Vanished (26 page)

What did he want to say to the man?

Every night I relive the day your son died.

I can’t imagine your pain.

I’d do the exact same thing again.

Every sentence was wrong. They were shallow next to this man’s experience. How could he ask Kent to let his son go?

“Please let Jake go.” Mason’s plea echoed through the speakers. There was nothing he could say to fix the past or ease this man’s pain. He had to say what was in his heart.

Kent finally broke eye contact and looked at the floor.

“I’ve visited Wyatt’s grave every year,” Mason admitted.

His gaze flew back to Mason’s, disbelief flooding his eyes. “Bullshit.”

Mason swallowed hard. “It’s the truth.” He gave a detailed description of the boy’s headstone and location. “I’ve even taken Jake with me a few times. He knows I caused the death of a boy.”

Kent said something to Jake that Mason couldn’t hear. Jake nodded in response.

“I relive that day every night. Sometimes several times a night,” said Mason.

Kent leaned forward a bit, his eyes hungry for Mason’s words.

“Sometimes in my dreams, my shot misses.”

The man nodded slightly. No doubt he’d had the same dream.

“But it never matters. The outcome never changes,” Mason said, watching the man’s eyes narrow. No doubt Kent had multiple dreams where Wyatt walked away unscathed.

“When Wyatt jumped up at the same moment I fired, I knew what would happen. I’ve wished a million times that I could have pulled back that bullet.”

Kent blew out a shaky breath.

“My life has never been the same,” Mason said.

“Don’t you dare try to compare your pain to mine,” Kent hissed. “You don’t have the slightest idea of what I’ve gone through. I watched my son die, murdered by someone who was supposed to protect him.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Mason saw Ava stiffen. A misstep. He’d triggered Jopek’s defenses.

“I can’t even begin—,” Mason started.

“I cradled him and felt the destruction your bullet did to his head.” Kent’s gun crept back up to point at Mason. “I could feel the sharp edges of his broken skull. Inside it was soft.” His voice got louder. “I tried to put him back together!”

Ava grabbed the handset. “Kent, please don’t point the gun at us. Remember, there are eyes watching from outside.”

Kent lowered his gun and his gaze, but his body shook with the effort.

“We’re losing him,” Corello muttered. “Get him focused.”

“This is your chance to tell Mason what you wanted to say, remember?” Ava continued. “So far he’s done most of the talking. What do you want him to hear?”

Mason watched the man try to get a handle on his emotions. And empathized. The man was searching for answers and trying to right a situation where he believed he’d been wronged.

“I’ve had two failed marriages,” Kent stated, staring at the floor. “I can’t stay with a woman because they don’t understand what this has done to me. I’m an alcoholic. I haven’t touched a drink in three years, but there was a time when all I’d do was drink. I lost jobs. I lost my home.” He looked up at Mason. “I used to make a circuit of the liquor stores. I didn’t want the employees judging how much alcohol I bought, so I’d drive an extra twenty miles so I’d never have to go to the same store more than once a month.”

Mason listened.

“That’s when I realized I needed to take control. I wasn’t going to let externals dictate my life,” Kent continued. “I stopped drinking. Every time I didn’t stop at the liquor store was a success to be celebrated. I proved I had the power to make a change in my life. I decided to change other things. I needed to regain my health, so I made it happen. Sheer willpower. Mental toughness is what saved me.”

Mason understood. That was how he’d survived his divorce. He’d moved into autopilot and set the program to run at optimum. From the outside, he looked pretty good.

Just don’t look too deep.

Mason had cracks in his shell.

And Kent Jopek did, too.

“But I couldn’t make the nightmares go away. I had control over every waking minute, but as soon as I went to sleep, Wyatt would talk to me, begging me to save him. So like everything else, I made a plan that would make things change.” Kent looked directly at Mason.

Something inside him just changed. His eyes are wrong.

A warning went off in Mason’s brain, his body hardening. Corello and Ava both took deep breaths. They saw it, too. Kent had disengaged his emotions from his actions.

“I needed to destroy you just as I had been destroyed. Bit by bit. Piece by piece. What was important to you? What could I take away? I watched you, Callahan. I spent weeks watching, seeing how you lived your life.” Kent gave a short laugh. “You know what? Your life stinks. You work. That’s it. Your home is a bare, empty box. You don’t date. You don’t hang out with friends. So I had to strike where I could. Phase one was your job, because it seemed to be all you had.”

Kent had succeeded. Having the respect of his peers and position yanked out from under Mason had nearly toppled him emotionally. He’d been lucky he had Henley’s case to focus on, and Ava to open his eyes.

“I’d tried to get a hold of this kid.” Kent squeezed his arm around Jake’s neck, and the boy’s face turned pink.

Mason shifted his weight to the balls of his feet, ready to strike.

“Easy,” Ava whispered.

He held his breath.

“I couldn’t nab him. Three times I tried. I settled for the girl because she was easy. I thought she might be enough, but it didn’t satisfy me. She wasn’t close enough to your life. Her death wouldn’t cause the level of pain I wanted.”

