The Short Drop (29 page)

He was at the SUV, keys in the door, when the hand, strong as cold iron, went over his mouth, deftly turning and exposing his neck. The icy silver of a hypodermic needle kissed his skin like a wasp’s sting.

“Quiet, now,” a voice of rotting fruit whispered. “I’ll take you to see your father.”

CHAPTER FORTY

Duke smiled at his son and waved him over. He came to his father obediently and tried not to fidget as Duke rebuttoned his top button and straightened his tie for the third time. The Christmas party was in full swing, and even though the senator had a strict “no shop talk” policy at the annual gathering, politics was never far from anyone’s lips.

A doughy beet-red man stopped to shake hands with Duke. Gibson was used to it. People were always interrupting to talk to his dad. His dad was important, and Gibson felt immense pride in the respect that everyone showed him. Yet as the two men spoke, Duke made the man feel like the center of the universe—asked after his wife and children by name and congratulated him on a recent triumph in the House. The man went away happy, and Duke turned back to his son.

“The day that man gets a call from me is the day I’m on fire, and he’s got the only hose for three states.”

Gibson laughed, even though he didn’t really understand the joke. He just liked when his father treated him like one of the guys. An insider. Duke ran his hand through his son’s hair, mussing it affectionately.

“Dad . . . ,” Gibson complained and straightened it with the flat of his hand.

“Where are the rest of the kids? You don’t need to hang out down here on the killing floor.”

“They’re all upstairs watching kids’ movies,” he said with disgust.

At ten, Gibson was in the midst of becoming wise beyond his years. His favorite movie was
The Godfather Part II
—not that the original was bad, but everyone knew that
Part II
was the superior film. According to his dad, John Cazale was the most underrated actor in movie history.
Only ever made five movies, but I’ll stand those five against any five ever made,
Duke had told him when they’d watched it together the first time.

That fall, Gibson had landed in the principal’s office for grabbing a classmate by the face, exclaiming, “I know it was you, Bobby, you broke my heart,” and kissing him violently on the mouth. Duke had laughed until he’d cried and halfheartedly told his son not to do it again. Gibson pointed out that nothing had disappeared from his locker since.

“Kids’ movies, huh? That sounds pretty rough.”

“The worst. What’s going on down here?”

“Just lining them up and knocking them down. These things are all about appearances, kiddo. Mark my words, there’s nothing phonier under heaven than a DC holiday party. The only honest words you’ll hear all night are the drink orders at the bar.”

“So why do it?”

“Some things you just have to do. It’s all about appearances. Did I say that already? Anyway, the trick is seeing what they’re trying to hide. What are they trying to draw your eye away from? Figure that out, and you figure out the man. Or woman. But start with men, because they’re easier. Women are more of a PhD thing.”

“Got it.” Gibson nodded sagely, then: “Like how?”

“All right, so take that fellow over there,” Duke pointed to a tall, thin man with a face like a strip of sandpaper. He was surveying the room and nursing a beer.

“Is he someone important?”

“You tell me,” Duke said.

Gibson stared at him a long time. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Because no one is trying to talk to him. If he was important, he wouldn’t be alone.”

“Good boy.” Duke chuckled. “But just him now. Can you tell just from looking at him?”

Gibson sized the man up. He wore a suit and shiny tie. He had a lapel pin and wire-rimmed glasses. His blond hair was combed back conservatively. Gibson couldn’t see it.

“He looks like everyone else.”

“Nobody looks like everybody else. We try but fail. The trick, Gib, is not to look at the center of a man. At the center every man looks the same. Suit, tie, lapel pin. He’s wearing the uniform, and he looks good. At the center he could be the president of the United States. It’s at the edge where the truth lies. It’s like hair. Everyone brushes their hair so it looks good from straight on. Why? Because that’s how we see it in the mirror. Straight on. We only ever see ourselves straight on, so that’s the only angle we worry about.”

“So I should look at his back?”

“Not literally, but yes. Look at his shoes. What do you see?”

“They’re scuffed. One of the laces is broken.”

“What does that tell you?”

“He wears them a lot?”

“And what does that tell you?”

Gibson thought hard. The shoes reminded him of Ben Rizolli’s basketball. Ben Rizolli’s dad had split when he was little, and it was just Ben and his mom. There wasn’t a lot of money. Ben had had the same basketball since forever, and it went everywhere Ben went. The seams and lettering were worn away, and there was hardly any grip left on it at all. Gibson always felt bad that a kid who loved basketball couldn’t afford a new one.

