The Book of Lies (17 page)

“Let me ask you something, Cal: Why’d
you
come on this trip?”

“I almost got killed this morning.”

“Before that. When you saw your dad lying there in the rain . . . You had your own feeling, right? You listened to something inside yourself and suddenly your life was reignited. Like in
Don Juan
, where he says that sometimes you need to lace your belt the opposite way. We get so comfortable in our lives, things get so mundane, we spiritually fall asleep. But you don’t have to go to an ashram in India to reignite your life. If we just follow those feelings, like my feeling to go talk to your dad at the airport—”

“Serena, the only reason I got on this plane was to save my own rear.”

She undoes her Indian-style position, stands up from her seat, and never abandons the soft, knowing smile that lifts her cheeks. “Your father told me where you work, Cal. If you really were as tough as you think, you wouldn’t be there. And if you really didn’t want to connect with him, you wouldn’t be
here
. It’s no different than taking me along with you. In that act, you did one of the most beautiful things anyone can do. You said
yes
to me. And with your father, just getting on this plane, you did the same. You buckled your belt the other way.”

As she walks back to her seat, I look down at my unfastened seat belt. “Airline buckles only go one way,” I call out.

“Not when you share them with the person next to you,” she calls back.

40

T
he blue lights swirled, the siren howled, and Naomi held her breath.

Three minutes. She’d be there in three minutes, Naomi told herself, clenching the wheel as her car slowly elbowed through the lunchtime traffic on Miami Gardens Drive.

In her ear, Scotty was gone. She needed her cell to make sure—

“Pick up the damn phone, Mom!” she screamed. But all she heard back was a droning ring, again and again and—

“This is Naomi,” her own voice replied on the answering machine. “I’m probably screening you right now, so—”

With a click, she hung up and started again. Mom’s cell. Still no answer. Home phone . . .

“This is Naomi. I’m probably screening you—”

Click. Redial.

Two minutes. Less than two minutes, she swore to herself as she cut off a black Acura and the phone continued to ring. . . .
Dammit, why isn’t she picking up!?

On the GPS screen, the glowing crimson triangle still hadn’t moved from her house.
No, don’t think the worst—

Swerving across two lanes of traffic, Naomi jerked the wheel to the left, and her dark green Chevy bucked and bounced over the last few inches of the street’s concrete turning lane. The phone beeped and she reacted instinctively.

“Mom?” she asked, picking up.

“Local police are en route,” Scotty said. “For all you know, this is just—”

“Just
what
!? He’s at my house, Scotty—
with my son
!”

“That doesn’t mean—”

“How the hell’d he know where I live!?”

Ramming the gas, Naomi sank her nails deep into the rubber of the steering wheel. As she craned her neck wildly back and forth, she fought to get a better look past the thin trees. At the far end of the block was a modest, faded yellow rambler with a crooked garage door and . . .

Her mom’s car. Still in the driveway.
Oh, no . . .

“Who gave him my address!?”
she shouted at Scotty.

“Listen, you need to—”

“I’ve never been listed!
Someone gave him my damn address!
”

The brakes were still screaming as Naomi threw open her car door and leapt outside.

“Nomi, if he’s still in there . . .” Scotty warned.

“Scotty, swear to me you didn’t give anyone my address. By accident or on purpose . . . I need to hear it.”

“A-Are you—? I— Of course I didn’t!”

There was real pain in his voice. She trusted that pain.

“Lucas!”
Naomi screamed, pulling her gun and sprinting for the front door. Her feet felt like anvils, her throat like a pinched straw. She tried to breathe. . . .

“Luuucas!”
She jabbed her key at the bottom lock, but even before it got there . . . the door slowly swung away from her.
God.
It was already open.

She could hear the sirens in the distance.

“Nomi, you need to wait,” Scotty pleaded. “Don’t go in without—”

Darting inside, she felt her heart kicking in her neck. Her eyes scanned the hallway . . . the front closet . . . but all she was really looking for were her son’s shoes . . . There.

Lucas’s flip-flops.

That means Lucas is still—

Frantically sprinting toward the kitchen, she heard her phone beep in her ear. Another call.

“What’re you, a
mental
patient?” her mother asked as Naomi clicked over. “Who leaves fifteen rambling messages like that?”

