River Runs Red (The Border Trilogy) (32 page)

Molly watched the attack with her fist clenched excitedly. It was like the night’s darkness had erased everything but Wade and his victims spotlit for her voyeuristic pleasure, a ballet of violence and terror with only one inevitable conclusion.

The man was up on his hands and knees now, pawing inside his pocket. He brought out a cell phone just as Wade reached him. Wade slapped it from his hands, grabbed his head, pressed his knee against the man’s spine and yanked his head backward, toward him. Molly couldn’t hear the snap from where she sat, transfixed, but she could imagine it.

Wade didn’t stand around enjoying his kills, but hurried back to his car, slammed the door, and drove away. Molly ducked when he passed her, just in case. After he was gone, she found she couldn’t follow. Her legs vibrated from excitement; her back and sides were drenched with sweat. She wiped damp hair from her brow.

She sat like that, gripped by a bizarre, undeniable thrill, until she heard the first siren. As if that had released her, she started the Camry and drove off, leaving the fresh corpses alone in the night.

* * *

Wade woke up—that was the best way he could phrase it—while driving east on Interstate 10, in the right-hand lane, near the Zaragosa exit. He had no idea how long he had been driving—didn’t remember even leaving his hotel room—but the rental’s clock said it was 12:32. Fortunately traffic was light, and whatever had possessed him to go out sleep-driving, if there was such a thing, at least seemed to be in control of the car. It wasn’t until he jolted into consciousness that he swerved out of his lane. A speeding pickup blasted its horn and Wade snapped the car back into place.

The rumble of his tires on the roadway spoke to him in words he could almost understand.

Hands trembling, he pulled off the highway, onto the frontage road, and into the first parking lot he came to. There he killed the engine and sat, his body quaking as adrenaline drained from him. He felt weak, nauseated.
What the hell was that about?
he wondered, resting his forehead on his knuckles.

A bolt of unexpected pain lanced through him. He yanked his head back, reached up, flipped on the dome light.

His knuckles were raw, scraped and bruised.

He didn’t remember damaging his hands in Palo Duro. Maybe if they had tried to go into the cave, he would have, but he didn’t, and

pregnant

and if anything else had happened to them, he couldn’t bring it to

kethili

bring it to mind.

Images flashed through his head, unfamiliar yet somehow not. A pregnant woman, on her back, struggling for breath. A man, carrying bundles, screaming in horror.

In the light from overhead, he examined his hands more closely. Brown-red stains on the sides looked like blood, but not his. Was he

kethili-anh ra nia tapotec istryllium kethili

was he losing it, somehow? Hallucinating, or worse?

He started the car again, turned the radio on, punched the tuning buttons looking for local news. A few minutes later, he found a station and listened, his breathing shallow and strained.

“Two people were reportedly killed tonight near the convention center, in what a police spokesman is describing as an especially brutal double homicide. Detectives are—”

Wade snapped the radio off.

This couldn’t be happening.

He had spent the day reliving memories of his father. His father, the murderer, whose killing spree had been stopped only by Byrd and that strange, glowing liquid in the cave.

His father, the madman.

Could madness be hereditary? Brutal, homicidal madness?

Brent Scheiner had been a bastard, an abuser, a man who preyed on the weak, but until after his fight with Byrd, until he suddenly snapped, he had never been a killer.

Hallucinatory nightmare scraps swam in Wade’s vision, splashes from memory’s current.
Two people on a darkened sidewalk. Blood pooling under the pregnant one’s head. The
crack
of the other’s spine, his body suddenly limp, the stench when he voided himself. Kethili-anh ka nakastata ne gasta. A lipstick tube, price tag still affixed to its lid, rolling off the curb and into the street.

He touched his shoulder, sore, maybe bruised—

Where she hit me with her purse.

Oh, fuck me,
he thought, tears springing with sudden urgency to his eyes, a moaning sob escaping his lips,
where she hit me with her purse.

THIRTY-FIVE

Molly sat with a cup of coffee, cream, no sugar, and a single slice of buttered toast. The TV was on. Matt and Meredith were sparring behind their
Today
desk when her phone rang. Early morning calls were rare, and she worried that it was the hospital—that yesterday’s jaunt had been too much for Byrd. With a trembling, reluctant hand, she lifted the phone. “Hello?”

“Molly, it’s Wade. I’ve got to talk to you. Can you meet me for breakfast?”

She swallowed the bit of toast in her mouth, brushed crumbs off her lower lip. He sounded awful, like he hadn’t slept and was coming down with something. “Sure. Is everything okay?”

“I’ll tell you when I see you.”

“Where?”

“Pick a place. Not too far away. I want to do this now.”

She named a coffee shop usually frequented by university students, not far from the hospital. It might be crowded, but its chairs were gathered into cozy groupings between large pillars, offering a degree of privacy while still being public enough for safety. “It’s just got pastries and such,” she said. “If that’s okay.”

“It’s fine. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

“I’ll need twenty,” she said. “But I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

She hung up, tossed the rest of her toast into the trash, poured her coffee down the sink. Before she left, she called Franklin Carrier and told him she would be late, and why. “Go get him, girl,” he said.

“That’s the plan.”

Given what she had seen last night—the almost erotic charge she had experienced remembered vividly, making her tingle all over—she would have been surprised if Wade had slept at all.

Unless he was used to nights like that.

He was ensconced in a chair when she reached the coffee shop. He had managed to find the most remote table in the place, tucked back in a corner with a pillar and a rack of coffee mugs and pots blocking access to it from three sides. The table was small and round, its surface a tiled mosaic. Wade had a huge mug steaming on top of it, no food. Molly waved and ordered a coffee and a croissant at the counter. When she had them, she carried them to the table, set them down, and leaned over to kiss Wade’s cheek. He didn’t return the gesture. His eyes were bloodshot, his brow furrowed.

