The Unquiet-CP-6 (48 page)

He walked from the bar, passing through the ranks of dancing couples and noisy drunks, of lovers and friends, moving from light to darkness, from the life within to the life beyond. When he stepped outside, the cool of the night air made him reel again for a moment, then cleared his head. He took his keys from his jacket pocket and headed for his car, each step forcing more blood from his wound, each step taking him a little closer to the end. He stopped at the car and used his left hand to support himself against the roof while his right fitted the key into the lock. He opened the door and saw himself reflected in the glass of the side window, then another reflection joined his, hovering behind his shoulder. It was a bird, a monstrous dove with a white face and a dark beak and human eyes buried deep in its sockets. It raised a wing, but the wing was black, not white, with claws at the end that held something long and metal in their grip.

And then the wing began to beat with a soft swishing sound, and he felt a new, sharp pain as his collarbone was broken by a blow. He twisted, trying to get to the gun in his pocket, but another bird appeared, this time a hawk, and this bird was holding a baseball bat, a good old-fashioned Louisville Slugger designed, if held in the right hands, to knock that baby right out of the ballpark, except now the Slugger was aimed at his head. He couldn’t duck to avoid the blow, so he raised his left arm instead. The impact shattered his elbow, and the wings were beating and the blows were raining down upon him, and he dropped to his knees as something in his head came apart with a noise like bread breaking, and his eyes were filled with red. He opened his mouth to speak, although there were no words for him to form, and his jaw was almost torn from his face as the crowbar swung in a lazy arc, felling him like a tree so that he lay flat on the cold gravel while the blood flowed and the beating went on, his body making strange, soft sounds, bones moving inside where bones had no right to move, the framework within fracturing, the tender organs bursting.

And still he lived.

The blows stopped, but the pain did not. A foot slid under his belly, levering him upward so that he flopped onto his back, resting slightly against the open door, half in, half out of the car, one hand lying useless by his side, the other thrown back into the interior. He saw the whole world through a red prism, dominated by birds like men and men like birds.

“He’s gone,” said a voice, and it sounded familiar to Merrick.

“No he ain’t,” said another. “Not yet.”

There was hot breath close to his ear.

“You shouldn’t have come here,” said the second voice. “You should have just forgot about her. She’s long dead, but she was good while she lasted.”

He was conscious of movement to his left. The crowbar struck him just above the ear and light shone through the prism, refracting the world in a red-tinged rainbow, turning it to splinters of color in his fading consciousness.

daddy

Almost there, honey, almost there.

And still, still he lived.

The fingers of his right hand clawed at the floor of the car. They found the barrel of the Smith IO, and he tugged it free of the tape and flicked at it until he could reach the grip, pulling it toward him, willing the blackness to lift, if only for a moment.

daddy

In a minute, honey. Daddy’s got something he has to do first.

Slowly, he drew the gun to him. He tried to lift it, but his wounded arm would not hold the weight. Instead, he allowed himself to fall on his side, and the pain was almost beyond endurance as splintered bone and torn flesh shuddered from the impact. He opened his eyes, or perhaps they had always been open, and it was just the new waves of pain provoked by the movement that caused the mist briefly to lift. His cheek was flat against the gravel. His right arm was outstretched before him, the gun lying on the horizontal. There were two figures ahead of him, walking side by side perhaps fifteen feet from where he lay. He shifted his hand slightly, ignoring the feeling of his fractured bones rubbing against one another, until the gun was pointing at the two men.

And, somehow, Merrick found the strength within himself to pull the trigger, or perhaps it was the strength of another added to his own, for he thought he felt a pressure on the knuckle of his index finger as though someone were pressing softly upon it.

The man on the right seemed to do a little jog, then stumbled and fell as his shattered ankle gave way. He shouted something that Merrick could not understand, but Merrick’s finger was tightening on the trigger for the second shot and he had no time for the utterances of others. He fired again, the target larger now, for the injured man was lying on his side, his friend trying to lift him, but the shot was wild, the gun bucking in his hand and sending the bullet over the recumbent figure.

