Cracked (33 page)

Darren had it all arranged.

While Skipper, Marie and a veritable army of security stayed at his house with Matthew, Darren had talked our other brother, Laurence, into going to stay at Ginger and Fred’s house in California. It had been decided that there had to be a Cleary presence at the house there, on the off-chance that Jeanette showed up there with Luke. I pictured Laurence pacing, telling bad jokes and getting in Marta’s way, and felt comforted. If Luke wound up there, he would be so safe and loved.

Skip and Marie lived in the old Cleary house in Downs Mills, Maine, which they had nearly gutted and renovated. I hadn’t been there in three years, but as Darren said, it would be a good home base for the purpose of our trip: bring home our nephew, and kill Jeanette Vasquez.

“I wonder,” I said to Darren on the plane. I stretched my legs, which I could almost do. We were flying first class, which was a nice treat, even if it wasn’t a private plane. “I wonder how many of them there are.” It was the thought that had been going around and around in my head incessantly.

“We’re not even sure she’s here, Bean,” Darren said. “We’re making this trip on Jack’s paranoid delusion about a conspiracy with his foster family.” Somehow, Darren refused to believe this was as big as I thought it might be. Yes, Jeanette and Lola and Miller may have been Jack’s foster siblings, and they had found out who he was, and that he was rich now. They were bad people. But the rest of it? He had a hard time with it.

“Darren, trust me. I just know this.” I’d told him about my dream about Ginger, about “King of the Road,” and Bangor, Maine. He had an easier time believing in some telepathic twin bond with Ginger than he did in Jack’s stories of his childhood. “Still, she must have somebody else here. Michael, maybe? The father, though I hate to use that word? If he’s still alive, that is.”

I knew I was flying closer to Jeanette and Luke. I knew that like I knew my own name. I trusted Jack, and I trusted Ginger. I closed my eyes.

I felt like once this was over I could sleep for a year or two. Maybe after calling D-Man and getting a nice big unlimited supply of crack. My trusty Altoids tin with my stash was gone, taken or lost at some point in the last day or two. Physically, I had to admit I did feel stronger without it. Perhaps this was a temporary cure for addiction, I thought: hunt down and kill a few sociopaths who seemed to be intent on murdering all the people I loved. Rage and homicide in place of escape and self-destruction.

Still. I knew that after this was over, I would be reunited with crack, one way or another. It was my reward, and for however long I decided to live, my life partner.

I grabbed Darren’s hand.

“If anything happens to you,” I started to say, but Darren stopped me.

“Bean. Right back at you.” He was staring straight ahead. I knew that this had to be all hitting him at least as hard as it had me, but we hadn’t had much time to talk. I wanted to get this over with, so Darren and I could spend some time with the twins. “When this is over, Bean?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“You’re going to rehab.”

“Darren,” I started, but he stopped me.

“No, Danny. I don’t want to hear it. I know you’ve been clean for a few days now. And I know that just as soon as we finish this, you’re going right back to it. And if you think I’m going to let that happen…” He squeezed my hand. “Danny, I lost Ginger. I am not going to lose you too.”

I squeezed his hand back, but I didn’t say anything. Darren released my hand and burrowed into himself, and slept.

* * *

Bangor International Airport is no LAX, and for that I was grateful. It was just daybreak in Maine, and when we landed the sky looked both gray and clean.

“Home,” Darren said. He had slept fitfully throughout the flight, while my eyes were now dry and red from long hours awake.

We made our way to the nearest rental counter to get a car, but the customer service rep said he was sorry but they were all sold out.

His nametag told us that he was called Blake G. I wanted to know what the G stood for, but I held back, for once. “Sorry, Mr. Cleary,” he said. He made a sad face. “It’s December,” he said, “and we don’t have a big fleet here, as I’m sure you can imagine. People like to come east for Christmas month. We don’t have the Escalade you requested.”

“No worries, Blake,” Darren said. “What do you have free for us?”

Blake rented us a chrome-green PT Cruiser.

“Very inconspicuous,” I said, once we’d thrown our meagre luggage into the hatch. “Good for staying under the radar.”

