A Time of Torment (25 page)

‘That was my feeling.’

‘Is Griffin at risk from them?’

‘Maybe.’

Parker let the lawyer consider the possible consequences.

‘We still wait,’ said Castin.

‘If it goes south—’

‘I’ll deal with it,’ said Castin.

‘Okay.’

There was a pause.

‘How far south could it go?’

Parker recalled the faces of the two men.

‘Antarctica,’ he said.

Castin thanked Parker, although even he didn’t seem sure why, and hung up.

Next, Parker called Shakey to make sure he’d gotten home safely. The little man was sitting in his armchair, eating a sandwich and watching a VHS tape of
The Goonies.
Shakey didn’t own a computer, and didn’t have a credit card, so downloading movies was out, even though Parker had offered to share his Netflix password and buy him a Netflix-compatible Blu-ray player. But Shakey had a huge affection for VHS and old vinyl, both of which could be bought cheaply. His little apartment was now a repository of books, records, and VHS movies. It had taken Parker only a little while to realize that Shakey was a man who had lived for years on the street, his only possessions what he could wheel in a cart or carry, and he was now enjoying
owning
things, and being surrounded by them without having to worry about mobility or potential theft.

Parker remembered a conversation with the teenage daughter of one of Rachel’s friends, who couldn’t understand why people still bought music, or spent money on DVDs, CDs, books, magazines, and a whole host of other items on which Parker was quite happy to drop the occasional dollar. ‘Our generation doesn’t want to own things,’ she’d explained to Parker, in the manner of a teacher explaining to a slow pupil why it was important not to lick his fingers and stick them in an electrical outlet. Parker had nodded along politely while thinking that it was easy to decry ownership when almost everything you could want was at your fingertips, most of it for free, legally or otherwise. But ownership and possessions mattered when, like Shakey, you could remember not having very much at all. In the end, you had to be reasonably wealthy and privileged to choose not to own stuff.

He told Shakey that he’d see him around, then hung up. He was glad Shakey was doing okay. At least some good had come out of that murderous business in Prosperous, a consequence of his investigation into the death of Shakey’s friend, Jude. He’d read about the town in the newspaper earlier that week. Apparently its supply of drinking water had become polluted, and the county was providing tanker trucks to supply the town’s needs. The report included a picture of some of Prosperous’s previously privileged inhabitants standing in line with containers like refugees in a war-torn city. First fire, the paper noted, now water. Pretty soon, Prosperous would be plagued by locusts and boils, or so Parker certainly hoped.

Thinking about Shakey brought him back to Harpur Griffin. Angel and Louis had gently suggested that some form of more professional surveillance than a crippled homeless man might have been appropriate, but it wasn’t as if Parker had a huge pool of resources on which to draw. Griffin and his buddies had already seen Angel and Louis, and the Fulcis couldn’t have been more conspicuous if they’d dressed up as brightly colored dinosaurs.

Also, Griffin didn’t strike Parker as particularly bright, but the same couldn’t be said of the men who’d been with him at the bar. They’d have been watching for a tail. Already they knew that they had strayed onto Parker’s radar, and he onto theirs. It was a pity he hadn’t anticipated that Griffin might have been enjoying such interesting company: he could have had Angel tag their car so it could be tracked by GPS.

But Griffin was the weak link, and it was in his own power to save himself, if he chose. To do so, he simply had to share what he knew about Jerome Burnel; about the men who Parker was now certain had played some part in Burnel’s disappearance …

And about the Dead King.

There was no moon tonight, but he could still make out the gleam of the water on the marshes. He felt the urge to call Rachel. Sam might be up late, and he could talk with her before she went to bed. He missed her always, even though he could not think of her without being troubled.

He had visited her in Vermont at the end of the previous month. She had chatted unselfconsciously with him over ice cream, and they’d gone to see a movie, Rachel joining them, so that they were almost a family once again. At no point did Sam give any indication that she was other than what she appeared to be: a slightly precocious little girl, happy in her own skin.

