Why was this happening? Who had set her up like this?
And then she knew.
“Please, Jeremy! Don’t you see? Doctor Levy’s framed me. He wrote that letter, trying to goad you into attacking me.” She almost said “killing” but didn’t want to put the idea in his head if it wasn’t already there. “If you do, the agency will track you down and put you away.”
And if he did kill her, Aaron would step into the void. It all fit.
He stepped closer, his eyes wild.
She held up a trembling hand. “Stop, Jeremy! It’s a trap! For both of us!”
He didn’t seem to be listening.
“It was my daddy’s Plan—to purify his Bloodline and to bring the Others back here where they belong.”
“‘Others’? What are you—?”
“My brother and me, we been part of it. And now when it’s all come true, when the baby—the Key to the future—is finally on the way, you come along and ruin it!”
“Baby? You mean she’s pregnant?”
“You know damn fuck well she is! You said so right in your letter.”
Julia didn’t know about that, but a part of her brain, a part that wasn’t scared nearly as senseless as the rest of her, wanted to examine that child, test it, observe it, watch it grow.
Key to the future? Who knew? But it might be the key to her survival.
“I can help you with your child.”
Another step closer. Foam flecked his lips as his voice rose to a shout.
“There ain’t gonna be no child! Because now, thanks to you, Dawn knows I’m her daddy, and sure as shit she’s gonna get rid of my baby! You’ve ruined everything! Everything!”
With that he raised the tire iron.
Now Julia screamed. “Jeremy! Please! NO!”
“Yes!” he said as he swung.
She raised her arm and screamed in pain as her ulna cracked. He swung again. She tried to fend him off with her other arm but couldn’t raise it fast enough.
The last thing she heard was the crunch of her skull as it caved in.
14
Finally Jeremy stopped swinging. He didn’t know how many times he’d hit her but his arms had tired.
He looked down at what was left of Doc Vecca: Below the neck she was undamaged; above…another story. Mostly bloody goo with chunks of bone. Gonna need fingerprints to identify this one.
Now, with the rage-fire cooling, he started to realize what he’d done, how he’d royally screwed himself.
This agency Vecca kept talking about…if they were half as tough and connected as she’d said, they’d be after him as soon as her body was found—probably no later than mid-morning tomorrow when she didn’t show up for work.
Had to get out of here and disappear. Fast.
Shit. If he only had Moonglow’s two hundred fifty K. Easy to disappear with that. For a while, at least. He’d have to make do with what was in his bank account. Clean that out first thing tomorrow and hit the road.
But first…one more score to even.
Levy.
Maybe Vecca had been telling the truth. Maybe she hadn’t signed the letter. Maybe it had been Levy instead. One way or another that weasel had to be involved. He’d always had it in for Jeremy, always against using him for the clinical trial.
Might as well make as big a splash as possible before dropping out of sight. In for a dime, in for a dollar, as Daddy used to say.
Levy had a date with Vecca in that great laboratory in the sky—tonight.
15
When it became clear where Bolton was headed, Jack had been tempted to turn around and head home. No question about Bolton’s first stop. But would he make a second?
The possibility bothered Jack, so he found a place near the woods where he had a view of Levy’s street, fished a brand-new goody from the spare tire well, and made himself comfortable.
After a while his eyes wanted to close and he’d had to shake himself awake a couple of times. But the drowsiness fled when he saw a silver Miata pull up in front of the house.
Bolton, damn him.
Jack’s plan had been to put a couple of degrees of separation between him and Bolton: Light his fuse, point him at Vecca, and let him deliver the payback for Gerhard and Christy. That done, Jack could sit back and watch from afar as the agency reeled him in and threw away the key.
But that wasn’t going to be possible now.
Wait. Why not? Levy was almost as responsible as Vecca. Why not let him take a hit?
Because he wasn’t alone in there. Bolton might very well kill everyone in the house.
Shit.
