Keeping Watch (42 page)

Shit,
Allen thought abruptly;
the bastard stopped to look at a compass. He's making for his car.

No time to waste. Allen started up again, but hadn't gone a dozen paces before he halted; predator or not, he was making too much noise. He laid the gun on a log thick with moss, whipped his folding knife from his pocket, sliced through the sodden laces on his boots, and dropped the knife into his T-shirt pocket. He stepped out of the boots, did the same with his sodden jeans and socks, and went on, dressed in nothing but olive-green shorts and T-shirt.

The freedom was extraordinary. His skin seemed to drink in the forest. Why hadn't the Snakeman gone naked in the jungle? he wondered. Maybe he had.

Allen could trot now on the soft forest floor, and he set a path curving out around to the left. He figured he had at least a mile or two before O'Connell reached his car, since the next road was that far away. Of course, if O'Connell was traveling on foot, he could set off due east, and Allen would be screwed. But he believed the man would have a car.

Allen moved faster, dodging the trees, barely touching the thick growth, slipping through the green like a wild thing as his hair and clothing plastered against his body and his feet patted the mossy earth. Suddenly he stopped, his head coming up as if to taste the breeze. Somewhere, deep inside, a switch had been thrown, and its current began to wake an entire set of long-buried instincts. He
knew
where O'Connell was, he could feel him like the blip on an internal radar. The man was moving swiftly, though not as fast as Allen was, and his path would intersect the trajectory of Allen's curve in less than ten minutes.

Two minutes later, Allen became aware of O'Connell's growing assurance, knew when the man paused to sweep his gaze over the woods behind him, felt the man's glee that he had escaped and fury that Howard had not. The man's thoughts touched on his son then, and the flare of his anger came across the forest like the heat from a fire.

At five minutes the forest stopped abruptly and Allen was stumbling into an unnatural clear place, a confusing bare strip, harsh gravel digging into his bare feet: the access road. It ran arrow-straight to the west, disappearing around a corner a few hundred yards to Allen's right. He stood in the center of the foreign thing, listening in his mind for O'Connell's progress. He could run down this road and hope to reach the car before its owner did, or he could set up an ambush.

The green was ready for him. Sometime earlier that year, the forest had given up a tree. Not a terribly large tree, and not so long ago that it had become a sodden and immovable mass along the edge of the road. Sparsely branched, with no root ball to speak of, it seemed set there for his purpose: perfect. He laid the Glock on the ground, and braced himself under the curve of its trunk.

The weight of it was almost too much, particularly the first wrenching motions needed to loose it from the soil's embrace. His ribs shrieked at him, his shoulder groaned, but the tree came, an inch and then a foot, and he staggered across the bruising rock surface with the dead branches wrapping his face, letting go only when his feet hit the softness again on the other side of the road.

He retrieved the gun and sat against a tree trunk, hugging his ribs and whining with pain, trying not to pant any more than he had to. The dead tree now lying across the road was not big enough to block a determined driver, particularly in a four-wheel-drive vehicle, but it would force him to slow to a crawl, and that was all Allen needed. After a minute he checked the gun, then sat with it sheltering under his bent-up legs. His thumb began to play with the safety: on and off, on and off.

He felt (imagined? Did it matter which?) when O'Connell reached the car, knew the man's surge of satisfaction when he found it undiscovered. Allen's ears picked out the whine of its starter from the rain noises, and then the thing was coming down the track. He got to his feet, taking up a position clear of the trees so he would have an open line of fire, and so O'Connell would see him. He dashed the hair and dead leaves from his face, and he waited.

Had Mark O'Connell spent less time as hunter and more as prey, he might not have made the mistakes he did. Had he remained cautious once he gained the car, been capable of thinking of its two tons as a liability instead of weight to throw around, he would not have gone down the road at such a speed. He might have listened to the voice of the hunted, telling him that there was no safety in steel, that a man with a handgun could be equal to a heavily armed killer in a tank of an SUV, given the right circumstances. But he did not listen to any voice but the gloating tones of the habitual victor, and he came around the curve moving too fast to stop.

The dead tree and its mud-covered guardian froze him for one crucial half second, allowing his arm to make a brief automatic jerk away from the standing wild man before he caught himself and yanked his juggernaut back toward Allen. But the moment of indecision cost the heavy car its momentum, and the wet soil under the gravel gave beneath its skidding tires.