“He doesn’t have many pairs. He probably can’t afford a lot of shoes. He’s hoping no one looks at his feet.”

“Not bad. Do you think the senator is wearing scuffed shoes tonight?”

“No way.”

“No way. That’s right. Now look at my shoes.”

Gibson looked down at his father’s feet. Duke was wearing a pair of worn black wing tips. The leather was creased deeply above the toe. He looked up at his dad inquisitively.

“So what does that tell you about your old man?” Duke asked.

“I don’t know.”

“It means that no one thing reveals a man. Never be so arrogant to think you know a man from just his shoes. But . . .”

“But, it’s a start?”

“It’s a start,” Duke said. “So what’s the difference between him and me?”

“People keep talking to you.”

Duke winked. “It’s a start.”

Gibson felt proud and nodded vigorously. He felt like he was missing something, but he was happy for his dad’s attention and didn’t want to spoil it by asking too many questions. He’d figure it out on his own.

“All right, kiddo. Give me an hour. I need to work a bit, but then I know a place in Georgetown that makes a killer Oreo milkshake. Deal?”

“Deal.”

Three hours later, he awakened where he’d fallen asleep, curled up on a bed in one of the guestrooms beneath a fur coat.

“Wake up, son. Wake up. Wake up.”

Duke scooped him up and carried him out to the car. Gibson didn’t wake until the door slammed shut.

“Wake up . . .”

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Gibson came to at the bottom of an ocean strewn with the archaeology of his life. In the murky, dim light he could make out the rusted hulk of his father’s green station wagon half submerged in a sandbank. The ruins of his childhood home leaned crazily to one side. Improbably, the white dogwood in the backyard was in full bloom. His first bicycle leaned against it. And to his right, the classroom where the FBI had cuffed him and perp-walked him out past a sea of TV cameras.

Something caught his eye up on the surface. He pushed off from the bottom and began to rise. As he broke the surface, his eyes flew open, and he took a deep, rasping breath. A naked lightbulb, like a wayward sun, swayed near his face. He blinked rapidly, trying to focus his eyes. But when he had, he wished he hadn’t.

On tiptoes, Gibson teetered on a wooden stool. A rope around his neck was the only thing that kept him from falling, but the price was the cruel way it bit into his skin. He tried to grab the rope to take the pressure off his throat, but his hands were bound behind his back. Panicking, he began to thrash and nearly lost his balance. A steadying hand helped him regain his perch.

“All right, now. Settle down. Not just yet. Not just yet. Business first,” said the voice from outside the diner.

The diner.

The attack came back to him. Something about his father. His heart sank, and he felt very foolish and very alone. The rope around his neck made it hard to look around, but he took the biggest breath he could muster and took stock of his surroundings.

He was in a basement. The half windows were set high up on the pale-yellow walls. It was night out. Watercolors of birds hung along the walls: hummingbirds, woodpeckers, and cardinals. An easel was set up in the corner. Some kind of painter’s studio? A set of carpeted stairs led up, but up to where?

A man stepped into view. Gibson shuddered. In his confusion, he thought the man had followed him up from his unconscious. One of those benthic predators that lurks in the black depths of the ocean. But it was only a man. At least on the surface. Average height. Slight build. A pale, unremarkable face apart from a recently broken nose that was swollen and red. He was the sort of man who might check you into a hotel or sit beside you in a doctor’s waiting room. At least that’s what the man wanted you to see. But at the edges of the man, the camouflage began to fray.

The eyes were what gave him away. The eyes were the jaundiced yellow of a diurnal owl and motionless like the dead surface of the moon. Sunk deep in their sockets, they fixed on Gibson, seeming to see everything and nothing. He’d met some scary men in jail and even scarier men in the Marines, but this man, if he was a man at all, scared him more than any of those. This man was death come for him.

But perhaps more unsettling still were his clothes. The man was dressed like him. Not sort of like him. Not similar colors and styles, but the exact same shirt, jeans, and shoes. They looked like a couple of twins who shopped together. That meant the man had been in the clothing store with him, had followed behind him, had seen him shopping, and had picked out the same outfit. It told Gibson that his abduction had been exactingly planned. Whatever lay ahead, it was nothing good, and whatever he might think to try, this man would have already anticipated it.