“L-Lucas . . . where’s—?
Where are you?
” Naomi asked, her gun pointed straight out and her back touching the wall as she prowled around the corner of her dark and clearly empty kitchen.

“The video store—we walked from the park—though I didn’t realize that was a reason to call out the entire Customs Service,” her mother shot back.

“Where’s Lucas?”

“Right next to me. He wants one of those
Star War
movies—those are okay, right? No nudity or anything?”

Naomi doubled back into the hallway and quickly checked both bedrooms . . . closets . . . bathrooms . . . All empty. Back in the living room, she studied the carpet, the sofa cushions, even the slight sway of the vertical blinds that led to the backyard. Nothing was out of place. The back door was still locked. But something still . . .

“Mom, go to the back of the video store,” Naomi said into the phone. “There’s a bathroom there—”

“Wait, what happened?”

“Just find the bathroom—they’ll let you use it if you ask nice—then lock the door and wait there for me, okay? I don’t care who bangs on that door, you don’t open it, you don’t let Lucas out, you don’t check on anything until I’m there. Only me.”

Naomi pulled out her GPS device, clicked back to Scotty on her cell, then began to search for the red triangle.

“Nomi, don’t click off like that!” Scotty scolded. “I thought you were—”

“Shh.” It took a moment to reorient herself. On-screen, the tiny crimson triangle stood completely still. So did Naomi. She was rushing so fast, she never even saw it. According to the screen, the beacon was now coming from behind her.

Naomi twisted around and dashed up the main hallway, rammed her shoulder at the front door, and crashed outside, back into the bright sun.

Outside, her front yard was empty. There was no breeze. And no sound but the shrieking sirens that finally turned onto her block.

“He’s gone,” she whispered.

“You sure?” Scotty asked. “If he came there— No note? No message?”

On-screen, the crimson triangle overlapped almost perfectly with the white, elongated triangle that represented Naomi’s location.
Overlapped . . .
Looking straight down, Naomi stepped off the exploding-fireworks-shaped doormat she still hadn’t removed since July Fourth and took a peek underneath. On the ground was a tiny and familiar flat oval disk.

“Oh, he definitely left a message,” Naomi said, pinching the transmitter with two fingers. Ellis didn’t come here just to leave it under the mat. If her son had been home, Ellis would’ve— A boil of anger bubbled up the back of her neck. The last time she was this mad was during her repo years. The victim sued for the cost of the hospital bills. And won. Four figures.

“You okay there?” Scotty asked.

Naomi let go of the welcome mat, and as it slapped against the concrete, a swirl of dust cartwheeled out the sides. For a moment, Naomi just knelt there, thinking about her son, and her mom, and everything that might’ve happened if something might’ve happened. But it hadn’t. And that’s what made it so damn easy to focus back on Ellis. And Cal. Especially on Cal. The former agent . . . the one who was at the port last night . . . and the one who could’ve easily given her family’s address to—

“You’re plotting their deaths now, aren’t you,” Scotty said.

“I want the next flight to Cleveland.”

“Yeah, and I want to eat cream sauce without feeling puffy after.”

Naomi didn’t say a word.

“I was joking, Nomi. (Kinda.) Now do you want the bad news or the really bad news?”

“Bad news.”

“You just missed one of the flights to Cleveland; you’re on the next one.”

“And the really bad?”

“I got Ellis’s full file from the prosecutor, like you asked. They got everything in here: psych profiles, behavior reports, even identifying marks.”

“I thought you said this was really bad?”

“Hear that noise? That’s the other shoe falling, Nomi. Because that tattoo on Ellis’s hand? You’re not gonna believe what it stands for.”

41

C
ain? As in
Cain
Cain?” I ask Roosevelt through my newest disposable cell. As we whip down the highway, I scour the buttons on the dashboard, searching for—

“Here,”
my father says from the passenger seat. He clicks a switch, and a cannonball of warm air blasts at the fog on our windshield, lifting it away like a raised curtain.

“Now find the heat,” Serena pleads from the backseat as the gray Cleveland sky smothers all light and we plow through the slush and past the blackened snowbanks on I-71.

