Before Cain Strikes (28 page)

“But…”

“Listen to me.” He looked her in the eye. “Every man, woman and child with a badge is out there right now looking for him. Two more sets of tired eyes won’t make a damn bit of difference. We’ve done our bit for king and country today. And besides, they’ve invented these devices now called telephones. You think your statement would be any different if you were at One Police Plaza versus on your sofa at home?”

No more protests. She handed over her car keys. And that was that.

Next stop: Oyster Bay.

Grover Kirk had made peace with his own mortality. It wasn’t that—when he realized what Cain42 was doing, he wanted to die. But he’d expected to. Once the tear gas filled the train car, and once the gunshots and the screams joined the tear gas, Grover had waited for death to arrive. Would it be heaven? Would it be hell? Would it be oblivion? He was about to enter the Undiscovered Country. So be it. His life had been one of constant battle, and finally he was to be at rest.

But Cain42 had spared him. He had taught him a lesson, and he had done so by forcing him to bear witness to a massacre. Now, surely, he would be able to treat the subject of serial murder with freshness and vigor.

No, thank you.

Not a chance.

Never again.

He had located his car in the overpriced lot. As soon as he returned to his room, he was going to load up all the research on his computer, all of the audio files
and interview transcripts and the book—of course, the book—and he was going to delete it. Then he was going to delete the bookmarks from his web browser. Then he was going to find the nearest seminary and…what? Run away? Hide? That was surely an attractive option. Not for nothing had mankind honed a superior survival instinct. Would his family wonder about him? Would they worry about where he might have vanished to and why? No. And hiding away had the added advantage of hiding away from them. He booted up his car’s GPS. He would ensconce himself in some ecumenical retreat and he would know peace and he would be able to wash away the mistakes and misconceptions of the past.
Retreat
—what a perfect word!

Retreat, yes, but what about responsibility?

Someone had tipped Cain42 off, and although it was probably someone inside the Bureau, probably someone Grover had never even met, there was the niggling possibility that it was someone he
had
met, someone not inside the Bureau at all, someone perhaps who had sat at that poker game in the strip club and learned about the ruse from Lester’s unstoppable mouth. What were the odds? How unlucky would he, Grover, have to be?

But that was a self-answering question, wasn’t it.

Grover envisioned the poker game in his mind. He could remember who played what hand, who flopped into the pot, who folded early, who bluffed, who won big. All his life, he had been attuned to the behavior of small groups. It had allowed him to ingratiate himself with the survivors of Galileo. It had allowed him to become one with the denizens of the message boards. So, during the game, what behavior, if anything, was out of the ordinary? This was a challenge. He had just met
these gentlemen. Who was he to say what was ordinary and what was unusual?

He needed assistance, and certainly not from the authorities. Where was it that Lester said he was staying? At a lighthouse? Yes. Nolan Worth ran it as a B and B. If Lester couldn’t help him, perhaps Nolan could.

Grover drove east through the wild birth pangs of a late-autumn rainstorm. The lighthouse, the storm—all the requisite Gothic ingredients for the end of his mystery.

“M
other of Christ,” mumbled Nolan Worth. He’d just banged his thumbnail with his hammer. Again. He was attempting to hang a mural that Halley bought at a charity auction. She wanted it above the front desk. But that’s where he had his genuine Saginaw M1 carbine rifle on display. He bought that rifle at a flea market when he was fourteen years old. He bought it with his own allowance money and he prized it above all his possessions.

Halley told him he could keep it under the desk, out of sight. If someone tried to rob the place, they would be in for a surprise. She said it with a wink and then returned to her sewing. She knew she didn’t need to say any more. He would do what she wanted. In the end, he always did.

