Son of Destruction (34 page)

‘No thanks, Bobby, I’m fine. Nice to see you.’

‘You too.’

She is sitting there fishing for thoughts. Surprised by what surfaces, she laughs. ‘And let’s don’t talk about our problems!’

Bobby grins. ‘Let’s don’t.’

‘It’s just so nice to
see
you.’

He jumps up. ‘I forgot napkins!’

‘Don’t worry, we’re fine.’

‘I guess we are.’

She says, ‘We have a lot to talk about.’

They are both smiling now. Bobby says, ‘We do.’

Rushing out of the Flordana, overcharged and crackling with frustration, Dan feels like a fugitive from the static Fort Jude Sunday afternoon. In Grammy’s room, in the Flordana coffee shop, he turned into a convict in a holding pen, waiting for – helicopter rescue? Darkness, so he could swarm over the wall and escape?

The key, he realizes. Jessie Vukovich told her story, liberating him. He drives through the soft Florida night like a death-row murderer with a last minute reprieve. He is going to confront the man Lucy sent him all this way to meet. He knows she did: the whole jewel box thing, the contents she left behind like a message to him. The thump between his shoulder blades. He finds certain details encoded. How could she not want this?

He isn’t sure how the encounter with the father will end, but tonight by God he will end it.

Darkness changes everything. By day Coral Shores looks orderly and civilized, bisected by the boulevard, with neat cross streets intersecting. It looks like a grid, but only to outsiders. At night it turns into a warren. Coordinates keep sliding around, defying his GPS. In a better world it would be a straight shot to the peninsula, but in a community committed to privacy no road is straight and nothing is clear-cut. The route Dan mapped so carefully sends him down identical side streets that turn suddenly, looping back to Coral Boulevard, unless they dead-end at a stand of trees or dump him at the edges, stymied by yet another private driveway to a protected house with its private waterfront. At night all these houses look alike; every tree on Coral Shores looks like every other tree and landmarks repeat themselves so he can never be sure whether he has been this way before.

In the dark on Coral Shores nothing is as advertised, and to make things worse he almost sideswiped a stranger’s heavy car the last time he went around that circle and discovered it was the same old circle all over again.

He’s pissed off at himself for being careless and for getting lost, and he is even more pissed because angry as he is, Dan is torn. Where he grew up hoping for better – forget Jor-El, he thinks bitterly. Werewolf is more like it, if werewolves have were-children, which would explain a few things.

This is the hell of it, then. All his life Dan has traveled on the knowledge that the man he looks like – who looks like him! – is out there, a loving stranger built from the same genetic material as him, blood and bone, fiber and mysterious power, but now . . . He’s not searching for his father the defrocked superhero, he is tracking a monster.

In a way, he’s grieving for the myth. Dan’s last remaining suspect was never a brave prisoner of war, government witness, valiant secret agent under deep cover. It’s hard, letting go of the idea of his father as a silent hero walking out of his only son’s life for good and compelling reasons. Heroic elements like honor, valor, duty did not call his real dad to serve just when he most needed him. Those are stories unhappy kids tell themselves so they can keep on going just like all the other kids.

Now, in the realm of suspects Kalen looks like the biodad. The father Dan is tracking tonight turns out to be a drunken ape who beats the women he forces into sex. Or, and this is what troubles him. Destroys them. The template he appears to be modeled on is all that and, worse: he doesn’t even know what the fucker looks like.

Like me?
He says through locked teeth, ‘I don’t think so.’

When he finds Kalen, he’ll drag the designated father-to-be outside and beat him with a tire iron, one lick for every soul he’s ruined or betrayed, including Lucy’s,
One lick for every year he stole from my life.
Unless all he wants is to get him down and beat the truth out of him – whatever it is. Fuck knows there are questions. Fuck knows the bastard deserves it. But even though he’s rigid with anger, a vulnerable part of Dan is in stasis, poised for the exculpating ‘Father!’ ‘Son!’ moment in which things are made right and everything is explained.

A crazy thing to expect. Kalen,
in extremis
, yacking up truth?

Fuck! Wrong turn.

Question. Is Kalen also a murderer? The thought darts across his mind like a spray of sparks running along a fuse. What if he torched old lady Archambault?

Fuck! Another wrong turn. Fuck! Another question.

