Mystery: Satan's Road - Suspense Thriller Mystery (Mystery, Suspense, Thriller, Suspense Crime Thriller) (9 page)

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Tommy’s brain felt like it was about to explode. He imagined the surface an impossible distance away from him, his sense of direction slipping away. Where was the top, the bottom?

The arm he had grabbed moved slightly, proof of some remaining life. He pushed upward uselessly, believing he was going nowhere, unable to think of any other option. The body was clearly pulling him down. He needed to let go or drown. He tried to relax, burn less oxygen.

Tommy’s lungs felt like they were taking on a hot, painful life of their own. He was fighting now to resist breathing in, his hand barely aware of the floating form he was holding. He was on the verge of an uncontrollable gasp, when his head broke the surface and a chill breeze forced his eyes open. He took in a raspy breath and heard the sound echo sharply across the lake and back to him.

He pulled the body up. It was an older man; his white hair plastered over his ears. Blood was running from his nose – at least Tommy guessed it was blood – it looked like India ink in the moonlight. Could this old man be the target?

Dragging the body to the shore was easy; it offered no resistance. Melanie met him by one of the lower, flatter rocks. She was strangely quiet.

“Is he alive?” was all she asked. Tommy propped the older man’s face up in the crook of his arm, and without thinking, blew air into his lungs. He could taste the salt of the man’s blood on his lips. He blew again, instinctively. This couldn’t be the man they were after. He was older than his grandfather.

On the fifth exhalation, the old man spasmed and rolled his eyes open. He jerked once and then rolled over on the rock and regurgitated foamy lake water, blood and digested food onto the pebbles of the shore.

“Are you OK?” Melanie asked again, kneeling down, her hand on his back.

“I’ve got to warn Tamara,” he gurgled, weakly wiping his mouth. He collapsed then, breathing in shaky inhalations, his shirt up over his back. To Tommy and the girl, the phrase sounded strange and foreign.
Did he say tomorrow?
Then Tommy recognized the name. Tamara. This was O’Brien – the main target. But so was his wife. The other person who had information she shouldn’t have. The other soldier Tommy brought with him, Clayton, was supposed to be looking after that detail. Tamara should be dead by now, buried in the pine needles surrounding the lake.

“I’m going to go and call the police,” offered the girl.             

Before Tim could object, the old man said “No!” Melanie formed her mouth into a tiny O. Tommy looked on, surprised by this turn of events.

“He’s in shock or something. Doesn’t know what he’s saying,” she said, and turned to leave. Tommy could tell she knew something wasn’t right.             

Kam coughed again. “Don’t,” he yelled, the pain coloring his voice. “If you want to live, don’t.”

Tommy moved back from O’Brien and sat shivering on another rock, patiently waiting this out. He had time.

O’Brien was sitting up now – his arms wrapped around himself, shivering. They heard a car whiz by above them, the headlights flashing across the trees. It didn’t stop; didn’t even slow down for the broken glass that marked the point of the collision.

Tommy looked into O’Brien’s eyes. Could he see shock there? He’d heard of people in accidents who walked around for a few minutes like everything was fine and then just dropped dead. That would make things a lot easier all around. He wasn’t even sure what shock looked like, but the guy was in his sixties and just experienced a head-on collision and near drowning. How would he feel like after that experience? He noticed he wasn’t feeling horny anymore. Lake Muskoka was like an industrial-strength cold shower.

“If you want to go home, cool, but I don’t know what the police will think. This is like deserting the scene of an accident or something,” said Tommy.

“You don’t understand,” interrupted O’Brien, his teeth chattering. “The other driver? He was waiting for me. Like he had a mission to accomplish. A suicide mission. And he was trying to kill me.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Tommy maneuvered the rented Ford pickup down the winding drive that snaked through the trees towards Kam's home.

Kam was more alert now than he was for most of the short drive around the lake, his back straight, his eyes narrowed. Something had pulled his attention away from his wet clothes and the bruise on his forehead that had bled down into his eyes and given him a crazed look.

