The Living Blood

  “Lo siento mucho, mi vida,” he said, sounding as miserable as she felt. He kissed the top of her head. “I’m sorry, a thousand times over.” For an instant, they breathed together in the near darkness of the shuttered room. Jessica clung to him, crying silently, while David stroked her back with even, steady movements. After a moment David went on, “I know something of what you feel, Jessica. I had a sister, although I do not remember her because I was torn from my family as a child. And I had parents, of course. I also had a young wife once, my first. And precious few others. I can no longer see their faces, but my heart feels their absence. I had another family I loved, a true family, only once thereafter—and that was with you. Aside from that, my brothers have been my only family, and Khaldun my only father, and now I have been forced to leave them as well. I do know how it feels to lose a loved one. I know in ways you have yet to learn.”

  “I know you do, David,” Jessica said, massaging his scalp with her fingertips. “I know.”

  His lips found hers, and Jessica sank into his kiss. The raw parts of her heart would not be raw forever, she knew. She loved this man, and they both loved their child, and ultimately nothing in the world would matter except that.

  David pulled away from her abruptly, glancing at his watch. “It’s nearly one o’clock. The hurricane isn’t predicted to make landfall until four. Teferi and I will go to Star Island, Jess. If your sister is to be found, we will find her. Stay here. Keep our little girl safe.”

  Jessica nodded, feeling the first inkling of joy she’d allowed herself since she’d first heard about what had happened at the clinic.

  Her sister, she realized, couldn’t be in better hands.

  47

  Star Island

  1:45 P.M.

  The crazy fucking bastard, Justin thought. A monster hurricane was heading straight for his house on the bay, and Shannon O’Neal had told his security staff that he would defy the evacuation order. The staff will remain and carry on business as usual, he’d said in a printed memo circulated among them. If the storm reached the island, they would all congregate in the third-floor library, where supplies had been stored and they should be high enough to avoid flooding. There would be a considerable hazard-pay bonus, the note promised. No one, it said, will leave the house.

  As if the old loon thought the blood made him invincible.

  That morning when Justin had heard the reports of a hurricane gunning for Miami, he’d honestly believed the heavens had issued him a divine reprieve. Or hell, for that matter. From above or below, he didn’t care—the point was, after a day and a half of posing as a poker-faced interrogator, he’d had enough. He’d called his wife and told her to take the girls to her mother’s house out in West Dade horse country and decided it was time to go, to try to return to his life and forget about this mortifying detour. No, mortifying wasn’t the word for it. It was unfathomable.

  Especially now that he was being forced to sit in on Baylor’s interrogation of the woman.

  He was watching the same man he’d discussed Kafka with over lunch in Coconut Grove burn cigarettes into this woman’s bare arms, his eyes impassive while he scorched her flesh. In the silence of the room, all of them heard the faint szzzzz sound, as if the cigarette were being put out in a glass of water. Butts littered the ashtray at the mercenary’s feet.

  Alexis whimpered, her eyes turning to liquid with tears she wouldn’t allow to fall, but her face was already dripping with perspiration, and her T-shirt was soaked, too. Justin’s father had told him that the scientist was too incoherent to be any help after his own questioning, so Alexis had been here since noon, in one of the upstairs guest rooms decorated richly with antique furniture, recast as a makeshift torture chamber. Baylor had chosen the room, commenting to Justin that he liked the forest-green color scheme.

  I like to take it easy on ladies, you know. You work them patiently, escalate slowly. Most of them would rather die than be disfigured, so sometimes the mere threat of that is enough to get them talking. That and the subtle threat of rape, of course. Hence the bedroom. On the top of her mind, you see. It’s always there.

  Justin stole a glance at the woman’s bare arms, and he was immediately sorry he had. By now, both of her arms were dotted with ugly red-brown burn marks, some of them puffing into blisters. Others, where the skin had broken, were bloody.

