Shattered (22 page)

“Get your bony little ass outta the car!” The foster father yanks the boy out of the battered Ford Galaxie by the nape of his neck. The kid, a miserable, trembling bundle of nerves known as Henry-honey to his alcoholic foster mother, goes sprawling across the powdery gravel lot outside the warehouse.

“It's not my fault!”

“Shuddup!” The big, bearded German in flannel and denim circles around to the other side of the car.

On the ground, out of breath, eyes red from crying, the eight-year-old Henry-honey curls into a fetal position and cries into the crook of his elbow. He's a skinny kid dressed in corduroy pants and a baseball shirt, with a thatch of greasy chestnut-colored hair.

“Your turn!” Henry-honey hears his foster father growl to the teenage girl who is cowering inside the car. From his vantage point on the ground, Henry-honey can see the foster father's scuffed work boots shuffling violently on the other side of the car as he drags the girl out the door and around the rear of the car toward the warehouse.

“Stop it, you're hurting me, leggo my hair!” The girl's name is Peggy—“Peggers” to her school pals—and she is masking her terror with petulant anger. A sandy-haired girl with huge blue eyes and big braids on the side of her head, she has always hated this big hairy authority figure, this odiferous intrusion into her life, and now the mutual disrespect has finally boiled over.

“Get your asses inside! The both o' ya!”

The foster father takes each kid by the neck, and roughly ushers them toward the building. The low-slung, windowless structure spans several acres of backwater farmland, and features a series of rusty garage-style doors stretching in to the distance in either direction. There's a rust-pocked sign hanging above the lone steel door.

The sign says U-Store-It Mini-Warehouses.

Inside the building, the two kids are dragged down a pitch-black, cobweb-fringed corridor that smells of urine and moldy stone. Henry-honey's heart is beating so hard it feels as though it's about to crack his sternum.

“Hurry up! Hurry up” The foster father's voice slurs with rage, his breath hot with the stink of whiskey. Where is he taking them, and why? And what is he going to do to them? The foster father has spanked Honey-boy on many occasions, once on his bare bottom with a rubber hose that made welts and hurt for a week and a half, but this time the stakes seem higher. This time, it seems as though the man is planning on seriously hurting Henry-honey.

“That's far enough!” The foster father throws them both to the cement floor. “On your knees facing each other!”

The two kids reluctantly obey the man. They each lower themselves to their knees and then sheepishly look at each other. At first, Henry-honey can glean nothing from Peggers's blank stare. Her pale blue eyes shimmer with tears in the dark corridor, but they also seem emptied out as they gaze stoically back at him. Henry-honey starts to shake. “P-p-p-pluh-please…d-don't hurt us, please, p-please.”

“SHUDDUP!”

Henry-honey starts to sob.

The big man grabs the boy by the scruff of the neck, then wrenches his head up. “Are you the one took money from your mother's jewel box?”

“I-I—I don't—”

“Answer me!”

“No.”

The big man released his grip. Henry-honey collapsed back to his knees. The foster father turned to Peggers. “How about you, missy?”

She doesn't say anything.

He slaps her, hard, across the cheek. “You speak when spoken to!”

“Yes. Yes, I took the money.”

The big man nods and walks back around behind her. He leans down, takes hold of her waist and yanks her bell-bottom jeans and panties down. Peggers flinches. Henry-honey watches, breathless, his tears congealing in his eyes.

“Don't move!” The foster father slips off his big belt with its Confederate-flag buckle, and then in one violent slashing motion he bullwhips it across the girl's rear end. Peggers gasps.

Henry-honey looks away.

“Don't you look away, boy!”

Henry-honey forces himself to watch. The big man whips Peggers again and again and again and again and again, until the girl stops gasping and just stares straight ahead, that horrible blank stare solidifying on her face. Henry wants to die. He looks into his foster sister's eyes, and she looks into his, and they share something then. Something secret. Something that will stay between them forever.

“Don't you goddamn move,” utters the big man, whose pants are falling down now. He pushes them down the rest of the way, exposing his enormous erection. He is breathing heavily now, his expression changing.

The two kids keep staring at each other, but they no longer
see
each other.

They stare through each other.

The foster father positions himself behind the girl and starts sodomizing her. She keeps staring into Henry-honey's eyes as the big man thrusts into her, jerking her skinny body with violent spasms. Henry tries to look away, but the big man snarls in a hoarse drawl between pelvic thrusts, “Don't you look away, boy…. I want you to see this…. I want you to see what happens to thieves…”

Henry-honey gapes, his sister's terrible blank gaze searing his brain.

