Dark Lie (9781101607084) (22 page)

SEVENTEEN

S
eeing Sam push open the green basement door and enter, Bert had known from his training what he should do. He needed to get on his radio, inform Walker, alert the FBI.

But he didn't. Instead, his hand, as if acting on its own, went to his belt and presented him with his sidearm.

Bert snapped the safety off the pistol. For once, his aging body needed no coaxing. It moved forward on its own, toward the cellar entryway.

Headed down the steep steps.

Toward that open door.

And into the dark.

With no idea whose side he was on.

Silently, cautiously, Bert slipped into the dark basement. Taut, with his handgun at the ready, he stopped at the first corner to listen. He heard the girl crying. Heard a man's voice make an inchoate sort of croak. Whipping around the corner with his weapon leveled, Bert saw that the sound had come from Sam White, who was blundering into a room with a broken door.

Bert lowered his gun. Obviously Blake wasn't in that room, or Sam White would be dead.

Bert knew he ought to head in there, assess the situation, render assistance, take Sam White into custody.

Nope.

For the first time, Bert acknowledged in his own mind that he was not just following Sam White. And he was not doing his duty as a police officer either. He was not trying to arrest a perpetrator or rescue the Phillips girl or anyone else. And he was not going to radio for backup.

He was looking for Blake.

His grandson.

Silent, like an old gray cat, Bert reached the doorway Sam White had entered and passed it. A long, dim hallway lay ahead, partly illuminated by a blast of electric light from what appeared to be another shattered doorway.

With impatient bravado he strode down there, knowing that the moment he entered that lit area, he would be a plain target for anyone—not necessarily his grandson—any armed and dangerous perp lurking in the darkness beyond the area he could see. But letting the chips fall wherever, Bert stepped into the light anyway, peering into what turned out to be a bathroom with a watery mess on the floor and two stalls hanging open, empty. Nowhere else in there for anyone to hide. Ceiling light shining like a son of a bitch. Bert flicked it off.

He gave his eyes a moment to adjust to the darkness before he tackled the next stretch of hallway. Should have given them several minutes more, but by acting like a badass TV cop he had scared himself, and his heart wouldn't stand the wait. He could feel the old pump pounding fit for a coronary. Could feel the sweat popping out on his forehead. Couldn't stand himself much longer. Swallowing hard, Bert raised his pistol, strode out of the bathroom, and headed on down the hallway.

Walking into darkness. Couldn't see where he was going.

But anybody down there would see him coming, silhouetted against the light that still shone, not from the bathroom, but from the other room at the far end of the hallway.

Anybody, not necessarily his grandson.

Even if it was Blake, the boy wouldn't know it was his granddaddy coming to get him.

And if he did know, would he care?

Bert shied away from answering that question, yet made himself a moving target by sidestepping, taking a few strides, sidestepping again, then back the other way, at irregular intervals.

Stalking along the unlit hallway, Bert tried to remember the layout of the building. He thought he should be coming to a corner, then a doorway to a stairwell. As his eyes struggled with the darkness, making shapes of the shadows, he thought he actually saw the vertical line of the corner ahead, and he quickened his stride to get behind it. . . .

Something large blocked his foot. He stumbled hard, falling, throwing his hands up to catch himself, but instead of sprawling on the floor, he slammed into a wall. Not a proper wall but a barrier made of rough wood, which should not have been there.

He turned, panicked, to point his gun in the direction of the thing that had tripped him up. Just by the feel of it underfoot he knew what it was: a body. But he had no idea whether it was dead or alive.

Facing back toward the distant light, squinting into the gloom, he could make out the dark shape lying across the passageway.

A man.

Playing possum?

Bert stood waiting, gun at the ready, willing the form to move. Stand up. Curse him. Knife him.

Get up, damn you.

But it just lay there. Stone still.

Hurt?

Unconscious?

