Bloodstream (36 page)

Then Lincoln focused on a scene that chilled him to the marrow. Pete Sparks had fallen to his knees and seemed too dazed to notice the overweight boy standing beside him. The boy reached down and removed the weapon from Pete’s holster.

Lincoln was too far away to disarm the boy with a tackle. He managed to take only two steps forward, then froze as the boy turned to face him, rage glowing in his eyes. Lincoln recognized him. It was Barry Knowlton.

“Put it down, son,” said Lincoln quietly. “just put the gun down on the floor.”

“No. No, I’m tired of being kicked around!”

“We can talk about it. But first you have to put it down.”

“Like anyone ever bothers to talk to me!” Barry turned, his gaze circling wildly around the gym. “You girls, you never bother. You just laugh at me! All the time, that’s all I hear, the laughing.” His focus shot to another part of the room. “Or you, stud! What’d you call me? Fat ass? Say it now! Go ahead, say it now!”

“Put the gun down,” Lincoln repeated, slowly reaching for his own weapon. It was the last resort; he didn’t want to shoot the boy. He had to talk him down. Negotiate. Anything to keep the bullets from flying.

Footsteps scurried in the shadows and he caught a glimpse of Fern’s blond hair as she rushed a group of students out the door. But there were still dozens of people trapped against the far wall, unable to flee.

He took another step forward. Instantly the boy turned to face him.

“You’ve made your point, Barry,” said Lincoln. “Let’s go in the other room and talk, okay?”

“He called me fat ass.” Anguish had crept into the boy’s voice. The desolation of the outsider.

“We’ll talk, just the two of us,” said Lincoln.

“No.” The boy turned toward the trapped students, cowering against the wall. “It’s my turn to call the shots.”

Claire drove with her radio turned off, the silence interrupted only by the sweep of her windshield wipers as they cleared away the dusting of snow. She had spent the hour’s drive from Bangor deep in thought, and by the time she reached the Tranquility town line, she had pieced it all together. Her theory centered on Warren Emerson.

Emerson’s farmhouse was located on the lower slopes of Beech Hill, only a mile upstream from the lake. It was remote enough that it required its own septic system, which drained into a leach field. If a parasite had matured in his intestines, he would have been a continuing source of parasitic eggs. All it took was a leak in his aging septic tank, a year of heavy flooding, and those eggs could have been washed into the nearby Meegawki Stream.

Into the lake.

An elegantly logical explanation, she thought. It’s not an epidemic of madness. Nor is it a centuries-old curse on this town. It’s a microorganism, a parasitic larva lodging itself in the human brain, wreaking havoc as it grows. All they needed to confirm the diagnosis was a positive ELISA blood test. One more day, and they’d be certain.

A siren alerted her to an approaching police car. She looked up at the lights flashing in her rearview mirror, and saw a cruiser from Two Hills. It barreled past her and raced toward Tranquility. A moment later, a second cruiser screamed by, going in the same direction, followed by an ambulance.

Up ahead, she saw that the flashing lights had turned onto the road toward the high school.

She followed them.

It was a replay of the frightening scene from a month before, emergency vehicles parked at crazy angles outside the gym, clusters of teenagers standing in the road, crying and hugging each other. But this time snow was fluttering from the night sky, and the vehicles’ flashing lights were muted, as though seen through white gauze.

Claire grabbed her medical bag and hurried toward the building. She was stopped half a block from the gym by Officer Mark Dolan, decked out in body armor. The look he gave her confirmed what she’d long suspected: their dislike for each other was mutual.

“Everyone has to stay back,” he said. “We’ve got a hostage situation.”

“Has anyone been hurt?”

“Not yet, and we want to keep it that way.”

“Where’s Lincoln?”

“He’s trying to talk the kid down. Now you have to move back, Dr. Elliot. Away from the building.”

Claire retreated to where the crowd had gathered. She watched Dolan turn and confer with the police chief from Two Hills. The men in uniform were in charge here, and she was merely another annoying civilian.

“Lincoln’s all alone,” said Fern. “And these goddamn heroes aren’t doing anything to help him.”

