Caller unknown, p.30
Caller Unknown, page 30
II Kings 12
A phone number. And a name flashed: Jim Dove’s phone number, 207-288-5512. He’d called it recently—very recently.
There was a road map of the northeast in the side pocket of the car. His fingers seemed to find Lake Tranquility without thought. Almost due north. After a short, necessary sleep, he would be there by first light.
He closed his eyes. A kaleidoscope of images came: palm trees in a mild breeze; an open front door, a dim corridor, a brightly lit kitchen, a pool of blood on the counter, a dismembered finger…
He wasn’t sure if he moaned in his sleep or in waking. He opened his eyes, disoriented. There was a sudden white light coming through the windshield. It came from the headlights of a car on the ramp leading down to the dock.
A silhouetted figure, a long shadow reaching ahead, was walking down the ramp, skirting to Ed’s left. The light glinted off the barrel of a shotgun aimed at his window.
Ed simultaneously grabbed for the key in the ignition and pulled out the manual choke. The Volvo engine coughed and caught, and he slammed the car into first and ducked down. The driver’s window exploded in a cloud of glass and he felt a fierce nick on his left ear as the car lurched forward. He hauled the wheel over, the rear end of the Volvo fishtailing, sliding on the slush, without any traction. The front wheels bit. Then he was racing toward the man, the raised shotgun aimed directly at him. It flashed again, but the shot was wide, only starring the left side of the windshield.
Ed slammed into second, floored the gas, and the station wagon was on the man. He had broken the shotgun and was trying to eject and reinsert new cartridges. He looked up at the last second. For an instant Ed saw him. Conservatively dressed, gray suit, white shirt, black tie, in his late twenties. His mouth opened in an “o” of surprise, then terror when he saw Ed was intent not on escape but on running him over. The hood of the Volvo seemed to swallow him. The car’s clearance was only some six inches, but the snow added a couple more. The man was pulled under the one-ton car and there was a series of momentary dull thuds as the bumper caught him, and then he was worked feet first underneath the exhaust and suspension system. The Volvo braked with the drag and then there was one last thud and it was released, racing toward the on ramp and the blazing lights.
Ed rammed on the brakes and the Volvo skidded in the slush. He looked in the rearview. There was a wide path in the snow behind him that ended in the tangled, motionless form of the man he’d run over. One of his arms and his head seemed to have been put on the wrong way around. The snow was absorbing a pool of blood.
Ed’s breathing was out of control, his breath almost a squeak. His hands trembled on the wheel. He realized his foot was clamped down on the brake. His senses began to return. He looked up at the car on the on ramp. Was the shooter alone, or was there someone else waiting? He hit his own brights, floored the gas again and reached the ramp at forty, scraping the side of the parked saloon car in a shower of sparks. Ed caught a brief glimpse of it as it flew past. A navy-blue Ford, empty.
Then he was fishtailing onto the feeder road to Route 1 and the interstate. Bitter wind howled in through the shattered window. It felt like a scalpel was slicing his ear where the shot had grazed him.
He drove for ten miles. By then the cold wind was freezing his hands and face. He needed to stop.
The red star came up out of the night on his right-hand side, floating in a sea of light in the otherwise pitch-black. It was red, with the letter T indented into the bottom of the star. A truck stop. More memory came cascading back.
He turned onto the off ramp. The gas station lay bathed in sodium light. There was an all-night diner next to it. He pulled in where the big rigs were parked.
He stared at the sign. Texaco. His mind was breaking from its cocoon. The last day at the Lot. Suddenly he was no longer in the freezing gas station. He felt the hot buttoned cushions of the yellow school bus and Shannon’s braids on his shoulder. Shannon—he remembered her. Dead because of him. The names in the papers he’d found taped next to his body began making sense: David, Carl, Kevin, Hope, Catrine, Shannon, and him. Vessels and Vials—God’s sacrifices, Typhon’s sacrifices. The Seven Apostles. All dead apart from him and David.
