A Killing Rain (35 page)

Louis looked to the left as he drove along the beach road, watching the sun as it began its slow descent into the gulf. The air was still cool and the sunset was going to be lost behind the heavy cloud bank that hung over the water.

He hurried, wanting to get ba
ck to Joe. They had planned to go to Timmy’s Nook tonight for their final dinner on Captiva.

When he pulled in, he slowed, seeing Susan’s old silver Mercedes in front of his cottage. Joe and Susan
were standing by the car. And then he saw Ben sitting on the step of the cottage watching Issy playing in the sand.

He parked behind Susan'
s car. Susan and Joe watched him as he came up the gravel path. Ben looked up. There was nothing in his face, no expression, no happiness, nothing at all.

But he was here.

There was a second of awkward silence before Joe spoke.

“I think I will go for a walk,” she said, glancing at Louis.

Louis and Susan watched her head over the low dunes. Susan looked back at him. He had hoped to tell her about him and Joe before she learned it from someone else but there hadn’t been time. It was obvious from her face that she knew now.

“I like her,” Susan said. “She’s good for you.”

Louis couldn’t think of a damn thing to say. It hadn’t worked out for him and Susan and they both knew it. But they were both okay with that.

Susan looked at Ben, hunched on the porch steps, then back at Louis. She started to say something then just gave Louis a long, hard hug.

“Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you so much.”

As h
e held her, over her shoulder he saw Ben watching them. He pulled back gently.

“How
’s he doing?” he asked.

Susan
’s smile faded. “He’s very angry,” she said softly. “He talks to me about the things that happened to him. He asks about the woman he was locked up with, what happened to her, and he even asked about the McAllisters. But he won’t talk to me about his father.” Susan looked at Benjamin, her lower lip quivering. “I think he hates me.”

“He needs time,” Louis said.

She was still looking at Ben. “He asked me to bring him here,” she said.

Ben was drawing circles in the sand with a stick.

“Go talk to him,” Susan said.

Susan headed out toward the beach and
Louis walked over to the steps.

“Can I sit down?” he asked.

Ben shrugged.

Louis sat down on the step. Ben didn’t move away when their shoulders touched.

“What are you drawing?” Louis asked.

“Not
hing.”

“You feeling okay?”

Ben waited a moment. “I’m scared a lot.”

“Of what?”

“Being taken again,” he said softly.

Louis shut his eyes for a second
. It was very quiet except for the soft hiss of the surf.

“Why didn’t my daddy come back for me?” Ben asked
.

Louis looked at him. “What do you mean?”

“At the park? Why didn’t he come back? We waited a long time.”

Louis cleared his throat
, unsure he could talk. “Maybe he wanted to, but he just couldn’t.”

Ben stared at the sand
, the stick motionless.

“The blond man said Daddy was a coward
,” Ben whispered.

“These were bad guys. They wanted to hurt your father,” Louis said
. “Being afraid doesn’t make you a coward.”

Ben looked up at him. “Ma says
you came,” he said. “She says you never stopped looking for me.”

Louis’s throat tightened
.

“I
looked for Daddy when I found the helicopters,” Ben said. “But he wasn’t there. Were you?”

Louis nodded
.

Ben leaned over, his head against Louis’s shoulder. For a
few minutes they just sat there motionless, the soft evening breeze against their faces.

“Ma says you’re moving and you’re going to be a cop again.”

“Yes.”

“Will you come and see me sometime?”

“Yes.”

A long silence.

“I love you, Louis.”

It was still dark when he slipped out of Joe’s bed. He looked back at her. Her face was in the shadows, a shaft of moonlight falling across her shoulder. Her two cats were curled at the bottom of the bed.

Pulling on a pair of sweatpants, he left the bedroom. Out in the dark living room,
his eyes were drawn to the sliding glass doors and the lights beyond.

He went out onto the balcony. Miami was spread out below him like a carpet of lights. A police siren wailed and died in the distance. A warm breeze came up, wrapping itself around him.

He leaned on the railing.

Oh man... this is going to be tough.

He felt the press of her breasts on his back and her arms wrapping around his chest.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

“I can’t stay here,” he said softly.

She hesitated. “I have a feeling you’re not talking about my apartment.”

Louis turned to face her. “I need to know he’s going to be all right.”

