The Meridians (20 page)

The older man stopped smiling. "Because you have to do what I tell you or you'll die. And not only you, but a host of other people are depending on you to do what I say. Myself included."

"Why don't you just do whatever it is?"

"Can't," answered the man. "It has to be you."

"And why should I believe you? Who are you?"

"We've gone over that already, Scott. I can't tell you who I am right now...you wouldn't believe me and it would just get in the way of you believing me when I tell you what needs doing." The old man sighed. "And as for why you should believe me...well, I think you owe me."

"For what?"

"You know what."

And Scott did. He remembered the instant that Mr. Gray pulled the trigger in the alley, remembered the heat on his face, remembered the world spinning...and then this old man was beside him. Dead with a bullet wound to the head.

Scott looked at the old man now. Hale and hearty, standing in front of him as though nothing untoward had ever happened to him. "How are you still alive?" he asked.

The old man looked comically wounded. "You don't have to sound so upset about it," he said. "I rather like me alive."

"I didn't, that is, I...." Scott's voice drifted off into nothing. This was the most insane conversation he had ever been a part of.

The old man smiled again. "See why I'm not giving you much in the way of answers? Even the questions might blow your mind right out your nose." Then he laughed again as Scott tried to process what had just been said.

He gave up after a moment. It was no good. Nothing was making sense. There was no way this man could be alive unless...

Scott looked up. "You're his twin!" he almost shouted.

The old man got quiet all of a sudden, as though Scott had just told him his favorite dog died. "Nope. Not a twin," he said quietly, then forced a sparkle back into his eye. "But this isn't about me, anyway. It's about you, and about what you're supposed to do."

Scott shrugged internally. He might as well hear what the crazy old man had to say, since he was clearly not going to get any answers by direct questions. "What is it you want me to do?" he asked.

The old man told him, and Scott couldn't help but guffaw.

"You're serious?"

The old man nodded, and once again the glimmer of jollity was gone from his eyes. Scott could see he was serious, indeed

"Why?" he asked.

The old man shrugged and wrote something on a piece of paper. Then handed it to Scott. "Because if you don't, then you aren't the only one that Mr. Gray is going to kill," he said, and his voice, though light and airy, made Scott shiver all the same.

"Will I get to kill him?" he asked.

The old man looked at him with an expression that Scott could not interpret. "Why do you want to kill him so badly?" he asked.

"You seem to know everything, you tell me," countered Scott.

"Because he killed your family," said the old man.

"Bingo," said Scott.

"You might want to be careful about wanting to kill people, Scott," said the old man, and suddenly - and for the first time - he truly
seemed
old, like some heavy weight was resting on his shoulders. "It's a slippery slope to travel on, and before you know it you've turned into the same thing that you're hunting."

Scott shook his head in disgust. "You think I could ever be anything like Mr. Gray?" he asked.

The old man looked at Scott deeply, and then said, "Sometimes I don't know what she sees in you."

The words struck Scott like a blow. The old man could only be talking about Amy, the only woman that had ever really seen into Scott's heart and loved what she saw there.

He felt his hands curl into fists at his sides. "What would you know about her."

Now it was the old man's turn to look surprised. Then he laughed again. "Oh, you think I'm talking about
Amy
? Well, I'm not, so you can get the wounded knight look off your face. No need to protect her honor from me, I'm not saying anything about her. Never knew her, in fact, though I understand she was a wonderful person."

"She was," said Scott. He didn't mean to, didn't mean to share his feelings about his dead wife with this stranger, but somehow the words just came out of him. "She was the most perfect woman I've ever met."

The old man nodded. "I know you loved her, Scott. And that's a good thing. Love makes us into better people, it gives us strength when we're afraid. It makes bad men good and good men better. It's the thing that makes living into life, the thing that separates us from all the other animals crawling over the face of the earth." The man drew a deep breath. "That's why I know you don't love her anymore. You did once, but you don't love Amy anymore."

Scott felt a growl of rage come out of him. How dare he! Who was this man to say something like that. Every single moment of Scott's life was devoted to his wife. With a sudden pounce, he jumped at the old man, meaning in that instant to hit him, to strike him, to
punish
him for insinuating - hell, for just straight out saying - that Scott didn't love his wife.

He rushed the old man, who waited until the last moment, then suddenly twisted and grabbed. Scott felt himself pulled off his feet, and then suddenly was slamming into the ground, his wrist pinned behind him uncomfortably and the old man's knee across the back of his neck.

"Hapkido," said the old man. "I'm a fifth degree black belt. Comes in useful."

Scott struggled to get himself free, but it was no use. He just got himself more and more jammed up under the old man's grasp.

"The more you struggle, the more it's going to hurt," said the old man who had no name but who had the power to reduce Scott quickly to nothing with his words and his body.

Scott opened his mouth to scream.

"I wouldn't yell if I were you," said the old man. "I'll just be gone by the time anyone gets here, and you'll have yet another oddity to explain in your life." The pressure eased up on his wrist and shoulder, but the old man did not let him up yet. "You want to know why I say that you don't love Amy anymore?"

Scott was silent.

"I'll take that as a yes." The old man shifted his weight, and suddenly the pain in Scott's arm returned. "I want you to pay attention to this, Scott. I think that you don't love Amy anymore because you've turned into too much of a self-centered, egotistical, self-pitying turd of a man to love anyone but yourself."

