I tried to retrace the route that John Carvalho had driven in his heap two nights ago. I wasn't sure of the way, but I felt I was on the right track, my instincts honed sharp by adrenaline, and before long I came upon the old barn set back from the road, and I drew in. Leaving the headlights on, I got out. Bats fluttered through the air above the tilted cupola. Ahead stood the boat on a cradle; with the wind moving in the high grass, it appeared to be underway in a rolling sea. In the glow of the headlights, I walked along the path and came to the sand road that led out to Shawmut Point. The cable was down and I could make out dry tire grooves in the damp sand, where a vehicle had recently passed.
Back in the Blazer, I engaged the four-wheel drive and shut off the lights. Between the expanses of clearing night sky, sand, and ocean, there was enough visibility to maneuver by, and as I did, my mind's eye kept panning back to the human remains lying in the cottage, scanning it for something I might have seen but not noticed. It was one of the cop skills I'd once possessed.
Soon, ahead of me in the gloom, I could make out a row of houses, including one that Rand had owned, which would shortly
be torn down to make way for the final phase of Point Pines. I tried for a moment to imagine this place as it must once have existed, pristine, with a margin of low trees and long stretches of dunes and empty beach. Off to one side was Carvalho's old station wagon. It hadn't needed a hidden kill switch to bring it to a halt. I could see that the wheels were sunk to the hubs in the soft sand. I got out and went over to the car. It was empty and unlocked. I opened it. The interior held the aromas of dog and the old man's fear. I glanced around. I tried the glove box, but it was locked, or jammed. Using my key, I pried the edge down enough to get a hold and I yanked the lid open. Inside, among old maps and papers was a cell phone. I was surprised; it didn't seem like technology Carvalho would trust. I pressed the power button, but it was dead. And now I was pretty sure why Paula Jensen's calls to her daughter had never reached her. I slid the phone into my pocket.
From beyond the row of houses, I could hear the sound of the surf rolling against the slope of outer beach. I was sick of the ocean. I wanted a desert, a barren land without people and problems. I approached the last house, which sat slightly apart from the others.
It was like finally seeing a place that you've only heard about in stories. It was the scene of TJ's and Red Dog's dark night of decision, where they'd played an adult game with booze and a gun, and pushed friendship to its limit. And it was the scene of harsh discovery for Iva Rand, where betrayal had slapped her in the face. There were probably a host of other memories, fond ones, of family and closeness and fun, and some bad ones, too, but I didn't know them. The house was unimpressive, in need of the TLC an occupying family would give it, but its family had moved on to other things and were scattered now, and the house was doomed to destruction to make way for bigger things. It was a small drab structure; the only splash of color was a cluster of old lobster buoys, which hung beside the door, like a corsage on a gray dress, though under starlight even they didn't offer much. I was ten feet from it when the door opened.
Gruff lunged out, tugging John Carvalho, who held the dog on a chain leash. In his other hand was the Python. He was holding it up, peering over the barrel of it at me. I raised my hands, the way
I had when old Vito had come into my office with the sawed-off. Had that been only a few days ago? It felt far longer. Carvalho stopped where he stood.
He was a massive, humped presence in his old work clothes, his large dog taut on its leash. “I could've killed you at any point coming in here,” he said, his hoarse voice cracking.
“You didn't, and that's good. It tells a lot.”
I was near enough to see large loops of perspiration darkening the shirt fabric under his arms. His forehead was clenched in tight furrows. I was trying to read what went on behind them, there within the vortexes of his dread and paranoia. Was there sickness? The kind that would lead to the torture and murder of a child? I tried to void the image of the body in the cottage, though it didn't want to go away. “I'm not here to hurt you,” I said. “Or anyone. Put the gun down.” I slid a glance at the dog, which stood rock-still, its eyes locked on me. I drew a slow breath and went nearer.
“Stop!”
From the other side of the low rise just beyond the house, the waves beat monotonously against the shore. “Let me take the girl,” I said.
Carvalho's small, dark eyes showed no comprehension.
“She's here, isn't she?”
“What're you talking about?”
“She made a cell-phone call to her mother.” Still he didn't move; so I applied whatever pressure a lie might bear. “I traced the call to here.”
He shook his head firmly, and all of a sudden, I had my doubts. I even felt sympathy for him: his daughter had been taken from him, and it had cost him his wife. He'd been paid off with bad real estate and worse promises. “We can talk about this,” I said.
