Psycho Save Us (39 page)

Olga was
standing over her, snarling down at her, her visage a bog hag from a scary
nighttime story.  She screamed a string of Russian words and then slapped Oni. 
Mikhael clutched his ruined hand and fell back against the toilet.  He
screamed.  Olga screamed.  Dmitry screamed.  Olga shoved Dmitry, who ignored
this and reached out to snatch Shannon’s right arm.  He yanked her off the ground.

Kaley tried to
scream, tried to tell Little Sister to run.  But nothing came out.  She was
still paralyzed by the Taser’s kiss.  And once again, the empathic connection
had cursed them.  Shan hadn’t wanted to sever the Anchor. 
Get out of here!
Kaley willed at her.  Shan felt Big Sister’s command, but too late.  She was
now in the clutches of something far worse than the White Ninja had ever had to
contend with.

As they carried
her kicking and screaming from the room, Kaley fumbled impotently with her own
fear, as well as Bonetta’s, and Shan’s, and the slimy ink that was Oni’s lust. 
“Shan…Shannon…?”

“
Kaley!
”

“No,” she
whispered, trying to will herself to her feet.  “No…Bonetta…please…”

Bonetta was off
someplace crying to herself. 
As useless as a rainstorm in the Mojave Desert
,
as Ricky used to say.  The thought came out of nowhere, and settled in.

They hauled Shan
out the door.  Before it closed, Kaley managed to scream, “Take me! 
Taaaaaaaaaaaake
meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
”

But the door
slammed closed, and
SLAM!

Click
.

After that,
there was nothing for a while but the screams.  Kaley’s body continued to
spasm, jump, and tingle as it remembered itself.  She rolled onto her side, and
started crawling.  She vomited from the coalescing fear, and watched the
white-brown mixture spread out in front of her.  Half out of her mind, she
watched as chunks of meat floated in that pool.

She felt the
hands of the other children in the room trying to help her to her feet.  Or was
that imagined?  Probably imagined, yes.  But there was definitely empathy
there.  There was…

Bonetta’s
whimpering.  Kaley was so sick with anger that she would probably throttle
Bonetta Harper with her bare hands were she able.  At the moment, all she was
able to do was crawl.  The door of cracked and peeling paint was a million
miles away, it seemed.  From the floor, all she could see was Monopoly money,
as well as the shoe pawn and the dog pawn. 
Shan always wanted to be the
dog, and Ricky was always the race car
.  Community Chest cards were mixed
in with the balls of Hungry Hungry Hippos.  She would never play these games
again, and in years to come it would be difficult to explain to others just why
she refrained from joining in with them.

She made it to
the door, and came to her knees.  She pulled weakly at the doorknob, and did
not stop trying to turn it no matter how many times it failed to open.  “Take
me,” she said.  “Take me.  Take me.  Take me.  Take me.  Take me.  Take me. 
Take me.”

Several minutes
passed.  Several eternities.

This was all a
dream.  She was convinced of it.  Nothing so horrible could happen to people so
good.  This sort of thing happened in places like you heard about on TV, in
Darfur or Rwanda, not here, not to people like her or her sister.  A bullet
perhaps, yes, but not—

She was impaled
by the pain and terror long before she heard any screams.

And
she sank…

In the Ocean of
Sorrow, she sank, deeper and deeper.  And like any drowning creature she
reached out.  Not physically with her hands, but with her beseeching heart.  It
was so frail and timid that it needed someone, some
thing
to show her the
way.  Her world was darkness.  Though her eyes still worked and she was
somewhat cognizant of Bonetta Harper standing over her, shaking her, Kaley was
blinded.  She could see, but saw nothing.

She reached out
for someone, anyone at all, to help her.  No, not help for her.  For her
sister.  The pain…

Oh, chil’
…
you got a
lotta hurt comin’ yo way
.

It swirled in
great eddies.  Much pain churned beneath the waters.  It was the screams of
anyone who had touched these walls, this floor, the toilet, the door…

…and Shannon.