Merrick had the time and the strength to pull the trigger one last time. He fired as the blackness descended, and the bullet tore through the forehead of the wounded man, exiting in a red cloud. The survivor tried to drag the body away, but the dead man’s foot caught in a storm drain. People appeared at the door of the Old Moose Lodge, for even in a place like this the sound of gunfire was bound to attract attention. Voices shouted, and figures began to run toward him. The survivor fled, leaving the dead man behind.

Merrick exhaled a final breath. A woman stood over him, the waitress from the bar. She spoke, but Merrick did not hear what she said

daddy?

i’m here, Lucy.

for Merrick was gone.

Chapter XXXIII

W hile Frank Merrick died with his daughter’s name upon his lips, Angel, Louis, and I decided on a course of action to deal with Caswell. We were in the bar, the remains of our meal still scattered around us, but we weren’t drinking.

We agreed that Caswell appeared close to some form of breakdown, although whether caused by incipient guilt or something else we could not tell. It was Angel who put it best, as he often did.

“If he’s so overcome with guilt, then why? Lucy Merrick has been missing for years. Unless they kept her there for all that time, which doesn’t seem too likely, then why is he so consciencestricken now, all of a sudden?”

“Merrick, perhaps,” I said.

“Which means somebody told him that Merrick has been asking questions.”

“Not necessarily. It’s not like Merrick has been keeping a low profile. The cops are aware of him, and thanks to Demarcian’s killing, the Russians are too. Demarcian was involved somehow. Merrick didn’t just pick his name out of a hat.”

“You think maybe these guys were sharing images of the abuse, and that’s the connection to Demarcian?” asked Angel.

“Dr. Christian said that he hadn’t heard of anything involving men with bird masks turning up in photos or on video, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing like that out there.”

“They would have been taking a chance by selling it,” said Angel. “Might have risked drawing attention to themselves.”

“Maybe they needed the money,” said Louis.

“But Caswell had enough to buy the Gilead land outright,” I replied. “It doesn’t sound like money was an issue.”

“But where did the cash come from?” asked Angel. “Had to have come from somewhere, so maybe they were selling this stuff.”

“How much does it go for, though?” I said. “Enough to buy a patch of unwanted land in a forest?

The barman said that the land wasn’t exactly given away for free, but it didn’t cost the earth either. He could have bought it for the equivalent of nickels and dimes.”

Angel shrugged. “Depends what they were selling. Depends how bad it was. For the kids, I mean.”

None of us said anything more for a time. I tried to create patterns in my mind, to put together a sequence of events that made sense, but I kept losing myself in contradictory statements and false trails. More and more, I was convinced that Clay was involved with what had occurred, but how, then, to balance that with Christian’s view of him as a man who was almost obsessed with finding evidence of abuse, even to the detriment of his own career, or Rebecca Clay’s description of a loving father devoted to the children in his charge? Then there were the Russians. Louis had asked some questions and discovered the identity of the redheaded man who had come to my house. His name was Utarov, and he was one of the most trusted captains in the New England operation. According to Louis, there was paper out on Merrick, a piece of unfinished business relating to some jobs he had undertaken against the Russians sometime in the past, but there were also rumors of unease in New England. Prostitutes, mainly those of Asian, African, and Eastern European origin, had been moved out of Massachusetts and Providence and told to lie low, or they had been forced to do so by the men who controlled them. More specialized services had also been curtailed, particularly those relating to child pornography and child prostitution.

“Trafficking,” Louis had concluded. “Explains why they took the Asians and the others off the streets and left the pure American womanhood to take up the slack. They’re worried about something, and it’s connected to Demarcian.”

Their appetites would have stayed the same, wasn’t that what Christian had told me? These men wouldn’t have stopped abusing, but they might have found another outlet for their urges: young children acquired through Boston, perhaps, with Demarcian as one of the points of contact?

What then? Did they film the abuse and sell it back to Demarcian and others like him, one operation funding another? Was that the nature of their particular “Project”?

