Carla Neggers - The Mist

Except no one really believed that.

Jeremiah Rush was standing behind his desk, directing a middle-aged couple to the Freedom Trail. Without breaking eye contact with them, he gave a subtle nod toward a hall behind him.

Two minutes later, Bob took the hotel’s back steps to a narrow alley, one of the countless nooks and crannies he was always surprised to find on Beacon Hill.

March was eyeing a shiny dark blue BMW.

Bob motioned to the expensive car. “Going to steal it, John?”

“I want to trade my life for hers.” March didn’t meet Bob’s eye, the only indication-other than being there in the first place-that the strain of his daughter’s kidnapping had gotten to him. “Let Estabrook torture me instead.”

“Come on, will you?” Bob said, nearly knocking a pot of geraniums off the bottom step. “Cut me a break. I lose the FBI director in Boston, and they’ll zap my pension for sure.”

March’s shoulders slumped, but only for a second before he straightened again. Even now, after hearing his kidnapped daughter scream in agony, cry for her daddy, he didn’t have a thread or a hair out of place. But anyone who thought he was unaffected would, Bob knew, be making a mistake.

March blew out a breath at the overcast sky. “It was hard enough to shake my detail, but you, O’Reilly. Hell.” He looked over at his longtime friend. “Fill me in.”

Bob was relieved to have the emotions out of the way. “The dead guy, Bassette, was local. You know that. He hired a couple of guys from Chicago -Estabrook’s old stomping grounds. One of them must have sneaked into our yard and planted the bomb on Abigail’s porch. Cops. You’d think we’d sew up the place, but only so much you can do. They could have thrown the bomb over the fence and killed Scoop and Fiona outright.”

“Bob-”

“You don’t need Estabrook to torture you. You’re torturing yourself. I know. I’ve been doing the same thing, blaming myself for Fiona having to sit there with Scoop bleeding all over her. For what she saw yesterday in that alley.” Bob bent over and righted the flowerpot. He had no idea why. He sighed. “It gets us nowhere. The blame.”

“I’m sorry, Bob. For Fiona. She’s a good kid. She-”

“Why are you sorry? What did you do to her?”

The FBI director barely cracked a smile, and Bob suddenly remembered them standing on a South Boston street years ago. March, ten years older, handsome, had been on the move, and Bob, just a kid, had been a cop’s son who didn’t want his friend up the street to be dead. Every night, he’d prayed for Deirdre McCarthy to come home to her mother. Things hadn’t worked out that way, and now, thirty years later, he could feel that awful, hot, violent summer reaching out to him and the man a few yards from him, sucking them back into a time and a world they both had tried to forget.

Bob felt ragged and out of control, even as he was determined to get through the day. Do his job. Find Abigail. Arrest her kidnappers.

March looked as if he’d crumble if anyone touched him.

“You know Abigail wants a wedding?” Bob dug out another pack of gum. “She’s not waiting anymore. She’s marrying her rich Garrison. I’ll be invited. Who knows where it’ll be.”

“Owen’s a good man,” March said, choking back his emotion.

“He didn’t grow up like we did. None of them did.” Bob worked a piece of gum out of the pack. “Then there’s Keira. Ten to one she and Simon will be getting married. She’s already dragging me on that Christmas trip to Ireland. Hell, John. These women are going to break my bank.”

March had tears now in his dark eyes. “Are you at peace with your past, Bob?”

Bob grinned at him. “Never.”

“I keep hearing her scream.”

“I know. We all do, but it’s worse for you. Be glad her mother didn’t get that call.” Bob peeled off the wrapper and stuck the gum in his mouth. “Because I’m your friend, John, I’m going to tell you this. Kathryn wants to take you to a spa retreat.”

“A spa-Bob, what are you talking about?”

He chewed his gum. “She told Abigail on her last trip to Boston. I was up on my porch, and I overheard them talking down by Scoop’s garden. I can see you in a bathrobe, drinking herbal tea, waiting for your massage-”

“All right, enough.” March sighed up at the sky again. “We’re not as young as we used to be.”

“So? Who cares? We know what we’re doing now. Right?”

“Does anyone ever-”

“You’re giving me a headache, John. I figure we have ten minutes, tops, before that prick Yarborough lands on us. You know damn well he’s on our trail. He’s not going to let us off Beacon Hill.”

March managed a weak grin. “Whose job does he get first, yours or mine?”

“He can have mine. I’m moving to Ireland to sing in pubs.” Bob saw now what he and March had to do. Maybe March had already seen it, and he’d just been letting the younger police lieutenant come to the same conclusion on his own. Or maybe Bob was taking the lead this time. It didn’t matter. “Lizzie Rush’s old man taught her well, but let’s go find her and her new Brit friend, Lord Davenport. You and me.”

The back door to the hotel opened, and a tawny-haired, middle-aged man in wrinkled khakis walked down the steps. Clearly a Rush, he looked at the two men in the alley as if he knew exactly who they were. “Lizzie’s her mother’s daughter.” The newcomer was tanned and leathery, his tone cool, controlled-but he radiated an intensity that told Bob that this man, too, had a loved one in harm’s way. “I took the red-eye from Vegas. I hate flying. Fill me in, or do I need to kidnap Boston ’s chief homicide detective and the director of the FBI?”

Harlan Rush, Lizzie Rush’s father, could do it, too. Bob balled up his gum wrapper and shoved it in his pocket as he looked to March. “John?”

March didn’t hesitate. “We go.”

Harlan dangled a set of keys from his hand. “My nephew said we could borrow his dad’s car. It’s that one right there. Lucky, huh? You don’t need to steal it after all.”

“Licensed to carry concealed?” Bob asked him.

Harlan headed past Bob for the BMW. “I’m licensed to carry a cruise missile to shove up Norman Estabrook’s flabby butt.”

Bob figured, who was he to argue?

He climbed into the leather backseat of Bradley Rush’s sedan, Harlan Rush at the wheel, next to him, the former BPD detective who’d investigated his Irish wife’s death.

“I hope by the time we get to Maine,” Bob said as Rush started the car, “we find out Abigail is safe and sound here in Boston, and we can all have fried clams.”

The two men in front made no comment.

“Yeah,” Bob said on a breath. “Let’s go.”

Near Kennebunkport, Maine

7:45 a.m., EDT

August 27

“I love cormorants,” Lizzie said as she ambled along the narrow path above the rocks. “I can watch them endlessly.”

Neither of the two men with her responded. Myles Fletcher had stayed next to her, even if it meant he had to veer off the path, into pine needles or onto the rocks. The second man, silent and obviously less fit, walked a few steps ahead of them. Both men were armed with nine-millimeter pistols, Fletcher’s holstered at his waist, his partner’s in his right hand.

Lizzie hadn’t left her house with so much as a butter knife. She’d tried reaching for a fist-size rock, but Fletcher had calmly touched her shoulder and shaken his head, effectively changing her mind.

She nodded to the ocean, calm and gray in the fog. “It’s a beautiful spot, isn’t it? I know you can’t see much today. I used to walk this path with my grandmother.” She tried to adopt the breezy style she’d had with Norman-oblivious, personable, as if she had no concerns about being escorted to him by armed guards and wasn’t a woman who’d send information anonymously to the FBI. “She’d tell me if she had her way, she’d die out here, watching a cormorant dive for food.”