Kaley gave up. 
As she imagined any drowning person must eventually do, she resigned herself to
her fate.  She would swallow the water and drowned.  It must be easier at some
point to just accept your lot in life than it was to keep fighting it.  The
fire she had formerly felt was doused.  All light diminished.  The pain filled
her mouth and nostrils, the terror coursed through the arteries of her heart
and choked them off.  The passion she had felt when fighting back Olga and
Dmitry and Mikhael had ebbed, too small a current against the pain.  She was
exhausted afterwards.  The heat of that passion was dwindling.

And yet, at the
very center were coals that were still warm.  And perhaps, just perhaps, she
saw an ember there?  Kaley sighed the sigh of her last breath, and when she
did, the air touched at the coals and heated them.  “You gotta blow on the
coals, give ’em some air,” Ricky had once told her on the first, and only,
camping trip he’d ever arranged for them.  It hadn’t been far.  Kennesaw
Mountain, forty-five minutes north of Atlanta.  She remembered that trip.  It
both seemed like not so long ago and yet a hundred years.

Kaley steadied
her breathing.  She inhaled slowly, slowly, then exhaled slowly, slowly, and
felt a calming heat wash over her.  “Blow gently now,” Ricky said.  “Add some
more kindlin’, I reckon.  Then build it up slowly.  Add too much too soon, an’
it’ll smother it.  Put some twigs in, then a few small branches, then the
bigger stuff.  Let it catch fire slowly.  Slowly.”

And she did. 
She started with her memories of Ricky.  Those were first.  She focused on
them, breathed, and focused.  She saw him sitting in front of the TV wearing
his Atlanta Falcons cap, saw him sitting with a smaller version of Shan in his
lap while he watched reruns of
Star Trek
and
Star Trek: The Next
Generation
.  That gave her something.  It gave her hope in a well of
hopelessness.  Kaley had told Bonetta to forget about hope, but in truth it was
about balancing hope and reality.  She saw that now.  She saw it crystal clear.

Now came Aunt
Tabitha, her with her kindly church woman’s words.  There Aunt Tabby was with
Shan, sitting on the back porch eating ice cream after having taken them to
church and fed them a big lunch.  Their one-Sunday-a-month ritual.  Hope
flared, but threatened to die out without more kindling and soon.

Next came Nan. 
Yes, Nan was good kindling.  She shared something with Kaley.  They were both
the firemakers.  They brought kindling.  They were enkindlers. 
That’s a
nice word
, she thought. 
Better than “charm
.
”  We are enkindlers,
and we carry the kindling
.  Yes, Nan had enkindled Kaley and her sister
each time she passed around a banana sandwich, each time she touched their
heads affectionately, each time she—

The pain!  It
soared to new heights.  Shannon’s screams were now audible through the door,
her resonance felt even more deeply by Big Sister.  It wouldn’t have been as
bad if it was Bonetta in there, but it was her
sister
.  Not only that,
but her sister was an enkindler too.  The feedback was dousing the flames,
putting her back where she had been before, utterly lost in despair.

“You need good
kindlin’,” Ricky reminded her.

Next, her
mother…

No!
  No, her mother
was not good kindling.  Her mother would be like cold dirt to the flames,
dousing them and ruining the foundation of the fire.  Kaley needed kindling,
and all her mother provided was a void.  Kaley needed
fire
.  She needed
anger
. 
She needed
audacity
.

She searched for
the charmed touch left by the other kids who’d occupied this room, and found
nothing.  Those threads had been little more than echoes, shadows without
substance.  Her mind, her
heart
, groped for something that was truly
fire.  It could be anything.  Bonetta didn’t have enough—there was a flicker of
something in her now, but Kaley needed more.  She needed something to smother
that which she felt resonating from the next room.

“Or maybe fire’s
not the answer.”