But Parker could not help but look at her and recall seeing another Sam, one who had stood in judgment over a dying man, and might even have willed his death; one who had whispered urgently to her father, warning him not to question her or speak of that which he thought he might have seen, for fear of what he might bring down upon both of them. That Sam spoke with the voice of a child, but she was something stranger, something older …

He pushed these concerns away. They would do him no good. He understood now that his purpose on this earth, just like the purpose of any father, was to protect his child.

But this child was special. This child, he believed, could change worlds.

I
t was a miracle that Harpur Griffin even managed to find his car at the end of the night. If he hadn’t been intoxicated when he left his apartment, he certainly was by the time one a.m. came. He’d drifted around some of Portland’s less salubrious drinking establishments until he found a man named Benny Tosca smearing his face with chicken wing sauce at a bar out by Deering Junction.

Tosca had been bounced from one of the state’s more rural police departments for something to do with hookers, parking violations, a rat-infested condo that he owned, and an attempt to drown a candidate for mayor, the details of which remained unclear since the mayoral candidate chose not to press any charges, and the chief of police had given Tosca the option of going quietly and saving the department some embarrassment, or going noisily and almost assuredly ending up in jail, with Benny sensibly taking the former course. He had ended up working as a PI until that career path also terminated in the weeds of illegality, and now he mostly chased down bad debts for a payday loan company that operated out of a former Armenian restaurant off Forest Avenue, and on weekends he occasionally manned the door at strip joints. Benny Tosca disliked everyone, but he reserved a particular hatred for those who had succeeded where he had not, which meant cops and PIs, along with fathers, husbands, dog owners, slum landlords, pimps, and regular human beings.

Not that he had any fondness for ex-cons either, but Griffin smoothed over Tosca’s residual objections to convicted wrongdoers by offering to pay for a couple of rounds, and pretty soon Tosca was giving him a whole lot of information on Charlie Parker, some of which might actually have been true. Even allowing for exaggeration and bile, Tosca’s description of Parker confirmed what Griffin had already suspected: he was principled, dangerous, and more than capable of taking on the Cut.

Tosca left the bar to return to his task of watching out for undesirables at the entrance to whatever show club was paying him that evening, while Griffin wandered off to retrieve his car, once he remembered where he’d left it. He’d parked behind an old brownstone that had been converted to commercial use, and was now probably locked up for the weekend. He struggled to open the driver’s door, and then found himself unable to fit the key in the ignition. Griffin took this as a sign that it might be inadvisable to drive in his present condition. He was unlikely to attract the attention of any passing cops where he was parked, so he put the seat back to grab a nap in order to straighten himself out, and was unconscious within seconds.

Griffin woke when the tape was placed over his mouth. More of it was wound around his head, securing him to the headrest. He tried to struggle, but two nylon straps had been passed over the seat and around his body, both of which were now instantly tightened. The first loop encircled his chest, efficiently restricting the movement of his arms. The second was around his throat.

Jabal appeared before him, staring at him through the windshield. Griffin heard the back door open and close, and then Lucius joined Jabal. Lucius had something in his hand, but in the darkness Griffin couldn’t make out what it was.

Finally, the front passenger door opened, and a third man took the seat beside Griffin, who could just about turn his head to look at him. Griffin recognized the new arrival immediately from the last time he’d seen him, which was when he was lying on the floor of Oakey’s men’s room with a fractured skull.

‘Remember me?’ asked Marius, and Griffin nodded. Even though his nostrils were not constricted, he was struggling to breathe. He needed to take a leak so badly. He knew that, right now, he had bigger troubles, but it was the immediacy of his aching bladder that most concerned him. Had he been a more philosophical man, and a less inebriated one, Griffin might have recognized it as the same impulse that causes a man on the gallows to fixate on a splinter, a hat, a face, anything but the enormity of his own imminent extinction.

