Randy White - Dead Silence

With his hands now in front of him, Will could have ripped away the tape covering his eyes. But even a moron like Buffalo-head might notice, so Will used his lips to feel around until he found the break in the tape he’d already created. A couple more layers and he would be free.

In fact, if he had only five more minutes-

“Devil Child? I’m coming in-I’m warning you.”

Shit. Buffalo-head was right outside.

Will was still struggling to step through his hands again when he heard the creaking of the trailer door.

The boy lay still, focusing on the silence of the Cuban’s labored breathing, feeling the man’s eyes on him, sensing the beam of a flashlight panning over his body.

Will heard Buffalo-head’s nervous laughter. “You are freezing. Good. Balled up like a dog. That is what you deserve for poisoning me! To live like a dog before I come back with a gun. Do you hear me?”

Will didn’t move.

“You say you’re not afraid of guns? Hah! Then how do you feel about being buried in the cold ground? We will see!”

The trailer door slammed shut, not as loud as a gunshot but almost, and Will jumped. In his mind was this image of the hole the American had mentioned, the empty horse’s grave.

Moments later, the door opened again, and Will knew it was Metal-eyes. He could smell the man’s hair lotion. He could feel the man stalking closer and soon could smell another distinctive odor, familiar and medicinal.

Ketamine.

Damn it.

Will forced his muscles not to flex when the Cuban jammed a syringe needle into his thigh. Will could feel the horse tranquilizer flooding his system but didn’t react.

Seconds later, Will couldn’t move even if he had wanted to.

At ten, Tomlinson banged at my hotel door and said, “Demons have returned to the bell tower. Want to go for a drive? I was twitchy to begin with. Now I’m having visions. I think he’s there.”

“The boy, you mean. Where?”

“I mean my brother. Or father. Maybe both-God help us.” He had the keys to the rental car and rattled them in his hand. “I should have told you about the missing girl Fred mentioned, but I never let myself be convinced.”

Earlier, he’d made only a vague reference to her after admitting that he knew his father had not sold the family estate. Their only contact over the years had been a few phone calls and cards. “The day I began to suspect was the last time I set foot on the property.”

Not long afterward, his father, a gifted paleontologist, and his brother, a Yale graduate with two years at Johns Hopkins, both left the country while Tomlinson was still at Harvard. Now he wasn’t even sure they were alive.

Standing at my door, he said, “I swore I’d never go back. But everything in its time, man. The dream was bizarre, now it’s like a tractor pulling me home.” He looked over my shoulder into the room. “You mind grabbing an extra jacket? It’s freezing out here.”

I was awake. I had spent two hours cross-referencing new information related to William Chaser’s abduction. E-mails from Barbara’s staff and one from Harrington. Now I was trying to get my mind off the puzzle of the boy’s disappearance by reading an article in National Geographic Adventurer about the puzzle that is the precise magnetic navigation system in sea turtles.

I closed the magazine and tossed it on the desk. “Someone could be living in your old place. Maybe it’s been leased, you don’t know. And it’s late.”

“Tell that to my demons. Last I heard, Dr. Tomlinson was working in Brazil and my brother was growing poppies on the far side of the world. But it doesn’t mean they gave away the family jewels.” He rattled the keys.

Tomlinson’s manic reaction to alcohol mixed with guilt takes many forms, most of them familiar to me by now. This was different. His eyes were wild but not glazed. He was dressed in layers: jeans, shirts and at least two pairs of socks-a scarecrow’s costume for most but for him bedrock proof that he’d given the matter sober consideration.

Fifteen minutes later, I was standing outside a hedged compound, a deserted hulk of a house that Tomlinson said was once his family’s estate. MEL-VILLE PLACE read a weathered sign at the stone entranceway-the author had spent part of a whaling season here. When Tomlinson said the family had money, I’d assumed millions, not hundreds of millions. There was a light on in a staff cottage. He asked me to wait while he went to the door.

I watched the door open. A buxom woman in a housecoat appeared. I heard a hoot of surprise, then watched the woman hug Tomlinson. He lifted her off the floor as if they were dancing.

“It’s okay,” he yelled. “Give me a minute!”

As the door closed, I could hear the woman weeping.

I walked to the back of the property to a dune overlooking the sea. I was there for only a few minutes when I noticed the silhouette of a man approaching. I looked at the house, then at the silhouette.

Physical characteristics in a family vary, but the person coming toward me was Tomlinson’s ectomorphic opposite: broad and squat, not tall and lean-unlikely it was his father or brother. And his movements were mechanical, like a robot tracking unfamiliar ground.

I looked far down the beach. No lights. The nearest estate was two miles away. Even so, I wondered if it might be a neighbor sleepwalking.

No… the man was awake. His course didn’t vary. I realized it was because he saw me. As he approached, I expected a signal of acknowledgment, at least a tentative greeting, typical of strangers meeting at night in an isolated place.

Nothing. The closer he got, the faster the man walked. Maybe he expected me to turn and leave-or run.

I didn’t.

“Are you him? The liar that says his name is Thomas?”

When the man spoke, I backed up a step, couldn’t help it. By now he had breached what academics call the alarm perimeter and hadn’t slowed. Friends stop at three feet, acquaintances at four, strangers at nine. He kept coming. It wasn’t until I stepped toward the man that he halted.

“You scared, bub? I’m waiting for an answer.” The man was a local, his accent similar to the horse trainer’s.

I said, “Here’s the way it works: You introduce yourself, then I explain my name’s not Thomas. Afterward, we both go on our merry ways.”

“Didn’t say that. I said you was the liar pretending his name was Thomas.”

The man stepped closer.

Wind blew off the ocean, topping the dunes. I could smell creosote and diesel, odors I associate with commercial fishing. Not a tall man but big. His face was shadowed because the sea was behind him, a pale band of beach where waves boomed, water blacker than the squall-black sky. Age was in his voice and the way he moved, not old but getting there.

I wondered if he could see my face. Realized he couldn’t when he said, “If you don’t remember me, bub, maybe you need glasses.”

My foul-weather jacket wasn’t zipped. I said, “Maybe we both do,” as I took off my glasses and cleaned them on my sweater. “If you’ve got a problem, mister, I can’t help unless I know what it is.”

The mansion behind me was five stories, all the windows dark except for the lights on the porch and in the windows of the cottage. I turned toward the cottage, the mansion to my left, the sea to my right.

After a moment, the man said, surprised, “You’re not him,” but it was also an accusation. He looked at the mansion, took a few steps toward it, then stopped. “You must be the other guy. The one who’s a cop looking for some missing boy. Only strangers come out on this point in winter. Alone anyway.”

I said, “Because it’s private property? Maybe I should be asking the questions.”