Authors: Grant McKenzie
CHAPTER 53
Lance Corporal James Ronson had inherited an ugly house in a simple neighborhood that showed its age with liver spots and varicose veins. An architect’s designed-by-committee nightmare, the early 1970s split-level had been built of sawdust and chewing gum before getting marooned upon a high concrete basement with undersized windows.
Its cracked stucco siding and overgrown front lawn reminded Wallace of homes in his own North Shore neighborhood that — on a double-dog-dare to prove adolescent bravery — he used to egg or cover in toilet paper when he could sneak enough rolls out of the house.
Neglect often invited youthful imaginations to assume such homes must be either haunted or lair to an evil cannibalistic witch. The truth usually wasn’t much better than the fiction: an alcoholic bachelor or lonely widow whose children were now too busy with their own lives to ever stop around.
Or in this case, a soldier. Kidnapped, tortured and dismissed. If he had kept to himself, Wallace could have mustered some pity. But he hadn’t. He left his cave and attacked innocents, which made him nothing short of a monster.
Wallace glanced over at the empty seat beside him. Laurel had told him she couldn’t take part, but she had made him change into one of her dad’s clean shirts and said he was welcome to borrow her car.
“If you get caught,” she added. “I’ll tell the police you stole it.”
It was a fair trade. And for what he had to do, he was glad she wasn’t along.
Wallace picked up his shotgun. The Defender felt warm in his hand, even comforting. Reloaded and only a little worse for wear, it gave him strength. And even if it was false, even if all he held was an inanimate tool, he took whatever he could get.
“Let’s do this,” he said.
Gun in hand, Wallace slipped out of the truck and moved up the weed-infested garden path at a brisk pace. Four concrete steps to the front door. He tried the handle, but this wasn’t Canada. It was locked.
No time to waste
.
Wallace knocked and pressed his ear to the door.
When he heard footsteps approach from the other side, he took two steps back.
When the handle began to turn, his foot lashed out.
The door smashed open, knocking whoever stood behind it flat on his ass.
Wallace rushed inside.
The man on the floor was barefoot, wearing baby blue boxers and a thin white T-shirt. Blood spotted the front of the shirt from a dripping, freshly-flattened nose.
Wallace pumped the shotgun, letting the man hear the anus-puckering
Click Clack
, while he kicked the door closed behind them for privacy.
The man lifted his hands to cover his face. He was already trembling. A good start.
“I ain’t got nothing worth stealing, man. A few old computers maybe, some small tools. You’d break your back moving the TV. It’s a bloody dinosaur.”
“James Ronson?” asked Wallace.
The man peered out from beneath splayed fingers. “Yeah, that’s me.”
“My name is Wallace Carver. That mean anything to you?”
“No.” His forehead crinkled into deep furrows. “Should it?”
“My wife and sons have been abducted. I think you’re involved.”
Ronson lowered his hands and looked up at Wallace through intelligent but muddied chocolate-brown eyes.
“You’re the bus driver,” he said.
A surge of anger made the shotgun tremble against Wallace’s shoulder. “That’s me.” His voice cracked. “What have you done with my family?”
“Hold on, hold on,” Ronson blurted. “I wasn’t involved, OK? I mean, yeah, I know about it, but, man, I just handle the comms, do a little computer work, you know? I set up the phones, it’s what I do, but I didn’t want nothing else to do with it.”
Wallace snarled and kicked at Ronson’s legs. “Get up.” He waved his gun in the direction of the living room. “You’re going to tell me everything you know or I’m going to make al Qaeda look like a fucking babysitter.”
Ronson blanched and rolled over to push himself to his feet. He was skin and bone with a two-day growth of beard. Clusters of scabbed-over needle marks and tiny symmetrical cuts that could have come from a razor blade ran along the inside of his arms and the backs of his legs. But there was also enough muscle definition to let Wallace know he hadn’t completely given up on himself. Not yet.
As he walked, Ronson tilted his head back and lifted his T-shirt to press it against his bloody nose. His exposed back was etched in raised scar tissue.
Wallace looked closer. The scars formed a familiar grid pattern; a game he played with his sons; a game they loved because Wallace concentrated hard on losing nearly every turn. Someone had carved a game of X & Os on the man’s flesh. A large C cut deeply across the grid, showing the game had ended in a tie.
Ronson turned and dropped onto an ugly couch in the middle of an even uglier room. Asparagus green shag carpet covered the floor and continued inexplicably halfway up the walls. The walls, in turn, were painted a lighter shade of mint as though the designer had thought a slight contrast would make all the difference.