Yes, Shannon was gone. The thought hit him hard. How could she be dead when she had been so alive, asleep on his shoulder in the yellow bus, lit by the slant of the sun as they turned into that crazy, abandoned gas station lot and the red Texaco sign rose up into the June evening and the song of the white-throated sparrow came from the trees: Ah, te,e,e,te,e…?
His memory, so slow up until now, unraveled quickly: Winthrop Road, vacations on Tranquility, Jim, the day it all changed at Northeastern, Eagle Lake—
Miami. That was where he had come from. Miami was why he had two names. There had been a life before and a life after. He had become another person in Florida. He’d had a life, a job—and a wife. A pregnant wife.
Sarah. He stared blindly ahead. Sarah: they’d taken her. Why? Because she was collateral; a tool to bend him to their will should their mental coercion not work.
He remembered the cell phone. The choice. Accept the call or refuse. Accept and Sarah and the child would live. Refuse, they would die.
His life was over either way. He was alone: a wanted man pitted against an organization that spanned every police, secret service, and judicial organization in the country.
He looked at his head in the mirror. The entire left side of his throat was soaked with blood. Some of the shot had shredded his left earlobe. The freezing night air had at least stanched the bleeding, but, with his haunted face, dark rings under his eyes and the blood that had turned his white collar red, he looked like an extra from Dawn of the Dead. “When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth.”
He got out of the car stiffly. A shoal of broken glass fell from his lap onto the asphalt. He looked around. No one was to be seen. He reached in and removed more handfuls of shattered glass. There was a dumpster near the truck stop and next to it a pile of cardboard facings. He went to the passenger door, opened the glove compartment and pulled out the clasp knife he had seen there, then went around to the rear door of the station wagon and took out a roll of duct tape. He quickly cut two layers of thick cardboard and taped them over the broken window.
He hurried back to the tail door, threw in the tape and some extra cardboard and slammed it shut. Only then did he notice a length of fabric, he guessed from the gunman’s coat, trailing in the slushy gravel from the suspension of the Volvo. That and the broken window would be enough to excite the suspicions of a highway patrolman. He reached underneath and grabbed the fabric. It seemed to be caught on the lower control arm. He used the knife to cut it away. The fabric was thick with blood. He threw it into the dumpster, then wiped his hands in a bank of snow.
There was a pay phone at the side of the diner and some coins in the console. He scooped them up and went to it. He was reluctant to pull Jim into this again, but needs must. He dialed the number. Half wanting to hear Jim’s voice, half hoping he wouldn’t be there. The phone rang and rang. No answer. He hung up. He realized that, despite his qualms, he had been desperate for a friendly voice.
He was staring at the coin return when the side door of the diner opened, casting a shaft of light on him. A busboy came out with a bag of trash. He stared at Ed, taking in the bloodstained collar, before going to the dumpster and throwing in the bag.
Ed quickly got back in the station wagon. A few starry glass crystals nipped his ass as he sat down. The engine stalled when he turned the ignition. He cursed. He’d left the choke pulled out all the way from the Kennebec and now the carburetor was swamped with gas. He smashed the choke back in, knowing the damage was probably done and he would have to wait for a half-hour or so before the engine fired again.
The busboy had disappeared. Ed wondered if he was already on the phone to the police. He turned the ignition again. By a miracle, it suddenly roared into life. He didn’t look back as he peeled out of the lot.
*
The Operator in Mt. Lebanon had been busy coordinating things between David, the two other Suburbans, Bailey, and the team already in place in the backwoods. Sometime in the depths of the night, perhaps about half past two, Bailey went silent on him.
An hour or so later, as he stretched and looked around, he noticed a light on a switchboard he barely looked at anymore indicating an incoming call to Dove’s Bait and Tackle. His heart began to beat a little faster as he flipped a switch. He waited for the call to be picked up, but it was not.
He rang Bailey’s cell again, but there was no response. He kept at it until about four o’clock, when, on maybe his twentieth attempt, the phone was abruptly answered.
“Yes?” a strange voice said. There was a burst of static as from a transceiver in the background and the Operator immediately thought, “Cop,” and hung up.