“Why? You seem to have the answers.” His voice sounded on the verge of a wail.
“I was slow in putting it together. I should've picked up on it when you first told me about the cameras at the nuke plantâthat's not your only fear about being out here, is it? You've worried Rand might be watching you. You didn't want to be found out.”
He hooked a thick forearm across his brow, mopping sweat.
“Come on,” I said. “All this is negotiable.”
“That's the trouble with the world. Everything is. Sentences for criminals, tax rates for the superrich, even grades for students ⦠it's why I left teaching. Nothing's clear or sure anymore.”
“It never was, Mr. Carvalho. Some people have just tried to convince us it was. But it's a lie.”
“It's how they
want
it to be,” he said with sweaty desperation. “I thought you were one of the smarter ones, who understood it. I tried to explain it to you.”
I knew his riffsâeyes in the sky, Jews in Hollywood, Arabs running the gas pumps, alien encampments on the dark side of the moon ⦠and an unholy high command pulling all the puppet strings. Or there was Rand, who owned Standish. They were simpler scenarios of the constant struggle of the good with the bad, courage with cowardice, all going on right inside our own selves. “Think,” I said. “You haven't physically hurt anyone yet. Have you? Michelle Nickerson made a phone call last night. On this phone.” I drew out the cellular unit I'd taken from his car. Sweat was streaming from my brow.
“You're not making sense,” he mumbled.
“Tell me about the girl in the cottage behind your motel. The hitchhiker.”
His eyes widened for an instant. He heaved a breath and seemed to recoil at the idea of my having found out, or at something else churning inside him. “When did you ⦔ His voice almost broke.
“Just tonight,” I said. “Fran knows, too. The police have been called.”
Now he did moan. “She ⦠IâI didn't hurt her. She walked into the office off the road one day. She'd been thumbing, she told me, and someone picked her up. The driver said he'd take her where she wanted to go, but instead he drove her to someplace and ⦔ I could see his Adam's apple bobble in his thick throat. “Then he ⦠kicked her out of his car, in the woods. When she came to the motel, she was scared to death. I let her stay in the cabin.”
“You didn't go to the police, though. Or a hospital.”
“She didn't want that. No. She was sick, and scared, so I let her stay a few daysâwe had those old cabins no one was using. I didn't know then it was drugs making her so sick.”
“She overdosed?”
“I was so afraid. There were reports then that she was missing. She'd run away because her father was bad to her, she said. I gave her a place to stay. I ⦠I didn't know. She stayed out there awhile and I ⦠I didn't find her right away. I got very scared.”
He looked it now, too: capable of rash and unreasoned action. I was scared, as well. “If true,” I said, forcing myself to stay calm, “you've got nothing to worry about. Do you know who it was who picked her up?”
He shook his head.
“She didn't describe the person? Or a car?”
He shook his head again, as though stubbornly resistant to the idea that he might know.
“What about where he took her?”
“It sounded like someplace ⦠remote.”
“Out here?” I asked. “Perhaps as Ginny had been?”
He drew a harsh breath and seemed ready to explode, whether in tears or violent rage, I didn't know. “All right,” I said. “All right. That's past. We have to talk about now. About Michelle Nickerson.”
For a moment he didn't move. My fear had begun to gather. Then he backed up slowly and stepped inside the door, drawing the dog with him. As he turned from me for an instant, I drew my gun. I had the idea that stopping him would take considerable force. I didn't want to have to apply itâbut I had to face the reality that I might be out of choices. I clutched the .38 by my side.
He left the dog inside. After just a moment, a young woman emerged, with Carvalho behind her, still holding his weapon. My heartbeat quickened. I knew who she was; not that she looked like any photograph I had of herâshe looked haggard. She was older than the pictures, too. Her hair, once dyed black, was matted and showing its lighter roots. Her gothic garb had been exchanged for a pair of shapeless overalls and a Cape Cod sweatshirt that looked lived in.
“Michelleâit's going to be okay,” I called, wanting it to be so.
Carvalho gripped her upper arm in one hand and pointed the Python at me with the other. It was as if the grand conspiracy he had feared in his soul, and thrilled to, had corroded the very structure of his world. Sweat was pouring off him. He glanced quickly skyward, then toward the light blinking feebly atop the Pilgrim nuclear plant across the bay to his right. He seemed disoriented.
