She got the call from Rick. Trying his best to appear calm—that was his way, after two tours in Iraq—but it was impossible not to hear the worry in his voice. “Carrie, I don’t want you to panic, but something’s happened . . .” The ensuing pause became the dividing line in her life. “To Raef!”

She remembered how every nerve in her body seemed to go dead.

He’d fallen on the soccer field at school and never got up. No one was really sure what precisely had happened yet, but “his right arm started shaking and then he said his leg felt numb and then he just fell . . .”

Carrie knew from her husband’s tone that he was trying to hold it together as well. This was bad.

“He’s not conscious, honey,” Rick said, sucking in a bolstering breath. “But the EMTs are there. They’re taking him to Memorial Hospital.”

Oh my God! That was close to a two-hour drive from where she was. With traffic. Only about ten minutes for Rick. “I’ll meet you there,” he said. “Okay?”

“Okay,” Carrie answered shakily.

“And, Carrie, baby . . .”

“Yes,” she said, her eyes already overrun with tears and her heartbeat racing.

“He’s gonna make it, Carrie. I promise he will. He’s gonna come through this—you know that, don’t you?”

“I know that, Rick,” she answered weakly.

She knew it because he was saying it. Because nothing could happen to Rick. He was part of the first Marine platoon to arrive in Iraq, and he did two rotations as a field commander, ending up with the rank of captain. He had come through the war fine. Everything always came easy for him. He played third base at U of F and probably could have been drafted as a pro. He had a 3.8 GPA as a history major. He was on the short list for a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, but instead decided to enlist. He was the most capable man she knew.

Raef had to be okay if Rick was saying it.

“I’m on my way,” she said, already heading toward her Prius. “I’ll see you there.”

“You drive safely,” he told her. “I love you, baby.”

“I love you too.”

The drive should have taken close to two hours, but she made it in an hour and a half. A patrol car escorted her, flashing lights and all. When she got to the hospital, she ran through the sliding-glass doors of the emergency entrance, her heart out of control. “My son! He’s being operated on,” she blurted to the attendant at the desk. “Raef Holmes. He’s in the OR . . .”

“Second floor to the right,” the attendant said. “I’ll call up. You can take the elevator . . .”

Carrie bolted up the stairs. She pushed through the OR doors, searching frantically for Rick. She didn’t see him anywhere. He must have stepped out for a second to make a call. Instead a nurse introduced her to the surgeon. “My son’s in there. Raef Holmes . . .”

“Your boy’s had what we call an AVM,” said the surgeon, a young-looking Asian in green scrubs. “An arteriovenous malformation. It’s a tangle of abnormal arteries and veins in the temporal lobe of the brain. We operated on him to relieve some of the pressure. He’s a strong kid, but I’d be lying if I told you anything other than that it’s touch and go right now. We’ve got him sedated in the ICU. We placed him in a coma—”

“A coma!” Carrie put a hand to her mouth. My poor baby . . .

“To control the swelling. The next forty-eight hours will be key. But, Ms. Holmes . . .” The surgeon took her by the arm and walked her over to a bench. “I’m afraid there’s more . . .”

More. Carrie remembered saying to herself, What could possibly be more?

Then she focused back on Rick. Why he wasn’t here. “Where’s my husband?” she asked, suddenly seeing something in the surgeon’s eyes, something held back, that raised her anxiety level even more.

“He collapsed,” the surgeon said, easing her down onto the bench. “In the waiting room. While we were working on your son. It looks like a dissected aorta. He’s in the OR now. We’ve got our top cardiac team working on him now. It could have happened anytime . . .” He went through a rough explanation. It was lurking and likely been there for years. Probably congenital. “It just blew.”

“Blew . . .” Carrie muttered back to him, eyes flooding. Oh, Rick. Rick . . .

It just blew.

They let her look in at him. For the next six hours, she had a husband in the OR and her son in the ICU. Both of them fighting for their lives as she raced back and forth, afraid to leave either one for any time. She didn’t know who needed her more.

“I love you mountains and oceans,” she said to Raef as she sat by his bed, squeezing his small, unresponsive hand. She remembered Rick’s vow: “He’s going to be all right, Carrie. You know that, don’t you?”

Yes, she had said, I know that, Rick. Because you said so.

“You’re going to make it, Raef,” she whispered in his ear. “You’re going to be healthy again, and do all the things young boys do. You know that, right? You know how we love you, don’t you?” Her eyes filled with tears. “You know that nothing could happen to you . . .”

She remembered closing her eyes and praying. “If you save my boy’s life . . .” She was never the religious type, but right now . . . “You can take anything from me. Anything. I swear to you . . .”

Not long after that, a nurse touched her shoulder. Carrie turned. “Ms. Holmes, they need you down in the OR . . .”

She looked at the nurse’s face for a sign that it was okay.

Rick died on the table. He had a stroke caused by an aortic rupture, and they couldn’t stem the flow of blood or get oxygen to the brain. It had probably been there from birth, the doctors said. Through college. Through Iraq. Through law school. Maybe it was the stress of what happened to Raef that caused it to finally rupture, the doctors speculated. Trying to be strong for all of them. The doctors did everything they could.

Now every time she looked in her son’s resilient eyes, she saw him.

Rick.

“So what do I always say to you?” Carrie said, pulling Raef close to her. “C’mere . . .” The stress of her first day back on the job returned. Losing Martinez. Fielding the call from Steadman. “I need a really big hug.”

“I love you mountains and oceans, right, Mommy?” Her arms nestled around him, tears of joy filling her eyes.

“Right. Oh, that’s pretty big!” Carrie said with a halting breath, lifting him off the ground.

And as she held him, the oddest thought wormed into her brain.

What Steadman had said on the phone. As if only to her. “I swear on my daughter’s life, Carrie. You’ll know what I mean . . .”

Yes, I do know what that means, she thought now. She gripped her sweet-smelling boy a little tighter.

“Whatever it looks like, whatever anyone believes, it wasn’t me!”

That’s why the words had hit home the way they did. There was a space in her heart that seemed to open for those very words.

“I swear!” Those words meant everything to her.

Yes, she said to herself, hugging Raef. I know exactly what that means.