Steel Breeze (24 page)

“Deak
Parsons never had a son,” Bell went on. “If he has a grandson somewhere, it’s
not from the man I killed on the green. All they have in common is a name.”

The
rotting boards groaned under Sensei’s advance, and Bell, still walking
backwards, put a hand behind him to feel for the doorframe. At some point soon
he would have to turn and run. “And Tibbets, the one you wanted most, I looked
him up too before I left the house. When he died in 2007, he had a grandson in
the Navy, but no granddaughters. So those girls you killed in Ohio…. Who were
they?”

“Where
is the boy?” Sensei whispered.

“Just
because Tibbets was living in Ohio when he died, you think everyone in the
state with the same name is related to him?” Bell felt the doorframe under his
fingers, and the curtain.

“The
boy.”  

“And
I took your word for it. All of it. We could have been killing anyone. Random
strangers. All that bullshit about karma, about the sins of the fathers…bloodlines….”

“Give
me the boy, and you can go. I will spare you.”

“No.”

Bell
saw a glimmer of silver, as if Sensei were holding a flashlight instead of a
sword hilt. He felt the muscles in his legs and torso twisting reflexively,
heard the zip of the
katana’s
blood groove and felt the breath of
sword-wind on his left cheek, followed by a scattering of wood splinters as the
blade cleaved into the doorframe. Sensei could afford such a bold move against
an unarmed opponent, and while the old man worked his blade free of the rotted
wood that had greedily embraced it, Bell chanced a backward glance at the door,
gripped the knob in his sweaty palm, and pushed through into the dark interior
of the Palace. He could lose Sensei in here, could take a route as convoluted
as a path through the corn maze inside this building where he knew how to find
the hidden doors, the staff passageways that ran behind and between the exhibit
rooms. But he’d barely taken one step into the darkness when two sounds stopped
him in his tracks: the labored whine of an underpowered car coming up the dirt
road, and the high, thin cry of a child floating over the corn, calling out, “
Dadday!
”

Sensei
pivoted, a swift, graceful rotation, hips following eyes following ears toward
the cry of his prey. Holding his sword low, gripping the hilt with both hands,
the blade trailing behind him, the old Spirit Warrior ran across the road and vanished
into the corn just fractions of a second before Desmond Carmichael’s SUV
bounded into the space he had just occupied.

* * *

Desmond
saw a black-clad figure cut in front of the car. There was too much dust on the
windshield for him to make out more than a silhouette, but it was the size of a
man and moving fast. By the time he hit the brakes, it had already disappeared
into the corn, and his first thought was that he should have accelerated and
hit the fucker. Drelick was drawing her gun while jumping out of the lurching
car as it rebounded from the sudden stop. Desmond felt his heart thud in his
chest, mimicking the car, startled by the impact of a second dark figure
sliding across the hood. This one knocked Drelick sideways. She slipped and
fell to the ground but kept her hands locked on the grip of her weapon, which
she trained on the second man, now following the first into the maze.

“FBI!
Stop or I’ll shoot!” she bellowed. But he didn’t stop, and from a half-kneeling
position in a mud puddle beside the car, she fired two shots. They crackled
across the sky, but only tickled the corn stalks.

Desmond
got out of the car and ran to help her up, but she was already on her feet when
he got there. She held up a raised palm and pushed the air with it, signaling
him to stay back, and then sprinted down the aisle of corn. Desmond had only
caught a glimpse of the first man, but was pretty sure he’d seen a sword in his
hands. The second man appeared to be empty-handed. The pair had been running
from the building and into the maze before the car arrived. Desmond took a few
steps in the direction of the porch with its wooden demon masks, threatening
signs, and peeling paint. If the men were leaving Lucas behind in there, could
he possibly still be alive? It was like walking through water. Desmond didn’t
know if he had the strength to step inside and search among the fake horrors
for a real one. Then he heard the siren of Lucas’s voice, a sound he would
recognize even among a chorus of children all calling out the same word, a word
that gave him back the only identity he wanted in the world:
Daddy.