Standing on a stepladder he’d built himself, on the second floor of the lighthouse he’d renovated himself, he gripped that hammer in his hand so tightly that he was convinced the wooden handle would split open. These days, he was rarely without his hammer. He even snuck it under his pillow one night. Just as he’d drifted off to sleep, it fell behind the bed with a loud clunk. Halley slept right through it. He reached behind the mattress
and picked it up. When Halley slept, her lips were curled in a perpetual frown. He imagined driving the claw end of the hammer down and shattering that frown into a million pieces.

He sucked on his throbbing thumb and took another look at the nail in the wall. He’d had to go to the hardware store and buy heavy-duty nails that would support his wife’s mural (which must have been painted on some special canvas that was interwoven with steel). The nail’s head was almost as wide, and nearly as dense, as the male end of his trusty hammer. And this was just the first nail. He had two more to put up to properly support a mural of this size and weight…not to mention ugliness. It was folk art, which to Nolan Worth was just some salesman’s phrase for marketing childish doodles to rich wives. Halley’s expensive mural, for example, was ostensibly an oil painting of a lighthouse by the sea, only the lighthouse curved like a ripe banana and the sea was the color of snot.

Oh, what improvements he could make to the painting with his hammer…but who was he kidding? He was never going to actually harm anyone or anything. He was just a geriatric Walter Mitty living in a world of pipe dreams. He would for the rest of his pathetic life be nothing but a—

Bzzzt!

That was the front door. Were they expecting guests?

“Are we expecting guests?” he called out to Halley. Lester Stuart and his granddaughter were upstairs in their rooms. Rafe Stuart already had a key. He was certain there were no reservations scheduled, not for this time of year. That had been one of the reasons he and Halley had been so eager to take Rafe and Sophie in.
They enjoyed the company. “Halley, are you expecting anyone?”

Bzzzt!

With a sigh, Nolan dismounted the stepladder and descended the spiral staircase to the ground floor. The
ratatatat
of raindrops echoed and abounded throughout the stairwell. Millions of watery nails, mused Nolan, shooting down from the sky. He put on his innkeeper face and opened the front door.

The man who stood there at the threshold was sopping wet and pale. His puffy black coat appeared to be at least two sizes too big for his slim frame, but maybe that was the fashion these days. Nolan never understood fashion. The man was in his late thirties, maybe, but possessed such alertness and wisdom in his eyes that Nolan felt immediately laid open and dissected.

“They say once you’re wet, you can’t get wetter,” the man told him. “That’s not true.”

Nolan stepped aside and allowed him entry. “Of course. I’m sorry.” He closed the door. It locked automatically. “How can I help you?”

The man wandered the round room, nodding at the historical artwork on the walls. “Ever since we first spoke, I’ve wanted to come here. How often does one find a fellow connoisseur in one unusual hobby, let alone two? I’ve wanted to meet you for a while now. I just wish it were under better circumstances.” Yes. This
was
him. Nolan knew it. He was tempted to fall on one knee and pledge his life to his liege. Instead, he offered his hand in greeting and asked, “Better circumstances?”

Cain42 shook off his coat. His shoulder wound no longer ached. This wasn’t good news. “I appear to be leaking,” he said. “Can you fix me up?”

Penelope Sue insisted on tagging along. What an ideal opportunity, after all, for her to finally meet the famous Esme Stuart! And besides, as poor condition as Esme was in, Tom, with his two hours of sleep, wasn’t much better off. Begrudgingly, Tom acquiesced, and occupied the backseat while the two women sat up front and chatted. His mind desperately wanted to nap, but his ears wouldn’t let him.

The conversation began idly, as most introductory conversations did. They compared childhoods, somehow finding equivalences between Esme’s urban upbringing in Boston and Penelope Sue’s rustic early days on a Kentucky farm. What really hit it off between them, though, was their common guilty pleasure: Ringo Starr.

Tom did his level best not to groan.

Esme and Penelope Sue rooted for the session man, the humble professional. They spoke on and on about Ringo’s underrated skills as a drummer and his place in history, and Tom, humble professional that he was, had no idea they could easily have been justifying their affection for him.