The shag was beaten down from years of shuffling feet and featured several prominent burn marks. The ceiling was yellow from cigarette smoke and streaked with ghostly fingers of soot from a gas fireplace in the corner that had likely passed its last inspection more than three decades earlier.
“I know,” said Ronson. “Hideous, ain’t it.”
“Suits you,” said Wallace.
Ronson sighed resignedly. “Yeah, you could be right.”
He lowered his T-shirt as the blood in his nostrils began to clot. More scars, in a similar pattern to the ones on his back, vanished beneath the thin fabric.
Wallace resettled the shotgun in the crook of his shoulder. “Who’s got my family?”
Ronson glanced nervously at a small table beside the couch. A blown-glass pipe and several tiny nuggets of crystallized cocaine sat on a ceramic pie plate celebrating America’s bicentennial.
“You mind if I smoke?” he asked.
Ronson’s hand was already reaching for the pipe when Wallace smashed it to bits with the blunt end of his shotgun.
“Fuuuck!” Ronson yanked his hand back and stared at his fingers to make sure they hadn’t been mangled.
Wallace snarled again. “Answer the fucking question.”
“I was gonna. I was gonna,” protested Ronson. “I just . . . just needed a little.” He ran his fingers through his hair, digging the nails into his scalp with a horrible scraping noise. “Fffuuuck. Fuuuckers. You have no fffucking idea who—”
Wallace slammed his shotgun down on the side table again, splintering the wood and sending any remaining shards of pottery, glass and crack spilling into the deep-pile carpet.
He glared at Ronson. “Next time, it’s your fucking hands. Both of them. Then your feet. I’m sure you know exactly how many bones are in your feet? Al Qaeda may have used you for sport, soldier, but you have no fucking idea how serious I am!”
Ronson held up his hands in surrender. “OK, OK, but they’ll fucking kill me, man.”
“Fast or slow?” asked Wallace.
Ronson looked up at him, confused. “What?”
“Will they kill you fast or slow?” Wallace repeated. “’Cause I’ll damn well make it slow. So fucking slow, you’ll wish you were in hell for days before you actually get there.”
Ronson began to chew the nails of his right hand. “You’re fucking scary, man.”
Wallace scowled and pressed his face closer to Ronson’s. “Who’s got my family?”
Ronson sighed heavily and spat out a few shards of fingernail. “That would be Sergeant Douglas Gallagher. He was my unit commander. Hell of a Marine.”
Wallace ground his teeth. “Why?”
Ronson’s eyes widened in surprise. “Why did he take them?”
“Yes,” Wallace snapped.
“To punish you, naturally.”
“Why?” Wallace repeated.
The surprise left Ronson’s face to be replaced with genuine puzzlement.
“Because of what you did.”
“And what was that?” asked Wallace.
“Come on.” Ronson smirked nervously. “How could you not know?”
Wallace rushed forward and jammed the barrel of the shotgun against the man’s temple. The cold steel cut into flesh as Ronson strained his neck muscles to stay upright.
“OK, OK. FUCK!” Ronson fixed a fierce glare on Wallace. “You killed his wife and daughter. They were all he had left after he was kicked out of the Corps. You took them away. He’s not the kind of man who could ever let that go.”
Ronson was unable to disguise a look of unbridled disgust as he added, “And who could blame him?”
CHAPTER 54
Gallagher dragged his disbelieving gaze away from the dark, empty hole.
“Where the fuck are they?”
He turned to glare at the house where the red-haired woman was silhouetted in the kitchen window. From this distance, her expression was unreadable.
Mr. Black frowned, relaxed his grip on his curved knife, and peered back down into the well. Gallagher’s flashlight beam was moving across the walls in a random, useless pattern.
Something glistened and was gone.
It had looked like—
“Go back,” said Mr. Black.
“What?”
“Move your flashlight back to the left. I saw something.”
Gallagher swung the beam across the slippery stone wall.
“There,” said Mr. Black.
Gallagher froze in place, his light illuminating a crack in the wall where several large stones had been pulled out to form a narrow ledge.
Two small boys were huddled in a cramped crevasse that looked barely large enough for one. They were pale and frail, frightened and starved. The cold and damp had sapped their strength to the point where they barely had the strength to shield their eyes from the flashlight’s brutal white glare.
“Resilient little buggers,” said Gallagher. “I wasn’t sure they’d survive.”
And, thought Mr. Black, wouldn’t that have been for the best?
CHAPTER 55
Wallace took a step back from the couch and wiped a sheen of nervous sweat from his face. He moved his tongue around the inside of his mouth, trying to get rid of a bad taste.