“He’ll be all right, Louis,” Joe said. “Kids are resilient. They’re stronger than you think.”

“They’re more fragile than you think, Joe. Especially boys.”

“He has a strong and loving mother.”

“And no father.”

Joe took a step back. “You can’t be Ben’s father, Louis.”

“I know that,” Louis said. “But I can be something.”

She just looked at him.

“I don’t want him to grow up scared,” Louis said. “I don’t want him to grow up angry. And I don’t want him to not trust people because his mother can’t. I just want...”

Louis shook his head.

Joe took another step back. “You’ve waited a long time for this. How can you just turn your back on everything?”

Louis knew she meant the job
-- and her.

Her eyes
teared up. He wrapped his arms around her, crushing her against him.

“I need you, too,” she whispered.

He closed his eyes and buried his face against her neck.

“I’ll be three hours away,” he said.

She pulled back and wiped her eyes. “Two if you drive fast.”

He cupped her face in his hands and kissed her.

The road in front of him was straight and flat, cutting a cruel slash across the gut of Florida. No curves, no hills, nothing to relieve the sadness of the journey. The sun had crept below the visor, making him squint as he headed west.

He glanced at the odometer, calculating how many miles he’d come. And how many more miles he had yet to go. He’d be back in Captiva before sunset.

His thoughts were jumping between Ben and Joe.

He was thinking, too, of Phillip Lawrence and he realized he had never thanked him. How did you thank a stranger for stepping in and saving your life? How did you thank a foster father for being a father?

There had been other boys in Phillip’s house. Other boys who had come out whole because of him. But Louis had also seen the others. The broken boys. Seen what they could do. What they could become.

He drove on, the sun sinking lower into the west.

Ben and Joe. They were both in his head, but Joe was there in his heart
. His eyes flicked up to the rearview mirror. He missed her already.

A rest stop came into view. He hesitated, then let up on the gas, pulling off Alligator Alley. He stopped in front of
the pay phone and got out.

The low slanting sun had turned the saw grass into a rippling river of gold. The blades whispered in the wind. He started to pick up the phone to call her. But then he stopped. He was thinking of the picture, the one of the little boy Joe carried behind her badge. The boy she couldn’t save.

He went back to the Mustang and opened the passenger door, popping open the glove box. It took him a minute to find it in all the junk. But finally, he pulled out Ben’s picture, the one Susan had given him the night he disappeared.

He looked at it for a moment then took out his wallet. He folded the photograph carefully and slid it behind his license.

Back in the car, he started the engine and pulled out of the lot, stopping before he pulled back out onto Alligator Alley.

He looked left, across the flat grass to where the gray edge of the coming night was shading in from the east. Then he turned the Mustang west
toward Captiva, heading home.

HEART OF ICE PREVIEW

Read the latest Louis Kincaid thriller!

Available on
Amazon
and
Barnes and Noble
in paperback and eBook

CHAPTER 1

Wednesday, December 31, 1969

He was staring at the frozen lake and thinking about his mother lying on a table somewhere screaming in pain.

He was remembering what she told him, how they had kept her in that little room and held her down, how it felt like her insides were being torn in half and how it went on and on and on for two days until she begged to die.

He was thinking about her and how much he had loved her. But he was also thinking that if she had been able to stand the pain for two more minutes –-
two damn minutes
-- his life would have been so very different.

But she couldn’t. So he was pulled from her womb at two minutes before midnight on September 14, and because of that everything now had changed.

The ferry was coming in. He heard its horn before he saw it, a white smudge emerging slowly from the gray afternoon fog. It was running late. The straits had frozen over early this year because of the long bitter cold snap and the ferry was forced to stay in the narrow channel that had been cut by the coast guard icebreaker
Mackinaw
. It was so cold, far colder than it should be, even for December. He pulled the hood of his parka up and looked down at the duffle at his feet. Had he remembered his gloves? Everything had happened so fast he hadn’t given much thought to what he had packed. Now he was so cold he didn’t even want to open the duffle to look, so he stuffed his red hands into his armpits and watched the ferry.

It was taking a long time to get to the dock, like it was moving in slow motion. But everything was like this now, everything was moving as if time no longer existed. But it didn’t really, he thought. Not
anymore. Time was nothing to him now. By tomorrow, he would have all the time in the world.