As they merged onto the L.I.E., Esme scrolled through her iPod and played Ringo’s “Don’t Pass Me By.” By the time they’d moved on to “Octopus’s Garden,” they’d entered the rainstorm. Dark clouds were massed like fat vultures over much of Long Island. According to Penelope Sue, the meteorologists on NY1 expected it to freeze over by morning, and were warning commuters about black ice—a phrase she had never heard before in her life.

“Don’t get much frost down in Kentucky, huh?”

“Oh, we get frost,” she replied. “We just shoo it away before it gets comfortable.”

“You must miss it.”

“Miss it?”

“Well, I mean, how long have you been up here now? A week? And I know Tom’s been too busy to properly show you around New York, not that he’d be the best tour guide. He hates the city.”

“I love it.” Penelope Sue smiled at her. “I do. I love that the weather’s different and the people are different and the shops are certainly different. We’ve got a Macy’s at the Red Fork Mall down near where I live. As soon as I fly back, I’m marching straight into that store and I’m going to ask them to change their name. That store at the Red Fork Mall may call itself a Macy’s, but I’ve been to Macy’s, the real Macy’s! Please. In fact, I’m hoping me and Tom can attend the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. I’ve seen it on TV but to be there in person, to see a fifty-foot-tall inflatable Spider-Man floating over Fifth Avenue? I love my home. I do. And I do miss it. But I am very, very happy to be here. With my man. Isn’t that right?”

She glanced in the rearview at Tom.

“Hmm?” he replied.

“Exactly.”

Now Esme checked the rearview. The scowl on her mentor’s face was priceless.

“Does Sophie like the parade?”

“She’s never been,” said Esme. “We almost took her last year but she had a sore throat and with the weather being this cold…”

“So take her this year! I know me and Tom would love the company. Then afterward we can go to the ice rink at Rockefeller Center. Because if you’re going to be a tourist, you might as well be a tourist, right? What
do you say, Tom Piper? Think we can get you into a pair of ice skates?”

Tom grumbled something in response, but neither Esme nor Penelope Sue heard him. They were too busy giggling at the image in their minds of their latter-day John Wayne in ankle-high laces.

Once they reached the turnoff for Oyster Bay, Esme directed Penelope Sue first toward the house. She was desperate to see her little girl, but she wasn’t so desperate that she would let Sophie see her like this. Her clothes and face remained an utter catastrophe. She let them into the house and told them to help themselves while she hopped into the shower. Before she left, though, Penelope Sue stopped her and asked discreetly, “Where’s his crotch rocket?”

Esme blinked. “Beg pardon?”

“You know. The motorcycle.”

“Ah. In the garage. Aren’t Harleys called cruisers?”

“Take your time in the shower, dear,” said Penelope Sue. “We’ll be in the garage.”

The older woman waggled her eyebrows and let Tom lead her. They looked like two spin-the-bottle teens on their way to a dark private closet. Esme watched them go, and then mounted the stairs to her bedroom.

Halley did not like her husband’s friend, not one bit.

“And how did you get a hole in your shoulder?” she asked him.

“Will my answer determine whether or not you sew me up?”

“That’s for me to decide, isn’t it?”

He was sitting on the edge of Nolan and Halley’s bed. Or rather, he was sitting on a brown towel that Halley
insisted be placed on the bed before he even entered the room. This strange man was not going to bleed on her silk sheets.

Halley had her sewing scissors in one hand and a spool of black thread in the other. “Are you going to tell me or am I going to have to put this away and call the police?”

Nolan reappeared with the bottle of rubbing alcohol he’d left to get.

“What are you waiting for?” he asked Halley.

“I’m waiting for a logical explanation,” she replied.

“I told you. He’s a friend from
B and B USA.
”

She cocked a mascara eyebrow. “Do you think I’m a moron?”

“Of course not…”

“And why are you still carrying that goddamn hammer? Is it your security blanket, Nolan? Is that what it is?”