The big black vehicle with the smoked-glass windows crunched one wheel up onto the tree while its back passenger side slammed into one of the tree's standing brothers, stunning the forest and sending buckets of collected raindrops splashing to the ground. The driver, however self-assured, had prudently fastened his belt and did not go through the windshield. Instead, he kicked open the front passenger-side door and dropped to the earth, protected now by all that steel. He edged his head over the hood; in his hand he carried a small automatic machine gun.

But the naked maniac was no longer in front of his tree. O'Connell lifted the gun and sent a brief spray into its trunk, hoping to drive the man out from behind it, but there was no response. He went around the back of the car, his shoes slipping on the wet moss at the side of the road, but he could see nothing from there either.

Allen was not behind the tree. When he'd seen the big car waver and come at him, he'd flung himself behind the moss-green trunk, but he had continued on, plunging deeper into the woods. He could no longer see the vehicle or its driver, but the shots told him all he needed to know: O'Connell was sticking with the car.

Allen worked his way up the road until he reached the curve. Checking to be sure the roadway was clear, he trotted across, then turned back. O'Connell might expect him to try an approach from behind, but he couldn't be sure, and he couldn't look in all directions at once. Gun down but ready, Allen let his feet choose their path between the trees. The hanging mosses brushed his shoulders, the ferns parted for his knees, and green surrounded him, the multiplicity of green that cloaked all his dreams.

Thirty yards from the car, he stopped. The shift and murmur of the rain forest were unbroken, no sound of bird or beast. There had been no shots after that one brief burst, and although Allen was certain that O'Connell was still there, he couldn't tell what the man was doing.

Setting up an ambush of his own,
Allen's mind whispered. The man was after all a hunter. But he was the kind of hunter who valued results over challenge, who put out grain to lead the deer in. The car was the bait; O'Connell would wait within view of it.

Of course, the only deadline in a deer hunt was the man's wish to regain the comfort of his hearth before darkness fell. Here, both sides knew it wouldn't be long before that houseful of guns followed the would-be assassin's track. Both men knew that time was on Allen's side. He moved with infinite caution across the forest floor, tasting the air, his instincts probing to find the other.

O'Connell was, he finally decided, back inside the car, hiding behind the dark reflective windows of the SUV. He trusted his urban protection more than the wilds, and valued his comfort. The naked man with the gun was sure to come; he would be met by death. Except that Allen had no intention of sticking his head into that vehicle. He was happy to wait in the rain. O'Connell wouldn't be able to stand it, not knowing. In a few minutes he'd begin to think he had imagined that mud-smeared, leaf-clotted creature pointing a shiny gun at him, think that maybe the tree'd just fallen there. Think that all he had to do was put the vehicle into low and set it to crawling over the trunk.

Give the bastard ten minutes,
Allen thought.

It took seven. The black sides of the car shifted slightly. A dark shape ventured up close to the windows, disappeared again. Another shift, and Allen slid the Glock's safety off. The shape of a body slithering over the seatbacks, keeping well down from the clearer glass of the front windows, settling into the driver's seat. Allen prepared to sprint up to the side of the car.

Then abruptly the silence was broken by a well-known voice, shouting, “Hold it right there!” and a lot happened fast. The ignition caught, the car jerked and died again as O'Connell snatched up the gun with one hand and held down the electric window control with the other, jamming the gun's barrel into the gap and pulling the trigger.
He'll be completely deaf,
Allen's brain registered in passing, and then he was ripping open the front passenger door and pointing the Glock at the back of Jamie O'Connell's father.

“Put it down,” Allen told him. The man turned his head just enough to catch a glimpse of Allen's weapon; O'Connell's hold on the machine pistol loosed, its barrel tipped to the sky before it fell to the gravel. “Now, reach out the window and put both hands on top of the car.”

Jerry's head reappeared around the tree he'd dived behind, and he squinted, trying to make sense of the sight. He came out, moving cautiously and with his gun ready, approaching the car.

“It's me, Jer,” Allen called.

Jerry's pace picked up and he reached for the door handle. It took some wrenching to get it open, and then O'Connell was stepping out, two guns on him.