Three times?
Mason’s gut twisted. Jake was never leaving the house again.

“And then I was surprised as hell to discover that you’d gotten a dog. Wyatt had a dog. I gave it away after he died. Dogs and boys belong together. I had no place in my life for it after that.”

Ava slowly lifted the handset to speak. “You let Henley and the dog go. Why?” she asked softly.

Mason felt her voice flow through him like creamy hot chocolate, and his spine relaxed. She had a special gift that worked on Kent as well as himself.

Kent shrugged and looked away. “Killing them wasn’t going to hurt you like I needed it to.”

He turned an eagle-sharp gaze back to Mason. “I wanted to pierce you in the heart. The loss of the dog and the girl would give you anxiety, but nothing like the pain of losing your son. I knew I had to return to my original plan to fully destroy you.” He twisted his hand with the knife near Jake’s ear, laying the blade against the source of life flowing through Jake’s neck. Exactly where the homeless man had held his knife on Wyatt.

“I know how to aim for your heart,” he said to Mason as he slowly raised his gun.

Blood appeared on Jake’s neck as Mason shouted, his vision narrowed on the movement of Kent’s blade.

Time slowed.

Kent fired and Ava gasped. Mason drew his gun and heard the windows crack behind him with the retort of rifle fire. Kent jerked to his right, knocking Jake to the floor as he spun away. Kent raced to the back of the store, zigzagging to avoid more sniper fire.

Beside Mason, Ava gasped again and bent over the check stand, her hand clasped to her shoulder. Blood flowed from under her hand. Kent’s bullet had caught her. Mason froze, torn between Ava and Jake and Kent.

Who first?

Corello grabbed Ava’s arm and shoved her to the floor, putting pressure on her shoulder.

“Go!” she yelled at Mason. “Go to Jake.” Her blue eyes pleaded. “I’ll be okay.”

Corello looked up and nodded, his face grim.

Mason raced around the check stand, dropped to his knees next to Jake on the floor in the freezer aisle, and ran his hands all over his son, checking for gunshot wounds. “Jake!”

“Dad! I’m okay.” Jake squirmed in his grasp. “I’m not hit.”

He wrapped his arms around Jake as they sprawled on the floor. Mason squeezed tight, trying to slow his skyrocketing heart.
Jake is safe.
Mason tilted his son’s jaw away to get a look at his neck. The slice in Jake’s neck was shallow. Nothing life threatening. He stood and hauled Jake up with him. “Get down behind the check stand with Ava. And stay there until they take you out of the store!” he ordered, giving the boy a shove in the right direction. Jake stumbled, his arms still tied behind him. He caught his balance and turned around to look at Mason.

“What about you?” Jake’s eyes were wide.

“I have to stop that son of a bitch.”

Mason heard shouts of “Everybody down!” as the SERT team rushed into the store. He didn’t obey. He was going to find Kent Jopek first.

He ran down the aisle, following the drops of blood.

Jopek had been hit.

26

The drops led to the double swinging doors at the back of the store. Mason took a deep breath, stole a peek through the hazy plastic window in one of the doors, and then pushed through with his gun leading the way.

The back room of the grocery store was silent, the cheery holiday music confined to the aisles of the store. The floor changed from highly polished tile to concrete, and the lighting dimmed. The back of the store was like a garage. High ceilings, unfinished walls, and crap stacked everywhere: boxes; mops; brooms; damaged, unsalable goods. Pallets of groceries in cardboard boxes wrapped in clear plastic waited to be opened and unpacked. Mason scanned the room. The blood trail led to his left, around the corner of a huge walk-in cooler.

He followed.

Shouts came from the front of the store, where the SERT team was methodically clearing the aisles. Any moment they would find the blood trail.

Let them handle Kent.

Go check on Ava.

He couldn’t do it. He pushed on. He had to find the man whose life he’d destroyed two decades ago. He couldn’t let Kent Jopek walk away. Part of him felt he owed the man something. But what? He’d nearly killed Jake, Henley, and Ava. He
had
killed Josie Mueller.

You owe him nothing.

Mason had spent twenty years agonizing over the pain he’d caused Kent; it was hard to change his way of thinking. Over four days, the man had uprooted the lives of Mason’s family. He didn’t deserve to be handled with kid gloves. Kent Jopek was now a destroyer, not a victim, and Mason needed to wrap his brain around it.

He killed Josie in cold blood.

Mason slowed his steps. No doubt Kent would shoot the moment he saw him. He ducked his head around the corner of the cooler to catch a quick glance at the pathway behind it.

All clear.

He stepped quickly around the corner, weapon in front, eyes scanning for movement. The blood drops followed the back wall of the cooler. Mason moved forward, listening hard for Kent. Tall pallets of groceries and a cardboard-baling machine created a narrow aisle behind the cooler. He kept going, peeking between the pallets of dry goods as he passed.

Faint sounds of an ambulance siren sounded outside, making Mason nearly gave up his hunt.
Ava?
The gunshot wound to her upper arm hadn’t looked bad. But what if the bullet had hit more than her arm?
Damn it.
Wouldn’t she have mentioned that?