“You sounded bad on the phone, Wade,” she said, settling into a plush wing-back chair. “What’s up?”

“I…had a rough night,” he said. He scratched the outside of his thigh, through his jeans.

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Me, too. I mean, sorry it happened.”

“You want to talk about it?”

“No.”

She sipped her coffee, watching him over the rim of her cup. “You wanted to see me, though.”

“Yeah.” His gaze darted around the place, landing on the coffee shop’s framed art (amateurish, vaguely Warholian watercolor portraits of writers, musicians, and artists), the other mismatched tables and chairs, the employees bustling about, but never meeting hers. She was getting used to the beard, but he hadn’t even combed his hair. Dark bags weighed down his eyes and his cheeks looked gaunt, as if he’d lost a few pounds overnight.

She knew he hadn’t. He had lost some in captivity, though. His natural good looks and cheerful manner had disguised it, hidden the emotional toll it must have taken on him. Today he displayed it all.

“So what’s up?” Knowing his secret gave her a private pleasure, a kind of power over him.

“I…” He stopped, picked up the giant mug, took a loud drink. “I haven’t told you what happened over there.”

“In Iraq?”

“Right. Or Byrd either. I told the story a hundred times to the authorities and to people at CNN, but that was just a version of it, you know?
Like
the truth, but not the whole truth.”

“And now you want to tell it?” Franklin had called this one. Next time she would trust his instincts.

“I think something happened to me over there, Molly. Something…I don’t know, weird. Something that’s not right.”

“What do you mean?” Molly dabbed at her lips with a napkin, hiding the grin she felt coming on.

“I’m not really sure. I just thought maybe if I told you about it, it would help me understand it myself.”

“I’m here, Wade. I called work, so they know I’ll be late. As long as you need.”

He nodded gratefully. “Well, you know the basics already, right?”

“I know what was in the news. You were kidnapped, you got away.”

“I was supposed to have a meeting with an insurgent leader. It took me days to set it up. Weeks. Working channels, talking to people who knew people who could get to him. Finally, one day, I got the call. Get to this address, right now. Sami, the Iraqi who worked as my driver and translator, was sitting in the lobby of the Palestine, my hotel, playing cards with some of the other men who did the same for other journalists. I grabbed him and we hustled out to his Mercedes, a gray, paint-peeling piece of crap that must have been thirty years old. We drove to the address where the meet was supposed to happen, through a few checkpoints, into a neighborhood where most of the houses were relatively intact. But when we parked and knocked on the door, someone answered without opening it more than an inch or two and shouted at us. Sami shouted back, then shrugged and started back to the car.

“‘What’s going on?’ I asked him. ‘Meeting’s off,’ he says. ‘Canceled. They will call when it can happen again.’

“Well, I was pissed. I yelled at Sami, yelled at the house, even though the guy had shut the door and there were no signs of life inside. Sami was used to things not working out—he was Iraqi, after all, so that was a way of life for him. He gave me a few shrugs and started up the Mercedes to drive back to the hotel. Before he got out of the parking space, two black trucks drove up and blocked us in. Then these masked guys jumped out of the truck beds with guns. I ducked down in the back, but they weren’t shooting at me. They killed Sami.”

“You must have been terrified.”

“I can’t even tell you. It was the most horrible—well, okay, not the most horrible moment of my life, because we both know when that was. But it was close.”

“I’m so sorry, Wade.”

He shrugged. “They dragged me out of the Mercedes and threw me into one of their trucks. Tied me up, stuck duct tape over my eyes and mouth. We drove around for a long time. I couldn’t tell where we were. I know we went through some checkpoints, but either they paid off the soldiers or they had allies there, because we were never stopped, even though anyone could see there was a gift-wrapped American journalist in the back.

“Finally, we stopped and they hauled me out of the truck. We went inside somewhere, and down some stairs. A lot of stairs. I kept thinking they had to end. A few times I stumbled, but they always caught me. I kept telling them I was an American, a journalist, but that didn’t bother them in the least. They knew who I was. They had set the trap for me, after all.

“I’m told I was missing for seventeen days. I tried to keep track, but I couldn’t see the sun. When they took off the duct tape, I was in some kind of cell, a cave with an iron door. People brought me meals, but they wouldn’t answer questions. Sometimes they demanded that I renounce Christianity and accept Allah. Sometimes they asked me questions about troop movements. They claimed I was a spy for George Bush.”

“I guess they didn’t know you very well,” Molly interrupted.

“Apparently not. After what seemed like a few days, they started occasionally torturing me.”

“Oh my God, Wade.”

“Nothing real terrible. Beating me with sticks. Taking my clothes away and throwing cold water over me, keeping me cold and wet for hours on end. When they did these things, they would rant about Abu Ghraib, like I was personally responsible for what went on there. Of course, I didn’t know anything that would help them, and the questions they asked hardly made sense anyway. When they told me it would stop if I made a propaganda video for them, I went ahead and made it. I tried to make it obvious that the things I was saying were scripted—all lies—crossing my fingers in front of the camera, winking, sometimes saying things like, ‘Is that good? Is that how you want me to say it?’”

“We all watched that online,” Molly told him. “It was awful, seeing you in that condition, with those armed men standing behind you. But you’re right, it was obvious that you didn’t mean a word of it. Byrd cracked up, said it was the worst propaganda tape ever made, and you’d better not try to join the Screen Actors Guild.”