Scott struggled again, but again found that the more he struggled, the more pain he was in, so after just a few seconds of ineffectual thrashing, he felt himself calm and grow still.

"Good boy," said the old man, as though addressing a dog who had just managed to get outside without peeing on the carpet for the first time. And truth to tell, Scott didn't feel much better than a dog would right now. "Let me ask you a question," said the old man.

"Go to hell," said Scott through clenched teeth.

The old man laughed, as though Scott had just told the funniest joke in the world. "You're proving my point for me more and more, Scott," he said. "So here's the question: of the last eight years since Amy and Chad died, how much of your life do you think either of them would have approved of?"

Scott stopped struggling, stopped cold in his movements as though hit by a freeze ray. Indeed, he felt cool inside, then was warmed as the hot humiliation the old man's words caused spread through him like a fire.

He was right. The old man was right.

Scott knew that Amy would not have approved of anything that he had done in the last eight years. She was full of love, full of life, and would not have appreciated the way that Scott had retreated from all existence in an effort to keep himself distant from anything that might cloud his memory of her or of Chad.

If she met me for the first time right now, would she love me? he asked himself. And knew the answer, and was ashamed.

The pressure on his arm and neck and back suddenly lessened and disappeared. "I'm guessing you're not going to try to hit me again," said the old man. "Of course, if I'm wrong, well, you kinda suck at fighting, so I guess I'm not too worried."

The old man moved away from Scott, and Scott slowly - and somewhat painfully - got back to his feet.

The old man was standing next to Scott's desk, arms crossed.

"So, you going to do what I asked you to do?" he said.

Scott didn't know what to say, but felt himself nodding.

"Good," said the old man. He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them, their clear blue gaze settled directly and deeply on Scott's face. "Remember to do it, Scott," he said. "And remember what we talked about today. I believe that Amy did love you, and I believe you could be the kind of person that she would love again, but not by hiding in here and living in your memories. Memories are too unreliable to hang your life on."

Then Scott felt woozy. He put a hand to his head and felt sweat beading across it. He stumbled, then fell to the floor. He looked up at the old man. "What...what did you...?" But he could not complete the sentence.

"Oh, I gave you a little something to help you calm down while I had you in that nifty arm lock. You didn't notice it because, well, you were hurting a bit so a little needle prick was hardly going to register."

Scott's legs went rubbery. His vision began to blur. But he saw enough to see the old man step forward and help him gently into a laying position. "Don't want you to fall and crack your head open," said the old man.

Then Scott's eyes closed, and he saw nothing else.

He heard something, though. Heard the old man say one more thing before darkness claimed him and he surrendered himself to oblivion.

"Don't forget what you're supposed to do," said the old man. "Don't forget where you're supposed to be."

***

21.

***

Lynette didn't like moving. She never had, and liked it much less when they were moving in order to avoid death at the hands of some strange gray ghost-man who had apparently targeted her and her son.

She had decided on moving the instant that the gray man disappeared. Though he seemed to have a strange attachment to - and hatred of - her son, what if he was more geographically bound than that? What if he was some kind of poltergheist? What if the strange man who had attacked them was bound to the apartment they lived in as much as to the boy she loved?

As soon as she had been reasonably certain that the man was not going to reappear in the elevator where he had left her and Kevin, she had rushed into the apartment to pack some of her and Kevin's things. She had thrown some clothes, their laptops, and a few other articles into some suitcases, then hustled them out of there as fast as she could. She was not going to be able to stay in a hotel forever, she knew, but she was darned if she was going to stay in that apartment for long after what they had just experienced. So she gave notice that she would be moving, and immediately began looking for somewhere else to move.

With her particular job, she could really move anywhere in the country, since mostly she worked at home and only rarely did a client insist on any kind of face-to-face interaction. Most of her work with her clients was done via the internet or over a phone and fax line, so she had her choice of places to live.

That first night, the night they stayed in the hotel - a small Marriott Inn that was only a few miles away from the apartment - she spent most of the night researching possible locations to live in, then decided on Boise, Idaho. The reason she decided on the small city in the middle of the barely-populated state was simple: it consistently rated in the top ten places to raise a family. She also logged into Autinet, a parental support group and news service for families with autistic children and, within minutes of posting questions about the place, discovered that there were several excellent autism treatment facilities and specialists in the Boise area. That clinched it. Lynette, the big city girl who had never left Los Angeles for more than a day or two in her life, was moving to Idaho.

But not to Boise. It turned out as soon as she started seriously looking into it that Boise was a place that was mostly inhabited, and had very few reasonably priced houses for sale. Meridian, on the other hand, had more than enough places to live in, and they were so inexpensive that she could afford a down payment on a house out of her savings and could even purchase one outright if she felt like dipping into the tidy insurance sum that Robbie had left for them.

She put a down payment on a two-bedroom house that she found using an online realtor, a nice-sounding man (she never met him but over the phone) named Tom who seemed to sincerely want to help her and Kevin find someplace suitable. She knew, of course, that that was his job - to sound concerned and sincere - and that he might in fact be no more interested in her than the average used car salesman. But in spite of this knowledge, she soon found herself enjoying his self-deprecating humor and folksy charm.

Tom made an offer for her on the house, and within only two weeks she had a house waiting for her in Meridian.