“Pay attention now. Are you paying attention? We don’t have much time,” the man said in a mild and polite tone. It was the voice of a surgeon dumbing down a complex procedure for an irritating patient. They regarded each other silently, and then, without ceremony or warning, the man kicked the stool from under Gibson’s feet. It made a keening whine across the wood floor and clattered into a far wall.

Gibson dropped no more than an inch, but the difference was profound. It was the callous inch that separated living from dying. The rope caught his weight with a jerk and tore into the flesh beneath his jaw. The tendons in his neck and shoulders felt like they were being ripped up like weeds. His legs thrashed in the air.

The man stepped forward and patted Gibson’s leg gently. Gibson felt a helpless despair. A vast welling up of regret that he supposed accompanied the premature end of any life. His regret was cold and offered no comfort. Filled up with words that he wished he had spoken and the faces he wished he had spoken them to.

He expected to lose consciousness quickly. That was how it worked in the movies. A few moments of helpless struggling before the rope wrung the life out of its victim. Instead, he hung there struggling and listening to the leathery scratch of his breathing and the pounding of the blood in his temples.

“This is the short drop,” the man said. “You’ll notice that, unlike the standard drop or the long drop, your neck is not broken. Which may seem like a blessing now, but in the end you will wish it had been a longer drop and a shorter wait. But that’s the good news and bad news of the short drop. You live longer, but . . . you live longer. Most people think they’d always want to live longer, but twenty minutes at the end of a rope is a long time to die. A long time to regret things that cannot be changed and that no longer matter.”

The man wrapped his arms around Gibson’s legs and lifted him up, supporting his weight. The stool slid under his feet, and Gibson danced on it weakly.

“So that we understand each other,” the man said. “I think it helps a man in your position to understand the punishment beforehand. The punishment for not satisfying me. How do you satisfy me, you ask? Well. I have a question for you. Only one, but it’s an important one. I will ask it until I am satisfied by the answer. Until I am satisfied . . . the short drop. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

The man held up his father’s thumb drive.

“Did you make a copy? Upload it before you left the diner?”

“If I tell you, will you let me go?”

The stool fell away again. He dropped. Pain lanced down his back and shoulders. He hung there a long time, longer than before. Eventually, the man’s arms lifted him again until his feet felt the stool slide under his feet. He felt smaller, as if a part of what he was had been torn away. The man gave him time to collect what little was left of his wits. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw his father sitting barefoot on the bottom of the stairs, gazing sadly at his son. Gibson blinked, and the apparition was gone, but he knew where he was. He was home.

“Oh,” the man said. “Welcome home. I wasn’t sure if you’d recognize it. It’s changed in the last decade. I liked it better with the red paint.”

“Fuck you,” Gibson tried to scream. It came out as no more than a whisper.

“I enjoyed meeting your father.” The man took out a knife and unfolded a long, unforgiving blade. “We had a good talk in this room. Two men coming to an understanding.” The man smiled faintly at the memory. “But to answer your question, I will not let you go if you tell me what I need to know. Not under any circumstance. Your life is not something you can barter for. I know that is a hard thing to hear, but honesty is best. However, I will tell you what I am willing to offer you.”

“Go to hell.”

“Upstairs, there’s a couple. Linda and Mark Tompkins. Linda paints the delightful pictures you see here. At the moment, what they know is that a masked, distraught man broke into their home and bound them. A man dressed as you are dressed. The man was sobbing. Hysterical. He said he was sorry. That he didn’t want to hurt them. He told them that this had been his house once. When the Tompkinses are discovered tomorrow, they will identify you as their assailant. The police will conclude, reasonably, that in a fit of despair following your divorce and the loss of your job and family, you broke into your childhood home and followed in your father’s footsteps.”

“That’s what you’re offering me?”

“Yes.”

“And if I don’t answer?”

“If you don’t answer, I will push the chair away. When you are dead I will go upstairs and I will butcher Linda and Mark Tompkins. I will make the man watch his wife die. I can make it last a long time.”

Gibson heard kinetic excitement in the man’s voice. He hid it well, but Gibson read joy on his face, or whatever passed for joy in someone like that.

“Why? They’ve done nothing.”

“Neither have you,” the man pointed out. “Unfortunately for them, events have placed them in our path just as events have placed you in mine. And through no fault of their own, their lives now hang in the balance. So to speak.”