“Something tells me that whoever wants to know where we are will find us anyway, Beanpole,” Darren said. “Damn, this thing is awkward to drive.” Darren was a low-slung sports car kind of guy, morally and aesthetically opposed to SUVs and other high-riding vehicles. But it was winter in Maine.

A soft snow had started to fall, and the landscape couldn’t have looked more different than Southern California if we had beamed ourselves to Mars. I rolled down the windows manually – Blake hadn’t rented us a bells-and-whistles model – and took a deep breath of air.

“Wow,” I said. “Smell that?”

“What, Bean,” Darren said.

“Smells like childhood,” I said.

Darren was silent, trying, I presumed, to get used to the new vehicle.

“What exactly are we doing here?” he said, once we were on the highway, heading north. The sun had come out, hard and clear.

“We’re going to find Luke and you’re going to take him back to Toronto with you. And then I’m going to end this,” I answered lightly. “We’re going to Skip and Marie’s. Home base.”

“We are,” Darren corrected. “Going to end this.”

“Darren,” I said, but he interrupted me.

“Why in the name of fuck do you think I’m here, Danny?” he said, and I watched his knuckles turn white on the steering wheel. “Tell me that.”

“To get revenge,” I answered.

“Right,” he said. “But where would I rather be?”

“With your nephew,” I said.

“You are correct, sir,” Darren answered. “But we made a pact. Remember? I’m in this as deep as you are,” he said. He glanced over at me, and I instinctively watched the road for him.

“Somebody needs to take care of Luke and get him to safety. And,” I said, to cut off any further arguments, “we need a gun.” I was looking in the passenger side mirror. I kept expecting to see someone following us. I hoped that if someone was, it would be Dave. I had a feeling that we were going to need help.

“Correction,” Darren said, smoking furiously. “We need several.”

* * *

After Mom and Dad were killed and the old house was empty, Skip and Marie had offered to buy out the rest of the sibs, but none of us really wanted the few grand any sale of the old house would have given. We all liked the idea of Skip in the place, and knowing he was there made us all feel, I think, like we still had a home to go back to.

Best of all, for Darren and me just now, we knew where the key was hidden, and better yet, where Skip kept the weapons.

Dad had always had plenty of guns, for hunting and target practice, and Skip had kept up the tradition. He didn’t have the heart for hunting, didn’t have the taste for it, and even less for cleaning and eating the gamey meat. But he liked tradition, and the contents of Dad’s gun locker in the basement would still be cleaned and oiled regularly.

“I feel funny about this,” I said, as we turned off the paved secondary road and onto the rutted dirt road that led to the old homestead.

“I know,” Darren replied. “This thing has terrible suspension.” The car was bouncing a lot, but he exaggerated it, bobbing up and down in his seat and making his voice sound all wobbly.

“No, I mean about going to the old house,” I said, and saw that Darren had been kidding. “Sorry. I’m a little tense.”

“I know, Bean. Me too.” We were a few miles away, and the morning had turned sunny and bright. I rolled my window down and stuck my head out, like a dog being taken for a drive. It helped.

“I keep thinking about Dave,” I said, after settling back into the vehicle and rolling up the window. We weren’t in Orange County anymore.

“Oh, do you now,” Darren said. “Oh,
really
.”

“Shut up,” I said. “You know what I mean. I haven’t seen him since I left him at my apartment that day.” The day I had gone to meet Jack for lunch. The day we had been in bed together again and I could almost feel what it would be like to be whole again.

The day Jack died.

We were both silent for a minute. I wouldn’t think about Jack yet. I couldn’t. When the time came – when I had gotten Luke to safety, when I had killed Jeanette and any other of this twisted “family” who might be involved, I would bury Jack my own way. Jack and Ginger. The two biggest loves of my life.

I didn’t know how much Dave knew about where things stood now – that Matt was safe, that Jeanette had Luke – or how he knew anything at all. Though I supposed he could be talking to Chandler York, Fred’s lawyer. I sincerely hoped so. I made a mental note to call Chandler’s office from Skip and Marie’s and find out myself if he knew anything at all about Dave or his whereabouts.

We drove another ten minutes in silence, and then we were turning into the old driveway.

“Wow,” Darren said. “Place looks the same, huh.”