  The room smelled like charcoal to him. By now, sitting in front of her in an upholstered armchair, Justin felt as if he was the one begging her. “Please, lady, cut the bullshit,” he said. “Your mother isn’t dead. Just tell us where we can find her, and this will all be over. All we want is a phone number. What’s so hard about that? We’ll call her up and ask her a few polite questions. We’re not interested in kidnapping anyone else. That’s a promise.”

  Justin was grateful that neither Baylor nor the Irishman made any audible chuckling noises when he tried his weak ploys on her. Who was he fooling? If he’d been the one sitting there instead, would he have been willing to give out his own mother’s telephone number? And Alexis knew exactly what was in his mind, because her gaze stared daggers at him. You hypocritical bastard, she seemed to be saying. Do you really think I’m that stupid?

  Another sudden cigarette burn, this one on top of an existing one, and the woman’s eyes screwed shut. This time, she cried out. While he held the cigarette firmly in place, Baylor talked to her in his upscale English accent that made him sound like an Oxford University professor, juxtaposing reason with torture. “An unpleasant business, this. I hate to waste good fags. We’ll have to move from your arms to your face, you see. And you’ve lots of skin remaining. You can use your imagination, miss. Rest assured that I will.”

  Justin’s stomach curdled. “I need lunch,” he said suddenly, even though he doubted he could eat today. “And I need to check on the other guy. I’ll be back.” Like hell I will, he thought.

  Baylor didn’t even look his way, but the Irishman smirked knowingly from where he sat on the bed, flipping through a Penthouse magazine. He mouthed a word that Justin didn’t recognize, probably an Irish version of wimp, except more profane, of course. Justin couldn’t understand half of what the man said, but most of it was obscene.

  “Bring us any news on that hurricane, then,” Baylor said in a disinterested tone, not lifting the cigarette away from the woman’s arm. He hadn’t even raised his voice to be heard over her cries.

  • • •

  Lucas Dorsey Shepard.

  His full name still came to his mind unbidden, a flashback to the morning’s ordeal. For ten minutes at a time, suffering the effects of the stun gun long after each jolt, the knowledge of his name was all Lucas had clung to as he’d sat limply in the chair. He hadn’t been able to coax his muscles to lift his head, to blink. To breathe, it had seemed.

  Miraculously, though, Lucas could feel himself recovering. His muscles were still twitching, locking up painfully at times, but the spells were brief. Portions of his skin felt singed, but he was amazed at how little pain lingered. It wasn’t his body he’d been most concerned about during his questioning, it was his mind. He’d lost control of his words, hearing phrases tumbling out of his mouth like someone speaking in tongues at one of his grandmother’s old church services, powerless to control himself. More than once, he had whispered Help Jared.

  And he must have lost consciousness, or close to it. When he’d woken up, he’d found himself handcuffed to the bed again, freed from the terrible chair. And Alexis—had he heard her yelling, fighting? He thought so, but the memories were vague—was simply gone. Seeing the empty space on the bed beside him and the horror it represented, Lucas had sobbed for a long time.

  He’d felt so helpless and distraught, it had taken him several minutes to notice his luck: Whoever had left him here had handcuffed only one of his hands to the pipe above the bed, not both. It was a sloppy mistake, and Lucas could only assume it had happened because he was no longer considered a threat. Or, maybe it was something else,
too. Even during his questioning, he’d had the presence of mind to notice the muffled clangor of thunder outside, and the clipped voices through the basement door. There had been a lot of movement out there.

  Whatever the reason, Lucas’s right arm was free to roam as far as he could stretch it over the edge of the mattress. The pipe had a T-shaped barrier built directly into the wall, unfortunately, which made it impossible for him to move over far enough to stand up. But that was all right. He still might find something he could use. He had long legs and long arms, and he was grateful for that now.

  In an instant, he’d forgotten his anguish and turned his battered mind to escape.

  So far, he’d found nothing small enough to pick his handcuff’s lock or to hide as a potential weapon. Within the circle of his eager reach, he’d found only a scrap of paper, a receipt from Pollo Tropical. There had to be something, his mind insisted. Why else would God have given him this opportunity? It couldn’t be for nothing.