“So?” Gibson said. “I don’t know them. Never met them. What the hell does who you kill have to do with me? That’s on you, not me.”

It was a bluff. He tried to make it a good one.

“True, true. It is ‘on me.’ Your conscience is clean. But it is not your conscience that should concern you.” The man shrugged. “Shouldn’t you be thinking about Ellie?”

At the mention of his daughter’s name, Gibson went rigid with fear. “What about her?”

“Well . . . how will it affect her? Your crime, I mean,” the man said. “Think how luridly it will play in the media. Imagine how you will be remembered. How Ellie will remember you. They will say that you lost your mind, but before you hung yourself, you murdered the Tompkinses—the unfortunate people who bought your father’s house. They will label you a degenerate psychopath who needed to inflict his misery on innocents. The deranged end to a family tragedy that began more than a decade ago. That will be the epitaph to your life. When Ellie is grown and thinks about her father, it will be with confusion and shame. The same way you’ve thought about your own father. So I ask you for Linda and Mark. And for your daughter. Did you make a copy?”

Gibson opened his mouth to speak but then shut it again. Tears streamed down his face. For his father. For his daughter. For the choice he had to make now.

But he knew he was through arguing or pleading with this man. From the first moment he had stared into this man’s empty eyes, Gibson had known on some level that there was no pity there and never had been. He’d be damned if he was going to waste the last minutes of his life begging. He would do something good with that time instead. He would save Linda and Mark. That would be worthwhile . . . even if her paintings were lousy.

“Did you make a copy?”

“I did not,” he said.

“Why not?”

“I didn’t think I had to.”

The man considered that. “You did, though. That was wrong.”

“Yes.”

“So you did not make a copy?”

“No.”

“No copies?”

“None.”

It went on and on like this. The same question asked dozens of times in dozens of different ways. It was insane, but Gibson fought for the man to believe him. Expected at any moment that the stool would be kicked away again. Finally . . .

“I believe you,” the man said.

Gibson stopped, exhaustion spreading through him. “Thank you,” he said. He wasn’t quite sure why, but he felt such gratitude, such peace, now that the man believed him. He just wanted to sleep.

The man nodded and folded his knife. He gathered his things to go, looking around to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything. When he was done, he returned to look at Gibson.

“Where is Suzanne?” Gibson asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Why did you kill my father?”

The man looked at him with curiosity. “Does it matter?”

“Suzanne was pregnant. The baby. Was it my father’s?”

“Is that what you really want to know? Will it give you peace?”

Gibson didn’t know. “Please.”

The man considered for a moment. He reached into a pocket and withdrew a sheet of paper from his pocket and unfolded it, careful so as not to accidentally see what it said.

“Whatever it says, whatever you learn, do not tell me, do not show it in your face. Remember the people upstairs.”

Gibson nodded and the man held it up for him to see. It took a great effort to focus his eyes and understand what he was reading. The paper was a paternity test. Three columns: “Suzanne Lombard,” “Child,” “Father (Alleged).” Beneath were rows of paired numbers that Gibson didn’t understand. And at the bottom:

The alleged father is not excluded as the biological father of the tested child. Based on testing obtained from analyses of the DNA loci listed, the probability of paternity is 99.9998%.

But it was the sentence that followed, and its implications, that roared in his ears—the concussive report of dominoes, stretching back through his entire life, finally falling. Oh, Bear. Oh, God, Bear.

Benjamin Lombard is not excluded as the biological father and is considered to be the father of Jane Doe.

The sounds of splintering wood and heavy footfalls came from upstairs. The man snatched the paper away. Gibson met his eyes. Whatever mask he wore to blend in among people ripped loose momentarily; beneath lay something abhorrent. Something ancient and infinitely cruel that people comforted themselves by believing had long ago become extinct, but which this man had coaxed back into life.

“Gibson!” a woman’s voice called out.

Jenn?

He tried to call out to her, but the stool went flying across the wood floor and suddenly he was dying all over again, hanging until consciousness slipped away.

When he came to, he lay on his back in the basement, Jenn Charles kneeling beside him.

“Did you get him?” he asked.

“Get who?” she asked. “There’s no one here but us.”

“Upstairs?” he asked, remembering the awful threats to the homeowners.

“They’re fine. Hendricks is with them. Are you okay?”

He was laughing and crying, jagged crests of relief and despair.

“What happened here?” Jenn asked, but mercifully his mind had found the power switch, and he was not available to answer.