Caswell was part of it, and he was weak and vulnerable. I was certain that he had put in a call as soon as he had encountered us, a plea for help from those whom he had assisted in the past. It would have increased the pressure on all of them, forcing them to respond, and we would be waiting for them when they came.

Angel and Louis went to their car and drove up to Caswell’s place, parking out of sight of the road and his house to take the first watch. I could almost see them there as I went to my room to get some sleep before my turn came, the car dark and quiet, perhaps some music playing low on the radio, Angel dozing, Louis still and intent, part of his attention on the road beyond while some hidden part of him wandered unknown worlds in his mind.

In my dreams, I walked through Gilead, and I heard the voices of children crying. I turned to the church and saw that there were young girls and boys wrapped in stinging ivy, the creepers tightening on their naked bodies as they were absorbed into the green world. I saw blood on the ground, and the remains of an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes, points of red seeping through the cloth.

And a thin man crawled out of a hole in the ground, his face torn and ruined by decay, his teeth visible through the holes in his cheeks.

“Old Gilead,” said Daniel Clay. “It gets in your soul…”

The call came through on the phone in my room while I was sleeping. It was O’Rourke. Since there was no cell phone coverage in Jackman, it had seemed like a good idea to let someone know where I was in case anything happened back east, so both O’Rourke and Jackie Garner had the number of the lodge. After all, my gun was still out there, and I would bear some responsibility for whatever Merrick did with it.

“Merrick’s dead,” he said.

I sat up. I could still taste food in my mouth, but it tasted of dirt, and the memory of my dream was strong. “How?”

“Killed in the parking lot of the Old Moose Lodge. It sounds like he had an eventful final day. He was busy, right up to the end. Mason Dubus was shot dead yesterday with a ten-millimeter bullet. We’re still waiting on a ballistics match, but it’s not like people get shot here every day, and not usually with a ten. Couple of hours ago, a Somerset County sheriff ’s deputy found two bodies on a side road just out of Bingham. Russians, it looks like. Then they got a call from a woman who found her father locked in his basement a couple of miles north of the scene. Seems the old guy was a vet—the animal kind, not the war kind—and a man matching Merrick’s description forced him to treat a gunshot wound and give him directions to Dubus’s house before locking him up. From what the vet said, the wound was pretty serious, but he sewed it and strapped it as best he could. It looks like Merrick continued northwest, killed Dubus, then had to stop at the lodge. He was bleeding badly by then. According to witnesses, he sat in a corner, drank some whiskey, talked to himself, then headed outside. They were waiting for him there.”

“How many?”

“Two, both wearing bird masks. Ring any bells? They beat him to death, or near enough to it. I guess they thought the job was done when they left him.”

“How long did he survive?”

“Long enough to take your gun from under the driver’s seat and shoot one of his attackers. I’m going on what I’ve been told, but the cops at the scene can’t figure out how he managed it. They broke just about every bone in his body. He must have wanted to kill this guy real bad. He got him with one in the left ankle, then one in the head. His pal tried to drag him away, but he got the dead guy’s foot caught in a drain, so he had to leave him.”

“Did the vic have a name?”

“I’m sure he did, but he wasn’t carrying a wallet. That, or his friend removed it before he left to try to cover his tracks. You want, maybe I can make some calls and arrange for you to take a look at him. He’s down in Augusta now. ME’s due to conduct an autopsy in the morning. How you liking Jackman? I never took you for the hunting kind. Not animals, anyhow.”

He stopped talking, then repeated the name of the town. “Jackman,” he said, thoughtfully. “The Old Moose Lodge is kind of on the way to Jackman, I guess.”

“I guess,” I echoed him.

“And Jackman’s pretty close to Gilead, and Mason Dubus was the big dog when Gilead was open for business.”

“That’s about it,” I said neutrally. I didn’t know if O’Rourke was aware of Merrick’s act of vandalism at Harmon’s house, and I was sure he didn’t know about Andy Kellog’s pictures. I didn’t want the cops up here dancing all over the site, not yet. I wanted to break Caswell for myself. I now felt that I owed it to Frank Merrick.