Jack was going to have to get his hands dirty. Just what he’d wanted to avoid.
He eased out the door and hurried toward Levy’s house. When Jack caught up to Bolton—carrying that same old tire iron—he was halfway across the lawn, silhouetted in the light from the lamps flanking the front door. He stopped a dozen feet behind him.
“There you are! I’ve been looking all over for you!”
Bolton froze, then turned. Jack couldn’t see his features, but knew Bolton could see his.
“You!” He started toward Jack at a limping run. “You ain’t gonna sucker me this time, motherfu—!”
“Hey, now, wait!” Jack said, backpedaling. “That was all a big misunderstanding!”
He slowed enough to let Bolton get close, then speeded up as he took a swing.
“I’ll show you a misunderstanding!” Bolton said as the iron cut through empty air.
Jack was off the curb now and backpedaling toward his car with Bolton in hot pursuit. He was glancing over his shoulder, making sure he was on course, when Bolton lunged forward for another swing. Jack felt the breeze from the tire iron, but no more. The move cost Bolton, though, twisting his knee and worsening his limp.
Just a little farther…
As Jack backed around the rear of his car, he pulled a Taser M-18. When Bolton reached the trunk area, he fired it. The darts flashed out and pierced the T-shirt and the skin beneath, sending fifty thousand volts into his central nervous system. The tire iron went flying as Bolton hit the pavement doing an epileptic variation on the worm. Jack released the trigger and he lay still.
He looked at Bolton, then at the Taser.
“Whoa.”
First time he’d tried one. He tended to favor a blackjack or sap for this kind of work, but Abe was always going on about how unreliable they were—hit too hard and the joe never wakes up, or not hard enough and you’ve got to give him a second tap, which might put him in vegetable land as well. After all, the reason for a sap was to put someone down, not dead. So Abe had lent him this baby on a trial basis. Jack was sold. The Taser was a keeper.
He glanced up and down the empty street. No one about. He popped the trunk, then lifted Bolton and dumped him inside. One thing about this trunk: Plenty of room. Enough for three or four Boltons, easy. Maybe more. Could be why Vinnie Donuts liked Crown Vics.
After slipping into a pair of gloves, he grabbed his roll of duct tape and quickly fastened Bolton’s wrists behind him. Then bound his ankles, then his knees—lots of tape. As he worked he envisioned this piece of crap drugging Christy, slitting her wrists, and watching her bleed to death, all after seducing her child—their child, for Christ sake.
No more community theater for Christy, no more listening to My Fair Lady…
He looked at this smear of human scum with a legacy of four corpses and a pregnant teenage daughter and sensed the darkness he kept bottled up breaking free. He felt his lips retracting, baring his teeth. He glanced over at the bloody tire iron lying in the gutter, temptingly near.
Don’t lose it…don’t lose it…
…yet.
He wrapped the tape extra tight, and as he worked, Bolton’s eyes fluttered open. He gave Jack a dazed look, then tried to move. When he realized he couldn’t, his eyes widened in shock, then blazed with anger.
“Pussy motherfucker! Can’t even fight me straight
up and fair!”
Jack tore a short strip of tape off the roll.
“Fair? You mean as in meeting on a field of honor? This from a guy who shot two unarmed doctors in the back, water-tortured a detective, and murdered his own sister while she was unconscious. Fair? You gotta be kidding.”
“In a fair fight my bloodline’d kick your bloodline’s ass!”
Jack fought the driving urge to shove the tape down Bolton’s windpipe. Instead he slapped it across his mouth.
“A fair fight presupposes I’ve got something to prove to you. Dream on.”
Bolton’s eyes blazed with wild hatred as he began kicking and thrashing. The Taser darts were still stuck in his chest. Jack reached down, grabbed the pistol, and gave him another dose.
Bolton began a different sort of thrashing.
16
Lying awake in bed, Aaron heard something that sounded like a car door slamming outside, then the roar of a big engine racing away. He got up and peeked out the front window.
