Shadowfires (35 page)

He had not known whom he expected—other than Seitz, Knowls, and the men of Geneplan—but he had certainly not expected Rachael and Shadway. He was stunned and could not imagine how she had learned of this place, though he knew that the answer would be obvious to him if his mind had been functioning normally.

They were crouched along the bank that flanked the road down there, fairly well concealed. But they had to reveal a little of themselves in order to get a good look at the cabin, and what little they revealed was enough for Eric to identify them in the magnified field of the binoculars.

The sight of Rachael enraged him, for she had rejected him, the only woman in his adult life to reject him—the bitch, the ungrateful stinking
bitch!
—and she turned her back on his money, too. Even worse: in the miasmal swamp of his deranged mind,
she
was responsible for his death, had virtually killed him by angering him to distraction and then letting him rush out onto Main Street, into the path of the truck. He could believe she had actually planned his death in order to inherit the very fortune on which she’d claimed to have no designs. Yes, of course, why not? And now there she was with her lover, with the man she had been fucking behind his back, and she had clearly come to finish the job that the garbage truck had started.

They pulled back beyond the bend, but a few seconds later he saw movement in the brush, to the left of the road, and he caught a glimpse of them moving off into the trees. They were going to make a cautious indirect approach.

Eric dropped the binoculars and shoved up from the armchair, stood swaying, in the grip of a rage so great that he almost felt crushed by it. Steel bands tightened across his chest, and for a moment he could not draw his breath. Then the bands snapped, and he sucked in great lungsful of air. He said, “Oh, Rachael, Rachael,” in a voice that sounded as if it were echoing up from hell. He liked the sound of it, so he said her name again: “Rachael, Rachael . . .”

From the floor beside the chair, he plucked up the ax.

He realized that he could not handle the ax and both knives, so he chose the butcher’s knife and left the other blade behind.

He would go out the back way. Circle around. Slip up on them through the woods. He had the cunning to do it. He felt as if he had been born to stalk and kill.

Hurrying across the living room toward the kitchen, Eric saw an image of himself in his mind’s eye: He was ramming the knife deep into her guts, then ripping it upward, tearing open her flat young belly. He made a shrill sound of eagerness and almost fell over the empty soup and stew cans in his haste to reach the back door. He would cut her, cut her, cut. And when she dropped to the ground with the knife in her belly, he would go at her with the ax, use the blunt edge of it first, smashing her bones to splinters, breaking her arms and legs, and then he would turn the wondrous shiny instrument over in his hands—his strange and powerful new hands!—and use the sharp edge.

By the time he reached the rear door and yanked it open and went out of the house, he was in the grip of that reptilian fury that he had feared only a short while ago, a cold and calculating fury, called forth out of genetic memories of inhuman ancestors. Having at last surrendered to that primeval rage, he was surprised to discover that it felt
good
.

Jerry Peake should have been asleep on his feet, for he had been up all night. But seeing Anson Sharp humiliated had revitalized him better than eight hours in the sheets could have. He felt marvelous.

He stood with Sharp in the corridor outside Sarah Kiel’s hospital room, waiting for Felsen Kiel to come and tell them what they needed to know. Peake required considerable restraint to keep from laughing at his boss’s vindictive grousing about the farmer from Kansas.

“If he wasn’t a know-nothing shit-kicker, I’d come down so hard on him that his teeth would still be vibrating next Christmas,” Sharp said. “But what’s the point, huh? He’s just a thick-headed Kansas plowboy who doesn’t know any better. No point talking to a brick wall, Peake. No point getting angry with a brick wall.”

“Right,” Peake said.

Pacing back and forth in front of Sarah’s closed door, glowering at the nurses who passed in the corridor, Sharp said, “You know, those farm families way out there on the plains, they get strange ’cause they breed too much among themselves, cousin to cousin, that sort of thing, which makes them more stupid generation by generation. But not only stupid, Peake. That inbreeding makes them stubborn as mules.”

“Mr. Kiel sure does seem stubborn,” Peake said.

“Just a dim-witted shit-kicker, so what’s the point of wasting energy breaking his butt? He wouldn’t learn his lesson anyway.”

