Trust Your Eyes (50 page)

When the 911 operator came on, Julie adopted a panicked tone and said, “There’s a fire! It looks like it’s started in the back of Ferber’s! The antiques store on East Fourth! And I think I heard shots, too!” She provided a street number, then ended the call before the operator could ask her anything else, and tossed the phone into Thomas’s lap.

Worked when she was back in school and didn’t want to take her exams.

SEVENTY

THE
ice pick had entered the side of Lewis’s right leg about five inches below the knee. Nicole had driven it straight in, through his jeans, and the tip had come out the other side, poking through his pants, the tip crimson.

It had the effect of pulling that leg out from under him, because he dropped right there, to both knees, crushing one of the board game boxes, screaming the whole time. He let go of his gun and twisted around so he could get hold of the handle of the ice pick to pull it back out.

That wasn’t something I wanted to see, but I was transfixed, as was Howard. What we both ended up seeing was even worse. Nicole sat up and got her hand on the pick before Lewis could, and instead of pulling it out and using it on him again in a new spot, or shoving it in even farther, she yanked on it
sideways
. The steel within his leg made new paths through his flesh, causing him to cry out again. He jerked his leg furiously, the heel of his boot catching Nicole, who was up on one arm and on her side, square in the chest.

It knocked her onto her back, but she was up in a second.

Lewis was scrambling, looking for his gun. It was on the floor in a rapidly growing puddle of his blood. He went to grab it, but Nicole had her hands on it first.

She wrapped her hand around the wet, bloodied grip and pointed it at Lewis’s head. He had rolled onto his back, had raised himself half up with his arms, and was scrambling backward, crablike, dragging the wounded leg after him.

Nicole was on her knees now, both hands on the gun, her arms out straight and steady. “I hate guns,” she said. Her blouse was torn open, revealing something else, dark and padded.

A vest.

“Nicole,” Lewis said. “Listen, listen to—”

She pulled the trigger and blew a corner of his head off. His body went flat, the floor a mass of blood and skull and brain matter.

Howard threw his hand to his mouth, like he was going to vomit. He turned, flung back the curtain, and started to run. Nicole scrambled after him.

In the distance, I heard sirens.

I pulled my left hand free of the tape, which now hung loose from my right hand and started tearing into the tape around my stomach that held me to the chair.

The sirens grew louder.

But even closer, the sounds of a car screeching to a stop in the alley. Someone shouting. A woman.

“Thomas!”

Shit.

I broke free of the chair and dived to the floor, scattering toys before me. I wanted to get over to Lewis, to his body.

There was a gun, tucked into the front of his pants. Morris’s gun, maybe.

In the front room, I heard a
pfft, pfft
and then the sound of another body dropping.

From outside: “Ray!”

“Thomas, stop!”

Julie.

I was on my knees, reaching for the gun, my fingers just touching the grip, when the curtain flung back. I glanced up, just in time to see Nicole’s boot catch my jaw.

It was one hell of a kick.

I saw stars as my body was catapulted backward. My arms went out instinctively to brace my fall, but it still hurt like hell when I landed. Something sharp dug into my back, then skittered out from under me. A toy dump truck.

My right hand had landed on one of the other items that had tumbled off the shelves. Even before I looked at it I could feel that it was part plastic, part metal.

Nicole pointed her gun at me. But before she could squeeze the trigger, there was a loud bang from the short hallway that led to the alley.

A door being thrown open.

“I got help!” Thomas screamed. “I got Julie!”

“No!” Julie, sounding as though she was a step behind him, screamed.

Nicole’s eyes turned toward the voices, and the gun followed. The second Thomas appeared he’d be dead.

I glanced over at my right hand, which was draped across the blue plastic fins of a foot-long, metal-pointed lawn dart.

It wasn’t exactly a javelin. But I wasn’t just good at throwing one of those in high school. I was pretty damn good at regular old darts.

In the milliseconds I had before Thomas ran in, I hoped throwing darts was like riding a bike.
You never forget how.