Nothing moving out there. Could have been anybody.
He’d been jumpy lately. Well, why not? Bolton had killed again and might not be through. Who knew what he’d—
Aaron started as he noticed an arc of reflected light just beyond the corner of his front yard, behind the big junipers. It looked like the fender of a car. No one was supposed to be parked out there.
With his heart thumping he padded downstairs to his study where he grabbed his pair of mini-binoculars and focused them on the car. He gasped as he recognized a Miata.
Bolton had a Miata.
Aaron stood paralyzed for a moment, then snatched up his phone and punched in 911.
17
Jack cruised the Thruway truck stop lot till he found what he was looking for: an idling eighteen-wheel rig parked facing the food court and between two others of its kind. He backed up to the space between it and its neighbor to the right, then opened his trunk and hauled Bolton out. He grabbed the coil of half-inch nylon cord he’d just picked up at a Home Depot along the way, then crawled under the refrigerated trailer, dragging the struggling Bolton behind him.
He’d gone on autopilot along the way, feeling nothing, almost as if he were watching himself from afar as he looped the cord around Bolton’s taped legs, tying multiple knots on knots, then secured the other end to the cab’s rear frame rail. All through the process Bolton twisted and thrashed, breath snorting through his nostrils as he made frightened squeals and moans behind the tape.
When Jack finished, he looked at him. Couldn’t make out his features in the dark; all he saw was a wriggling, oblong shape making faint, muffled, panicky noises.
“Having a bad day, Jeremy?” he said, raising his voice above the sound of the engine as he patted him on a shoulder. “It’s about to get worse.”
More whining and thrashing.
“I want you to take this personally. I’m sending you off to your greater reward this way because I don’t want you identified for a while, maybe not ever. I also don’t want you to die too quickly. It won’t take you near as long as it took Gerhard, but long enough.”
He crawled out from under the trailer and stood listening: The noise from the idling cab drowned out Bolton.
Jack returned to his car and parked it halfway between the truck and the on-ramp to the Thruway. Then he took out a sheet with the phone numbers Russ had found for him.
Two names, two numbers, two women. The widows of Doctors Horace Golden and Elmer Dalton. Nancy Golden had remarried, Grace Dalton had not. Never ceased to amaze him how many secrets could be ferreted out through the Internet.
He dialed Nancy Golden—now Nancy Emerson—then Grace Dalton. He gave them both the same message: Jeremy Bolton has disappeared from Creighton. No one’s talking because no one knows where he is. Then he hung up.
Exactly thirteen minutes after the second call, a lean man in a cowboy hat and boots strode up to the cab, flicked a cigarette away, and climbed in.
Jack got out and stood by his door as the driver did some revving, then ratcheted into gear and started moving. Bolton must have worked the tape off his mouth somehow, because Jack heard him. His scream dopplered up, then down as the truck accelerated past.
He got back in and followed. The rig had barely made it to the entrance ramp when Jack’s headlights picked up a gleaming line of red winding from beneath the trailer.
A line of blood…a bloodline.
…my bloodline’d kick your bloodline’s ass!
Jack stared at the red streak.
There goes your bloodline.
But this was not the end of Bolton’s bloodline—or Jonah Stevens’s. It lived on in Thompson and in Dawn, especially in her baby. Where was Jonah’s bloodline headed? The man had concentrated it for a purpose, aimed it toward some end. What?
He couldn’t help thinking of Emma and his own bloodline. Where would she have taken it?
Nausea tickled his stomach. He pulled over and onto the shoulder, stopped for a few deep breaths.
Bloodline…
Had to call Levy tomorrow…set up a meet…needed some info only he could supply.
18
Hank broke off in midsentence and looked around. He’d not only forgotten what he’d been about to say, but where he was.
He looked down from his makeshift stage and saw seventy or eighty faces staring up at him. Now he remembered…he was speaking to a Kicker group in the basement of a clubhouse in Howard Beach.