Shattering his psyche into a horrible, beautiful mosaic.

Sending him deep inside himself.

Federal Marshal Norm Pokorny and his team of tactical specialists reached the safe house at precisely 2:23
A.M.
, and eased the paramilitary van—a black Dodge Sprinter, to be specific, with the windows replaced by bulletproof alloy panels—over to the curb behind the two idling sheriff department vehicles. Following protocols established for search-and-assess missions, Pokorny immediately got on his radio and murmured softly, “Stand by, folks.”

Pokorny clicked open his door and climbed out without a sound.

He had no idea what they were walking into, as he strode past the sheriff's cruiser, his eyes shaded by polarized night glasses, his gaze everywhere all at once. He unsnapped his Glock nine millimeter, drew it out of the holster, and carried it at his side.

A light went on in the neighbor's window, then another one, and another one. Pokorny noticed the entire block was lit up, lights in all the windows now, yet quiet. Lots of rustling drapes, people watching. The tension in the air crackled. Pokorny tasted it on his tongue, a sharp tang of danger, the silence hanging there like an echo.

Pokorny was a stout, muscular man, and he moved with surprising grace as he approached the deputy's prowler. He saw the interior light still on, the engine rumbling faintly. A turn signal clicked as though it were a metronome. Pokorny smelled an ambush and reached for his vest mike. He whispered into it: “I want two teams, right now, right now. On the line. Tell me you copy.”

A voice popped: “Copy.”

“I want Willings and the blue team to lay down a perimeter around the property. Got that?”

“Copy that.”

“I want Pelham and the sharpshooters positioned on the four corners. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“I'm going in the front, nice and casual. Willings, you better back my ass up this time.”

The voice returned: “What about the tunnel?”

“One thing at a time,” Pokorny whispered. “Everybody on the ready line?”

“Affirmative.”

“I want clean vectors this time. You get a head shot on the bogey, you do it quick and clean.”

“Copy that, Cap.”

“This may be nothing but jitters inside. On my mark. Ready…nice and quiet. Go!”

Several things happened simultaneously at various corners of the property. Pokorny started around the front of the prowler and the rear doors of the Sprinter clicked open, and eight shadowy figures came out in single file, weapons down, silently dispersing across the parkway in front of the neighbors to the south. Pokorny casually strode up the sidewalk with his automatic pressed against his thigh, eyes up and alert. He could smell the night in his nostrils.

Approaching the porch, the marshal saw several things that computed quickly in his brain: a flattened bush, footprints in the weeds, maybe blood. It was hard to confirm the latter, the pink stuff had mixed well with the gritty soil. In his peripheral vision he noted the rest of the team moving behind him: Half the grouping went east, the other half west. Black-clad commandos with souped-up assault rifles.

Pokorny didn't knock. The front door was ajar. Everything calm inside, though. He thumbed the hammer on the Glock, and turned away from the door.

“Front of the house is not secure,” he murmured into his vest mike. “Repeat:
not secure
. I want everybody on standby mode, safeties off.”

He descended the porch steps and went around the front of the house.

“I want all collateral—” he started to say as he rounded the corner of the bungalow and then saw the sheriff and deputy posed in the shadows. “What the devil is this, what is this, what's going on?”

“Negative copy on that, say again,” the voice crackled out of Pokorny's pocket radio.

The marshal didn't answer. He approached the two men in uniform sitting against the house, facing each other. The back of the sheriff's ruined skull gleamed in the moonlight. “Got officers down! Officers down! Move in! Now! Hard target! Now! NOW!”

 

Grove and Geisel made it to the Black River Drive house five minutes later.

Their escort, a young field agent from the Indy office named Nesmith, had pushed the government-issued sedan, an unmarked '99 Pontiac Grand Prix, as far as it could be pushed, crossing the rolling hills and patchwork forests of Owen County in just under twenty minutes flat, running at an average speed of ninety-odd miles an hour. On some of the long dark straightaway sections the car actually reached 120, at one point causing Geisel to remark from the backseat that perhaps they would be defeating their own purpose by getting themselves killed. But Grove urged Nesmith to keep the needle pinned, the headlights on bright, and the two-way turned up.