Bert felt his sweaty hands start to lose control. This was not the way it was supposed to be. His grandson was not supposed to meet him lying down. Grandfather and grandson were supposed to converge face-to-face. Their eyes were supposed to lock. Their fists were supposed to lift. And something was supposed to happen. Some kind of justice or comprehension, and then Bert would know what he was made of because he would know what to do. Maybe shake hands. Maybe hug Blake, maybe kill him. Or maybe his grandson was supposed to kill him instead because he had been such a poor excuse of a grandpa. Or if not that, then maybe he, Bert, was supposed to understand what was wrong with himself.

Bert's gun hand quaked so hard he couldn't steady it. But he kept it up in the air. With his other he fumbled for his flashlight, finally got it out of its holder on his belt with its business end wavering toward what seemed to be the head of the dark manifestation on the floor. It took his arthritic fingers three tries to get the flashlight flicked on.

And he saw.

Blake Roman lay there with his eyes wide open, but not looking at anything in this life.

The flashlight illuminated Blake's head with a white aureole of light, and from that halo Blake gazed up with the look of a child, not a man, with the look of a boy who has been utterly betrayed. Like a storybook prince on bended knee mutely begging,
Love me, love me, why won't you love me?
A prince wearing a cloak of blood red tied with a crimson ribbon at his throat.

Bert flinched, swallowing hard, staring at Blake's throat slit clear across from shoulder to shoulder, at Blake's blood running down to the floor and spreading like a crimson cape. But then Bert's gaze locked with the empty gaze of his grandson's eyes, supposedly the window to the soul that should have inhabited the body his grandson used to walk around in. In the corpse lying at his feet Bert saw nothingness, and he stopped trembling. He knew who and what he was. And he knew to his marrow that he was finished, through, done. Done with being a cop. Done with Appletree; there were other places on earth. Or maybe done altogether.

Not conceptualizing much of this, just reacting, Bert fired a bullet into the body on the floor as if driving a stake into a vampire.

* * *

A moment after the gunshot finished echoing through the dark basement, Sam heard footsteps impending down the hallway toward him. Not welcome footsteps. Not running, the way rescuers would have done. These footfalls drummed out the relentless rhythm of a desperate man.

Inwardly cursing all handcuffs ever manufactured, Sam blundered toward the door to place his large self between whatever was coming and his wife. He couldn't fight with steel bracelets binding his wrists, but maybe he could stop a bullet or two.

Juliet, he saw as he scuttled past, had seized the knife again as she huddled over Dorrie. But that eight-inch blade wasn't going to do her much good against a gun—

A hard hand slammed the door aside, sofa and all. Hard-faced, the gunman strode in, pistol at the ready.

Sam exclaimed, “Bert!”

But the old man showed no sign of hearing. He didn't even seem to see Sam, although for a moment—Sam's heart stopped—Bert's gun barrel's single black-hole eye stared straight at him. Then it passed on like a tornado, sparing him. Sam swiveled to watch, gawking, as Bert blew past him. He saw Bert cast an expressionless glance at the woman lying unconscious on the floor, the girl cowering over her with knife in hand. Then Bert strode past them, coiled, and hurled his pistol with great force and accuracy through the window. Shattering glass flew like fountain spray. Sam heard shouts and screams from outside.

Turning his back on the sounds, Bert strode over to Sam, grabbed him by the elbow, and spun him around as if spinning a display stand at the end of a drugstore aisle, as if he were looking for aspirin or something. No, make that handcuffs. It was handcuffs Bert was after. Sam felt Bert jabbing at them none too gently with some kind of key or tool. Then, blessedly, he felt the cuffs snick off him.

For a moment Sam blinked at his own hands, which had gravitated forward and up in front of his face to greet him like long-lost friends. The next instant, they led him urgently to Dorrie. Folding to the floor beside his wife, Sam gathered her upper body into his lap and his arms, cradling her, hugging her to his chest, kissing her lidded eyes, her temple, her forehead. He could barely sense her shallow breathing.

“Dorrie, it's Sam. I'm here. Dorrie,” he begged, “don't leave me.”

He caught sight of a silvery circular blur. Bert seemed to be amusing himself by spinning the handcuffs. No. Bert wanted something else to throw. Like an aging David facing his final Goliath, Bert whirled the handcuffs and let go, sending them winging through the window amid more shouts and flying glass.