Did he?

Wrong turn . . .

He has to wonder: wrong question?

A voice he barely recognizes fills the car. ‘Asshole, what do you want here?’ Yes he is shouting.

Not knowing makes him even angrier.

When he gets to the house he’ll break in and pounce, drag Kalen out into the street and then he will . . . Imagination betrays him.
Father! Son!
What would that be like? It makes him shudder.

Whatever Bradley J. Kalen is to him, whatever the gross, rotting brute of a rapist says or does or denies doing when he confronts him,
He is no father to me
.
I will not have it.
OK then, he thinks, smoking with fury. When you get to the house, smash the lock and yank him out the door no questions, no explanations, and when you drag your quarry into the light, take your long look into its face, God knows you’ve been waiting long enough. Then beat the crap out of him.

Roaring with frustration, he shouts, ‘If I can find the fucking place!’

Maybe some deep, unsuspecting part of Walker wants to get caught but it’s unlikely, given the care with which he circumscribes his life. More likely he’s played out his string, trailing young Dan Carteret night and day without stopping for more than the rudimentaries, running hard last night and all day and into tonight, blindly rushing along on no sleep, on exhaustion compounded by intolerable tension and aching grief. Although he refuses to acknowledge it, Walker Pike is strung out on hours of following without being seen, taut and driven because he does not know how to do what he has to without hurting anyone.

In fact he isn’t sure what he has to do, but that’s not the hardest thing. The hardest thing is being
this close
to his son without showing himself, even when he most wants to speak to him. With no idea what he would say if they did talk, because they are strangers and he’s afraid to find out what said son, the baby he, OK, the child he walked out on, would have to say to him.

Or maybe he’s sitting out here in plain sight because he is flat-out exhausted.

Unless it’s the function of geography.

At night on Coral Shores it’s harder to follow a man without his picking up on it. Bright moonlight defies him. This is, furthermore, a tight community where solid citizens hunker down at home after dark, particularly on Sunday nights when the nesting instinct strikes. All partied out after the weekend, they hole up in front of the electronic fire, snug and sanctimoniously self-satisfied.

There’s nobody on the streets but Walker Pike and the man he is following.

Inevitably, the kid will pick up Walker’s headlights in his rear view mirror; he’ll notice that when he turns, Walker turns. They’ve already come close; that rented tin can almost nicked him back there on the circle. He had to lay back and run with his lights off for several blocks, until the driver was done stopping to see if Walker would pass him, and fed up with screeching around corners to trick the driver keeping pace with him. Out on the barren peninsula road even a blind monkey would know that he was being followed.

Better get there first, Pike, if you hope to control what goes down out there when the kid comes charging in to storm Kalen’s house.

Walker will wait for him outside Orville Kalen’s dream house. It’s easy enough for Walker to find – not because he’s local, but because this is not the first time he’s been here, parked outside. Never mind when that was, or what Walker Pike considered when he stopped in front of the gleaming modern house one night not that long ago, riveted and trembling with suppressed rage. Shattered, he hit the gas and scratched off while the enemy he most wanted dead was still alive. Correction. Still safe.

Unlike the northerner from the real world, who will keep cross-hatching Coral Shores until he hits the right road, Walker goes like an arrow to the end of the peninsula. Out here, planting is sparse. Scrub pines and travelers’ palms cling to sandy dirt that blows across the city’s poshest piece of real estate same as it did in the white trash neighborhood on Pierce Point back in the day, when Walker and Wade lived with Pop in four rooms above the garage.

In denser neighborhoods on Coral Shores where Walker Pike never comes and certainly would never be invited, homeowners have trees and topsoil, tons of sphagnum moss and fertilizer delivered by the truckload. Gardeners roll out sod richer than Persian carpeting and set down plants like bric-a-brac, whereas Pierce Point families cemented over front yards to get rid of sandspurs, or battled nature with rye grass and supermarket shrubs doomed by the sandy soil before they patted dirt over the roots. Like the others in his part of town, Orville Kalen had all the right things trucked out to garnish his expansive Sixties modern house at the nether end of Coral Shores, but without constant attention nothing lives long, not even a man with all the money in the world.

When you die, they die.

There are days when Walker wishes that he could.