He was a smaller man than he appeared in photographs or on Allen's television screen, and his eyes were more intensely blue. The eyes glittered with fury, and with something else. Amusement, perhaps? Certainly with a strong conviction of his own superiority to these two hicks who had somehow managed to turn the tables on him. The man's meandering gaze rested briefly on the badge clipped to Jerry's shirt, then he dismissed both it and the man wearing it and turned to Allen, clad only in T-shirt, shorts, and mud. The corner of his mouth twitched in disdain, and he tipped his head to look into Allen's face, holding his gaze. Now the smirk was unmistakable.

“You must be the pervert who kidnapped my son,” he said to Allen. His voice was conversational. “I hope you got your pleasure out of the boy, because by the time I finish with you, you're going to wish you'd been castrated at birth.”

And then Jerry hit him; Jerry the staunch upholder of order, Jerry the paragon of self-control, Sheriff Carmichael, who had never once in all his career treated a prisoner with anything but firm good manners, succumbing to a rush of brutality at the brief phrase of a man he'd never met, never seen except on tape; he reached out with the flat of his gun and smacked O'Connell in the head.

Then he looked down at his hand in surprise, as if it had nothing to do with the man on the ground.
Even Jerry,
Allen thought, and reached to tug the handcuffs from his brother's belt.

When the first wrist snapped on, O'Connell began to laugh through the blood on his face. Jerry gave a shudder. The murder died from his eyes, and only then did he holster his gun and reach for the radio.

Chapter 35

Jamie O'Connell sat on the hard bench and tried not to think. It would be so much easier if he could just go empty, turn into a brainless moron, become a smiling vegetable. Then maybe they'd all leave him alone. Let him go back to the Johnson farm and sit on the porch swing with Terry on his lap, talk to the chickens. Montana had been a dream, even though he'd seen Rachel and talked to Pete on the phone since then; it had been something he'd made up, like his arms had made up their memory of a wriggling Jack Russell terrier, like his feet had invented the feel of a warm weight during the night.

It was all so confusing. They all wanted something from him, and he didn't know how to give it to them. The men in the suits wanted him to tell about his father, and Rachel wanted him to come back with her, and Allen . . . He didn't know how to put what Allen wanted, he just knew it was the hardest thing of all. Because Allen wouldn't say what it was, just, “Do what you think is right.”

What you think is right.
Shit—how could he know what was right? If even the grown-ups couldn't agree what to do, how could he be expected to? Sometimes he just hated Allen. Just purely hated the big man with the hole in his arm that he didn't even blame Jamie for, like he didn't blame Jamie for fucking up his life, even though Jamie could see it there in his face, that kind of haunted look that Allen wore sometimes when the FBI was threatening to lock him up or something. Not that he'd ever tell Jamie just what it was that made him look haunted, but Jamie figured that was it. And it was Jamie's fault, for dragging him into all this in the first place with that stupid
deadboy
email, instead of figuring out how to deal with his problems on his own. Jamie's fault Allen got shot and Alice was in trouble and Howard was dead and that strange woman Rae looked so nervous and
everything,
but Allen just sat there and told him to do what was right. And he
hated
Allen when that happened, wanted to gouge his eyes out and take his old deer rifle and aim it right at the man's chest and pull the trigger so he'd be
gone
and leave Jamie alone with Father like he belonged, just him and Father.

But the strange thing was, even when he was most pissed off with Allen and just wanted Allen to LEAVE HIM ALONE, for some reason the endless conversations with the men in suits went more easily when Allen was there. Not that Allen stopped them from pushing at him, or that he helped Jamie figure out what to say. It was less definite than that. More like, when Allen was there, it was easier to breathe. It wasn't that he'd tell Jamie when to breathe, or what to say with the air that came out; he was just there, and it was easier.

And when Allen wasn't there? Well, those were usually the times when he'd imagine Father looking on. He'd almost convinced himself that Father really was there, behind the mirror that had to be a one-way window, until Allen found out what he was thinking and took him behind it to see. But when the men with the suits started in on him, asking him about dates and when his father had been home and when he hadn't, and who they had seen when they were in Vegas one time, and the places they'd flown last summer, and a hundred other things he knew the answers to deep down, he couldn't tell them because he'd look over the shoulder of Father's lawyer and see Father's ghost through the glass—or after they moved to the room with the stupid bright kiddie prints on the wall, he'd see someone in the hall or walking down the street and think it was Father, even though he knew that Father was in jail.

Yes, when Allen was in the room, there was more air to breathe, and he could think better, and Father's ghostly figure wasn't as substantial.