“I'm not the Commission,” I said, hoping he was capable of discernment. “But if this goes bad, the Tri-Lateralists win.” I was talking to him in the terms of his delusions, but maybe it was the best chance any of us had of not ending up dead.
In the distance, a siren wailed. Carvalho glanced up in panic, and for an odd instant I was back in my office the day when Vito, the old pizza man, had come in holding a shotgun. A police car was coming out along the strand, not in sight yet, and there was time aplenty for this to go bad. Keeping the Python on me, Carvalho gave the girl a light shove. “Run!” She stumbled a few steps sideways, and stopped. She seemed to be coming out of a stupor. She blinked at him. “Go!” he croaked. She did, moving away from us in a run. I felt relief.
“You did right,” I told Carvalho.
He suddenly looked startled and lifted the gun.
“Don't!”
I yelled, though the word seemed to come like saltwater taffy, stretched out and torturously slow.
He paid me no attention, may not even have heard me over the distant hiss of surf. He started toward me, the weapon raised.
Growing up, I had watched Roy Rogers shoot the gun from an outlaw's hand at twenty yards. It was easy in TV-Land, and no one ever had to die.
“Stop right there,” I shoutedâanother line for the textbook.
He lumbered forward. I lifted the .38 and fired. The shot went way wide, as I'd meant it to. Inside the house, the dog was barking furiously, throwing itself against a window. “Hands high!” I yelled at Carvalho (I was on a roll), but he didn't obey me this time either. I fired wide again.
He got the idea finally. He got down on his knees and laid the Python on the sand.
“Good,” I said.
His eyes found mine and brightened for a moment; then he lay down sideways. I waded through the sand to him. I could see a dark froth on his lips and a quick-spreading stain on the front of his shirt. What? I'd missed him both times. Then, slowly, his eyes dimmedâperhaps in peace, as though in witness of something radiant and trueâor perhaps they were seeing the storied descent of a human soul through circle after circle of hell. I gaped. I'd purposely missed, and yet he was dead. In the house, the dog was leaping at the window.
I'd been right. I
had
missed Carvalho. As I'd missed whatever muffled sound Ted Rand's gun had made behind me. He held a shiny automatic, the barrel lengthened by a suppressor. Carvalho's Python had been ridiculous, too, but at least he'd had the mitt for it. This looked too big and powerful for Rand's small hand. Still, he had been able to find the trigger just fine. He glanced at me and then walked over to Carvalho, who lay on his side, his lower legs bent, his face on the sand. “Poor deluded fool,” murmured Rand.
He could've been talking about me. I looked up at the approaching sounds of people. One of them was Michelle Nickerson. The other was the cop, ShanleyâMirror Shades. He had them on now. Otherwise, he was dressed for night, in dark civilian clothing, and he was holding on to Michelle's arm. Her gaze went to the body sprawled on the sand, and her free hand came to her mouth, but she made no sound.
“I'll take that,” Rand said to me, nodding at the .38. I hesitated and then handed it over.
“Are you all right?” I asked the girl.
She paid no attention. Her expression was one of dull horror.
“Leave her and go get the boat,” Rand told Shanley. “Hurry.”
Shanley glanced at us and then released the girl's arm. When she didn't move, he turned and jogged off over the dune.
Rand looked at Michelle Nickerson, but he didn't seem interested in her. For her part, she was oblivious to both of us. In the distance, though closer now, came the rising, falling sounds of sirens. Covering us with his shiny gun, Rand said, “Come on. We're taking a ride,” and ushered us in the direction Shanley had gone.
“I'll go,” I said. “Let her stay. Her parents may be in one of those cars.”
Rand shook his head. “We all go.”
“Why?” I said. “You didn't kidnap her.”
“Keep moving.”
“She's got nothing to do with your plans. Carvalho took you, didn't he, Michelle?” She glanced at me for the first time, but she didn't speak. I said, “Maybe he heard a police dispatch that had you walking along the road at night, and he wanted to take you in. Did he hurt you?”
She blinked and shook her head slowly. “He ⦠he said I'd be safe out here. He thought something had happened to my dad. I ⦠want to go home.”
I looked at Rand. “Let her go.”
“Can't. You're rightâI didn't even know about her until you came to town asking questions. My business was with Ben. But she's fallen into it now. So have you. Move.”