He picked up the dedicated phone to Vermeulen’s rooms.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Ed reached Hadsville at 7.15. The early-morning gray revealed the socioeconomic slide of central Maine: boarded-up and paint-peeled clapboard houses lined the county road; apple orchards had been abandoned, their trees gnarled and black like twisted human limbs; a psychedelically painted trailer was an occult healing center; the hoarding outside the next church warned him that “Christ Died for Your Sins.”
Over a rise and the trees closed in and the mountains rose up gray and ghostlike in the cold dawn. A brown sign indicated the road to Tranquility.
For everything he now remembered, he knew there was still plenty missing: the unknown lay ahead. He had last been there ten years before. What would he find? Fear was for specific, known threats; dread was for everything else, for the great unknown. And for Ed that was all that was left.
He drove fast, the cold whipping in through the cardboard-covered driver’s-side window. Yellow moose warning signs whipped past. After ten miles the road crested another ridge. There hadn’t been another car since Hadsville. The first bars of gray light sat in the east, but the sun wasn’t hurrying, still in irons to the gray clouds that had closed over Maine after yesterday’s snowstorm. The slate-gray surface of the lake was emerging from the gloom of the surrounding forest below, stretching into the distance to the northwest, toward cloud-covered Nakuset. In front, the road ran down an incline for the last three miles, going straight as a die through the wilderness to the lake. He now recalled that the road was simply known as the Three Mile Road.
Suddenly the asphalt came to an abrupt end and the Volvo was crunching over unpaved gravel, fishtailing slightly as the tires slid over the loose surface. He slowed, wrestling with the wheel as the car slid toward one of the deep drainage ditches that edged the side of the road. He remembered then: the “Pavement Ends” sign had toppled over into the ditch many years before and had never been replaced.
The road-surface transition triggered more memories. Ahead was a junction. The right branched toward the bait store, the eastern log cabins, and the Sun Mountain Hotel. The left branch went to Brantwood and the sparsely populated west side of the lake, then arced around the northwestern edge, following it to its northern tip, to Dickson Camp and the logging tracks that Jim and he had taken ten years before.
Ed caught a glint in his driving mirror and instantly his eyes flicked to it. Car lights had appeared in the notch of pines at the crest of a ridge five miles back toward Hadsville. The lights flared as they came level with the mirror and then dimmed slightly as the car began its descent toward Tranquility. Close behind there was a second set of lights. One other car on a lonely winter’s morning heading toward a virtual dead end might have been coincidence, but two? Deer season was over. Two cars could only mean pursuers.
Ed boosted the gas and the engine surged, sending gravel spitting out behind: thirty, forty… The telegraph poles by the side of the road flicked past faster and faster. The road incline was easing, the forest giving way to a grassy, marshy, snow-covered waste on either side. The junction was just ahead. He looked in the mirror again just as the vehicles behind crested another ridge. It was difficult to gauge at such a great distance, but it looked like they were going fast, the headlights swinging slightly, even on the straight stretch of road, as if the drivers were struggling for control. Ed goosed the engine again. He was now going over fifty, recklessly fast on the unpaved road. The cardboard ripped off the driver’s-side window and the cold air slapped him in the face.
Ed rammed his foot down: the speedometer leapt toward the red. The Volvo was hitting sixty now. A line of trees crossed his path 100 yards ahead, marking the junction.
He braked fast and the station wagon slid onto the snow-covered verge, sending up a spume of mud, before he got it back on the gravel and onto the intersection.
He pulled the wheel to the left, toward Brantwood, pressed down on the gas again, and the Volvo took off. From here there was no sign of the lights behind. He guessed that they would be at the junction in about fifteen minutes.
On his right, he began to see tracks leading off to cabins by the lake. Two or three flashed past and then he saw what he had been looking for. Stark against the sea of evergreen conifers, the white trunks of ash trees, the last ghostly, sere leaves hanging from the black latticework of their thin branches. “Turn to the right in the place of ash.” Beyond them was the driveway to Brantwood.
