The Homecoming (13 page)

Rainey had grown two inches in the last months, and his physiotherapy had ended weeks ago. Now he was a strong, fit young boy. Axel adored him, as younger brothers sometimes worship older brothers. Axel felt that Rainey could do no wrong. Kate hoped he was right.

Rainey and Axel reached the foot of the steps, heads down, immersed in a low and, from the sound of it, intense conversation, neither of them seeing Kate standing there.

Kate was about to speak when she caught a flash of green over in the square, in a patch of slanting sunlight, by the sparkling fountain.

A woman was standing there, in a white dress, or perhaps a nightgown, looking back at her.

By some trick of the afternoon light through the trees, the air around her had a greenish glow, as if she were standing inside a swirling cloud of emerald sparks. The woman was thin, and looked as if she had been ill for a long time, but she had glossy black hair. Her face looked familiar, as if Kate had seen her once, in a dream, or perhaps an old movie. The woman was very still and seemed to be staring intently at the house.

Kate was overcome with a strong sense of déjà vu. A name floated up into her consciousness.

Anora Mercer

A tremor ran through her body. Not fear. Painful regret? Vertigo? Was she losing her mind?

Kate lifted a hand to her, and the woman—if she was there at all—raised her hand in response.

Kate almost called out to her.

A wind stirred the trees around her and the sunlight shimmered into a translucent green shadow and when it steadied again the image was gone.

Kate heard Axel call her name, and when she looked back down at him, he was staring up at her.

Her smile faltered and died away.

“Axel, you look terrible. What happened?”

Axel tilted his head and looked at her through his long brown hair, his
eyes dark with anger. His shirttail was hanging out and the knees of his slacks were stained with mud.

Kate came down the stairs and took him by the shoulders. He was vibrating like a plucked string. When he opened his mouth to speak, Kate saw blood on his teeth. She looked over at Rainey, who was standing over Axel with a protective arm laid across the smaller boy’s shoulders.

“He had a fight with Coleman Mauldar,” said Rainey. Kate felt her heart sink.

Coleman Mauldar was the only child of the mayor of Niceville, a jovial and ruthless man whom everybody called Little Rock.

Coleman was barely fourteen, but thanks to the roulette wheel of genetics, sixty pounds heavier and a foot taller than either Rainey or Axel, strong and quick, a gifted athlete, full of charm and mischief. He and his followers, Jay Dials and Owen Coors, had been making Rainey’s school days a misery ever since he had been abducted a year and a half ago. Now that Axel was living with him, Axel was getting his share of the abuse.

“What happened, Rainey?”

Axel wiped his face, straightened his back, cut in before Rainey could speak.

“They were calling him Crypt Boy again. So this time I smacked him one.”

“We got into a fight with them,” said Rainey. “But it didn’t last long.”

“What happened?”

“Father Casey broke it up. He said it wasn’t fair, because they were bigger than us.”

Axel wiped his nose on his sleeve.

“They’re never gonna stop,” Rainey said. “I’m Crypt Boy and Axel is Cop Killer’s Kid. They followed us home today, calling us names, until we got to the corner there. I wish my dad were here. He would have taken care of them.”

This of course cracked her heart, but she kept it hidden from the boys.

Kate had resolved to talk to the boys about Alice Bayer’s call, about skipping classes—this was her main reason for being here today to greet them—though what they had just said made it difficult to bring it up right now.

But her sense of injustice was on fire.

Working as a family practice lawyer had brought her in contact with
a lot of childish stupidity and meanness, not all of it committed by children.

But when it was … Rousseau thought that all children were innocent until corrupted by the adult world. Rousseau was dead wrong.

There was a bit of grave evil in every child, but in a few children, grave evil was all there was and all there ever would be.

People didn’t like to think this, but in family law, and in Nick’s world, it was a fact of life. On his own, Jay Dials was a decent kid, from a good family—his father owned Billy Dials Town and Country, a building supply store on South Gwinnett—and Owen Coors was the son of a state police captain, Marty Coors, a close friend of Nick’s.

Jay and Owen knew right from wrong well enough. But in Kate’s opinion, when they got with Coleman, things changed.