This time Bert seemed inclined to respond to the shouts. He clawed at his old radio.

“Walker, you asshole,” he grated in his gravelly voice, “get your fat cowardly backside in here. Or what would do more good, send the medics. Woman and girl need help. Tell the FBI they can put the flash-bang grenades away. Their serial killer is lying dead with his throat cut.”

Sam heard Juliet gasp. Horror, relief, shock, release. But Sam felt no reaction. Hugging Dorrie, whispering to her to stay alive, please live, please stay—hanging on minute by minute, Sam cared about nothing except his wife, his love.

* * *

This time I journeyed not in a dark tunnel but in a luminous lake of prismatic light. This time I did not need to struggle, suffer, fight my way toward love; the light was made of love, and I floated in it. The love was made of timelessness, not a swift stream of moments to sweep me along, but a vast pool of eternity in which to drift. Perspective had splayed like my poor lupus-hexed carcass sprawled below on a dingy linoleum floor, and I relaxed without pain in the sunlight near the smashed window, I lazed as if on invisible eiderdown, luxuriating in an unimaginable freedom. Freedom from the strait and narrow progression of seconds, moments, hours. Freedom from lupus. Freedom from myself.

Outside any context of my life's minutes ticking away, I saw my bloodied body being cradled in the arms of a man I barely recognized at first: an unshaven man with a harrowed, bruised face. A man in a business suit but wearing no tie, his shirt collar all sweat, his slacks ruined with dirt, his jacket soiled as if he'd been spelunking in it, rumpled as if he'd slept—no, not slept in it. Sam looked as if he hadn't had any sleep—

Sam?

Sam! Here!

Sam, embracing me in his arms, talking to me—I could see him talking but I could not hear him. Sam, a real man. Sam, a real hero. And Juliet. I could see her kneeling on the other side of my body from Sam, clutching herself, her thin shoulders shaking. Juliet, my daughter. I barely knew her, yet in some atavistic way I loved her more than—

More than life.

No romance novel I had ever read, no classic movie I had ever watched, began to explain the bone-strong, marrow-deep way I loved my daughter.

Far, far more than I had ever loved Blake.

Although as a girl I had loved him with all my silly heart.

And he—even as a felon, in some sick, insane sense of the word, Blake had loved me. He had looked like a man, but he had never gotten over being a boy. This I knew because he had handed me the knife.

I killed him.

Would hell's fire someday burn me because I had slashed that man-boy's throat? Killing, even to save Juliet, was a dreadful thing. And to kill someone who had once been my prince—

From a presence that floated with me in the lake of light came a gentle reply.
Think, rather, that you closed the eyes of a dream long dead.

Of course I had an entity keeping me company and giving me guidance, but this time it was not a silver swimming blade named Pandora. This time my companion was—all names, no names, it was in the golden light and of the white light. It was the light. Some people might call it angel. Some might call it God.

I gave what my parents had taught me to give to God: guilt to the hilt in my own heart.
He wasn't my dream man. He was a real person. And I killed him.

Instantly the presence responded,
Think, rather, that you put an end to his misery.

I didn't knife him to be merciful.

Again, reassurance reached me without hesitation.
Neither did you do it to be cruel.

This being was very different from the pitiless God my parents had taught me. This was no He-God, no Jehovah. Neither was this a She-God. But it was utterly a Person conversing with me inside my mind, a stranger residing deep within me like an old, forgotten friend.

It instructed me,
Think why you did what you did.

That was simple enough.
For Juliet.

I saw her clutching at my hand as the paramedics shoved her away. I saw Sam standing over me, praying, as she stood beside him, watching the ambulance people work on me.

Sam. I loved him.

I really loved him. As a real person.

I loved him so much.

But would he still be able to love me now that he knew about me? If I returned to my body . . .

Understand that every ending is a beginning,
whispered the white-light presence that accompanied me.

I understood only that I hovered on the cusp of an enormity.

* * *

Sam felt the girl tugging at his sleeve, but he had to keep his eyes on Dorrie, unconscious on the floor. Officious people in white coats intruded, getting in the way; he couldn't see Dorrie's face.