It did, and it didn’t. I climbed out of the car and was hit with the old familiar smell of fresh wood, from the mill two miles away. Something about the quality of the light – so different from anyplace else I had been, and so evocative of childhood – made my eyes water.

But the house had recently been painted a nice deep green, and Marie had done a lot of landscaping. Not to my taste, but if you liked fake wooden wells painted bright red and a walkway lined with big rocks painted white, then it was the place for you.

Darren was yards ahead of me, lifting the third rock on the right from the door, and grabbing the front door key from underneath.

“Everybody in Downs Mills knows where that key is,” I said. “I don’t know why they bother locking it.” I hugged myself. It was cold, and the snow had started again.

“They didn’t,” Darren said, trying the front door. It was unlocked.

My heart started beating faster. I had been kidding about the key – Skip was, for such a resolutely small-town man, pretty security conscious. Only the day before, he had told me that he was thinking about putting a security system into the old place because he was worried about Marie out there on her own when he was in Bangor at the car lot.

Skipper would never have left the door unlocked.

Darren had his hand up, indicating that I should stay where I was, while he checked it out.

“Fuck that,” I said, marching toward him. As I did, I heard something, a high-pitched reverberating noise, and a muffled pop, and Darren stopped ahead of me. In what seemed like slow motion, he fell backwards, and I could see the hunter’s arrow stuck in his chest, burrowed past his jacket, into a point almost directly in the middle of his torso.

I think I screamed. I know I looked up.

Detective Harry Miller stood a few feet back from the doorway of Skipper’s house,
my
house, and in the time I had run to Darren, he had restrung his bow. He was pointing it at me.

In the surreal way that the brain functions in extreme fear and panic, I noticed that he had shaved and had a haircut.

And then I ran, straight at him.

He fired.

Miller wasn’t as good as he thought he was.

I threw myself over Darren, bounding over him like I was running hurdles, then broke into a somersault, keeping myself as low to the ground as I could while I ran. I had only about thirty feet to cover, but Miller had a crossbow, and it was already strung.

I felt a burning pain in the side of my head, and then I couldn’t hear much of anything at all on my right side, but before he could string another arrow, I jumped up the stairs and dived into his legs. Miller saw it coming, knew that’s what I’d planned to do, and I could tell that he had tried to ground his legs firmly to give him purchase, but his balance was compromised by trying to restring his weapon. He went down, but not before he managed to kick the side of my head. The bad side. The side that had blood running from it.

I held onto him with everything I had. I held his legs as closely together as I could, and realized that when he fell, Miller had hit his head on the hall table. He wasn’t out, but he was stunned. He was moaning. His shirt had pulled away from his shoulder, and I could see a large bandage there. This is where he had been shot. Good.

Outside, Darren wasn’t making a sound, which was a very bad sign. I had to finish this, and get back to him.

The bow had skittered a few feet away from Miller, and he was lying on a leather quiver of arrows that was strapped to his back. But one solitary arrow, the one that he had planned to kill me with, was on the floor, just beyond his head.

I leapt for it, but it meant letting Miller go for a second. His eyes were open, and I could see a bit of blood on the floor. He had cut his head on the table. Head wounds bleed like crazy, but I knew it probably wasn’t serious.

Miller grabbed my legs, but I had the arrow.

In one movement, he surprised me by flipping me over onto my back, from my face plant on the floor.

Blood was trickling down his face and onto mine as he wrapped his hands around my throat and squeezed.

I closed my eyes and found myself praying to God and to Ginger as I grabbed the arrow firmly in my hands and plunged it, as hard as I could with the decreasing oxygen to my brain, into his neck. I might not have been able to, had he been able to squeeze even a fraction harder, but the wound on his shoulder had weakened him.

Miller’s hands immediately left my throat, and I turned over and coughed, bringing up some bright red blood. I hoped nothing was too injured there. I had to save Darren, and my adrenaline was too high to feel immediate pain.

But I had aimed well. The arrow had gone straight and deep into Miller’s neck, but he remained on his knees, making a gurgling sound. His hands went to the arrow. He was trying to take it out. Quickly I grabbed another arrow from the quiver on the floor, but I watched as he fell over to one side, knocking one of Marie’s Royal Doulton figurines from an end table onto the hardwood floor, smashing it.