Desmond
ran into the maze, his sneakers slipping on fallen husks. He could hear the
mechanical beating of angel wings off in the distance—a helicopter coming in
response to Drelick’s call. He trotted behind her, watching her move with both
hands on the gun, holding it low, aimed at the ground but coiled and ready to
spring up. He guessed she had good form, prayed she was good enough to save Lucas.
There was a slight stagger in her step, as if she were favoring one foot. He would
have felt better if her partner were with them, or if she’d let him carry her
ankle piece. He felt helpless, merely a witness, and he touched the silver
fountain pen in the front pocket of his jeans; a talisman, a piece of Sandy
that he had tucked in before leaving the house with some inarticulate notion
that it would bring him luck and strength. The pointed tip slid under his thumbnail
and sent a flare of pain through his hand. Maybe he deserved something worse
for being here as an impotent bystander at what might be their son’s murder. The
shot of pain roused him from his creeping fugue and grounded him in the moment.

He
could hear a clanging of steel on steel now. Lucas’s crying went silent. Had he
realized that yelling would only help the bad men to find him? But weren’t they
the ones who put him in the maze in the first place? It didn’t make sense, and
neither did the sound of sword on sword, but he was pretty sure that was what
he was hearing.

He
jogged along behind Drelick, huffing to keep up. She stopped at the end of a
row and flattened her body against the corn, somehow slimming her profile
without rustling the stalks. She glared at him, but he refused to stay back
more than a few paces. The noise of the duel around the bend was unsettling. There
were long moments of charged silence, followed by rapid flurries, clangs, and
grunts. He could see Drelick’s chest rising and falling in a slow, deep rhythm.
She seemed to be gearing up for action, preparing herself for it while the
swordsmen were engaged with each other. When she looked at Desmond again, her
eyes were wide and somehow brighter, kindled with the fierce energy of being
alive in a moment when death was circling the perimeter of the campfire,
looking for an in.

Sotto
voce
,
she said, “You stay put. I don’t need another victim.”

Desmond
shook his head.

“You
need to let me do my job and save your son. I can’t be worrying about you.”

“He’s
my responsibility, and I’m coming.”

She
looked away from him and took one last deep breath, her breasts pushing her
stiff white cotton shirt at the lapels of her black blazer. Rain began
pattering on the pale green husks, blooming in dark gray spots. Drelick rounded
the corner, bringing her gun up level with her eyes as she moved beyond
Desmond’s line of sight. He slipped into the position she had just occupied and
peered around the end of the row. He couldn’t see Lucas, and for a second he
thought he might pass out as his body floated on a swelling wave of relief, the
tension he had been holding onto so tightly now momentarily unwinding.

He
saw the fighters—one, a young American man with long dirty-blonde hair in a
ponytail, the other a short, sturdy, Japanese man with silvered black hair and
bronzed skin, his eye sockets deeply wrinkled at the corners but his body
exuding the limber vitality of a much younger man, as if his old face were only
a mask. Their swords were locked together in a block, low down near the hilts.
Their faces were close, like lovers reading the prospect of a kiss in each
other’s eyes, when the old man somehow swiveled his sword around, breaking the
lock and thrusting the butt of his hilt into the young man’s face, breaking his
nose with a crunch that Desmond could hear from all the way at the end of the
row.

Drelick
took the opportunity to close in, but the motion of her approach caught the old
man’s eye, and he brought his blade around with a twirl as he spun to face her.
The gun was clearly trained on him, and it prevented him from finishing his
opponent. The younger man—his lips, chin, and shirt drenched with blood from
his nose—darted through an opening in the corn row while the old warrior turned
to face the oncoming threat. It looked like a point-blank shot when Drelick
finally took it after a wildly unnerving pause in which Desmond felt
simultaneously terrified that she was taking too long to aim, and impressed by
the cool control she was exercising. The shot boomed out, crackling across the
sky. It seemed incredible that such a loud sound could come from such a small
gun. The sword flashed out in a silver streak from the old man’s left hip to
his right shoulder, faster than a shooting star, but with a white spark and a
sound like the ringing of a bell at the center point of the arc. Drelick
uttered a weak, frightened sound that could have been a laugh, but sounded more
like a trembling sigh of awe. Her reaction cost her the chance to fire a second
round before the samurai could recover his balance. He saw it in her face and
disappeared through the opening in the corn.

