Honey Moon (40 page)

She was the only person left on earth.

As she stood in the park's vacant heart, she finally lifted her eyes back to the sky so she could take in the entire skeleton of Black Thunder as it encompassed her abandoned universe. Her eyes stung as she followed the invincible lines of the mythic coaster: the great lift hill followed by the plunge toward the earth at an angle sharp enough to penetrate the very bowels of hell, all three hills with their glorious, thrice-delivered promises of death and resurrection, the heart-stopping spiral down to the water and the smooth, fast delivery into the station.

Somewhere on that wild, racing ride she had once been able to touch eternity.

Or had she? She began to tremble. Was the certainty that she had been able to find her mother when she had ridden that coaster nothing more than the fancy of a child? Had the coaster really delivered her into the presence of God? She knew that her belief in God had been born on that coaster as surely as that same belief had been washed away by Dash Coogan's blood.

As she stared at the great ribs of Black Thunder etched against the parched sky, she cursed and begged God, both at the same time.
I want him back! You can't
have him. He's mine, not yours! Give him back to me. Give him back!

The ferocious sun burned through her hair into her scalp. She started to sob and sank to her knees, not

to pray but to curse.
You fucker. You awful fucker.

But even as she squeezed her eyes shut the silhouette of Black Thunder's three mighty hills stayed etched on her lids. The horrible obscenities continued to spill from her until they gradually assumed the cadence of ritual.

Exhausted, a stillness came over her. She opened her eyes and lifted them to the mountaintops as those

in despair had done for centuries. Hope. Black Thunder had always given it to her. And as she stared at those three wooden peaks, she was filled with the absolute certainty that the coaster could transport her to some eternal place where she could find her husband, a place that existed beyond the temporal, a place where love could live forever.

But Black Thunder had no more life left in it than Dash Coogan's body, and it was incapable of transporting her anywhere. The massive skeleton stood crippled and impotent against the August sky, no longer bearing promises of hope and resurrection, no longer promising anything except dry rot and decay.

She stumbled back to her car, the weight of her weariness overwhelming. If only she could make Black Thunder run again. If only . . .

Climbing inside the suffocating interior of the car, she leaned back against the seat and fell into an exhausted sleep.

23

Sheri Poltrain had been working behind the register at the Gas V Carry in Cumberland County, North Carolina, for three years. She'd been robbed twice and threatened with bodily harm half a dozen times. Now as the stranger approached the register of the convenience store, she tensed. She was better acquainted with trouble than most women, and she knew when it was walking toward her.

He looked like a biker, except the wrists and hands exposed beneath the sleeves of his unzipped brown leather jacket were clean and free of tattoos. And he didn't have a beer gut. Not even close. Through the open front of his jacket, she saw a belly as flat as the stretch of rainy county highway that ran past the gas pumps outside. He was at least six feet tall, with good shoulders, a muscular chest, and faded jeans that clung to one of those narrow, tight butts men never had the good sense to appreciate. No. There was definitely nothing wrong with his body. In fact, it was pretty incredible. What was wrong with him was

his face.

He was just about the meanest-looking son of a bitch she'd ever seen. Not ugly mean. Just cruel mean. Like he might put out cigarettes on sensitive parts of a woman's body without ever changing his expression.

His hair, damp with the chilly late November drizzle that fell outside, was dark brown, almost black, and it hung nearly to his shoulders. It was clean but shaggy. He had a strong, perfectly shaped nose and the kinds of bones she'd once heard somebody describe as chiseled. But great bones couldn't make up for those thin lips and that hard mouth that didn't seem to have learned how to smile. And great bones couldn't make up for the coldest, single blue eye she had ever seen in her life.

She told herself not to stare at the black patch that covered his other eye, but it was hard to ignore. With that black patch and emotionless expression, he looked like some kind of modern-day pirate. Not the blow-dryer kind on the cover of one of the romance novels that sat on the rack next to her register, but the nasty kind who might pull a Saturday night special out of his back pocket and empty it into her belly.

She looked uneasily down at the digital display on her register that told her how much gas he had pumped into the mud-splattered gray GMC van that sat outside. "That'll be twenty-two even." She wasn't the type to let any man see that she was afraid, but this one gave her the heebie-jeebies, and her voice wasn't as firm as usual.

"Also a bottle of aspirin," he said.

Her eyes flickered with surprise at his faintly accented speech. He wasn't an American, but a foreigner. He sounded like he was from the Middle East or somewhere. The notion sprang into her mind that he might be some kind of Arab terrorist, but she didn't know if Arab terrorists could have blue eyes.

She removed an aspirin bottle from the cardboard display behind her and slid it across the counter. There was something dead in that single visible eye, an absence of any sort of life force that gave her the creeps, but when he withdrew nothing more threatening than a wallet from his back pocket, her curiosity poked through one small corner of her fear.

"You stayin' around here?"

The look he gave her was so threatening she quickly returned her attention to the register. He laid thirty dollars on the counter, picked up the aspirin bottle, and walked out of the store.

"You forgot your change," she called after him.

He didn't bother to look back.

Eric removed the seal from the aspirin bottle. As he rounded the back of the van, he pulled off the lid and took out the cotton wad. It was a chilly, drizzly Saturday afternoon in late November, and the dampness was bothering the leg he had injured in his auto accident. When he was behind the wheel, he swallowed three pills with the cold coffee dregs in his Styrofoam cup.

After his car had crashed through the guardrail last May, he'd spent a month in the hospital and another two months in physical therapy as an outpatient. Then in September, he'd started work on a new film. They'd considered delaying shooting because of his injuries, but he'd made good progress, and they had eventually decided to work around them instead, giving him a stunt double for a number of scenes he would normally have done himself.