But sometimes he hated it when Allen was there. Sometimes he'd be sitting in his chair with a clean man in a suit going at him—really polite, they always were, and Father's lawyers were always ready whenever they got too pushy, but he could tell they wanted to pry him open like a clam. And he'd start to feel Father there, looking on, approving of his son's silence, like it was strength under fire. Then Jamie would feel a little smile begin to grow on his face, like he and Father had a secret. And it was true, Father always
knew,
he knew what Jamie was thinking and what he was going to do—he'd have known what Jamie was up to back in May if he'd been around and not off in one of those places the suit men kept asking about. And Jamie was absolutely gut-certain that Father knew now, even locked in jail, exactly what Jamie was doing and saying, and those times when Jamie just stared at the clean men and thought,
Oh, go fuck yourself
—that was when Father would stir in the back of his mind, and nod his approval, and Jamie would smile to himself, an echo of that scary smile of Father's.

But then Allen would come in and Father would fade in Jamie's mind just a little, and he'd just hate Allen,
hate
him for a few minutes until the extra air kicked in, and he'd remember Allen was his friend, and get confused again.

Yes, all in all, Jamie wished he could just cut out his brain and stop thinking.

But maybe not today. Today, at last—weeks and weeks after Allen and his brother had set the trap in the woods that Father had walked into, where Howard had died—Jamie was
finally
going to see Father. He'd been aware for some time that lawyers were maneuvering and people were fighting over this, and he'd tried not even to think about it, knowing it might never happen, and not knowing how he'd feel about it if it did.

Because Father was sure to be really mad. With good reason—Jamie had brought this all down on him, Jamie's unwillingness to be raised as Father saw fit, Jamie's sissy-weakness that Father had worked so long to cure. And Father was sure to be mad in other ways, too: One thing Jamie had learned since May was, normal people didn't live like that. Normal fathers didn't do things to their sons like his did; when they went hunting, they hunted the deer; when they needed to be gone for a day or two, they got a baby-sitter, they didn't lock their kid in a dark room or leave him in a cabin in the woods.

Of course, Father would say that “normal” is another word for “stupid.” Ordinary people played baseball with their kids and helped them with their homework because they wanted their kids to be as stupid as they were, as dull and boring and spineless and weak. Herd animals. Father was something else, and his son would be something else, too. Stronger, more independent, with sharp teeth.

Funny thing was, it was Allen who'd been the soldier, tough and trained—and you could see it, if you looked, see that there was something hard as rocks inside him. Yet it was Allen who now went along with the herd, who allowed the FBI and everyone to do things their way even though he very obviously thought they were clueless; Allen who'd walked freely into confinement, who stuck around when he clearly hated it, who could so easily walk away to freedom but let himself be dragged down by Jamie, and Rae, and even Jerry. Stupid. Weak to hang around, to put himself through hours of interviews where no one wanted him—not the suit men, not the lawyers, not Jamie. Stupid not to have dealt with Father when he had the chance, like a soldier (wasn't this a war?). If he'd just shot Father—not that Jamie wanted that to have happened, but if he had—then it all could have ended and Jamie would be free of all this confusion and crap and he could get on with life, even though he'd hate Allen forever for killing Father, and probably never want to look at him again. But instead Allen and his brother had busted Father (and Jamie still couldn't understand how that had happened, still held a strong suspicion that Father had arranged his own arrest as part of some incomprehensible scheme) and there was Father behind bars, more like a spider behind his web, tugging at them all through the lawyers, waiting there in jail until it was time for his lawyers to get him out.

And they would, Jamie could feel that. The pressure was on, the men in suits seeming to sweat as they pressed him for information, giving Jamie the impression that they'd just love to take him by the throat and shake it out of him, even when they looked cool and unconcerned on the outside. Allen was there at most of the interviews now, never telling Jamie what to say, just being there and looking on, keeping the suits and lawyers in line and giving him room to breathe.

Like he was going to be inside the room today, when Jamie and his father would meet for the first time since May.

Jamie remembered thinking, during that strange drive away from Montana when he'd imagined he was leading Father away from the Johnsons, that if Allen tried to get between him and Father, Allen wouldn't stand a chance. And it was weird that, even though Allen seemed to be ordinary and weak, Jamie was no longer quite so certain that Father's capture had been a fluke, or part of a clever plan. He'd even thought, lying awake the night before, that with the three of them in a room together, he himself might be the one who got torn apart.