Behind his good looks and his cheerful manner, Kate believed, Coleman Mauldar was a sadistic monster, and right at this moment she felt she could do almost anything to him, hurt him badly, just to make him stop.

Axel and Rainey were looking at her and what she was feeling must have been written on her face.

“So if Coleman is bad,” Axel asked, “is it okay to hurt him back?”

I’d love to
, Kate was thinking.

“We’re going to have to do something about this. Axel, your mom and I will go have a talk with Father Casey about all of this. In the meantime, both of you come in. We’ll get you cleaned up.”

Axel nodded, seemed to shake off his bad mood. Axel was a resilient kid, in some ways tougher than Rainey. He came up the stairs in a lighter mood.

Rainey stayed down on the street, looking across at the park with the fountain.

Kate, coming up behind him, caught the hunted look in his large brown eyes.

She turned to follow his look, thinking about Coleman Mauldar and his … his
minions
. If they had the nerve to follow him here, if they were loitering in the park over there, they were going to bitterly regret it. They were going to bitterly regret a lot from now on. Kate was going to make a project out of Coleman Mauldar.

“Are you looking for Coleman?”

Rainey looked up at her, his expression blank, and then back out at the square.

“No. I was looking for somebody else.”

“Somebody else? Who?”

“Nobody,” he said, turning away. “Just a person I saw once.”

“In the park over there? Just now? Because I thought I saw a lady in white standing in—”

“No,” said Rainey, slipping away. “It was nobody. Nobody at all.”

At around the same time that Kate Kavanaugh was tending to Rainey and Axel and considering various ways to murder a fourteen-year-old boy, her brother, Reed Walker, was roughly ninety miles northwest of Niceville, rolling southbound on Side Road 336 with the golden brown hills of the Belfair Range filling up his windshield.

His radio beeped at him.

“Charlie Six, what’s your twenty?”

Reed’s gun belt creaked as he leaned forward to pick up the handset. His ride was brand new and he’d racked the driver seat back as far as it would go to make room for his six-foot-two frame. This made it a reach for the handset, but it was a lot easier on the knees.

“Charlie Six, I’m southbound at mile marker thirty-one on Side Road 366. That you, Marty?”

“It is. You going for the barn?”

“Roger that, boss. I’ve been on since oh-four-hundred. Shift ends at sixteen hundred hours.”

“Not for you, my friend. Kentucky’s telling us they had a car go jackrabbit at the state line with us. Lost him in a turnout. Last they saw he was heading our way, maybe forty miles east of your twenty, westbound on the interstate.”

Reed Walker was getting this call because he was at the wheel of a Ford Police Interceptor with a 365-horsepower mill that could get him
from zero to sixty in under five seconds, and the northeastern part of the state was his operational zone.

The car was navy blue with State Police markings that were visible only when the light hit the car at a certain angle. It was a blunt blue bullet with big fat tires, a NASCAR-certified steel roll cage all around him. It had a muscled-up hunchbacked look, as if it were bulked out on steroids. It was squat and mean and tight and had a rack of steel bumper bars up front, run-flat tires, an LED light rack so bright that when he lit it up you could see it from two miles away. Its top speed was classified but during the shakedown trials at the training ring over in Pinchbeck, Reed had run it out to one-ninety and he could feel the car aching to do better than that. And he would have let it, if the pit boss hadn’t stopped him.

He figured it was fast enough and steady enough to blow the doors off anything with wheels and a lot of things with wings. Reed loved this ride more than a K-9 cop loved his dog.

Reed was pulling a one-eighty turn and punching the pedal back up to speed while Marty Coors got the descriptors and read them out—

“Georgia says it’s a Dodge Viper—”

Be still my beating heart
.

“Matte black. Kansas plates a vanity plate—hotel alpha romeo lima echo quebec utah india november—
harlequin
?—registered to a Robert Lawrence Quinn—born June 13, 1965. No wants no warrants. VIN comes back as a Chipa Edition Viper … Christ … stats say this brute tops out at two hundred—You think you can take this car?”

“Any given Sunday, boss. I’m at the on-ramp now. Have we got a visual yet?”