At the turn-off, Kam had anticipated the lights of his cottage, but was surprised when he couldn’t see them. He also wasn’t sure if he was ever able to see lights from the road at night, turned away from the highway, as the building was, most of the windows and the sunroom facing the lake. Examining the idea didn’t help though. He had made a grudging accommodation to his wet clothes and the scratchy blanket; huddled as he was between the two teenagers, but he could feel his arms break out in gooseflesh again.

When they turned into the widening area of the drive, he forgot all about his discomfort.

The cabin was black as the night. Even the porch light had been doused. He couldn’t remember ever seeing his home like this, as if the life had been sucked out of it. He knew in that instant that everything had changed. Chapertah’s insane leap was a shock to his system – the accident, an affront to his senses. What he witnessed now was like the stars shifting their positions right in front of his eyes. He felt his mind reel a bit as if it had been round-housed, felt a part of him struggle to hold on, let go and then make one last desperate effort to keep from just falling to his knees and blubbering like a child.

Tommy had parked and swung himself onto the ground, but he looked uncertain. Kam guessed it was his reluctance to get out of the truck. What he didn’t know was that Tommy was wondering what had happened to Clayton. He expected to meet him here. He must still be out in the woods with the body of the old woman.

Melanie seemed lost in thought, her arms tightly crossed over her chest. She was chewing on a strand of hair.

“Mr. O’Brien? Is there anyone home?” asked Melanie, her voice lower than seemed natural to Kam. He looked for Tamara’s car. It would be in the garage if she were home.
If she was home?
It was almost midnight, and she had never been a night person. Though every instinct told him to run to the side door, he forced himself to walk slowly, his stocking feet sticking to the gravel. He had lost his shoes somewhere. Maybe they had been knocked off in the collision. He heard that could happen.

He reached the screen door and felt it creak as he pushed it aside for the main door, an old refinished oak antique they had discovered at a garage sale years before.

When he turned the knob, it opened easily. He stepped inside, Tommy so close behind him he could hear his shallow breath.

The study was lit only by moonlight – all the color leeched out. The doors into the side bedrooms were open, their mouths dark and ominous looking. Everything was wrong, everything – the house looking the way he might imagine it a decade after he was dead and buried, as if he had passed through a time warp or awoke in another universe. But at the same time, everything was the same –the Casein original above the mantle, Tamara’s loom, a half-finished carafe of homemade wine on the serving counter.

He moved past the study and into the sunroom. “Tamara!” he called out, feeling a little foolish. She often slept in the nude. She might rush out of the bedroom naked to be greeted by a houseful of strangers.

“Tamara. We have company!” he said again, even louder. Tommy was looking at his shoes.

On the tile floor of the sunroom, just inches from his left foot he noticed a fragment of pottery. He knelt and picked up the shard. It was painted red and yellow, the piece she had been working on that weekend.

A jolt of emotion struck Kam, then and he grew dizzy again. She had never broken a piece of pottery as long as he could remember. The sign of this one, a favorite, callously left on the sunroom floor, brought tears to his eyes. If she had broken it by accident, she would have been meticulous about cleaning it up. He noticed another smaller shard under the coffee table. He reached for it on his hands and knees, bumping his ravaged forehead again. The vase had broken on the hard tile floor. Someone had made an attempt to clean it up. All the dust fragments, the shards, were gone. Only two pieces, too big to be missed, remained. He clutched them both and stood up.

“Is everything OK?” asked Tommy. He realized then that the old man knew his wife was involved. Clayton had done a poor clean up job after removing her. He had left a message though by leaving the lights out. This was their agreed on signal that they had found the document.

“Does it look OK?” the old man growled, got up, turned and then threw his weight into the young soldier and drove him down against the oak wainscoting.

Tommy went down hard, caught completely off guard. Kam grabbed him by the collar, all of his weight on the boy’s chest. “You fucker,” he growled. “You don’t fool me. I taught American dialects for years. I recognized your poorly disguised southern drawl. You’re mixed up in this Revelation business, but I don’t give a shit.” He squeezed harder, the anger and rage compounded by his bloodied face and wild hair. “Where is she? So help me, if anything has happened to her, I will rip you apart with my bare hands.”