Grove spent the whole journey from Grissom to Fox Run clutching the radio handset. He never let go of it. He spoke numerous times to the SWAT team, to the sheriff's dispatcher, and to the field office communications people in Indianapolis. After a while, he had forgotten he was even holding the mike. But now as the Pontiac careered around the corner of Burlington and Black River, Grove dropped the mike.

His entire body tingled with adrenaline as Ne-smith zoomed toward 11 Black River. Grove could see the rest of the homes on the block blazing with light, some of the neighbors now gathering on their porches in robes and worried expressions. Grove could also see the cop cars and the SWAT van looming, lined up along the curb in front of a neighbor's house. What he did
not
see was Marshal Pokorny and the other tactical officers drawing their guns, then pouring into the house through the back door, doing a frantic room-to-room.

As the Pontiac scudded to a stop behind the empty SWAT van, Grove finally got a good look at the meager little bungalow. For the most infinitesimal instant, Grove felt a pang of guilt and shame. The house, with its cheap brick, its weeds, and its little gingerbread porch, made Grove think of some tacky variation of a Grimm's fairytale.
The safe house.
There it was. Looking deceptively still and quiet, but radiating a malignant kind of tableau.

Doors flew open. Guns came out. Even Geisel drew a .38 snubbie from a shoulder holster. Grove took the lead. He crossed the lawn with his Charter Arms cannon high in one hand, the other hand raising the laminate ID around his neck so nobody mistook him for an Unfriendly. His senses magnified the sights and sounds and smells surrounding him, bombarding his brain, as he vaulted up the porch steps.

Movement on either side of the house registered like flash frames in Grove's peripheral vision, dark-clad guerrillas, heavily armed, coming around the front of the house. Grove clearly heard Geisel call out to them, identifying himself and Grove and Nesmith, hollering at the SWAT guys to allow Grove inside the domicile, this was the husband, one of them, FBI, so let him through, as Grove lunged for the open door.

He kicked it in.

Plunging into the living room, weapon at the ready, Grove nearly lost his balance on the braided rug. He skidded a little, then whirled around the room. He had lost all sense of procedure and professionalism as the odors of Maura's cigarettes, and maybe something burning on a stove, and moldy bathroom smells assaulted him. “Where are they?!” he yelled at the empty living room. “Where are they?”

“Ulysses—!”

“Pokorny!”

“Hold it, Ulysses—”

An awkward moment as Geisel tried to reach out for Grove, tried to pull him back at the exact moment a black-garbed marshal materialized in the archway between the living room and the kitchen. Gun barrels jumped up all around the room. Voices bellowed in unison. “Put 'em down! Put 'em down! Put 'em down right now!”

More SWAT guys appeared on the porch, a pair of sharpshooters, both squatting and aiming their M-1s at the interior of the house. Tiny red laser dots swam up and down Grove's spine.

“Hold your fire! Everbody!”

Pokorny's baritone cut through the garbled chorus of voices. The beefy captain had appeared in the hallway to Grove's immediate right, hands up in surrender, his craggy face lit up with alarm. Grove spun and aimed his gun—more out of instinct than anything else—and stared at the grizzled twenty-year veteran of the Marshal Service.

“Everybody take it easy.” Pokorny kept his hands up, burning his gaze into Grove. “Stand down now, we're all on the same team here.”

Grove kept his gun aimed at Pokorny. “Where's my wife? My boy—?”

“The house is empty. Listen to me. Grove—the house is empty!”

“Everybody put the goddamn guns down!” Geisel's voice was ragged with nerves.

At last Grove managed to lower the barrel. The others backed off, released their hammers, clicked their safeties. Grove had not taken his eyes off the marshal. “Somebody give me some answers.”

Pokorny nodded and spoke very quickly and evenly as though addressing a wild animal. “I understand you want your family out of harm's way, we're working on it—”

“You're not answering my question.”

“They're gone, there's nobody here, no perp, nobody, and right now we're looking at—”

“How long have you been here?”

The marshal told him about their arrival five minutes earlier, the bodies on the east side of the house, and the signs of struggle in the basement. “So now,” Pokorny added, almost as an afterthought, “We're looking at the escape tunnel as a possible mode of—”

“The what? The
what
?”

For a brief moment, all the men gathered in the living room looked at each other, trying to gauge who was supposed to know about these things.

“There's an escape tunnel in the basement,” Pokorny finally told Grove. “Nobody told you this?”