Peake could not risk an answer. He required almost superhuman determination to keep a grin off his face.

Six or eight times during the next half hour, Sharp said, “Besides, it’s faster to let
him
get the information out of the girl. She’s a dim bulb herself, a drugged-up little whore who’s probably had syphilis and clap so often her brain’s like oatmeal. I figured it’d take us hours to get anything out of her. But when that shit-kicker came into the room, and I heard the girl say ‘Daddy’ in that happy-shaky little voice, I knew he’d get out of her what we needed a lot faster than we could get it. Let him do our job for us, I thought.”

Jerry Peake marveled at the deputy director’s boldness in trying to reshape Peake’s perception of what had actually happened in Sarah’s room. Then again, maybe Sharp was beginning to believe that he had not backed down and had cleverly manipulated The Stone, getting the best of him. He was fruitcake enough to buy his own lies.

Once, Sharp put a hand on Peake’s shoulder, not in a comradely manner but to be sure of his subordinate’s attention. “Listen, Peake, don’t you get the wrong idea about the way I came on with that little whore. The foul language I used, the threats, the little bit of hurt I caused her when I squeezed her hand . . . the way I touched her . . . didn’t mean a thing. Just a technique, you know. A good method for getting quick answers. If this wasn’t a national security crisis, I’d never have tried that stuff. But sometimes, in special situations like this, we have to do things for our country that maybe neither we nor our country would ordinarily approve of. We understand each other?”

“Yes, sir. Of course.” Surprised by his own ability to fake naïveté and admiration, and to do it convincingly, Peake said, “I’m amazed you’d worry that I’d misunderstand. I’d never have thought of such an approach myself. But the moment you went to work on her . . . well, I knew what you were doing, and I admired your interrogation skills. I see this case as an opportunity, sir. I mean, the chance to work with you, which I figured would be a very valuable learning experience, which it has been—even more valuable than I’d hoped.”

For a moment Sharp’s marble-hard green eyes fixed on Peake with evident suspicion. Then the deputy director decided to take him at his word, for he relaxed a bit and said, “Good. I’m glad you feel that way, Peake. This is a nasty business sometimes. It can even make you feel dirty now and then, what you have to do, but it’s for the country, and that’s what we always have to keep in mind.”

“Yes, sir. I always keep that in mind.”

Sharp nodded and began to pace and grumble again.

But Peake knew that Sharp had enjoyed intimidating and hurting Sarah Kiel and had
immensely
enjoyed touching her. He knew that Sharp was a sadist and a pedophile, for he had seen those dark aspects of his boss surge clearly to the surface in that hospital room. No matter what lies Sharp told him, Jerry Peake was never going to forget what he had seen. Knowing these things about the deputy director gave Peake an enormous advantage—though, as yet, he had absolutely no idea how to benefit from what he had learned.

He had also learned that Sharp was, at heart, a coward. In spite of his bullying ways and impressive physical appearance, the deputy director would back down in a crunch, even against a smaller man like The Stone, as long as the smaller man stood up to him with conviction. Sharp had no compunctions about violence and would resort to it when he thought he was fully protected by his government position or when his adversary was sufficiently weak and unthreatening, but he would back off if he believed he faced the slightest chance of being hurt himself. Possessing that knowledge, Peake had another big advantage, but he did not yet see a way to use that one, either.

Nevertheless, he was confident he would eventually know how to apply the things he had learned. Making well-considered, fair, and effective use of such insights was precisely what a legend did best.

Unaware of having given Peake two good knives, Sharp paced back and forth with the impatience of a Caesar.

The Stone had demanded half an hour alone with his daughter. When thirty minutes had passed, Sharp began to look at his wristwatch more frequently.

After thirty-five minutes, he walked heavily to the door, put a hand against it, started to push inside, hesitated, and turned away. “Hell, give him another few minutes. Can’t be easy getting anything coherent out of that spaced-out little whore.”

Peake murmured agreement.