But
what
world?

He looked around. At the clapboard ticket house of the Arnold Line ferry, at the docks, the empty parking lot and the boarded-up
pastie shack. He looked past the park benches and the bare black trees still wearing their necklaces from last night’s ice storm. He looked back toward town where the fog blurred all the places he had known during his nineteen years here, and he tried hard to burn everything into his memory because suddenly he knew that once he got on the ferry there would be no way to ever come back and he would forget all of this and the person he had been here.

He turned and looked left.

Canada. It was just fifty miles away, less than an hour’s drive up I-75. He had never been there before.

But until now he had never had a reason to.

The ferry had docked. No one came out to take his ticket so he picked up his duffle, sprinted up the gangplank and boarded. The cabin was empty and but at least it was warmer. He set his duffle on one of the long wooden benches and sat down. He wanted a hot cup of coffee but there was no one at the snack bar at the far end of the cabin. The clouded glass carafes sat empty on the coffee machines. There wasn’t a soul to be seen anywhere, and he had the weird feeling that he was the only human being left on earth.

But then the metal floor began to vibrate beneath his feet and the ferry pulled away from the dock. He leaned his head against the cold glass of the window and closed his eyes.

He slept. And for the first time in weeks, he dreamed.

Dreamed of a bald man in horn-rimmed glasses and a blue suit.
Dreamed of shooting a rifle that looked nothing like the one he used to hunt deer with his dad. Dreamed of lying naked on a cold steel table in a white room with his red intestines pouring out of his gut. And then the bald man was holding up a big bright blue capsule and smiling and telling him that if he just took it all the pain would go away.

He was jerked awake by a jabbing on his shoulder.

He looked up into the red face of an old man wearing a navy pea coat with the ferry line emblem on the pocket.

“Time to get off, son.”

He rubbed his eyes and looked out the window, but it had fogged over. He rubbed it with the sleeve of his parka and saw something in the mist outside. It was the boarded-up pastie shack on the dock. They were back in St. Ignace.

“Hey!” he called out to the old man who was heading toward the door. “What happened? Why did we turn back?”

“No choice,” the old man said. “Got out aways but it was frozen solid. Got a call in to the cutter but she’s working the shipping lines and can’t get here until tomorrow morning.” He turned and started away.

“But I have to get to the island tonight!”

The old man stared at him then shook his head. “No one’s getting over there tonight, son.”

The old man shuffled off, the metal door banging behind him. The young man’s eyes went again to the window. His mind was spinning, trying to figure out his options. Stay here and wait? No, because tomorrow would be too late. Go home and try to explain? No, because he couldn’t look his father in the eye and tell him one more
lie. Leave and try to start over somewhere new? No, because she wouldn’t be there.

And it was all about her.

He reached for the duffle at his feet but paused. It was an old thing and the name stenciled on the green canvas was so faded it could barely be read: CHARLES S. LANGE. It had belonged to his father, and U.S. Army sergeant Charles Lange had stuffed his life into the duffle. Everything he needed to survive was in it – heating tablets, rations, mittens, compass, bullets, and a picture of his wife and baby son. When he came home he packed it away, emptying it and himself as best he could. Even his wife couldn’t get him to talk about had happened in Korea, and when she died three years later Charles Lange withdrew into himself even more. He was there as a father, or at least as much as he could be. And when his son turned sixteen, he brought out the duffle and gave it to him.

Cooper Lange had never used the duffle. But last night he had pulled it from his closet and hurriedly packed it with the things he guessed he might need to survive. A change of clothes, matches, some Mounds bars, the three hundred and two dollars from his bank account, an extra pair of gloves, his father’s old Army
compass.

He grabbed the bag and hurried from the ferry. The temperature had dropped sharply since he had boarded and the icy cold was like a hard slap against his face. He glanced at his watch.
Almost four. It would be dark soon. He had to figure out something fast. The dock was deserted and there were no cars in the lot. Chartering a plane in this weather was out of the question, not that he could afford it.

The weather...it was getting bad fast. The fog had retreated but he could see a bank of heavy pewter clouds building on the horizon of Lake Huron. His eyes caught a spot of something dark on the icy lake just off shore. Then he spotted another dark spot beyond the first.