A rustle sounded ahead on his left.

“Kent?” he asked quietly.

“Stay away, Callahan.”

Mason continued his progress. The blood turned the corner around the far side of the cooler. He stopped at the corner, imagining Kent on the other side with his gun trained at the point he believed Mason’s head would first appear.

“You’re shot.” Mason stated the obvious.

“No shit,” came the voice around the corner. There was no strength behind the words.

“SERT will be here in a moment. They’ll get you to the hospital.” Mason wondered how badly he was hurt. The drops of blood had increased to a trickle as he moved along the cooler.

“I’m not going to the hospital.”

“Where do you want to go?”

Kent didn’t answer.

“I’m going to come around this corner. You going to shoot?” Mason asked.

A long moment of silence made Mason wonder if the man had passed out.

“No, I won’t shoot.” Kent’s voice was soft.

Should he go? Mason paused. He wanted to be the man to bring Kent down for the crimes he’d committed against the people close to him. But the smart thing would be to wait for the SERT team.

“I’m going to be with my son again,” Kent said.

Mason spun around the corner, his gun trained on Kent. The man sat on the floor in the corner, propped up against the wall with his feet spread in front of him. The sniper’s shot had caused more damage than Mason had realized. Blood soaked the front of Kent’s jacket and pooled on the floor to his left. His eyes were slow to look up at Mason. He clutched his gun against his bloody chest; his other hand lay useless beside him. He looked at Mason’s gun and then into Mason’s eyes.

“I can hear him calling me,” he stated. His eyes struggled to focus.

Mason heard commands being shouted out on the floor of the store. “I think you hear the SERT team,” Mason said. Kent looked like a man who’d given up, and Mason felt a pang of sympathy.

“No, it’s Wyatt. He’s telling me to hurry up.”

Shouts of
“
Go, go, go
!
”
echoed into the back room.

Mason squatted at the feet of the defeated man, his gun ready. “I never meant to hurt your son. I did what I thought was right. And I know I wouldn’t have done anything different.”

Kent nodded and winced in pain, shifting on the floor. “Fucking hurts.”

“Sorry about that.”

“The pain sorta feels good, you know? I actually feel something besides the fucking emptiness in my heart.”

Mason didn’t know what to say.

“I won’t go to prison,” Kent stated, looking Mason in the eye again. “I can’t. I’ve been in prison for twenty years.”

“You don’t know that will happen.”

“Yes, I do. I killed that prostitute and set it up to look like you’d been there. I had to make it look brutal and angry. I wanted the scene to disturb you and everyone who looked at it.”

“Did you take Jake’s suitcase?”

Kent snorted. “Yeah, I was getting desperate. I was beginning to think I’d never get my hands on your son. I’d hoped to find something in the suitcase I could lure him with, but instead I found dirty laundry and a stuffed animal.”

Mason eyed the growing pool of blood on Kent’s left.

“We’re in the back!” Mason yelled out to the SERT team. “He’s down!”

“No!” Kent whispered. “Keep them away.”

Mason reached to take the gun from Kent’s hand on his chest. “Let me take this.”

Kent shook his head, whipped the gun into his mouth, and fired.

Mason tried not to vomit as three members of the SERT team attempted to revive Kent Jopek.

Why didn’t I grab the gun sooner?

Mason had fallen backward in shock as Kent swiftly shot himself, spraying blood on the wall behind him. He’d scooted away from the body, a split second before SERT swept into the back room. Now Mason sat on the floor, his back against a stack of pallets. One heavily armored officer asked if he was injured, and Mason shook his head.

He couldn’t speak. Shock locked his voice.

Mason hadn’t seen Kent’s suicide coming. There hadn’t been time to assess any signs.

The officers shouted commands and acted like they’d practiced the resuscitation a hundred times. Mason stared as Kent’s feet jerked with the officer’s movements, knowing their attempts were futile. No one could survive that damage to the brain.

Jake sprinted from the far end of the cooler, two SERT members hot on his heels shouting for him to stop. “Dad!” he shrieked when he saw Mason on the ground.

Mason lifted a hand as Jake ran closer. “I’m not hurt.”

“I heard a shot!” Jake fell to his knees, panting.

Mason pointed at the officers frantically working on Kent. “He shot himself.”

Jake looked and jumped back to his feet. “Stop it!” he shouted at the officers. “Don’t help him!” He lunged at an officer, but was grabbed around the waist by one who’d tailed him through the back room.

“Jake!” Mason leaped up, snatching his son away from the officer. “What are you doing?”

“Leave him alone! Stop them!”

Mason shook the boy, making Jake look him in the eye. “They’re doing their job!”

“Don’t let them save him,” Jake pleaded as tears streaked down his face. “He’ll come back and do this to us again!”

Mason pulled his son to his chest. “It’s over,” he said quietly in the boy’s ear. “He’s already gone. They can’t save him. He won’t come back.”

Jake let out a shuddering sob and collapsed into his father.