It took over an hour to lay the groundwork, to bring Jerry up to the time when deadboy had first appeared on Alice’s screen. Allen stopped, eyes shut, exhausted by the effort of speech and, more, of guarding his speech.
“Let’s take a break,” Jerry said. “I need to make a run down and pick up some more bread and milk before the market shuts. You need to take a trip to the can?”
“Not now, but I think I’ll be able to do it myself.” If Jerry intended to make a phone call summoning deputies with handcuffs, he could do it from his own kitchen: Allen was in no condition to make a break for it, and they both knew it.
Jerry drove off, and Allen fell into a deep sleep, broken only when the rattle of grocery bags came through the door. Allen inched himself upright and off the sofa. The pain pills were wearing thin, leaving him with a fire in his shoulder but an adequate sense of balance. He managed a trip to the toilet, although refastening the button on the top of his jeans defeated him. Allen got himself a glass of water and sat at the kitchen table. Darkness was gathering, the Carmichael dock nearly invisible.
“You need me to open the pills?” Jerry asked over his shoulder.
“I’ll leave them for a while. Maybe some Advil?” They’d help with the inflammation, anyway, and leave his brain unclouded.
Jerry put the open bottle on the table.
“How you feeling?”
“Like an old banana peel with a blowtorch on one side. I’ll mend.”
“Weintraub’s a good man.”
“I hope this doesn’t get him in trouble.”
“He’d like nothing better. You’ve probably made his week—hell, his year. He gets bored.”
“Glad to oblige.”
“Rae left this morning,” Jerry said abruptly, his back to Allen. This was the first time he’d mentioned her aloud to his brother, since he had discovered their relationship.
“I know,” Allen said. “I’d hoped to see her off last night, but things got . . . complicated.”
“I asked Nikki to marry me.”
“Finally! Hey, that’s great. Well, it is if she said she would.”
“She did. She wants to wait ’til after Christmas, for the sake of the boy.”
Red-haired, ethereal Nikki Walls, the younger sister of Allen’s ex-wife Lisa, had been married to a wife-beater, and had come out of that marriage with a red-haired son and a distinct wariness toward men in general.
“I’m happy for you, Jerry.”
“Yeah, me too. You want a steak or a hamburger for your second dinner?”
“Hamburger.” Not just because it was less of a strain on the lawman’s budget, but it would be easier to eat one-handed. Jerry tore open a parcel of butcher’s paper and used a spatula to carve off a lump of red meat, smashing it flat in a cast-iron skillet and adding a second lump beside it. He turned on the gas to high, and went back to the bags for buns.
“If you’re not going to have any painkillers, you want a beer?”
“Sure.”
Jerry popped open the bottle and set it on the table in front of Allen, then went back to his sizzling pan. “I remember reading about this character a few years ago, used to help women get away from their husbands. She’d sit in a doughnut shop, I think it was, down in Dallas or something, and wait for women to drive up.”
“Atlanta. That was Faye Yager, and yeah, she was something else. The people I work with are a lot lower-key, and they’re pretty careful about who they take on. A big part of my job is—was—to make sure the clients weren’t trying to pull one over on us.”
“So what went wrong with this kid?”
“I don’t know that anything did.”
Jerry turned to give him a look. “Allen, you’re sitting at the table with a bleeding arm while Ed keeps some kid under wraps. I can’t imagine that happens every day.”
Allen concentrated on the drips gathering on the green bottle before him. He drew a deep breath, and began. “Jameson Patrick O’Connell, prefers to be called Jamie. Twelve years old, mother died when he was seven. I first came across him back in May, an email that had been forwarded through several people.” He drank the beer and talked, telling his brother about his last abused kid in a lifetime of them. The surveillance, the somewhat rushed rescue, stashing the boy with a family across the country (no names there, either), and returning to Seattle in June a free man, to phone his brother for the first time in years. Relaxing into a summer with Rae on the islands. Finished.
And then Rachel’s letter.
Back to San Jose and what he’d found there (leave Gina out of it), things that he should have discovered in May. Mark O’Connell’s questionable job and his plane going off the radar. Breaking and entering the O’Connell house (and again, let Jerry think he’d gotten into the study on his own, not mentioning the phone call to Dave). The father’s diary, the number of losses in the boy’s immediate vicinity—pet, fire, suicide, drowning—and the slow accumulation of suspicion, then finally the printout that had fallen out of the book, giving details of how to sabotage a plane.
The hamburgers were ready. Jerry put them on the table, along with catsup, Aunt Midge’s homemade relish, and two more bottles of beer; the two brothers ate wordlessly.
When his plate was bare, Allen looked up. “Do you understand why I was concerned?”
“Every law enforcement officer in the country receives regular briefings on the cause and avoidance of school shootings. I’ve been on three courses about it. I’m no expert, but even I’ve heard of the three danger signs of enuresis, arson, and animal abuse. Not that I put much stock in them,” he added. “It’s always struck me as a pretty simplistic judgment.”