Claire turned and saw that Fern’s blond hair was in disarray, the loose strands crusted with snow. “I left him in there,” said Fern softly. “I didn’t have a choice. I had to get the kids out. .

“Who else is inside?”

“At least a few dozen other kids.” She stared at the building, melting snow dripping down her cheeks. “Lincoln has a gun. Why doesn’t be just use it?”

Claire looked back at the gym, the situation inside that building now vividly clear to her. An unstable boy. A room with dozens Of hostages. Lincoln would not act rashly, nor would he shoot a boy in cold blood, if he could avoid it. The fact that there had been no gunfire yet meant there was still hope of avoiding bloodshed.

She glanced at the policemen gathered behind their parked cruisers, and she saw their agitation, heard the excitement in their voices. These were small-town cops, facing a big-city crisis, and they were champing at the bit to take action, any action.

Mark Dolan signaled to two officers, who were already in position on either side of the gym doors. With his chief trapped inside, Dolan had assumed authority, and he was letting his testosterone take command.

Claire ran through the snow to the cruisers. Dolan and the Two Hills police chief stared at her in surprise as she dropped to a crouch beside them.

“You’re supposed to stay back!” said Dolan.

“Don’t tell me you’re going to send armed men in there!”

“The boy has a gun.”

“You’re going to get people killed, Dolan!”

“They’ll get killed if we
don’t
do something,” said the Two Hills chief. He signaled to three cops crouched behind the next car.

Claire watched in alarm as the officers scrambled toward the building and took position by the doors.

“Don’t do this,” she said to Dolan. “You don’t know the situation in there—”

“And you do?”

“There’s been no gunfire. Give Lincoln a chance to negotiate.”

“Lincoln’s not in charge, Dr. Elliot. Now get out of my face or I’ll have you arrested!”

She stared straight ahead at the gym doors. The snow was falling faster now, obscuring her view of the building, and through that gauzy curtain of white, the cops looked like ghostly figures floating toward the entrance.

One of them reached for the door.

Lincoln and the boy were at a stalemate. They faced each other across the shadowy gym, the distant beam from the emergency lamp slashing the darkness between them. The boy was still holding the gun, but so far all he’d done was wave it around in the air, eliciting terrified shrieks from the students huddled near the wall. He had not yet aimed at anyone, not even at Lincoln, who had his hand on his

weapon, and was prepared to draw it. Two girls were standing just behind the boy, making any shot risky. Lincoln was relying on his instincts now, and they told him this boy could still be talked down, that even as the boy raged on, there was some part of him struggling for control, needing only a calm voice to guide him.

Slowly, Lincoln lowered his hand from his holster. He was facing the boy with his arms at his sides now, a position of neutrality. Trust. “I don’t want to hurt you, son. And I don’t think you want to hurt anyone. You’re above that. You’re better than that.”

The boy wavered. He started to kneel, to place the gun on the floor, then he changed his mind and straightened again. He turned to look at the classmates who cowered in the shadows. “I’m not like you. I’m not like
any
of you.”

“Then prove it, son,” said Lincoln. “Put the weapon down.”

The boy turned to look at him. At that moment, the flames of his anger seemed to flicker, grow dim. He was drifting between rage and reason, and in Lincoln’s gaze he desperately sought anchor.

Lincoln moved toward him and held out his hand. “I’ll take it now,” he said quietly.

The boy nodded. Gazing steadily into Lincoln’s eyes, he reached out to surrender the weapon.

The door crashed open, followed by the rapid-fire staccato of running footsteps. Lincoln saw a confusing blur of movement as men burst into the room from every direction. Shrieking students ran for cover. And caught in the knifelike beam of the emergency lamp stood a dazed Barry Knowlton, his arm still extended, the weapon gripped in his hand. In that split-second, Lincoln saw with sickening clarity what was about to happen. He saw the boy, still clutching the gun, as he turned toward the cops. He saw the men, pumped on adrenaline, weapons raised.

Lincoln screamed,
“Hold your fire!”

His voice was lost in the deafening blast.

The thunder of gunfire momentarily paralyzed the crowd in the street. Then everyone reacted at once, the bystanders hysterical and screaming, the cops rushing toward the building.

A teacher ran out of the gym and shouted: “We need an ambulance!”

