James Patterson - Gone

He tried to shake me off. He wasn’t trying hard enough. I swung him around into the road. “Four boys, six girls, my grandfather and nanny. Why aren’t you helping them?”

The fed was finally able to dislodge one of my hands by punching down on it. I retaliated by punching the agent in his mouth. I was about to do it again when the state trooper who had brought me there linked his big arms around mine from behind.

“Is my family dead? Tell me!”

“Jeez,” the young fed said, thumbing his lip. “We don’t know, OK? We don’t know yet. We can’t get up there because of the fentanyl. We have a hazmat team on its way.”

I went really nuts then. I elbowed the trooper in his ribs and started running for the driveway. Then I was tackled by two more troopers and another agent.

“Get off me now, or I swear to God, I will shoot all three of you!” I snarled as I writhed and fought them in the dirt alongside the driveway. I lost it then. Some wall inside me broke, and I was bawling. My face filled with tears and dust as I sobbed.

“Get off me. Get off me, you fucking cowards,” I said as I wept.

“It’s poison up there, Detective,” said one of the troopers, with a Barney Fife twang. “I know you want to get to your family, but if you go up there unprotected, you’re going to die.”

“I know,” I cried. “I want the poison. Give me the poison. I just want to be with my kids.”

I calmed down after another few minutes of crying. Emily had taken me over to one of the fed SUVs and sat with me in the back. I’d melted down emotionally before, but never in front of so many people. And still I hadn’t faced it yet. Hadn’t faced the unfaceable.

The FBI hazmat squad showed up in a fire truck-like vehicle, already wearing their white hooded jumpsuits. After Emily spoke to them, they allowed me to gear up as well and follow them, as long as I stayed behind them and didn’t hit anyone else.

Emily and I started up the road behind the eight-man contingent. The air filter of the full-face breathing mask had some sort of pine scent in it that made me want to throw up.

The agents halted suddenly as something moved in the distance ahead. One of the SWAT guys raised his rifle.

“Don’t shoot!” I said through the interior mike when I saw what it was.

It was one of Cody’s sheepdogs. He stopped in the road and started barking at us. Good God. Aaron. I hadn’t even thought about him. Was he dead as well? For helping us? The dog barked some more and then ran back up the road from where it had come.

We went around a slight curve in the dirt road and saw the house for the first time, up the slope. There was no light on in the windows. Not a sound. In the dull, grainy moonlight, it was like I was seeing it for the first time. Its fish-scale shingles on the gabled roof, its gingerbread trim. The Queen Anne-style Victorian looked like it should be in the Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco, not out here in the middle of the high desert.

I shook my head and stared at the dormer where Mary Catherine slept.

Mary Catherine.

I pictured her.

Mary Catherine sewing a vintage lampshade she’d bought on eBay. Mary Catherine down on her knees in the hallway with the girls around a bucket of joint compound, teaching them how to spackle and sand. How to fix something. How to make a house, even a safe house, into a home.

In my heart, I’d been planning on our being together someday, I realized as I stopped walking. Now, in a few minutes, I would be making a phone call and telling her family back in Ireland that she was dead. I squeezed my hands into fists when they started shaking.

“You OK, Mike?” Emily said. “You want to go back?”

I shook my head quickly. For a second I thought I was going to throw up, but then it passed.

“Let’s keep going,” I said.

I stepped on something when we got to the front yard. It was a Wiffle ball, or what was left of one. Brian hit them so hard, he caved them in. I thought about Brian then. Watching my oldest son play his first football game back in New York, the smile that creased his face on that rainy, freezing field when the coach sent him in off the bench.

I turned and looked at the open front door as the SWAT team went inside. There was a sudden bang of another door being flung open. “Clear!” someone called. I squatted down and stared at the dirt as I listened to more bangs and more shouts of “Clear!” as the SWAT guys swept the house.

Then one of the agents appeared at the front door. It was the preppy-looking one I’d hit. He waved us up.

“Mike, you really, really don’t have to do this,” Emily said.

I lifted the crushed Wiffle ball and stared at it as I gathered myself.

“Yes, I do,” I said, standing and stepping toward the house.

“Mike,” said the agent, holding up his palm. “I don’t know what this means, but there’s no one here.”

“What do you mean?” I said, staring over his shoulder, into the foyer. “You mean they’re dead? They’re all dead?”

“No, Mike,” the agent said. “There are no bodies. There’s no anything. Your family isn’t here, Detective. The house is completely empty. Everyone is gone.”

The test for the fentanyl powder actually turned up negative. I quickly shucked off the suffocating mask and frantically searched the house.

It was true. Everyone was gone. I looked through the rooms. The beds were unmade. Everyone’s clothes seemed to be all there, including their sneakers. I even found Mary Catherine’s cell phone charging on the bookshelf beside her bed. It was hard to say if there was any kind of struggle, but it was obvious that they had all left quickly and suddenly, in the middle of the night.

I stared out Mary Catherine’s window at the dark mountains, going crazy. Perrine had my family. He’d taken them away.

Roadblocks were set up in the entire area. Troopers and local police came with bloodhounds. The dogs kept running around in circles in the farmyard, indicating that it was unlikely that anyone in my family had left on foot.

I peeled off the hazmat suit in the kitchen and just sat there at the table, rubbing a hand through my hair over and over again as I stared at the worn pine floor, trying to think. Why would Perrine come to kill my family and just take them instead? The implications of it wouldn’t stop coming, the possibilities of what he could do.

It was worse than finding them dead, I decided. I couldn’t believe that this was happening. How could I?

I looked up to see Emily take a seat next to me. She began to cry.

“I caused this,” she said. “You didn’t even want to go to LA, and I came up like a good little soldier and put on the con job and the pressure. You didn’t want to leave for exactly this reason. I caused this. I’m responsible.”

I wanted to tell her she was wrong, but I was in no shape to comfort anyone. The lead jacket of what was happening was too heavy. I was surprised I had the strength to breathe.

That was when the dog came in through the open back door. It was Cody’s border collie. She rubbed against my shins, and I reached out and patted the sad-looking pooch on the head.

As I was doing it, I remembered what Cody had told me about border collies. How brave and smart they were. How they always kept moving, kept circling. How they never quit.

I suddenly stood and took out my phone.

“Emily, listen to me. Stop crying. There’s still a shred of hope,” I said quickly, thumbing through my contacts.

“There is?” Emily said.

I nodded.

“That my guys are not here, all dead, means that Perrine is going to want to use them somehow, right? We need to find Perrine before that happens. We still have one shot.”