The Hunter Inside (35 page)

He ran along the wooden
planks past the other motel rooms, sending splashes of water across his shoes
and soaking his feet. He would almost certainly have a cold come the end of the
night.
But will the end of this night ever come?
he wondered.
Will we
ever come out of this dark, dark night?

And it
was
night.
The clouds that pushed down on Atlantic Beach blocked out most of the fading
light, making the June evening seem more like a late September evening.

O’Neill continued on without pausing
as he reached the reception area. It was the most obvious place to find a
telephone, but his earlier run-in with the woman on the main desk (he, unlike
Bill Arnold, hadn’t paid any attention to her name-tag), coupled with his
desire not to be overheard when making the call, were reason enough for him to
carry onwards and look for a booth out in the street.

It meant a difficult
journey of five blocks for O’Neill, and by the time he’d traveled two, he
wished he’d ignored his nature and taken the easiest option. His clothes, he
felt, could not get any wetter. His blue cotton pants were now an even snugger
fit, and his shirt became transparent, allowing the wind to whistle through its
thin fabric. Every hair on his body stood up, but any body heat that he had
bled out quickly. He shivered as he ran along the third block, cursing his luck
at the lack of a phone booth. The severity of the storm meant there was no one
for him to ask on the streets.

The hatches in Atlantic Beach were
well and truly battened down. The crisis the residents prepared themselves for
was the rain, the wind and the power of the storm. They had the right idea. He
wished the storm could be
his
only worry, but his was a position he had
earned through choice, and he ploughed on through the fourth block before
seeing the phone booth halfway down the fifth.

He pushed through the door
of the booth with a gasp of relief, able to get a proper breath for the first
time since leaving the motel room.
Five blocks,
he thought to himself.
Five
goddamn blocks.
Now he would have to go back five blocks. If he had known
how long it would take him to find the phone, he would have taken the car. Now,
it would take him longer to get back to the motel. Granted, it would not take
as long as his journey
from
the motel. The wind had been blowing towards
him, making him walk with his head almost level with his knees. It would carry
him back. It would push him onward. If he wasn’t careful it might even lift him
off his feet.

O’Neill forced his hands
into his pockets and felt with his thumbs for the paper with Hoskins’s number
on it. He found it without any trouble, and eased it out of the sodden
material, tearing it slightly due to its being damp. He looked at it anxiously,
hoping that the tear did not obscure the number, and was relieved to see that
he’d managed to tear it in the gap between the prefix and the suffix of the
number. The ink had not run. Again he fished in his pocket for change. First
the left pocket, then the right. Nothing but a twenty-dollar bill.

‘Damn.’ His curse was
uttered with such vehemence that spittle hit the glass window of the booth. It
was noticeable only by the fact that it remained on the window. He had seen
ornamental pieces resembling the window of the phone booth. A continuous stream
of water down a pane of glass, thought in various quarters to have soothing
qualities. He had never understood why people would want to reproduce the
effect of a miserable storm in the center of their living room. For him, there
was nothing soothing about the continuous flow of water down the glass that
made the world beyond seem like a hazy watercolor painting. The thought of
venturing out in it again to find change for the phone offered him even less
comfort, and it was only by picturing Todd, Sandy and Bill waiting at the
motel, that he managed to leave the phone booth. Upon doing so, the strength of
the wind knocked him sideways. He grabbed onto the phone booth and steadied
himself, aligning his head almost with his knees as before in order to walk. He
could not run; he felt as drained as he ever remembered. The wind swirled
around him, not pushing him on like he had hoped, but spinning him as though it
was trying to disorientate him. He was forced to walk a further two blocks,
before seeing a store that was still open. His legs ached so much that he
thought they might not be able to carry him back to the motel if the storm
failed to ease off. He was a big man, but the storm he was experiencing was too
big and too strong for him to have any hope of standing up to it. He was not
big
enough
.

He struggled onwards
towards the convenience store, holding the twenty-dollar bill, with some
effort, in his right fist. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a man rushed out from the
side of the store. He was twenty meters away from O’Neill, who could not hear
what he was saying due to the rattle of the wind in his eardrums. But the way
in which he waved his arms about suggested to O’Neill that he was in some kind
of distress.
Not now
, he thought to himself with an interior groan.
I
gotta keep moving
.

O’Neill continued, getting
closer to the man, blinking water out of his eyes as he went. By now he could
hear that the man was calling someone, but he could still not make out a name.
He was five meters away from the man, who had turned and rushed towards him as
he approached, before he realized who it was. It was Joe Myers.

‘What the hell are you
doing here?’ O’Neill screamed at the top of his voice to make himself heard
over the wind.

‘My kids…it’s my kids.
They’ve gone.’

O’Neill observed a look of horror in
the eyes of Joe Myers. His distress was such that he ran around in a circle,
oblivious to the tempest that made O’Neill sway. This was the worst possible
scenario for O’Neill. He felt positively mad at Joe Myers, despite the terror
that he also felt at this news. He had told him not to come. Now Shimasou had
the two kids, and O’Neill knew that they were part of its plan somewhere down
the line. Joe Myers might just as well of handed them over.

‘What are we gonna do?’ Joe looked at
the Special Agent, his tears mixing with the rain as it ran down his pale face.
It was by the look on his face that the Special Agent knew of the tears. His
eyes were screwed up in a tortured expression, drawing his cheeks and mouth
upwards into a grimace that reflected his distress.