Desmond’s
legs felt numb, anchored to the ground. Had he really just seen a man whose
eyesight should be failing cut a bullet in half in midflight?

Lucas’s
shrill voice rose from the center of the maze again, calling for him. Desmond
wobbled on his heels a couple of times, overrode the inertia of his terrified
body by sheer force of will, and followed Drelick deeper in.

Around
the next bend they came to three openings. The rain was picking up, turning into
a thin gray curtain, hissing in the stalks. On the ground, brown puddles danced
with droplets. Drelick was running along a dead-end aisle, listening to the
corn, trying to rule out the leftmost of the three paths. She didn’t give it
much time, and Desmond didn’t know if she had a reason to choose the middle
path or if it was just a coin toss she made in her head to save time, but that
was the one she ran into without so much as a glimmer of eye contact toward
him.

Desmond
scanned the mud at the threshold of the right-hand path and, finding no
footprints, followed Drelick.

He
caught up with her before the next set of openings. She was stepping through a
roughly reaped gap in the corn, making crunching sounds as she stepped on the
freshly felled stalks. There was nothing stealthy about following this trail
chopped by one of the swordsmen. It looked to Desmond like whoever had blazed
it was desperate for the quickest, most direct exit possible. Then he saw the
drops of blood on the fallen husks and his heartbeat doubled in his chest at
the thought of Lucas before he recalled that the younger man had been dripping
blood from his nose after the hilt strike. But his heart didn’t have a second
to settle back into its regular terrified register before he heard Lucas
shrieking, “
No!
Lemme
go!
Let goame….
Daddy! Help!”

Desmond
knocked Drelick aside and charged through the curtain of rain and broken
stalks, the razor edges of husks swatting and slicing at his face and fingers
as he stumbled and fumbled and raked his hands through them.

Then
he could see Lucas’s face above a collar of twisted duct tape that had left a
sticky gray film on his lips, wet hair clinging like strands of kelp to his
forehead, the water on his face a mixture of rain and tears. His small body was
draped over the left shoulder of the man carrying him; the younger man, it had
to be. A rag tied around the man’s right leg dripped blood as he staggered on,
limping under the weight of his hostage and swinging the sword in long strokes
to clear the way ahead. Lucas’s eyes found Desmond and widened, his face
suddenly infused with a desperate feral energy. He kicked, flailed, and cried,
“Daddy!”

The
swordsman heard the change in the boy’s voice and rotated toward Desmond,
swinging Lucas to face behind him. The rain had thinned the blood on the man’s
face, but there was enough of it smeared across his mouth to make him appear
grotesque when he smiled at Desmond. There was something strange and unexpected
in that smile, something genuine that seemed to say,
So you made it.
He
stood there smiling, the sword in one hand, rain sparking off the blade, and
the boy in the other, with no direction open to him.

“Put
him down,” Drelick said.

The
young man’s eyes had a faraway cast when he spoke. “You can’t save him.”

Desmond
felt Drelick’s bullet whiz past his face. It opened a blossom of blood in the middle
of the man’s chest, and brought him down.

Lucas
was running toward Desmond now, shrieking in the aftermath of the deafening
shot, but Desmond turned his head to look in the direction the bullet had come
from. Drelick was in a shooting stance, legs shoulder-width apart, her Glock
gripped in both hands. Beyond her, the old man swept into view, raised the
sword above her shoulder, above his head, and when it reached the apex, brought
it down in a fluid stroke like water gliding over a stone shelf, sluicing
through her long hair and cleaving into her body at the juncture of shoulder
and neck. Blood sprayed Desmond’s cheek before he could scream.