It still didn’t make sense
.
“How did I kill this man’s family?” he asked.
“How?” Ronson blurted. “Fuck me! You have to know that.”
“Pretend I don’t,” Wallace snapped. His voice was sharp and hard and tinged with violence. At the same time, his finger quivered above the trigger, so close it could easily slip. A simple spasm; an accidental twitch.
Ronson gulped and a wash of panic rippled in a wave from forehead to chin. He glanced to the side table where his pipe had been smashed to powder.
“Mm-maybe we could have a drink? I’ve got
—”
Wallace lashed out with his foot, sending the small table crashing into the wall.
Ronson winced. “OK. OK. It was a bus crash. Last year in Canada.” He looked up at Wallace. “You were driving the bus, right? Gallagher showed me—”
“What?” Wallace practically snarled. “What did he show you?”
“Photos. Clippings from the newspaper. There was one of the crash on the bridge and another of you receiving some medal from the mayor. Christ, all the medals stripped from us, how you—”
“Did you read it?” asked Wallace.
“The story. Uh, no. But Gallagher told us exact—”
“FUCK!”
Wallace spun the shotgun around in his hands and slammed the butt into the wall above Ronson’s head. Brittle chunks of plaster sprayed over the seated man as the gun smashed through to the studs. Smaller chunks littered the air as Wallace yanked the gun out of the hole and spun it back around.
The muzzle was aimed at Ronson again and Wallace’s finger trembled as though fighting an overwhelming urge for carnage.
Ronson held up his hands. Chalky dust stuck to the sweat beading his forehead and the twin trails of blood dripping from his nose.
“Look . . .” He tried to sound calm despite the tremor in his voice. “I know it was probably an accident. Fuck, if I don’t know about that . . . but Gallagher went through a lot in the sand and he didn’t adjust too well to being back home. Not that it was easy on any of us, especially with the Corps turning its back, but hell . . . his wife and daughter were everything to him, man. He was trying to adjust, trying to win them back, and then you
—”
“Win them back?” said Wallace. He shifted uneasily on the balls of his feet.
“Yeah. Carly left him. Said she couldn’t live with his moods anymore. Took their daughter, Katie, with her. If Gallagher was dark before she left, Christ, he really plummeted after. The Sarge was always a scary motherfucker, but . . . anyway, he had his old unit track her down. We didn’t know she had gone to Canada until, well . . . Bone found her, but by then it was too late . . .”
Ronson let the rest of the sentence drift, as if sensing that Wallace was no longer listening. The shotgun barrel had slowly tilted down, aiming away from his face to hover at the
center of the scar-tissue grid that marked his ruined stomach.
WALLACE STARED
out the living room window, his focus adrift. He had forgotten to draw the curtains.
How could he have been so careless?
He saw his own face reflected in the glass.
The fear in his eyes reminded him of the woman. Her features had been sharp, almost skeletal, with high cheek bones above deep hollows; plump, determined lips; and a prominent, almost-mannish chin. In photographs, she likely would have been stunning. In person, however, it took a sprinkle of light freckles across the bridge of her nose to soften the effect and elicit any sense of vulnerability.
Her hair was auburn and fell away from her face in tendrils, reaching past the broken glass, dangling towards the watery abyss . . .
Wallace blinked, not wanting to remember, but unable to shake the morbid hold the memory had on him.
The woman’s daughter was also thin, but not to the same anemic degree. She had darker hair and a rounder face, but like her mother, she possessed amazingly large and expressive eyes.
As they dangled over the edge of the bridge
— steel cables snapping, glass popping, metal twisting and groaning with their crushed car miraculously and tentatively locked in the bus’s front bike carrier — both sets of eyes were focused entirely on him.
Pleading.
Despite the blood. Despite his injuries. He was their world. Their only hope.
And he had been terrified
.
WALLACE BLINKED
again. For a moment he was unsure of what was memory and what was real.
A shadow moved beyond the window.
A figure approaching.
Running.
Fast.
“Fuck!”
Wallace pivoted with the shotgun tight against his shoulder as the front door was flung open.
“Don’t shoot,” called a familiar voice.
Ronson looked up from the couch in confusion as Wallace instantly lowered his weapon.
Crow poked his head around the corner and Wallace felt his heart swell with gratitude and relief. His friend’s face was bruised and swollen, but the damage did nothing to diminish the size of his grin.
When Crow stepped into the room, he had a Defender shotgun cradled in one arm.
“Sorry to burst in like this,” he said. He held up a glowing mobile phone in his free hand. “But it’s for you.”