The looks that Sharp cast at the closed door became increasingly murderous. Finally, forty minutes after they had left the room at The Stone’s insistence, Sharp tried to cover his fear of confrontation with the farmer by saying, “I have to make a few important calls. I’ll be at the public phones in the lobby.”

“Yes, sir.”

Sharp started away, then looked back. “When the shit-kicker comes out of there, he’s just going to have to wait for me no matter how long I take, and I don’t give a damn how much that upsets him.”

“Yes, sir.”

“It’ll do him good to cool his heels awhile,” Sharp said, and he stalked off, head held high, rolling his big shoulders, looking like a very important man, evidently convinced that his dignity was intact.

Jerry Peake leaned against the wall of the corridor and watched the nurses go by, smiling at the pretty ones and engaging them in brief flirtatious conversation when they were not too busy.

Sharp stayed away for twenty minutes, giving The Stone a full hour with Sarah, but when he came back from making his important—probably nonexistent—phone calls, The Stone had still not appeared. Even a coward could explode if pushed too far, and Sharp was furious.

“That lousy dirt-humping hayseed. He can’t come in here, reeking of pigshit, and screw up
my
investigation.”

He turned away from Peake and started toward Sarah’s room.

Before Sharp took two steps, The Stone came out.

Peake had wondered whether Felsen Kiel would look as imposing on second encounter as he had appeared when stepping dramatically into Sarah’s room and interrupting Anson Sharp in an act of molestation. To Peake’s great satisfaction, The Stone was even more imposing than on the previous occasion. That strong, seamed, weathered face. Those oversized hands, work-gnarled knuckles. An air of unshakable self-possession and serenity. Peake watched with a sort of awe as the man crossed the hallway, as if he were a slab of granite come to life.

“Gentlemen, I’m sorry to keep you waitin’. But, as I’m sure you understand, my daughter and I had a lot of catchin’ up to do.”

“And as
you
must understand, this is an urgent national security matter,” Sharp said, though more quietly than he had spoken earlier.

Unperturbed, The Stone said, “My daughter says you want to know if maybe she has some idea where a fella named Leben is hidin’ out.”

“That’s right,” Sharp said tightly.

“She said somethin’ about him bein’ a livin’ dead man, which I can’t quite get clear with her, but maybe that was just the drugs talkin’ through her. You think?”

“Just the drugs,” Sharp said.

“Well, she knows of a certain place he might be,” The Stone said. “The fella owns a cabin above Lake Arrowhead, she says. It’s a sort of secret retreat for him.” He took a folded paper from his shirt pocket. “I’ve written down these directions.” He handed the paper to Peake. To Peake, not to Anson Sharp.

Peake glanced at The Stone’s precise, clear handwriting, then passed the paper to Sharp.

“You know,” The Stone said, “my Sarah was a good girl up until three years ago, a fine daughter in every way. Then she fell under the spell of a sick person who got her onto drugs, put twisted thoughts in her head. She was only thirteen then, impressionable, vulnerable, easy pickin’.”

“Mr. Kiel, we don’t have time—”

The Stone pretended not to hear Sharp, even though he was looking directly at him. “My wife and I tried our best to find out who it was that had her spellbound, figured it had to be an older boy at school, but we could never identify him. Then one day, after a year durin’ which hell moved right into our home, Sarah up and disappeared, ran off to California to ‘live the good life.’ That’s what she wrote in the note to us, said she wanted to live the good life and that we were unsophisticated country people who didn’t know anythin’ about the world, said we were full of funny ideas. Like honesty, sobriety, and self-respect, I suppose. These days, lots of folks think those are funny ideas.”

“Mr. Kiel—”

“Anyway,” The Stone continued, “not long after that, I finally learned who it was corrupted her. A teacher. Can you credit that? A
teacher
, who’s supposed to be a figure of respect. New young history teacher. I demanded the school board investigate him. Most of the other teachers rallied round him to fight any investigation ’cause these days a lot of ’em seem to think we exist just to keep our mouths shut and pay their salaries no matter what garbage they want to pump into our children’s heads. Two-thirds of the teachers—”

“Mr. Kiel,” Sharp said more forcefully, “none of this is of any interest to us, and we—”