Trees. The dark spots were trees. That meant someone had started laying out the ice bridge. But was it finished?

There was no time to check. If he was going, he had to go now. He unzipped the duffle and found his gloves. He cursed himself for not bringing a flashlight and screwdrivers -– it was crazy to cross the bridge without them -- but he hadn’t planned on having to do this.

He hadn’t planned on doing any of this. But she...

Oh God, had he forgotten it? Digging beneath the clothes, he found her picture. It was her senior class portrait. Perfect oval
face framed by long straight dark hair, somber dark eyes and not even a hint of a smile. He turned it over to read what she had written even though he knew it by heart.

When love beckons to you, follow him, though his ways are hard and steep. And when he speaks to you believe in him, though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden. – Julie.

He started to put it back in the duffle but instead slipped it into the chest pocket of his parka and zipped it shut.

He put on his gloves, slung the duffle strap over his shoulder and headed across the parking lot. At the snow-covered beach, he stopped. Someone had tamped down a path that led to the shoreline, creating a crude entry to the ice bridge beyond.

The huge gray expanse of Lake Huron lay before him. And somewhere out lost in the fog was Mackinac Island.

It was only four miles across, but he knew what he was up against. He had grown up in St.
Ignace and spent the last five summers over on the island making good money slapping fudge in the shops on Main Street and cleaning the stalls at the stables. But when the tourists left in October, the island closed down and the hard winters left the couple hundred residents there isolated and dependent on the coast guard icebreakers. But sometimes, if it was cold enough, the water between the island and St. Ignace would freeze over. Someone on the island would venture out onto the lake with spud bars to test the ice’s thickness. If he made it to St. Ignace, he’d call back with the news that it was safe. The townspeople would take discarded Christmas trees and plant them in the ice to mark the safe path across.

The ice bridge brought freedom. But the swift-moving currents of the straits could cause the ice to shift at any time so the ice bridge could also brought death.

He glanced back over his shoulder at the red brick coast guard building on Huron Street. There was a light on inside. The coast guard guys didn’t want people out on the ice bridge but they couldn’t stop them so every year they sent out the same warning -- tell someone if you go out on the ice bridge. For a second, he thought about going up to the station.

But he couldn’t. He couldn’t tell anyone where he was going. That was what they had decided. She wouldn’t tell her parents and he wouldn’t tell his father. No one could know.

He hoisted the duffle and stepped onto the ice. It groaned but held firm. He pulled in a deep breath and headed toward the dark shape in the mist.

At the first tree, he stopped and looked back. The lights of St.
Ignace were just yellow blurs in the mist. Looking ahead again, he spotted the next tree and started toward it.

The sun was now just a pale pink glow above the gray horizon and out here on the exposed lake the wind hit his face like needles. But he kept moving in a tentative shuffle, trying not to think about the dark cold water beneath his feet.

He was panting and his head was aching by time he reached the fifth tree. It still wore its web of fake silver icicles and they danced in the wind. One small blue Christmas ornament clung to a branch.

Seeing it brought back the dream about the blue capsule and he realized now what it had meant. Just a month ago he had sat with his father in front of the TV watching a man pour hundreds of blue capsules into a huge jar sitting on a stool. No “Mayberry RFD” tonight, just Roger
Mudd staring back over his shoulder into the camera and whispering as a man in a suit and horn-rimmed glasses pulled out the first blue capsule.

September fourteenth, zero
zero one.

His father, sitting in the shadows, had said nothing, just got up and went into the kitchen. Alone, Cooper watched as they put the little slip of white paper with his birthday on it up on a big board next to the American flag. He had never won anything in his life -– except this.
The luck of being among the first young men drafted into the Vietnam War.

His eyes drifted left, again to where he imagined Canada was. He would be there soon enough, but right now he had to get to the island. He had to get to Julie.

A loud crack, like a rifle shot.

He froze.
Afraid to look down, afraid to even take a breath. Another crack.

Suddenly the world dropped.

Blackness. Water. Cold.

His scream died to a gurgle as the water closed over him.

He groped but there was nothing but water. Everything was getting heavy and darker. He had to get some air. He pushed the duffle off and kicked upward. But his hands hit only a ceiling of ice. He couldn’t find the hole, he couldn’t see anything, he couldn’t breathe.