But again, he couldn't decide how he would feel, if Allen turned out to be a match for Father. He did honestly hate Allen for putting Father behind bars. If he and Alice had just left Jamie the hell alone back in May, it would be all right, instead of this. Well, maybe not all right, because even before
deadboy,
Father'd had sharp teeth, like a tiger, a man-eating tiger. But wasn't Jamie his son? Wasn't Jamie strong and independent as well, with teeth and claws and brains?

Love and hate went round and round and it was all so confusing. He was nearly thirteen now, but some days he just wished someone would pick him up and hold him and tell him in a calm voice what to do.

Oh, Jamie really wished he could just stop thinking.

Allen Carmichael sat on the hard deck chair, a beer on his knee and the lights playing across the water in front of him, but he paid no attention to either, because he was thinking about tomorrow's meeting with Jamie and Mark O'Connell. He was dreading it, had hated the very thought of it ever since it was proposed—his every instinct shouted,
Keep the boy away from his father.
But he was the one who'd proposed it, he'd fought for it, he'd wheedled and maneuvered and made vows he probably wouldn't be able to keep, because Jamie had asked him for it.

Don't let him see the man, don't let the bastard get his screws back into the boy.

Allen Carmichael had been an advocate for children half his life, allying himself to their needs and wishes as he worked out the burden laid on him by the blue-eyed cave demon. He had thought he was accustomed to laying his trust at the feet of the children he served, thought he knew what it was to take risks. But never like this.

Keep Jamie away from him, lock the bastard away and lose the key.

And therein lay the problem. A man downing his own plane might be fined for littering, or pollution, but O'Connell hadn't even made an insurance claim. And there were no laws against taking skydiving classes, or buying a pristine twelve-year-old diary from an antiquarian bookstore in Denver just before Christmas last year and faking a record of your child's history, or misleading your son into thinking that you were incompetent when it came to computers, or sending your tame thug up to Montana to talk to a little girl, or half the other sins the feds had tagged the man with. There was no evidence that Jamie had ever been locked in that bare, windowless room adjoining his father's, nor that he had been parked in a remote cabin during one of the times when a target in Reno or Cincinnati had been hit. Oh sure, CPS would hold on to the boy for a while, but Allen did not imagine that a foster placement would deter Mark O'Connell for two minutes, once he was out.

Everyone knew that from the purchase of the diary to the smashing of the potentially incriminating hard drive on Jamie's computer—Jamie's, but which his father also used when he wanted to hide the evidence of his activities—the man's meticulous planning was aimed at closing down his operation and providing Jamie as a suspect for murder. Everyone but Jamie knew this, but so far the accumulated charges were all financial, and sooner or later O'Connell's lawyers were going to hit on a judge with no imagination and a hefty respect for defendants' rights, who would grant the man bail. And then he'd vanish.

Only Jamie stood in his way. Jamie, who claimed he couldn't remember half the places he'd been, any of the times he'd been abandoned for a crucial day or two. Jamie, whose clever mind had pieced together the story he'd blurted out to Allen, Jerry, and Ed, but who had since that night proved uncertain on chapter and verse. Jamie, who loved his father and desperately longed for the man's blessing with all the passion in his confused, abused soul. Jamie, whom Allen would accompany to a confrontation with the father who had been setting him up, using him as a carpenter uses a nail or a hit man a scope (although the feds were proving wildly unsuccessful at proving that role too).

He'd talked it over endlessly, with Rachel and Jerry, Alice and Rae, and several highly competent psychologists, and not one of them could tell him any more than he knew. Seeing his father would be bad for the boy; not seeing him would in the long run be worse.

The feds were desperate enough that when Allen pointed out that he alone had a chance of prying the facts out of Jamie, they believed him. And when he told them that he would only do so if they allowed Jamie a visit with his father, they believed that as well. In fact, Allen had no intention of carrying out his half of the bargain. He did not for a moment doubt that he could break Jamie's silence, had no question at all that the boy would testify if Allen drove him to it. But he would not do that, because to force Jamie would be to lose him. He'd be saving Jamie from his father, by becoming the father himself.

As he'd snatched Mouse from one atrocity, by flinging him into another.

And so he'd told the boy,
Do what you think is right,
praying that it was enough, knowing that when the boy came face-to-face with the father he so craved, those six little words would probably blow up in Allen's face. Trip wires worked both ways.