John Connolly - The Killing Kind

The sound of Marine 1 approaching us disturbed my thoughts. “They're going back to pick up the local ME, have the victims declared dead at the scene,” said MacArthur, unlocking the cuffs. “You go back with them. Someone will take you to the department. I'll follow on within the hour and we'll pick up this discussion where we left off.”

He watched me as I stepped carefully from the Whaler into the smaller boat. It turned in a broad arc and headed for the shore, leaving the Eliza May behind. The sun was setting, and the waves were afire as they prepared to haul Jack Mercier's body down.

At the Scarborough Police Department I sat for a time in the lobby and watched the dispatchers behind their protective screen. My clothes were soaked and I couldn't seem to get warm again. I found myself reading, over and over, warnings against rabies and DUI posted on the bulletin boards. I felt like I was coming down with a fever. My head ached and the skin on my scalp seemed to be constricting around the stitches.

Eventually I was led into the general-purpose briefing room. The command staff had just broken up their meeting in the smaller conference room, where MacArthur had been chewed out for letting me on board the Whaler. I was trying to draw in some heat through a cup of coffee, a patrol officer at the door to make sure I didn't try to steal one of the canine trophies stored in the cabinet, when MacArthur joined me, accompanied by Captain Bobby Melia, one of two captains in the force who were second in command to Chief Byron Fischer. MacArthur carried a tape recorder with him. They sat across from me, the door behind them closed, and asked me to take them through it all again. Then Norman Boone arrived from the BATF, and Ellis Howard from the Portland PD.

And I went through it again.

And again.

And again.

I was tired, cold, and hungry. Each time I told them what I knew, it got harder and harder to remember what I had left out, and their questions became more and more probing. But I couldn't tell them about Marcy Becker, because if the Fellowship did have connections among the police, then telling anyone in law enforcement about her would be tantamount to signing her death warrant. They were threatening to charge me as an accessory to Mercier's murder, in addition to accusations of withholding evidence, obstructing justice, and anything else that the law allowed. I let the waves of their anger break over me.

Two bodies were missing from the boat: those of the porn star with the busted finger, and Quentin Harrold, both of whom had gone out on the yacht to guard the Obers and the Merciers. The Scarborough PD suspected they had died in the first burst of gunfire. Jack Mercier had tried unsuccessfully to fire off a flare but had instead ignited his own clothing, which explained the charring on his body. There was a Colt revolver in the cabin where the bodies were found, but it had not been fired. Cartridges were scattered on the floor beside it where someone had made a last, desperate effort to load.

What harm can it do?

I wanted to get away from there. I wanted to talk to the Beckers, to force them-at gunpoint if necessary-to tell me where their daughter was hiding. I wanted to know what Grace Peltier had found. I wanted to sleep.

Most of all, I wanted to find Mr. Pudd, and the mute, and the old man who had wanted Rachel's skin: Aaron Faulkner. His wife was among the dead of St. Froid but he was not, and neither were his two children. A boy and a girl, I remembered. What age would they be now: late forties, early fifties? Ms. Torrance had been too young, as was Lutz. Unless there were others hidden elsewhere, which I doubted, that left only Pudd and the mute: they were Leonard and Muriel Faulkner, dispatched, when required, to do their father's bidding.

Wallace gave me a ride back to my car after eleven that night, threats of retribution still ringing in my ears. Angel and Louis were with Rachel when I returned home, drinking beer and watching television with the volume almost muted. All three of them left me alone while I stripped and showered, then pulled on a pair of chinos and a sweater. A new cell phone lay on the kitchen table, the memory card salvaged from the wreckage of the old phone and reinstalled. I took a bottle of Pete's Wicked Ale from the fridge and twisted it open. I could smell the hops and the distinctive fruity scent. I raised it to my mouth and took one mouthful, my first sip of alcohol in two years, then held it for as long as I was able. When at last I swallowed, it was warm and thick with saliva. I poured the rest into a glass and drank half of it, then sat looking at what remained. After a time, I took the glass to the sink and poured the beer down the drain.

It wasn't exactly a moment of revelation, more a confirmation. I didn't want it, not now. I could take it or leave it, and I chose to let it go. Amy had been right; it was just something to fill the hole, and I had found other ways to do that. But for now, nothing in a bottle was going to make things better.

I shivered again. Despite the shower and the change of clothes, I still hadn't been able to get warm. I could taste the salt on my lips, could smell the brine in my hair, and each time I did I was back on the waters of the bay, the Eliza May drifting slowly before me and Jack Mercier's body swaying gently against the sky.

I placed the bottle in the recycling box and looked up to see Rachel leaning against the door.

“You're not finishing it?” she said softly.

I shook my head. For a moment or two, I couldn't speak. I felt something breaking up inside of me, like a stone in my heart that my system was now ready to expel. A pain at the very center of my being began to spread throughout my body: to my fingers and toes, to my groin, to the tips of my ears. Wave after wave of it rocked me, so that I had to hold on to the sink to stop myself from falling. I squeezed my eyes closed tightly and saw:

a young woman emerging from an oil barrel by a canal in Louisiana, her teeth bared in her final agony and her body encased in a cocoon of transformed body fats, dumped by the Traveling Man after he had blinded her and killed her; a little dead boy running through my house in the middle of the night, calling me to play; Jack Mercier, burning with a desperate flame as his wife was dragged bleeding belowdecks; blood and water mixing on the pale, distorted features of Mickey Shine; my grandfather, his memory fading slowly away; my father sitting at a kitchen table, ruffling my hair with his great hand; and Susan and Jennifer, splayed across a kitchen chair-lost to me and yet not lost, gone and yet forever with me…

The pain made a rushing sound as it passed through me, and I thought I detected voices calling to me, over and over, as at last it reached its peak. My body tensed, my mouth opened, and I heard myself speak.

“It wasn't my fault,” I whispered.

Her brow furrowed. “I don't understand.”

“It-wasn't-my-fault,” I repeated. There were huge gaps between the words as I retched each one up and spat it, blinking, into the light. I licked my upper lip and tasted, again, salt and beer. My head was pounding in time to my heart, and I thought I was going to burn up. Past and present twisted and intertwined with each other like snakes in a pit. New deaths and old, old guilts and new, the pain of them white hot even as I spoke.

“None of it,” I said. My eyes were blurring, and now there was fresh salt water on my cheeks and lips. “I couldn't have saved them. If I'd been with them, I'd have died too. I did everything that I could. I'm still trying to do it, but I couldn't have saved them.”

And I didn't know about whom I was speaking. I think I was talking about them all: the man on the mast; Grace and Curtis Peltier; a woman and child, a year earlier, lying on the floor of a cheap apartment; another woman, another child, in the kitchen of our home in Brooklyn a year before that again; my father, my mother, my grandfather; a little boy with a bullet wound for an eye.