But what was he supposed to say next? How could he have forgotten? He’d given this speech so many times he could repeat it in his sleep.
Something was wrong. But what?
And then he knew: Something…someone was missing.
Jeremy…Jeremy was gone.
He didn’t know how or why or where, but Jeremy’s light had flickered out. Hank felt it, knew it. Just as he’d known, so many years ago, that Daddy was gone and never would be coming back.
Had an Enemy gotten to him? That was the most logical explanation.
Hank searched for grief but found only fear. He’d never been that close to Jeremy, hadn’t even liked him, to tell the truth. He was more concerned about being next on the Enemy’s list.
He looked again at his audience. Could one of them be lurking in the crowd, waiting for a chance to kill him too?
He fought the urge to turn and run. That would be stupid. He was safe here among the Kickers. This would be the last place the Enemy would try for him.
He calmed himself and resumed speaking. But not his usual spiel. He started telling them about a young woman—alone, afraid, no family, pregnant, thinking she hadn’t a friend in the world. But she did have friends and family—the Kickers. He told them how she and her baby were important to the future of the Kicker movement, to the future of the whole world, and how the Kicker family would find her and shelter her and protect her from those who feared and hated the dissimilated.
THURSDAY
1
Hank stood by the copy machine and watched as it started to spit out the brightly colored sheets. He grabbed one to double-check.
Dawn’s photo looked grainy but that couldn’t be helped. He’d enlarged it from one of the shots he’d taken when he’d tracked her down while Jeremy was in Creighton. The text said she was missing and offered a thousand bucks for any information leading to her discovery. He’d set up a special voice mail account for the calls. He knew a lot would be cranks, but he had plenty of manpower at his disposal to check them out.
He handed it to the nearer of the two Kickers who had accompanied him.
“This is what she looks like. This is who we’re looking for.”
The guy studied it for a few seconds, then handed it to his companion.
Later today he’d start handing out stacks of the flyers to the Kickers at the Lodge. They in turn would distribute bunches to all the Kickers they knew, who would spread them to all the Kickers they knew, and so on and so on.
He turned back to the ne
wspaper he’d brought along. Still no report of the death of Jerry Bethlehem, or Jeremy Bolton. But he did find mention of an unidentifiable body dragged along the Thruway beneath a truck last night. Could that be Jeremy?
He shuddered. From now on, he wasn’t traveling anywhere alone. He’d find a reason to have at least two Kickers with him at all times.
Just to be on the up and up, he’d filed missing persons reports with the NYPD on both Jerry Bethlehem and Dawn Pickering. Hank had been surprised at how seriously the cops had taken his reports. He later learned that their disappearance made them prime suspects in Dawn’s mother’s faked suicide. Hank had tried to glean more details but failed.
What a damn mess. The only upside was that he’d have both cops and Kickers on the lookout for Dawn. His big worry was that she and the baby had died along with Jeremy. But he didn’t think so. Through the night the tenuous link he’d had to Jeremy had been replaced by a link to the baby. He sensed it was alive and well. That meant Dawn was alive and well too. And thus findable.
Hank was going to find her first. And then, just as in his dreams, the Kicker Man would snuggle that baby in its arms and protect it from all Enemies.
2
Dawn eased herself into the warm water of the tub.
Like mother, like daughter, right?
But Mom hadn’t had a choice. This was Dawn’s idea, her own doing.
She felt like total hell. She’d been up all night drinking rum and Diet Pepsi. Sure, the rum wasn’t good for the baby—at least that was what she’d heard—but nowhere near as bad as what was about to happen to both of them.
She’d agonized over what to wear until she’d realized she was just delaying the inevitable.
She listened for any sounds from the house—like anybody trying to get in. About an hour ago, as she was working up the nerve to get off her butt and do it, she’d heard sounds outside. Thinking it was Jerry, she’d slid back into her hiding place.