He turned right and switched off the headlights, cursing the Volvo’s safety features; the side and rear lights remained on whenever the engine was running. He hoped these lesser lights would be hidden by the trees that now closed around on either side. He squinted ahead in the gloom. After 100 yards there was a turning point in the gravel. Two driveways barred by low metal gates led toward the lake. Even in the gloom he could read the names on the sides of the mailboxes by the gates. The left leaned drunkenly to one side, spotted with rust, and read “Constance;” the right, painted a pristine white, read “Sproule.” Both gates were padlocked and chained.
He remembered he had once had keys to this place. He had a memory of throwing them out of the window of the Greyhound bus into a water-filled ditch as he had crossed the Florida state line ten years earlier.
Ed pulled open the glove compartment, took out the gun and got out of the car. The heater had made a little difference, despite the broken window, but the air outside was frigid and his breath immediately condensed as he exhaled. He shivered.
He looked at the padlock. Heavy brass. He wasn’t sure whether a shot would take it out. Or, for that matter, whether a ricochet might strike him. He cocked the gun and took an oblique angle about a foot away, turned his head away and pulled the trigger. Instantaneously the gun bucked, there was a metallic chang and he heard the bullet whine off into the forest. He opened his eyes again to find the padlock blown off its hasp, the metal lock hoop slightly bent in its docking slot. He pulled it free with a screech of metal and opened the gate. He quickly got back in the car and drove it through, then got out and pulled the gate to behind him.
Seconds later he was rolling down a slight slope toward the lakeshore. There were no other marks in the fresh snow on the drive apart from a set of chipmunk paws. Ahead, the lake glimmered gray in the dawn light, its surface living up to its name, barely marked by a ripple. Patches of mist drifted over it. It stretched away far to the north, to the whaleback forest-covered mountains of the Appalachians. On his left, as he came around a corner, he saw the beechwood cabin. There was an air of desertion to the place. Weeds grew up through the gravel drive, dead leaves lay mounded at one end of the porch, a rocking chair lay on its side. One of the front windowpanes appeared cracked and the shingles were covered in green moss, but otherwise the roof seemed in a fair condition. A wooden sign was tacked over the screen door. Carved in it in imitation of an old-world copperplate hand was the word “Brantwood.”
The drive continued around the front, between the cabin and the boathouse. There was an empty carport on the flank of the house. He pulled into it, cut the engine and got out of the car.
He remembered the key to the rear door was hidden under the oil tank in the port. He crouched by it and reached into the gap between the cylinder and the concrete platform. As he touched sere leaves blown under the tank, something scuttled away under his fingers, then he felt metal and pulled out a Yale key. Despite it being stainless steel, the damp had corroded it in places.
He straightened and went to the back door. The interior of the cabin was veiled by a lace curtain. He wasn’t exactly certain what he would find inside.
He slid the Yale into the lock. The door swung open onto his past.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
The two black Chevy Suburbans were the type typically used by federal agencies. The vehicles had been equipped with enhanced six-liter V8 engines, and with the added torque and horsepower, and laden as they were with only two passengers, each with minimal equipment, they had effortlessly cruised down the Maine Turnpike, eating up the miles and Ed’s head start.
The SUVs’ windows were tinted, concealing the occupants. The first of the two drivers appeared quarried from unmoving stone: he looked to be ex-special forces. His head was about the same width as his bulging neck muscles. His Typhon codename was Hulk.
The passenger next to him was occupied with some syringes and vials laid out on the lid of the metal attaché case on his lap. He was known within the organization simply as Doc. He was to have administered the final checks on Constance before he was sent off to Colorado, but after the deaths at the City Point warehouse it turned out that the victim was not only conscious but a killer. Hence the extra backup in the Suburbans. Doc was still proceeding with Vermeulen’s original orders: bring in the subject, if biddable. It seemed that some chemical intervention might be required should Constance prove resistant, hence the syringes. Whether they would be used to tranquilize or euthanize remained to be seen.