I was trying to find an approach to convince him it was useless to flee, that the gunrunning was out in the open now and he'd be tagged for it, and for killing Nickerson, and John Carvalho, too. But I wasn't going to be able to persuade him. Rand wasn't a person who spooked easily: he finagled and bought and soft-talked; he offered Faustian bargains, and when those weren't enough, he rode roughshod over anything or anyone foolish enough to be in his way. He burned out resisters, as he had Chet Van Owen, only to turn around and give him a job. He drowned a girl and deeded her father a worthless motel. He ransacked Indian graves, then built a museum for the bones. He was tough and sweet and as remorseless as a great white shark. He hadn't had anything to do with Michelle's disappearance, but that wasn't important to him now.
We heard a boat approaching, and Rand ushered us down a slope to where we could see the skiff coming ashore. Shanley gunned it in close, tilted the outboard motor, and ran the bow onto the beach. Rand motioned us toward it. “Let her go,” I pleaded once more. “She can't do anything to stop you.”
Rand pointed his gun at me. “Neither can you.”
It was a punky old aluminum skiff with a newish outboard motor, no running lights. I saw a life jacket and some cushions. “Put on the jacket,” I told Michelle as we sat on the middle seat. Rand didn't object. With zombie movements, she drew it on, snapped the buckles. Rand shoved the boat back out and jumped in and sat facing us. Shanley got the motor going and came about. “Head for the channel,” Rand ordered. “That green light's our bearing.”
Shanley gave the motor full throttle and we moved out quickly. I felt the skiff's flimsiness as it began to bang against the small waves. The motor was newer, but I wondered if it was the boat that Red Dog and Teddy Rand had gone out in with whiskey and a gun all those years ago to weigh their futures. It was part of my need to put all the pieces into a whole, even when they were of small consequence by now. Away from the shelter that Shawmut afforded, the wind spanked at us and the swells grew.
“The person who picked up that runaway girl,” I said to Rand, “was it you?”
He looked at me with an expression of hatred. I had my answer. He waved the gun impatiently. “Keep quiet.” I was forced to grip the seat as we bounced over swells. Back on the land, the flicker of lights signaled the approach of several vehicles moving through the scrub oaks, heading for the point, like a small cortege. I hoped that Fran Carvalho wasn't with them.
And with that thought, I realized how Rand and Shanley had come to be here. The cop had taken Fran's call at the station and pumped her for details about her dad's being gone. I turned slightly to look back at Shanley as he worked the outboard motor, gazing at me,
through
me. Who could tell with the glasses?
Rand crouched in the bow looking seaward, and I realized he had no intention of letting us go. Why would he? We were tools, possibly useful as bargaining chips, but ultimately he would kill us.
Or get Shanley to do it, the way I figured he'd gotten the cop to secure Jillian Kearns's silence.
Far out toward the horizon, I saw a boat. It was low and pale, and moving in our direction. Was that our destination? Was it coming for Rand? As it moved nearer, I recognized it as the boat that Van Owen and I had seen from the jetty, the boat from which someone had fired a warning shot at us. Rand shifted position, as if getting read to stand and hail it. Then, off to starboard, at the edge of my vision, something else caught my eye. A dark moving line. At first I thought it might be a second boat, but then I realized it was the churn of swift, rising water where the outflowing bay water and the cold incoming tide met. Where the blues feed, Red Dog had told me, and the stripers, and sometimes the sharks.
I realized the cruiser would spot us in a minute if it hadn't already, and then, who knew? I glanced at Michelle Nickerson, and she seemed to be aware of the boat, too. Hoping the motion was imperceptible, I angled my body slightly toward the rear. We were just reaching the outer rim of the swift water. Shanley throttled down as we edged into the current. I glanced back at him and saw the green flicker of the channel marker in the lenses of his glasses. I lunged at him. He tried to avoid me, giving the throttle an unintended twist as he did. The motor roared, and the boat lurched. I hit him hard in the face with one hand and with the other grabbed for the control. In front, Rand half-rose and swung his gun around. Michelle threw herself to the floor. Rand fired, and I saw the mirror sunglasses shatter, blown apart by the round that hit Shanley in the face. He flopped back against the motor housing like a broken doll. Michelle screamed. I just managed to turn the motor, and swung the boat sharply. Rand stumbled to catch his balance. The skiff took a wave broadside.
I had hoped the rising water would just be enough to upset things, to shift the power ratio, but I underestimated the current. The wave flipped the skiff up into the air and capsized us. As I broke the surface, something crashed against my neck and shoulders, and I went down.