“None of our guys, but minutes ago several citizens called in a black sports car—couldn’t make the type and moving much too fast for plates—at mile marker three four five westbound—”

“Coming right at me, then. I’m gonna lay back here by the embankment—”

“Citizen says the car was a blur—”

“Can we get air?”

“Negative, Reed. Air’s doing cover flight on a prisoner transfer convoy—”

“Byron Deitz? Nick still babysitting him?”

“Yeah. He’s in the transfer van with him right now. They’re bringing him back from another one of those extradition hearings.”

“So no chopper for me?”

“You’re on your own, Charlie Six—wait one—”

Marty Coors cut away.

In the following silence, Reed sat at the wheel, taking in the world around him, seeing it as if this might be his last hour. The afternoon light was sliding sideways across the interstate—long blue shadows from the pine forest crawling out onto the blacktop. Through a break in the pines he could see a small herd of whitetail deer, grazing the kudzu and wild-flowers. They always came down from the Belfair Range in the fall.

Traffic on the interstate was sparse, just a few minivans and SUVs, now and then a transport or a tanker. Light traffic was a good thing. If this Viper showed up—and it was due at any moment—the chase would be right into the setting sun, and a wandering civilian hidden by the glare could kill him. Reed was thinking,
Can I catch a Viper?

The U.S. Marshals prisoner transport van—a rectangular tin box on squishy tires—swayed and lurched along the Cap City Thruway like a big blue rhino on a skateboard. The sound of the tires on the road and the rhythmic
knock-knock-knock
of the diesel engine filled the interior of the van with white noise. And there was a leak somewhere, because they were getting blowback from the tailpipe, so the air inside the prisoner compartment was stale and hot.

Sitting on a steel bench across from a silent and sullen Byron Deitz, Nick Kavanaugh was mainly concentrating on not throwing up. Deitz, shackled by the ankle to a ringbolt in the floor, had his big meaty fists bunched into his belt and his small black eyes fixed on Nick’s face, his fat lips tight. Nick stared back at him without blinking.

Their close association over the last few months had given each man a new perspective on the other. Where there had previously been intense dislike and contempt, now there was open hatred.

Their route, the last run for Deitz, this month anyway, was a direct trip northwest from Cap City to Niceville, a distance of about fifty miles.

The convoy was doing a careful fifty-five, going through the flatlands below Niceville, the four-lane blacktop lined with lodgepole pine and pampas grass. Through gaps in the pines you could see the sunlight glinting on the rippled surface of the Tulip River as it curled through the farmland to the west of the highway.

The light was hazy and golden, classic late fall in the South, long shadows sliding across the road as the sun slipped down into the west.
Through the pitted windshield of the transfer van, past the hulking shapes of the two Deputy U.S. Marshals up front on the other side of the steel mesh, Nick could see a big black Suburban, no markings, maybe fifty yards ahead. There were two Cap City FBI guys inside the Suburban, both wrapped in Kevlar, wired up and loaded for bear.

If Nick looked to his right through the rear window slits, he could see a steel gray State Police car coming up behind, flashers on, a couple of up-armored state cops staring back at him through the windshield.

Keeping company two hundred feet overhead was the state chopper that Reed Walker really could have used right now. The two marshals—Bradley Heath, the big blond guy with the shoulder-length hair, and Shaniqua Griffin, the beefy black chick—were the same two cops that La Motta and Munoz and Spahn had been watching on the CNN feed up at Leavenworth. These two, partners for only a month, disliked each other intensely and therefore were not much given to witty banter, so the mood inside the van was not the teensiest bit sparkly. Nick went back to staring at Byron Deitz and Byron Deitz went right on staring at him.

Reed stiffened and sat up in his harness. In the distance, over the wind in the pampas grass, came the sound of sirens … his radio popped back … “Charlie Six switch to tactical.”

Reed did.

The burst of adrenalized chatter and choppy cross talk came as no surprise. It wasn’t every day that you got to chase a runaway Viper down the interstate. The whole depot was pumped. Days like this, you’d pay to do the job.

“Echo Five, I just got my doors blown off by a black Viper tinted windows no ID on the driver he’s westbound at mile marker three five four—”