The picture had been finished ten days ago. Afterward, he was scheduled to fly to New York to discuss a play, but at the last minute he'd decided to drive instead, hoping the solitude would help him pull himself together. After a few days, the solitude had become more important than his destination, and the closest he'd gotten to Manhattan was the Jersey Turnpike.

He was heading south on the back roads, traveling in a GMC van because it was less conspicuous than

his Jag. At first he'd had vague ideas of visiting his father and stepmother on Hilton Head, where they'd retired a few years ago. But it hadn't taken him long to figure out that they were the last people he wanted to see, even though they'd been urging him to visit for years, ever since he'd grown famous. Still, he had six more weeks to kill before he had to start work on another film, and he had to do something to fill the time, so he kept on driving.

As he pulled away from the pumps, he caught sight of the female attendant watching him through the plate-glass window. She hadn't recognized him. No one had recognized him since he'd left L.A. He doubted that even his friends would have known him unless they looked closely. The phony accent he'd used in his last film, along with the longer hair he'd grown, had successfully concealed his identity for three thousand miles. Even more important than anonymity, the disguise afforded him at least temporary escape from being himself.

He turned out onto the wet county road and automatically patted his jacket pocket for his cigarettes only to remember he no longer smoked. They wouldn't let him smoke in the hospital, and by the time he was dismissed, he'd fallen out of the habit. He'd fallen out of the habit of enjoying all of life's sensory pleasures. Food no longer held any appeal, and neither did liquor or sex. He could no longer even remember why they had once been so important. Ever since he'd lost his children he felt as if he belonged more to the world of the dead than the living.

In the seven months since Lilly had taken the girls, he'd learned more than most lawyers knew about the sexual abuse of children. While he had lain in his hospital bed, he'd read stories of fathers violating tiny babies in unspeakable ways, of perverted, twisted men who preyed upon one daughter after another, betraying the most sacred trust that could exist between two human beings.

But he wasn't one of those monsters. He was also no longer the naive hothead who had stormed Mike Longacre's office demanding that his attorney put an end to Lilly's false accusations. Now he knew that the law was also full of injustice.

No matter what personal sacrifices he had to make, he wouldn't let his children end up in the underground, where they would be deprived not only of their father but of their mother as well. So he stayed away from them, relying on the international fleet of detectives he had hired to keep them under watch. With an increasing sense of dull resignation, he followed Lilly's wanderings with the girls, first to Paris and then to Italy. They'd spent August in Vienna, September in London. Now they were in Switzerland.

Everyplace she went, she engaged new governesses, new tutors, new specialists, all of whose bills he paid. From the interviews the detectives held with those she had hired, he knew that Becca was

regressing and that Rachel had become increasing difficult to control. Lilly herself was the only stability the girls had, and forcing them into the underground would end even that.

Even so, he ached for his daughters so badly that he was sometimes tempted.

Over the past seven

months his pain had gone beyond the torture of a raw, gaping wound into something more primal, a desolate emptiness of the soul that was worse than any physical anguish because it was a living death.

For a while he had been able to direct his despair into the role he was playing, but when the filming was done, he had lost his place to hide.

He had also gradually lost the ability to see any of the world's beauty, and now he only registered its horror. He could no longer read newspapers or watch television because he couldn't endure another account of a newborn baby abandoned in a trash can, umbilical cord still attached to its small, blue body.

He couldn't read about another severed head found in a cardboard carton, or a young woman gang raped. Murders, mutilations, evil. He had lost his ability to separate his own pain from the suffering of others.

All the world's pain belonged to him now, one atrocity after another, until his shoulders were bowed with the weight and he knew he would break if he didn't find a way to protect himself.

And so he was running, hiding away inside the skin of someone he'd invented, a persona so menacing that ordinary people drew away from him. He played jazz tapes instead of listening to the radio, slept in his van rather than a motel room with its beckoning television, avoided big towns and newspaper stands.

He sheltered himself in the only way he knew how because he had grown so fragile he was afraid he would shatter.

A tractor-trailer rig kicked water at his van as he turned from the county access road out onto a state highway. The wipers made several half-moon passes over the windshield before he could see. Through the blur he spotted a blue road sign imprinted with the white H that indicated a nearby hospital. It was what he'd been looking for, the fragile thread that allowed him both to protect himself and try to save his soul at the same time.

He followed the blue and white hospital signs through a two-stoplight town until he came to a small, unassuming brick structure. He parked in the farthest corner of the lot away from the hospital building and climbed into the back of the van. The seats had been removed so there was an area big enough to stretch out his bedroll, which was now neatly folded away next to an expensive leather suitcase that held his clothes. He pushed it aside and drew forward a cheap vinyl suitcase.

For several moments he did nothing. And then, with something that might have been either a curse or a prayer, he opened the lid.

* * *

'"Ow does a bloke get some service around 'ere?" Nurse Grayson's head shot up from the chart she had

been studying. She was generally unshockable, but her mouth dropped open at the improbable figure

who stood on the other side of the nurse's station desk, grinning devilishly at her.

He wore a frizzy red wig topped with a black pirate's scarf knotted at the side.

A purple satin shirt was tucked into voluminous black trousers that were spangled with saucer-sized red and purple polka dots. A single exaggerated eyebrow arched into the clown white that covered his face. He had a bright red mouth, another dot of red on the end of his nose, and a purple patch shaped like a star covering his left eye.

Nurse Grayson quickly recovered. "Who are you?"

He gave her a naughty grin that made her forget she was fifty-five years old and long past the age where she could be taken in by a charming scoundrel.

He sketched an overly dramatic bow before her, tapping his forehead, chest, and waist. "Patches the Pirate is me name, me pretty, and a more pitiful excuse for a sea dog, you'll never set eyes on."

Despite herself, his mischievous manner drew her in. "Now why is that?"