Nolan glanced down at the hammer. He hadn’t even realized he was still holding it. He handed the rubbing alcohol to his wife. She didn’t take it. “For Christ’s sake, Halley, you’re always going on about your charity work and what a humanitarian you are. Well, are you, or aren’t you?”

She glared at him, but took the bottle. Cleaning the wound was a simple matter. Halley had cleaned enough cuts when her rambunctious children were growing up. Certainly none of them ended up pierced straight through, though. With every application of rubbing alcohol, he winced as if being jabbed by a cattle prod.

Nolan watched from the corner of the room. Nervous. The hammer in his hands. A security blanket? Might as well be for all the good it was to him.

Now came the sewing. Halley unfortunately had to
sit beside Cain42 to properly stitch him up. The stench of the rubbing alcohol irritated her nostrils. “If you’re just going to stand there,” she barked at Nolan, “at least make some coffee.”

He left them alone.

She dipped the needle in the alcohol, threaded it, leaned in and began her work.

It was far from painless.

“Are you his lover?” she asked.

The wounded man let out a chuckle. “No.”

“Someone he served with in the war?”

“What war?”

Halley shrugged. She continued to sew. Then: “The person who did this to you, are they still out there? Are they looking to do it again?”

“I would imagine so.”

“You’re about as informative as a goddamn Magic 8 Ball.”

He smiled, and then grimaced as her needle once again tugged on his open flesh, forcing it shut.

Nolan returned with the coffee. He placed it on her desk, beside her sewing machine. On the mug was printed a brief uplifting anecdote from
Chicken Soup for the Soul.

“Almost done,” she said.

“Thank you,” replied her husband.

“Thank you,” replied the stranger. “But I need another favor.”

Halley ground her teeth. He needed another favor, did he? Of course he did. She tied off the stitches, stood and sipped down her coffee. Its smell alone was comforting, but not so comforting that she still didn’t want to jab her sewing scissors into the man’s shoulder wound, which she was more and more convinced resulted from
a bullet. What holy hell had her husband brought into their home?

“What is it?” Nolan asked him. “What do you need?”

Halley eyed her husband. There was the hammer, yet again, in his hand. Why was he so deferential toward this man? Was there some kind of blackmail going on? She knew he spent some of his days at that godforsaken strip club with all those other retired buddies of his. Had they gotten themselves involved in something nefarious? No. The very thought almost made her snicker. He was Mr. Reliable, Mr. Middle-of-the-Road. He’d never even cheated on his taxes, and they would have been even wealthier if he had. They would have been able to afford that wintertime beachfront property down in Cozumel, rather than stuck here, impotent, in snowbound New York. She could hear the rain coming down even now, driving in icy sheets against the old walls of the lighthouse. She took another sip from her coffee, this time for warmth.

“What do you need?” Nolan asked again.

“A syringe, for starters.”

“Oh, Christ, he’s a druggie.”

“I’ve lost a lot of blood,” he explained. “I need a transfusion.”

Enough was enough. Halley rested her coffee down on the desk beside her sewing scissors and approached him. “What do we look like?
General Hospital?
Look, I stitched you up as good as I can. If you want us to call you a cab, we’ll call you a cab. There’s an E.R. not far from here. I’m sure they’ve got all the blood you need.”

He ignored her and focused his attention on Nolan.
“I’m AB positive, so it doesn’t matter who contributes. I’d say a pint should do it.”

“Oh, a pint is what you want?” Halley shook her head in disgust. “There’s a pub across the street from the E.R. Knock yourself out.”

“Halley…”

“Nolan, you get this man out of my house or I’m calling the cops.”

She narrowed her eyes and stared at her husband. It might take him a few seconds, but he’d comply. He always did.

But he appeared frozen with indecision. So Halley leaned in toward her husband and whispered, “Need I remind you, Nolan, that there is a little girl upstairs. Do you really think it wise to have him here in the same place as her?”