O’Neill thought about the question. It
was certainly a good one. What
could
they do? O’Neill thought this was
probably a more realistic one, and he struggled to find an answer to Joe Myers’
original question as he pondered his own.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. And he really
didn’t
know. This was a case that he could not predict the outcome of.
He hadn’t even come close to foreseeing the possibility that Shimasou would
kidnap the kids. But why not? They were obviously part of the chain of Sandy’s family,
and the anger that he felt towards Joe Myers for ignoring his advice and
bringing the children to Atlantic Beach was replaced by a sense of guilt at
letting the children down. Shimasou did not have a reason to allow the children
to live. By killing them, it would become stronger and nearer to achieving its
goal. For the first time, O’Neill felt like crying. All their efforts had been
superseded by an event he should have foreseen, and now he stood, soaked to the
skin and more helpless than ever before in his career.

‘Do you have any change?’

‘What?’ Joe Myers had heard what
O’Neill said, and the reason for his question was surprise.

‘Do you have any change?’
He was more insistent
this time. He needed action, not words, and Joe nodded. O’Neill grabbed him by
the arm and ran back to the phone booth, practically dragging Joe Myers behind
him. The big Special Agent pushed the smaller man in first and then squeezed
himself in beside him. Now they were nose-to-nose, cramped into the tiny space
and trying to get their breath back as fresh forks of lightning flashed in the
sky nearby.

‘Listen, you gotta try and stay calm,
Joe. Or you won’t be able to help them. You hear me?’ He knew that the kids
might already be gone, but he also knew that he needed a strong Joe Myers. He
could be the next target for Shimasou.

Joe looked the Special Agent in the
eye. ‘You really think they have a chance? It’s him isn’t it? It’s the person
who killed Sandy’s parents, isn’t it?’

O’Neill nodded. ‘Yes, Joe. It probably
is. But we found Sandy. She’s safe, waiting at a motel five blocks from here.’
He observed a flicker of something like hope in Joe’s eyes at the news of his
wife.

‘But…the kids. She couldn’t handle it
if…’ He trailed off, unable to finish his sentence. O’Neill thought that the
man in front of him was already grieving for the loss of his children. He
didn’t think they stood a chance.

‘The change, Joe,’ O’Neill said, and
Joe absently put in his hand in his pocket and withdrew several coins before
handing them to O’Neill.

‘Who are you calling?’

‘I left my cell phone at the motel.
I’m calling Todd.’

‘Is that the guy who was with you at
my house?’

‘Yes. He’s with Sandy at the motel.’

‘But what are you going to say to
her?’

‘I don’t know, Joe. But I’ve got to
let them know about the kids. There’s no other way of doing this.’

Joe wondered at the Special Agent’s
words.
No other way?
It was a strange choice of words. And he had said
‘of doing this’. This? What was
this
? He watched as O’Neill fed coins
into the silver slot. He knew very little of what was actually going on here.
Up until yesterday he had thought Sandy’s parents had died in an accident. Now,
he knew that they had been murdered. What was more; the man who killed them had
driven his wife away from her home and had kidnapped his children. But he still
knew very little about him. He wondered how much the cop knew.

O’Neill keyed the number of his cell
phone into the pad in front of him, hoping desperately that the battery on the
cell phone was not totally flat.

Sandy listened to the rain
bombarding the motel room. Apart from its insistent drum roll, there was no
other sound in the room. Mayhew and Arnold sat, looking away from one another,
and all three felt completely helpless. Each of them wondered what had happened
to O’Neill. It seemed like an eternity to Sandy. She wanted action. She wanted
things to move. Sitting still at a time like this didn’t seem to be an option.
She needed to be moving, making strides towards her goal of getting back to her
family.

Bill Arnold had no family to think of.
He would be happy to get back to watching football and drinking Bud at home. He
might even give up trucking once all of this was over.
If it ever is,
he
thought. O’Neill had been gone almost half an hour and they’d received no word.
Bill wondered whether something bad had happened to him, but despite being
anxious to get through to the other side of this, going out into the storm to
fight Shimasou was the last thing he wanted to do right now.

Todd Mayhew sat and looked at the cell
phone. For ten minutes he had been studying it, willing it to ring. The longer
it went without ringing, the less chance of the battery lasting for more than a
few seconds when it did. The situation, like the weather, was deteriorating
rapidly.

Without warning the phone began to
buzz and move sideways along the wooden surface on which it had been placed.
Thank
God
, Mayhew thought, and snatched it up, pressing the send button and
placing it at his right ear.

‘Hello. Is that you, Sam?’

‘Yeah, listen.’ O’Neill launched into
a speech that was punctuated by loud bursts of static and the wind whining
through the microphone of the cell phone. Mayhew struggled to comprehend what
he was saying as Sandy and Bill watched him intently.

‘Hold on Sam. The line’s bad. I’m
gonna go outside and see if that helps.’ Mayhew stood and went quickly out into
the rain, followed by Bill Arnold. He cupped his hand around the cell phone in
an attempt to stop it being affected by the rain, while inserting a finger into
his left ear to block out the noise of the wind.

‘Go on Sam,’ he shouted, ‘it should be
a little better now.’

‘Todd. It’s the kids. It’s taken
Sandy’s kids. Joe Myers is with me here. We’re gonna get his car and drive back
to the motel. I want you to stay there and keep Sandy and Bill there. We’ll be
there in five. You get all that?’

Before Todd Mayhew could answer, the
Special Agent was gone.
The battery
, he thought, and looked at the cell
phone’s blank display. Luckily though, he had gotten what O’Neill had said. But
this was bad news, very bad news. Mayhew looked at Bill Arnold.

‘What did he say?’ Arnold asked.

‘It’s here, and it’s got Sandy’s
kids,’ Mayhew answered, a dejected expression somewhat akin to that of Bill
Arnold’s spreading across his face.

‘What are we gonna do?’ Arnold asked.
He didn’t really expect an answer; Mayhew knew as much as he did, but it was a
question he couldn’t prevent himself from asking the old man.