  Then, Lucas grazed his wrist against a rough-edged concrete block. He paused, fantasizing about using that as a weapon, but when he tugged on it with his fingers, he realized it was too unwieldy. With nowhere to hide it, how could he hope to surprise an armed man with a blow from a seventeen-pound block of concrete?

  Shit, shit, shit, shit.

  Wait, he thought. He tried to slow down his whirling brain. He had to be missing something.

  And he was, of course. He could use the block! It might break the handcuff’s chain, break the pipe, or maybe just knock the pipe away from the wall so he could find a way to slide free. Moving purposefully, not allowing his mind to start celebrating too soon, Lucas strained to lift the block until he’d pulled it to the mattress beside him. It was a standard rectangular cement block with two square holes at the center, exactly like the blocks he remembered playing with in schoolyards as a boy. After sitting up and moving his cuffed hand as far as he could from the iron shackle, Lucas calculated where the handcuff’s chain lay across the pipe, lifted the block above his shoulder despite his twitching muscles, and then crashed it down to the pipe and chain as hard as he could.

  When the block landed, a clanging racket sounded, traveling along the pipes the entire length of the wall. Damn! Lucas held his breath. He wouldn’t get many more chances if he kept making a commotion like that. His heartbeat in a frenzy, he moved the block to check his work.

  Nothing.

  Lucas could see white scrape marks against the gray pipe where the block had landed, but the pipe hadn’t been so much as scratched, and its wall screws were as secure as ever. The handcuff chain itself didn’t even have the scrape marks. Either the weight of the block had missed the handcuff entirely, or the block had absolutely no effect on the goddamned thing.

  Lucas prayed it was the former, lifting the block again. He tried to lift it higher this time, so he nearly lost control of it right before he flung it back down. Until he heard the clanging noise, he was afraid he would accidentally hit his shackled hand. But, no. This time, he was sure he’d hit the handcuff. But again, it looked untouched, except for some dust from the block.

  And the noise! He had to muffle it, he realized. Terrified that his captors were already on their way, Lucas yanked the pillowcase from his pillow and balled it up across the pipe. That would conceal the noise. With the pillowcase as a buffer, he repeated the same motion ten, twelve, thirteen times, until he was slick with sweat and a large corner of the block finally broke away against the impenetrable pipe. He’d accidentally scraped his left hand once or twice in his banging, cutting himself, but in his fervor he barely noticed. If he kept this up, he realized, the entire block might crumble, and he would lose the only tool he had. It wasn’t working. He was trapped here.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” Lucas said, his quick, shallow breathing overtaking his heartbeat. He’d kept panic away this long, but now he felt it clawing through his veil of logic, as if his hope had reawakened it, and it screamed to him that he was going to die unless he got free of this bed right now. Instinctively, he began to tug his bound wrist again, feeling the metal dig into the bones of his hand, not giving enough for him to even imagine that wriggling would make any difference. Still, he fought, as if pure will would break him free where even the concrete had failed. But he was only wasting his energy, he realized. He had to try something else.

  The structure of his hand was the problem, with his metacarpal jutting out so far at the thumb. Unless he could somehow change the shape of his hand, it wasn’t going to budge.

  But you can do that, a cool voice said from the back of Lucas’s head. Can’t you?

  Lucas’s breathing slowed suddenly as the realization seeped over him, washing away the panic. Yes, he could. He could change the shape of his hand. He wouldn’t have been able to do it if the captors hadn’t left one of his hands free, or if he hadn’t found a concrete block to work with. But since both of those things were true, he was once again in charge of his destiny for the first time in days. In years, it seemed. Everything was up to him now.

  The question, he realized, wasn’t whether he wanted to be free—but how much he wanted to be free. At what price? Lucas didn’t even have to think of his son for the answer, especially since Alexis had helped him peek at the awful reality that Jared might be dead. And he didn’t even have to enrage himself with the thought that a good woman such as Alexis had been taken to some distant corner of the house to be hurt or raped, or worse.