Despite the throbbing in the side of my head, the pain in my jaw and my back, I moved with lightning speed, grabbing the
dart by the tail end, swinging it back over my shoulder, then pitching it forward with everything I had.

“Ray!”

Thomas burst into the room.

The dart went into Nicole’s neck. It went in far enough, an inch or two, that it hung there.

Her mouth opened but no scream came out. Her right hand held on to the gun as her left flew up. She grasped the dart, and yanked it out.

It was like water from a tap.

Blood spurting everywhere.

Nicole dropped the dart and clamped her left hand over the wound. She dropped the gun from her right, turned, stumbled over to the desk.

She coughed and blood spilled from her mouth as well as her throat. She used the desk to briefly support herself, but only for a few seconds. She dropped to the floor as the sirens became almost deafening.

Now Julie was in the room, and she hit the brakes as soon as she saw the carnage. A firefighter, running in behind her, nearly knocked her over when she stopped so abruptly.

“Ray?” she said.

Thomas was already helping me to my feet. “Look who I found,” he said. “I brought Julie.” He smiled. “I’m back.”

SEVENTY-ONE

OVER
the next twenty-four hours, Thomas and I, and Julie, had to answer a lot of questions from a lot of different agencies. We were questioned separately, and together, by New York City cops, state police, FBI, even the Port Authority, for all I knew. One guy, I was told later, was from Homeland Security, but there were so many who wanted to pick our brains that I couldn’t figure out which one he was.

Thomas, when we had a moment together, expressed some concern that there was no one from the CIA. “You’d think they’d be here, wanting to see how I’m doing,” he whispered. I could see the disappointment in his eyes. He was hurt.

The benefit of all these hours of interrogation was that they had a way of informing us about what had happened. The blanks started to get filled in, in large part because the fire department and paramedics had arrived in time to save Howard Talliman and Morris Sawchuck, both found bleeding on the floor of the toy shop.

Talliman, whose condition was critical, had not been all that
forthcoming so far, but Sawchuck, who’d been shot in the lung and was listed in serious condition, was telling prosecutors everything he knew. Because he was hooked up to various machines to assist with his breathing, he was answering questions as quickly as he could type them on the laptop they’d brought into the ICU.

A lot of what had happened became clear during our kidnapping. Fitch’s blackmail attempt—what she knew or claimed to have known was still not entirely clear to us—led to a decision to kill her. Bridget Sawchuck was killed by mistake. Nicole killed that couple in Chicago as part of her mission to get the image of the smothered woman off the Internet.

That was kind of it, in a nutshell.

Lewis Blocker, of course, was dead.

And the paramedics were not able to save Nicole. Turned out that wasn’t her real name. There was talk that in another life she was some kind of Olympic athlete—that explained the power in that kick—but the cops were still trying to piece a lot of things together.

I didn’t feel good about killing the woman. I knew I’d had no choice, but I took no pleasure in it. I was going to be having nightmares about this for a very long time.

Bottom line was, I’d rather it was her being put in the ground than me. Or Thomas.

Many of the questions that were put to me, when I was being questioned alone, were about Thomas, and his bizarre preoccupation. I know they were in touch with Dr. Grigorin, and our good friends Agents Parker and Driscoll of the FBI made an appearance. They confirmed much of what I’d been saying: that while Thomas was certainly unique, he was not a threat to anyone or himself. By the end, it appeared the various law enforcement agencies were not only persuaded that Thomas was harmless, but that he was a hero. Bridget Sawchuck’s murder
would never have come to light without his explorations on Whirl360.

What was left unspoken was that it was these same explorations that led, ultimately, to the deaths of Kyle and Rochelle Billings. Whether this crossed Thomas’s mind I don’t know, and I certainly didn’t point it out to him. Maybe because their deaths were as much my fault as his. I was the idiot who’d waved that printout around when I’d knocked on Allison Fitch’s apartment door, which, evidently, had been picked up on a surveillance camera.

The one thing that never came up was the call Lewis took in Thomas’s bedroom. Thomas told me he’d never mentioned it, and neither had I.