‘You owe a debt to me,’ said Marius. Against the gag, Griffin tried to tell him that he’d done all he had been asked to do, that he was sorry, that he’d been dumb and drunk back at Oakey’s, just as he was dumb and drunk now.

‘Hush,’ said Marius. ‘It’ll all be over soon.’

Griffin needed to pee: he needed to pee so badly that he started to cry. He thought of his mother. He tried to keep the image of her in his head. He hadn’t spoken to her in a long time. He wasn’t even sure that she knew he was out of jail.

Marius slipped something over the knuckles of his right hand, then showed it to Griffin, turning his fist in front of his face: it was a knuckleduster, an old wooden one. Then Marius drew his hand back, striking Griffin just below the ear, and Griffin felt his jaw dislocate. He screamed against the gag as Marius climbed from the car, leaving Lucius to open the driver’s door and begin dousing Griffin in gasoline.

Griffin closed his eyes and imagined his mother’s hand stroking his hair as the gasoline poured down his face. The stink of the fumes burned his nostrils and stung his eyes, but he kept them shut even as he heard the striking of a match, followed by a surprised, angry hiss as the rest of the book burst into flame.

Then Harpur Griffin ignited too, burning a path into the next life.

C
omes the child through the marshes.

Comes the child, comes the child …

Jennifer Parker had a memory of the moment of her dying. She experienced it as an instant of incandescence, of pain turned to light and heat, and so profound was it that it seemed the agony must last for eternity. She was trapped in it, and had always been and would always be, for she could no longer remember how it had begun.

And then—

Nothing.

She thought that she might have slept, except how could one sleep and wake into a dream? The world was changed, and she was changed. She was at one and the same time the ‘was’, the ‘is’, and the ‘might-have-been’ of herself. She looked like a child, and spoke and thought like a child, but behind it all hovered another consciousness experiencing the world in ways she could not express. She was alone, but she was not afraid. She sat on a rock by the shore of a lake and watched the dead stream by to be absorbed into the bloody redness of the sky and the deep, dark blue of the sea. Sometimes they stopped and asked her to join them. Mothers reached out a hand to her, for reminding them of their own lost children. Fathers sought to protect her, no longer having children of their own to shield. But she did not respond, and eventually they continued on their way, and were at last lost to sight. Only to the children did she consent to speak, because they were often frightened and confused, and so she would talk with them, and reassure them that all would be well, even though she did not know if this was true, and in time they too rejoined the great mass, and vanished into the distant sea.

She did not count the days, because they were all the same. She had no concept of the passage of time, because the flow of people remained constant, only the faces changing, and soon she stopped noticing even these differences, and they became as one to her.

She thought of her father and mother, and felt herself as the last point of connection between them, as though they stood at opposite sides of a deep yet narrow chasm, with a stone stack between them, and on that stack she sat, one arm extended toward her father, the other toward her mother. She sensed her father as a cloud of red, and black, and fiery orange, but she could not touch him. Her mother she felt simultaneously as both an absence and a presence: near her father lurked something that had the form of her mother, but was not her mother entire. It was sad and angry, and so much of that sorrow and rage was directed at her father. But the best of her mother, the part that loved and was loved in turn, was elsewhere.

Then – and it might have been after an hour, or a month, or a year – that better part of her mother approached along the shore of the lake. The child watched her come, dressed in her favorite summer dress, but she did not rush to meet her. She remained seated on her rock, her knees drawn up beneath her chin, and felt the warmth of the passing dead.

And after a day, or an hour, or a moment, her mother was beside her, but she too was a being transformed. The child felt her mother’s distraction, an irritation at being called from a higher realm to deal with this girl she had once known, seated on a rock by the paths of the dead.

‘Hello, daughter.’

‘Hello, mother.’

Her mother – no, her Almost-Mother – stood behind her, watching the dead.

‘They are so many,’ said the Almost-Mother.

‘I used to try to count them, but then I gave up. Now I just see lights.’

The Almost-Mother sat down beside her.