Tommy relaxed and almost smiled. There was no point in pushing back yet, but it was time to give up the act.
What was this pathetic old fart going to do to him anyway?
 

“I saved your wrinkled old ass out there. Is this the way you repay me? And you should be thanking me for teaching your half-Jew bitch a lesson or two. ”

Kam looked momentarily confused, then set his teeth hard. He shook his head, his eyes glowing in the dark. “Kid. I know you think I’m just some old guy who got in the way of your grand mission. What you don’t know is I spent years in Vietnam. And I fucked with people who had real reasons to fight to the death. You don’t even have the remotest idea of what you’re really fighting for.”

Tommy McDane had a sudden vision of himself at the age of fifteen. He was carrying a Martin .3030 rifle at the time, his dad's favorite, the sight lowered on the eyes of a young buck at 5:00 in the morning in a field across from their farm. The image he saw clicked into his head as smooth as an oiled round. After that, nothing was the same ever again for him.

That same afternoon, he drove into town and joined the army, lying about his age, something that came easy for him. It was for the cause, so it was Okey Dokey. They shipped him to Dorsey for basic training. By the age of sixteen, when most kids were just starting to drive, had their first introduction to puking their guts out over a six-pack – Tommy had killed a dozen Afghani rebels, been laid about thirty times and had a fierce addiction to cocaine: all of which he saw as party to the Cause. And he told everyone he talked to what he was all about now. About the biggest fucking conspiracy of all time. About the American government being infested by libertarians too gutless to fight for what they believed in and reporters who did the bidding of the Jewish controlled media. Candy asses. Candy asses with educations working their way into control. What kind of life did he have in comparison? Midwest, lousy school, hayseed parents, and a dad who liked to throw a beer bottle at his head if he lipped back. He was taking control now. He'd learned how. Learned what he needed to know.

Tommy smirked at the man pinning him to the floor, jinked to the right, then rolled to the left. Kam flopped over onto the floor hard, surprise on his face, his hands going again for the young man’s neck. Tommy then grabbed the old man from the side and pulled a six-inch hunting knife smoothly from his boot. He pressed it into the older man’s neck. Kam froze when he felt the cold blade on his throat.

Tommy laughed in his ear. ”Vietnam? Was that in this century?” He felt a shudder go through the old man’s body.
He just got it now
, Tommy thought, fully disgusted by the cold feel of his pale white skin on his arms. Now finally the old guy understands; feels the gravity of this moment.

“Did you know what you were fighting for over there, old man? So the niggers could take over our cities? Was that it? So the Jews could have their way with the wives you left behind? So we could open the floodgates to every half-witted terrorist who wanted in? Was that what you were doin’ over there besides poking every slant-eyed whore in sight? Smokin’ a little Delta weed, Mr. Pro-fess-ahhh?” He pressed the knife harder into the old man’s neck and felt something warm trickle down the handle of the blade.

“Where is my wife?’ coughed the professor, his voice horse. It was almost a plea.

“She gave you up, traitor. What else would you expect? ” Tommy’s strength seemed to grow. His rage was pushing him into incoherence. He pressed the blade in deeper. “She saw you for what you really are, old man. You fucked up the country along with the rest of your liberal University bleeding-heart shit heads. And then you left the stink you made in my country, to hide out here. Whose gonna cleanup now, deserter? Think we were just going to forget what you did? We’re going to wipe this world clean of shit like you once and for all. Too bad you’ll miss the big day.“

Tommy was nose to nose with the older man, spittle flying, his eyes hard with hate. Kam could sense a huge well of anger there that would never be plumbed.

“Your little accident tonight? That was courtesy of your neighbor, Mr. Gauthier. Yeah. We know how to motivate people. We scared him so bad he gave his big shot life to end yours. Too bad he failed. Now I got to finish the job.”

Then in one final gesture of his disgust, Tommy drew his arm back to stab the blade into the professor’s neck.