THOMAS
was more withdrawn than usual in the wake of everything that had happened. What we’d been through would be traumatic for anyone. Yet I wondered whether Thomas’s idiosyncrasies actually made him better prepared to cope. He generally shut the world out, except those parts he could access online. With that kind of wall around him, maybe he’d taken in less of the horror.

I just didn’t know.

He had been brooding, though, and I wondered whether it might have less to do with our recent experience and more to do with what he had seemed ready to tell me just before Nicole and Lewis invaded the house. This thing that had happened to him, when he was thirteen, that had sparked trouble between Dad and him.

He’d said, back then, that he might be willing to talk about it with Julie, but the time wasn’t right yet. We needed to decompress before we tackled anything else.

Besides, I had a couple of things on my mind, too.

I’d been debating whether to stay at my father’s house, live
there with Thomas, at least for the foreseeable future. But to my surprise, when I proposed the idea to Thomas, he was reluctant.

“I don’t think I want to live with you,” he said. “Look at all the trouble you got me into.” He said he wanted to live at the place I had gone to visit, so long as he could keep his computer.

Which still left me the option of selling my place in Burlington and moving into Dad’s house permanently. Then I’d be close to Thomas, could check in on him as often as I wanted. Over breakfast, our last morning in New York City, we talked about traveling. Thomas said he wanted to touch the window of a particular pastry shop in Paris.

“I think,” I said, “if we go all that way, we might want to go inside and eat the pastry.”

“I guess that would be okay,” he said.

Our future plans weren’t the only thing on my mind. I couldn’t stop thinking about the phone call.

WE
went home with Julie, in her car.

I shouldn’t have been surprised to find a police car blocking the end of the driveway at my father’s house when we got back. The press—reporters other than Julie—had gotten wind of the story and been trying to find Thomas and me. So far, we had managed to avoid them. Not just because we didn’t need the aggravation, but because I wanted Julie to have a chance to break the whole story before anyone else got the details. Our—well, mostly my—firsthand accounts of what had happened were going to give her a hell of an exclusive.

The uniformed officer sitting behind the wheel got out to see who we were. Once we’d identified ourselves, he pulled his car out of the way. Julie drove up to the house and stopped. Thomas got out first. Although he was never very demonstrative, I could tell he was excited to be home.

As he was approaching the house, I called to him, “Do not touch the phone in your room.”

“Why?”

“Just don’t,” I said. “Don’t even go near it.”

He didn’t argue. He didn’t care that much about phones. It was the fact he had no computer to return to that most upset him. If he asked me once he asked me ten times on the way home when we would be going out to get him a new one.

I came around to the driver’s door. Julie powered down her window.

“Thanks,” I said, bending over, my head half in the window.

“You say that a lot.”

“It’s ’cause you’re so damned nice.”

“I’m going to the office. I’ve got a story to write up. Did I tell you about it?”

“A little,” I said.

“Maybe I’ll give you a call later.”

“Look forward to it,” I said, then leaned in and kissed her.

I watched her drive off, then went into the house. I was going to head up to Thomas’s room first thing, but I saw the light flashing on the phone in the kitchen, and thought I’d better check the messages.

There were five.

“Hey, Ray. Alice here. Harry needs you to come in and sign a couple more things. Let me know.”

Beep.
I hit 7 to delete.

“Ray? Hey, it’s Harry. Alice left a message for you yesterday. Right? Give me a shout.”

Beep.
I hit 7 again.

“Ray, Jesus, Harry here, I saw the news. God, I hope you guys are okay. Look, when you get back, call me.”

Beep.
7 again.

“Hi, I’m trying to reach Thomas or Ray Kilbride. My name
is Tricia, and I’m a producer for the
Today
show and we’d very much like to get in touch with you. It’s very important that—”

Didn’t have to wait for the beep this time. Hit 7.

“Hello, this is Angus Fried, from the
New York Times
, and—”

7.

I was parched, so I ran water from the tap until it was cold, filled a glass, and drank it all without taking a breath.