John Connolly - The Unquiet

He stared at me for a moment or two, as though I had already become such a man.

“Eventually,” he continued, “I went back, and I finished the job. I took pity on him, because it wasn’t right to leave him that way. I looked into them unblinking eyes, and I swear that something of what he was had stayed alive in there. It was trapped by what I’d made him, but I released it. I set it free. I guess that would count as a mercy, right? I can’t promise that I’d do the same for you, so you be real careful putting them cuffs on.”

I did as he had told me, leaning awkwardly across the bed so that my trapped right hand could close the cuff around my left wrist. Then I placed my left hand against the far bedpost. Merrick walked around the bed, the gun never wavering from me, his finger poised over the trigger. The sheet beneath my back was now drenched with perspiration. Carefully, using only his left hand, he secured the cuff, leaving me lying in a cruciform position. He moved in closer.

“You look scared, mister,” he whispered into my ear. His left hand brushed the hair from my brow. “You’re sweating like meat on a grill.”

I jerked my head away. Gun or no gun, I didn’t want him touching me like that. He grinned, then stepped back from me.

“You can breathe easy for now. You answer me right, and you may live to see another sunrise. I don’t hurt anything, man or beast, that I don’t have to hurt.”

“I don’t believe that.”

His body tensed, as though, somewhere, an unseen puppeteer had suddenly given his strings a gentle tweak. Then he pulled the sheets away from my body, leaving me naked before him.

“I think you ought to watch what you say,” he said. “It doesn’t seem to me like it’s smart for a man with his dick hanging out to start running off at the mouth in front of someone who could do him harm if he chose.”

It seemed absurd, but without that thin covering of cotton I felt more vulnerable than before. Vulnerable, and humiliated.

“What do you want?”

“To talk.”

“You could have done that in daylight. You didn’t have to break into my house to do it.”

“You’re an excitable man. I was worried that you might overreact. Then there’s the small fact that last time we were due to meet, you screwed me over, and I ended up with a cop’s knee in my back. You could say that I owe you one for that.”

He moved the gun swiftly to his left hand, then knelt on my legs and punched me hard in the kidney. With my body held rigid there was no way that I could move to absorb the pain. It ran riot through my system, forcing bubbles of nausea into my mouth.

The weight came off my legs. Merrick picked up a glass of water from the bedside table, drank from it, then splashed the remainder on my face.

“That’s a lesson I shouldn’t ought to have been forced to teach you, but you been schooled again in it anyways. You cross a man, you can expect him to come back at you, uh-huh, yes you can.”

He returned to his chair and sat down. Then, in a gesture that was almost tender, he carefully pulled the sheet back over my body.

“All I wanted was to talk to the woman,” he said. “Then she called you in, and you started interfering in matters that were no concern of yours.”

I found my voice. It came out slowly, like a startled animal emerging from its burrow to test the air for threats.

“She was frightened. It looks like she had good cause to be.”

“I don’t hurt women. I told you that before.”

I let that go. I didn’t want to anger him again.

“She didn’t know what you were talking about. She believes her father is dead.”

“So she says.”

“You think she’s lying?”

“She knows more than she’s telling, is what I think. I have unfinished business with Mr. Daniel Clay, uh-huh. I won’t let it lie still until I see him before me, alive or dead. I want recompense. I’m entitled to it, yes sir.”

He nodded once, deeply, as though he had just shared something very profound with me. Even the way he spoke and acted had changed somewhat, the little “uh-huhs” and “yes sirs” becoming more frequent and pronounced. They were ticks, and I knew then that Merrick was drifting out of the control not only of Eldritch and the Collector, but of himself.

“You’re being used,” I said. “Your grief and anger are being exploited by others.”

“I been used before. It’s a matter of understanding that, and of receiving proper payment for it.”

“And what’s your payment here? Money?”

“Information.”

He let the barrel of the gun drop until it was pointed at the floor. A wave of tiredness seemed to wash over him, breaking against his face so that his features were altered, confused memories twisting and coiling in the aftermath. He dug his fingers deep into the corners of his eyes, then drew them across his face. For a moment, he looked old and frail.

“Information about your daughter,” I said. “What did the lawyer give you? Names?”

“Maybe. Nobody else offered me help. Nobody else gave a damn about her. You know what it was like for me, being trapped in that jail knowing that something had happened to my little girl, knowing that there was nothing I could do to find her, to help her? Social worker came to the jail, told me she’d gone missing. Bad as it was before, when I figured out what had been done to her, this was worse. She was gone, and I knew she was in trouble. Have you any idea what that will do to a man? I tell you, it near broke me, but I wouldn’t let that happen. I’d be no use to her that way, no sir, so I bided my time and waited for my opportunity. I kept it together for her, and I didn’t break.”

But he was broken. Something had fractured deep within him, and the flaw was progressing through his system. He was no longer as he once had been, but as Aimee Price had said, there was no way of knowing if he had been rendered more lethal, and more dangerous, as a result. They were two different things, though, and had I been pressed at that moment, as I lay incapacitated on my own bed, under my own gun, I would have said that he was more dangerous but less lethal. His edge had been taken from him, but what had replaced it had rendered him unpredictable. He was now a prisoner of his own anger and sadness, and that had made him vulnerable in ways he could not even suspect.

“My little girl didn’t just disappear into thin air,” he said. “She was taken from me, and I’ll find whoever was responsible for it. She may still be out there now, somewhere, waiting for me to come get her and take her home.”

“You know that’s not true. She’s gone.”

“You shut your mouth! You don’t know that.”

I didn’t care now. I was sick of Merrick, sick of them all.

“She was a young girl,” I said. “They took her. Something went wrong. She’s dead, Frank. That’s what I believe. She’s dead like Daniel Clay.”

“You don’t know that. How do you know that about my little girl?”

“Because they stopped,” I said. “After her, they stopped. They got scared.”

He shook his head forcefully. “No, I won’t believe it until I see her. Until they show me her body, then she’s alive to me. You say otherwise again, and I’ll kill you where you lie, I swear it. You mark me! Yes sir, you mark me well.”

He was standing above me now, the gun poised in his hand, ready to fire. It shook slightly, the rage at the heart of his being transferring its energy to the weapon in his hand.

“I met Andy Kellog,” I said.

The gun stopped shaking, but it did not move from me.

“You saw Andy. Well, I guess you was going to figure out where I’d been sooner or later. How is he?”

“Not good.”