It’s December in Florida, but not like December here. At barely four o’clock, it’s nearly dark. Still, we’re not completely unprepared. From my job, my dad and I have the two thickest winter coats the donation room had to offer. From Serena’s driver’s license, we have an untraceable rental car. And from the gas station right outside the Cleveland airport, Serena has a
Cleveland Rocks
sweatshirt, and I—like Roosevelt in Fort Lauderdale—have a brand-new chat’n chuck mobile phone to make sure we’re not traced. Everything’s in place. But it doesn’t stop me from studying every car around us. The next Florida flight to Cleveland left barely an hour after ours. It’s not much of a lead.

“I thought you were dropping her at a hotel,” Roosevelt says as he hears Serena’s voice.

“If Ellis is following, it’s not safe by the airport. Trust me, we’re doing it first thing after the house,” I tell him. “So you were saying about Ellis’s tattoo.”

“Can’t you put him on speaker?” Serena asks from the backseat, looking up from a foldout map. Quickly backing down, she adds, “Sorry. I just—” Her voice drops to a whisper. “It’s not like I can’t hear everything he’s saying anyway.”

“They can hear me?” Roosevelt asks through the phone.

In the rearview, Serena nods. My dad thinks I don’t see him smile.

“Roosevelt, you’re on speaker,” I announce with the push of a button as I stuff the phone in a dashboard cup holder. Behind us, I notice a white Jeep with its lights off. “So the tattoo: It’s Cain from Adam and Eve. Okay, so he loves the bad guys.”

“Oh, goodness, son—you’re missing it all, aren’t ya?” Roo-sevelt asks, and I swear I hear a swish from his ponytail. “Sure, all the images—the dog, the stars, the moon, even the thorns that the man is carrying—they’re all ancient symbols of the so-called Mark of Cain. But deciphering that mark is one of the oldest questions of the Bible. Most scholars believe it’s something God gave to Cain as punishment for killing Abel: that God marked Cain as a murderer—gave him horns, put a cross on his forehead, made him into some gol-durn half-beast—then sent him wandering in the Land of Nod. But the real question remains: Who is Cain?”

“No . . . uh-uh. No offense to Sunday school, but spare us the lecture,” I shoot back. “Just tell us why it’s important.”

“Cal, this guy tried to kill you.
Both
of you,” Roosevelt says as my father shoots me a look. “Dontcha wanna hear
why
?”

On the highway, the car plows over a flat sheet of ice. We don’t go flying or spinning out of control, but for a full two or three seconds, I turn into the skid and know—as we glide in perfect, soundless silence across the ice—that I’m not in control. Since the moment I found my father, that’s my life.

“Just listen to him,” my dad insists, sounding like a dad.

I hold tight to the steering wheel, and the tires again gain traction.

“So back to brother Cain,” Roosevelt says through the speaker. “God created Adam and Eve—making Cain the first human ever born. First killer. First human villain, correct?”

“Depends what you want to believe: the Bible . . . ” I say, “or every single carbon-dated archaeological dig of the last hundred years that proves people existed fifty thousand years before Adam and Eve ever supposedly went on their apple rampage.”

“Here—exit
here
,” Serena calls out from the backseat, and I tug the wheel and veer toward the sign for
I-90 East
. Behind us, the Jeep with no lights does the same. I slow down, giving it a chance to pass, but it doesn’t.

“The Bible ain’t just a bunch of stories about dead people, Cal. It’s the greatest and oldest book of human civilization—a book that people through the centuries have given their lives for. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t problems of translation. It’s like Adam and Eve and the apple, right? Like you mentioned, one of the Bible’s most famous tales, except for the problem that there was no apple.”

“Says who?” my father asks.

“Look at the text, sir: The word
apple
never appears in the Bible. It ain’t there. Eve ate a fruit—probably a fig—but in ancient Greece, when the Old Testament was translated from Hebrew, the scribes put in the word
apple
because at the time, apples were the big symbols of desire and destruction. And those slight editorial changes—over time, they start affecting how we think about the Bible, even though they’re not even in the original text.”

“But now, thanks to the wonders of Bible college, you’ll reveal the far more interesting alternate history that’ll surprise us all,” I say.

“Cal, this ain’t about what
you
believe. It’s about what
Ellis
believes. And right now, you gotta understand that he’s coming at you with what he perceives is the power of
God
on his side.”