  This time, Lucas Shepard had to look no further than himself. He was tired of being a prisoner. He wanted his life back, whatever that life was. Pain or death might follow his actions from now on, but at least he was going to do his best to be free. He’d learned one aspect of who he was that day at the hospital with Jared, when he’d refused to get up to find that old woman a blanket because he was so terrified of losing his son. That day, he’d believed he was a coward.

  Now, he was learning another aspect, all right. Something he’d never have known. He had survived pain this morning. Pain, he realized, was nothing to fear.

  Shattering the trapezium, the uppermost carpal beneath his thumb, should do it. With that bone out of place, his thumb would be more pliable. It would hurt like hell, more than the electric jolts this morning, more than any other physical sensation of his life—and afterward, his thumb would probably be useless. He was a physician, so he couldn’t fool himself about that. But he should be able to force his hand through the handcuff. He could be free.

  Suddenly, it seemed like a small price indeed.

  “Do it right the first time,” he warned himself, his entire body shaking from his heart’s pounding. “It’s better to only have to do it once.”

  Lucas lifted up what was left of the concrete block, his free arm sore and unsteady by now. He stared at his bound hand, feeling his emotions drawing inward, distancing from his body. As he gazed at his hand, it only began to look like an obstacle to freedom, not a part of himself. That was what he told himself, at least, when he aimed the concrete block toward his left hand and began his swing. Like John Henry’s hammer, he remembered vaguely.

  After that, he only had to wait for the pain.

  48

  MacArthur Causeway

  Miami

  3:10 P.M.

  Dawit had seen few modern cities in such bedlam, except at wartime.

  Motorists were ignoring traffic signals altogether, so despite the legions of police officers, firefighters, and uniformed military reservists struggling to shepherd drivers in the streets, many intersections were at a standstill. Car horns blared in succession from all sides, their own blustering language. Drivers hung from their open car windows, shouting epithets both at each other and into the air itself. Many of the roads in business districts sparkled with newly broken glass, since residents tired of waiting in long lines for basic supplies had decided to take advantage of the absent shop-owners who had closed up early rather than face the raving masses. Dawit had watched men, women, and children running on
foot or pedaling on bicycles alongside his barely moving car, their arms crammed with items that might have felt precious to them, but looked ludicrous to Dawit; television sets, appliances, clothing. One shabbily dressed man gleefully wove his way through the streets with a store mannequin over his shoulder, as if he believed the shapely figure would somehow offer him salvation.

  Dawit saw all of them as dead people. The shelters were full, the radio said, and Florida’s Turnpike, leading north to safety, was virtually impassable. Now, the advice on the radio had changed: Go indoors. Stay at home, or seek the nearest high-rise. Go to a room on a high floor without windows, like a bathroom or a stairwell, and crouch beneath a bed mattress. Dawit flipped past a Spanish-language station in time to hear a seer calling the storm El Diablo, warning listeners it was the handiwork of the devil.

  Dawit did not believe in the devil, but he understood how many might.

  According to radio reports, the winds of the storm had reached 220 miles per hour, with gusts even higher than that, ready to churn destruction. More than two hundred people had already died in Bimini, the radio said, although newscasters admitted those estimates were sketchy, and most likely too low. And Miami’s skies were already hidden behind thick, unyielding clouds that had stolen the sun. Rain fell in a steady white sheet. The wind speed had picked up noticeably just in the time since he and Teferi had been in the car, so traffic lights swung wildly on their wires, cardboard and paper flew like confetti in mini-cyclones around them, and trees seemed to be twirling their branches in the air. The day had turned dark, with occasional lances of odd green-colored lightning, a fireworks display.

  A historic disaster was in the making, Dawit knew. The high wind speed and casualty estimates had panicked Miami’s residents, so some who had planned to brave the storm at home were having second thoughts, pinning their hopes to the roads. They refused to believe it was too late to run, and many of them would die in their automobiles. Such was the way of mortals, Dawit mused. When they were faced with death, they lost their much touted reasoning powers, becoming no more reasonable than any lower creatures. As often as he had witnessed the behavior, it never ceased to stupefy him. Who but an immortal would venture outside in the face of such a storm?