Allen started to nod, cut the motion short at the objection of his mangled muscles, and changed his response. “Sure. If every kid who lights a fire or wets his bed had to go into therapy, every parent in the country would need to take on a second job. But in Jamie’s case, we also had the history of chronic paternal abuse, the almost complete lack of peer support, and an early familiarity with firearms and explosives. Again, none of those are a sure prescription of a dangerous kid, but the accumulation of things gave me a really bad feeling in my gut. Basically, I didn’t want to take a chance. The family we’d placed him with had children.”
Allen described in general terms his rushed cross-country trip, the removal of the boy from his foster family, and the drive toward Seattle.
“I had decided that I needed to consult with my . . . I guess you’d call her my partner, on the boy’s stability. So even though it was disruptive to everyone, most of all the kid himself, I simply took him. We were on a back road south of Olympia at five this morning when a car pulled up next to us and started shooting.”
“Could it have just been something random?”
“Single occupant, middle-aged male, a guy capable of driving a car at high speed while shooting with some accuracy out the driver’s side window at a car in the right-hand lane. He kept after us, too, until I shook him off.”
“How’d you do that?”
“I, er, borrowed somebody’s pickup.”
Jerry stood up abruptly to dump the plates into the dishwasher and pour coffee into a pair of mugs. Allen could just imagine what was going through his brother’s mind: kidnapping across state lines, illegal surveillance, breaking and entering, car theft. The unreported bullet wound was the least of Sheriff Carmichael’s problems.
“I called the truck’s owner to let him know we’d be returning it.” If Ed could get some of the blood out of the upholstery.
Jerry didn’t say anything, just sat down with his cup and propped his head in his hands. Allen could only wait and see which way things would fall. He didn’t think Jerry would turn him in, but it was very possible he would throw Allen out. Just because some cops might be sympathetic to the plight of a trapped victim didn’t mean that a man whose law enforcement problems were predominantly summer drunks on boats would be one of them.
“Tell me more about the k
id,” Jerry said eventually through his fingers.
“To begin with, there is no doubt in my mind that Jamie was brutalized by his father. Not sexually, as far as I can tell, or if so it was only indirectly, but he was clearly chronically abused, even tortured, both physically and mentally. His father used to take him out hunting and play these horrifying games with him, pretending to hunt him down, driving away and leaving him for hours at a time—this is a child of eight or nine. If you need convincing, there’s one tape I can show you, although I wouldn’t recommend it. The boy walks into the room where his father is drinking and watching the television, and the father calls him over, picks up the shotgun that’s lying on the sofa next to him, rests it against the boy’s chest, and pulls the trigger. Empty of course, but how can the kid know that for sure? Father laughs, big joke. Creepiest damn thing I’ve ever seen. And Jerry? I’ve seen a whole lot.”
At that, Jerry looked at him. “Jesus,” he said, and in a while, “But why not call the cops on him?”
“Cases like that, sometimes we do. If we can make sure that the abuser goes away for a long time, and can’t get back at the victims, it’s always best to let the family return to its home, see what life is like in familiar surroundings without the abuser. If Jamie’s mother was still alive, we might have tried it. But O’Connell’s a manipulator, and rich. More than once he convinced schools that his boy was a liar and a troublemaker. No saying he wouldn’t do it again, and then life would really be hell for the kid. And I didn’t know about it then, but I suspect that O’Connell had some well-oiled strategies for disappearing once he caught a whiff of the law. Anyway, as soon as I saw that perverse little game with the gun, I knew we had to get the kid away from him.”
“But now you think this kid may be dangerous, too?”
“Violent men are made, not born. Abuse permeates their image of what it is to be an authority figure—what other role model do they have? And at a certain point in a young victim’s life—not always, but often—he will turn, and either begin to abuse those he perceives as weaker—animals, younger children—or else strike back at his own abuser. I’m sure you’ve seen it. And as you know, if the reaction is open, immediate, and reactive to a specific event, there’s a feeling that the violence is justified—that’s when you see failures to indict, or verdicts of justifiable homicide. But if the abuse victim takes an indirect route, if there’s any planning or entrapment involved, well, juries don’t like that.”
“And you honestly think that this kid—”
“Jerry, I don’t know. Like I told you on the phone, all I heard is that the father’s plane went down. Last I knew, the Coast Guard hadn’t even decided if the father actually went down in that plane. I heard the news, saw a lot of uncomfortable evidence against the kid, and felt I was running out of time. Before Al—” He caught himself, changed it to, “Before my partner and I could take the boy aside for a closer look, find out how he was ticking, all hell broke loose. I’m working blind here, Jer. And I need help.”
“From me.”
“I didn’t have anywhere else to turn.”
“Do you think the boy killed his father?”
Allen heard a faint tink in the back of his mind, saw a grenade bouncing down a cave floor, looked into a pair of mad, triumphant blue eyes. Then he blinked, and his brother’s calm brown eyes were waiting.
“I hope to God he didn’t, for his own sake. But like I said, we don’t even know if the bastard is dead.”