Kalen is home, right where Chaplin dumped him yesterday – yes, Walker knows. Over the years, he kept track. All that money made Kalen lazy and self-indulgent. Careless about how he got what he wanted. At this hour he’ll be staggering from bed to the fridge and back to bed with an overloaded plate, unless he’s sprawled on those greasy sheets with a freshly opened fifth, stupefied. First prize, he has choked to death on his own vomit, but that kind never dies. The rangy kid from New London will find the place; it is inevitable. He’ll bang on the door and something terrible will come down.

What Walker is most afraid of: fire.

He has to stop the kid before he gets close enough to knock. Until then, he waits. He cuts the motor and glides in next to the house. Yes he’s exposed, but his son won’t see Walker parked in the shadows with his lights off, at least not right away. Walker needs to be where he can see him coming.
My boy.

Given who he is and the line he has walked with such vigilance, Walker Pike is far from careless, but sometimes you just. Get. Tired.

He closes his eyes but does not sleep. Exhaustion greases the ways and instead Walker recedes into reverie, slipping away from solid ground as smoothly as a newly launched ship; he is adrift now although he doesn’t know it, that’s how bad it is.

Put it to too many hours behind the wheel. He is stretched to the limit by proximity and the need to keep his distance. All those years keeping them safe. Lucy. The boy. He loves them so much!

‘Don’t give your heart to anyone,’ Pop said to his sons after their mother ran away, ‘look what it made of me,’ and Walker took it to heart.

He took it to heart and didn’t let go until he followed Lucy Carteret to Huntington beach that night for no known reason except that she was lovely and she didn’t know he was alive. As far as she knew, he was just the guy who fixed her grandmother’s car, a necessary piece of the infrastructure, but he was his own person by that time, with a real life three thousand miles away from Pop’s garage and the judgmental society of Fort Jude. She didn’t need to know.

She smiled at Walker without seeing beyond the smudge on his face or the grease on the coverall. He wouldn’t tell her that he’d been called home from Cambridge during exams because Pop was in the hospital. Wade phoned him, sobbing; he had to come. Nor did she have to know what the old man said to him that same night, tossing in the bed with his belly swollen and the toxic whites of his eyes the color of Betadine from the years of drinking that did in his liver and brought Walker home from MIT.

Pop was drunker than shit when he said it, Walker told himself, then and now. That damn fool pint of Jack Daniels on top of what the hospital was giving him; didn’t they frisk his friends before they let anybody in to visit him?

Pop was dead drunk when he said that terrible thing to me
, Walker told himself resolutely; Pop didn’t know what he was saying; Pop was disconnected and raving. He was out of his mind with pain and alcohol and heavy duty meds compounded by whatever was in the IV flowing into him.

That night Pop raged for hours and Walker discounted it. Overturned, he took it for what he thought it was, but truth will always find you. The words followed him out of the room like a plague of hornets. Then the old lady died and for all these years he has wondered.

Were you trying to warn me, old man?

‘Walker, watch out! I see it!’ Wallace Pike rose up out of the bed in a surge of blankets like a shark attacking. Words came out of his face in a spray of spit and alcohol fumes. ‘It’s in you too.’

‘What is, Pop? What is?’

‘It’s in you, I can see it.’

‘Pop?’ He shuddered: bad memories. Certain fires. ‘Pop?’

The old man gargled words but couldn’t spit them out.
What were you trying to tell me?

At the time Walker thought it was sheer agony that unhinged Pop and set him to screaming; he asked, ‘Are you in pain?’

‘Hellfire,’ Pop howled like a man running ahead of a pack of demons and it came out like vomit, ‘the flame!’ He thrashed and bellowed until the nurses came and shot him full of downers; his flame died and the next day he forgot.

By the next day, Walker was in love with Lucy Carteret.

It still mystifies him because the fact of it is so profound: that a man can fall in love in a single night. That it can happen in a flash. They went to the same school but Walker didn’t know her. He finished Fort Jude High a year ahead of his class; there was no reason for her to know him. If you didn’t play sports or do any of the stupid things that kept all those fresh-faced, privileged Fort Jude insiders at school for hours after the last bell rang, you could spend three years there without knowing anyone. Walker went home after school to work for Pop. He didn’t mix with people outside the classroom. He didn’t much want to. Even before the trouble, Walker kept to himself.