Claire had to fight a stream of terrified kids pushing out the door as she struggled into the building. At first all she saw was a confusing jumble of silhouettes, men padded with body armor, paper streamers drifting, ghostlike, in the shadows above. The darkness smelled of sweat and fear.

And blood. She almost stepped in a pool of it as she forced her way into the gathering of cops. At their center was Lincoln, crouched on the floor, cradling a limp boy in his arms.

“Who gave the order?” he demanded, his voice hoarse with fury “Officer Dolan thought—”

“Mark?” Lincoln looked at Dolan.

“It was a joint decision,” said Dolan. “Chief Orbison and I—we knew the boy was armed—”

“He was about to surrender!” “We didn’t know!”

“Get out of here,” said Lincoln. “Go on, get
out
of here!”

Dolan turned and shoved Claire aside as he walked out the door. She knelt down beside Lincoln. “The ambulance is right outside.” “It’s too late,” he said.

“Let me see if I can help him!”

“There’s nothing you can do.” He looked at her, his eyes glistening with tears.

She reached down for the boy’s wrist and felt no pulse. Then Lincoln opened his arms and she saw the boy’s head. What was left of it.

21

That night he needed her. After Barry Knowlton’s body had been removed, after the ordeal of meeting the shattered parents, Lincoln had found himself trapped in the bright glare of reporters’ flashbulbs. Twice he’d broken down and cried in front of the TV cameras. He was not ashamed of his tears, nor was he stinting in his angry condemnation of how the crisis had been resolved. He knew he was laying the groundwork for a wrongful death suit against his own employer, the Town of Tranquility He didn’t care. All he knew was that a boy had been shot down like a deer in November, and someone should have to pay.

Driving through a galaxy of falling snow, he realized he could not bear the thought of going home, of spending this night, like so many other nights, alone.

He drove instead to Claire’s house.

Stumbling from his car through the calf-deep snow, he felt like some wretched pilgrim struggling toward sanctuary. He climbed to her porch and knocked again and again on the door, and when there was no response, he was suddenly gripped by despair at the thought she was not home, that this house was empty. That he faced the rest of the night without her.

Then above, a light came on, its warm halo filtering down through the falling snow. A moment later the door opened and she stood before him.

He stepped inside. Neither one of them said a word. She simply opened her arms to him, accepted him. He was dusted with snow, and it melted against her heat, trickling in cold rivulets to soak the flannel of her gown. She just kept holding him. even as melted snow puddled on the floor around her bare feet.

waited for you,’ she said.

“I couldn’t stand the thought of going home.”

Then stay here. Stay with me.”

Upstairs they shed their clothes and slid between sheets still warm from her sleeping body. He had not come to make love, had come seeking only comfort. She gave him both. granting him the welcome exhaustion that eased him into sleep.

He awakened to a view through the window of a sky so sharply blue it hurt his eyes. Claire lay curled up asleep beside him, her hair an unruly tangle of curls off the pillow. He could see strands of gray mingled among the brown, and that first silvering of age in her hair was so unexpectedly touching that he found himself blinking back tears.
Half a lifetime of’ not knowing YOU,
he thought. Half a lifetime wasted, until now.

He kissed her softly on the head, hut she didn’t awaken.

He got dressed while gazing out the window, at a world transformed by the night’s storm. A fluffy mantle of snow had buried his car, turning it into an indistinct mound of white. The snow-covered branches of trees drooped under their heavy cloaks, and where once there’d been the front lawn, now there seemed to be a bright field of diamonds, glittering in the sunlight.

A pickup truck came up the road and turned onto Claire’s property. It had a winter plow mounted in front, and Lincoln assumed at first that this was someone Claire had hired to clear her driveway. Then the driver stepped out, and Lincoln saw the Tranquility police department uniform. It was Floyd Spear.

Floyd waded over to the mound that was Lincoln’s vehicle and brushed away the snow from the license plate. Then he looked up,

questioningly, at the house.
Now the whole town will know where I spent the night.

Lincoln went downstairs and opened the front door just as Floyd raised his gloved hand to knock. “Morning,” said Lincoln.

“Uh ... morning.”