“Okay. Let me make some phone calls.”
“Jer—”
“Don’t worry. I won’t give you away, or the kid. Not until we both know more.”
“Thank you.”
Jerry studied his older brother, pale and hurting as he had been the last time desperation drove him to the door, in the spring of 1975. “You’ve spent your whole life doing this? Kidnapping children?”
“Rescuing them. Usually with their mother. Almost always.”
“Why?”
Jerry wasn’t asking why it needed doing: He’d seen enough cases where abused kids were not taken from their parents to know why it needed doing. Rather, Jerry was asking, Why you? And it all came down to that, Allen knew. Not just whether or not Jerry would help him now, but whether Jerry would have anything to do with him when this episode was over. Allen wished he wasn’t so nearly out of words.
“When I got to Vietnam, early on, I had a conversation with this guy who did long-range recon. He’d been in the bush for years, knew everything there was to know, all the ways to survive. I’d been in-country for about two minutes, so I asked him for advice, anything he could tell me that would help me make it out alive. What he said was, Don’t trust the children. He was right, of course; in a vicious war like that, even small kids carry grenades or can sell you a Coke with ground glass in it. But I listened to what he said, and I believed him, until one day I killed a whole cave full of children.”
Something moved in the back of Jerry’s eyes, and Allen waited, dreading the growth of revulsion, the final wedge that would split his brother from him forever. He waited, and saw Jerry review both the statement and the way in which he had said it. He saw Jerry deliberately put aside immediate judgment. He saw his brother choose to trust him.
Shaken, it took Allen a minute before he could start again.
“It took me seven years to get around to how I might make up for that act. And even then I didn’t know what I was doing, just that I had to do it. Eventually it came to me, that what it boiled down to was, Trust the children. Since then, I’ve spent my life trusting children. Listening to them and having faith in them. I owe them that. Even this one. Jer, I don’t know if Jamie’s a killer or not. I do know he’s a boy who’s had the most appalling things done to him, and he needs my help. I promised I’d give it to him. I’m not asking you to make phone calls or to help me with this. All I need is shelter until I’m strong enough to take him away.”
In the end, it was Jerry who turned away. “Let me think about it,” he said.
Allen returned to the sofa for a couple of hours and woke to voices in the kitchen, Jerry and Ed talking about food. He rubbed his face and craned to see the clock on the front of the VCR. Nearly midnight.
Getting up was damnably awkward, and he still couldn’t get the button on his jeans done with one hand, but he felt more like a three-dimensional man and less like a flattened carcass along a road. Jamie looked up when he came into the kitchen, his face open with pleasure.
“Hi, Allen, how’s your arm? Ed and I saw some killer whales and a bunch of dolphins, and we went swimming and made a campfire on a beach and cooked s’mores, and he let me pick the music. Ed’s got some way cool music, for old stuff.”
“Hey, boy,” Ed protested, “who’re you calling old stuff?” He winked at Allen, who suddenly felt shaky with relief over a worry he’d not known he had: Ed liked the boy. Yet another person on the kid’s side—and Jamie knew it, too; Allen had never known him so effusive.
Either that, or he’d inherited his father’s ability to con.
“I mean your music. That guy without the teeth, and the song about something that came out of the sky.”
“Creedence,” Ed explained, although Allen had been out with the man often enough to identify the musicians.
While Allen had slept, Jerry was cooking, and now produced a large pot of meaty spaghetti. Jamie ate two servings, and suddenly looked as if he’d been clubbed. Allen glanced at Jerry.
“I think we’d better continue this in the morning,” he suggested. Jerry started to object, then looked more closely at the state of his two houseguests, and backed down.
“You’re welcome to tie up overnight, Ed,” he told the boatman.
“I’ll do that, thanks. Give me a whistle when breakfast is on.”
“I should have done more shopping,” Jerry muttered, and led Jamie away to the guest room.
That night, the boy made no excursions to the computer downstairs.
Daw
n came early in the islands, finding Jerry already gone. He returned before the sun had chased the mist from the water, dressed in his uniform and wearing his gun—which only meant that he’d had a meeting with one of his deputies and wanted to make it official. Weintraub came not much after Jerry got back, to loose Allen’s arm from its sling and poke around with what seemed to Allen an unnecessary degree of curiosity before pronouncing himself satisfied that the foolish decision to avoid the hospital wasn’t going to mean the loss of the arm. He changed the dressings, replaced the strapping with an adjustable sling, and left, saying that his wife was expecting him back for breakfast.
Allen shaved, using Jerry’s electric razor so as not to leave his face looking as if it had been drawn through a blackberry patch, and came downstairs to the rich scent of browning sausages.
“Jerry, you’re going to make a fine wife for Nikki.”
The younger Carmichael glanced down at the frilly apron that one of their aunts had left behind after a Thanksgiving dinner. The sprigged cotton barely reached his thighs. “Cute, huh? I thought I’d make some chocolate chip pancakes. You think Jamie’d like them? Nikki’s kid can eat more of them than I can.”