Who said that?
  The words had
come from everywhere and from nowhere.  Kaley figured they may have come from
her own lips.  Lost in delirium, swimming in the Ocean of Sorrow and being
force-fed her sister’s agony, who knows what she might—

Him
.

She knew it in
an instant.  It came to her from…from…

Shan?  Shannon? 
Is that you?

Nothing else. 
No other response, just the screams from the other side of the door.

Kaley
ruminated.  Not fire, then.  No, not fire.  So what, then?  What could Shan be—

Not fire
. 
Cold
. 
Cold fury!  God help us, Kaley!  It’s too hot!  No more heat!  Cold!

“Him,” Kaley
whispered.  Bonetta was over her, her lips were moving, but no words seemed to
be coming out.  Many things were now becoming obvious to her, her senses more perceptive. 
The light in the room enhancing.  Beads of sweat and grease collecting on
Bonetta’s forehead.  The individual glints of light off of Bonetta’s locket,
dangling from her deck, inches from Kaley’s face.  The screams.  The sound of
the faucet
drip-drip-dripping
away.

“The void,” she
said.  It came back to her; that charmed insight she’d had at Dodson’s Store. 
It came to her in full resonating detail, what she had felt, what she had seen,
what had seemed to utterly transfixing about him.  At the time, she hadn’t
known what it was.

I have empathy
, she thought. 
He
doesn’t
.

“You,” she flung
at him.  “I need you.”

Where was he? 
He was somewhere out there.  Now hyperaware of many things, she felt air
molecules cascading down her trachea.  She felt the air as she pushed it out,
felt the bits of spittle that popped out at each hard consonant.  “Where are
you?” she asked, puzzled at her own certainty.  “I’m talking to you.  Do you
hear me?”

Outside, the
screams continued, and she felt Dmitry’s climax.

11

“Who
the fuck is Yevgeny Tidov?” Leon asked.

Agent Porter had
his own forensics kit in the SUV and had pulled out a pair of rubber gloves
with a plastic zip bag to place the cell phone within.  The three homeless men
stood to one side, getting vigorously questioned by Agents Stone and Mortimer,
and all of it was being copied by the two Atlanta city police officers who’d
shown up as backup first.  Another squad car was present, the two officers
fanning out.  Three other patrol cars were moving around the area looking for
signs of Pelletier, including David Emerson who, against all counsel, was still
on the job. 

“All I know is
that they said he asked the officer at the Parole Commission for information on
a guy by that name,” Porter said.  “The call came from this phone.  He was
standing right about here less than thirty minutes ago when he made the call.”

“And then he
called Tidov’s
parole officer
?”

“Yep.  Got all
the info he needed from the Commission office.  You up for another ride?”

“Where?  To Tidov’s?”

“Where else?” 
The agent walked over to hand the phone to one of the officers taking down the
statements of the three bums.  “Make sure that forensics gets this when they
arrive.”

“Yes, sir.”

Leon watched
Porter give Mortimer and Stone meaningful looks.  “What do we got?”

“Not much,”
Stone said.  “They said a guy matching Pelletier’s description just tossed it
at them.  Pretty much hollered, ‘Here you go’ and then took off.”

“Must’ve known
we got to O’Connor’s apartment after he left.  He knew we’d track it.  C’mon,
you’re driving, Mortimer.”

They piled into
the SUV and took off before anyone had their seatbelts on.  Sitting in the
back, Leon was checking in on the call he’d made to dispatch to send units to
Tidov’s residence.  He’d gotten the address from Porter’s friends at the
bureau, who’d gotten it from a man named Eugene Evans, who, to hear Porter tell
it, was incredibly confused about what was going on.  “Fuckin’ Parole
Commission needs to run a tighter ship.  I’ve always said that.  They don’t
have enough real oversight, just helter-skelter.”

“Who is this
Tidov guy?” Leon asked.

“He sounds like
another
vor
—”

He was
interrupted by a female dispatch officer over Leon’s radio.  “Detective
Hulsey?”