In the Dark (42 page)

himself with one arm. The effort overwhelmed Finn, and he stopped, panting and gulping down rain. Stride got to his feet and circled slowly. He didn’t think Clark could have gone far, but it was as if the man had been sucked into a cloud. The beach was empty.

 

“Where the hell is he?”

 

Maggie pointed. A violent wave drew back down toward the lake, and as the sheet of water slid off the sand, Stride saw a body prone in the surf, nearly thirty feet from where Clark had been standing. It was almost invisible, just a darker shadow against the black shoreline. The body didn’t move as another wave surged in and completely submerged him.

 

They stumbled over the driftwood and ran. Maggie spilled onto her face as her legs became tangled, and Stride stopped and helped her up. She waved him on as she waited for her head to clear. Stride splashed down to the edge of the lake and found Clark’s body, which was ashen white. Each wave buried the big man in almost eight inches of water and foam. Stride dug his hands under Clark’s shoulders and dragged him higher onto the beach, away from the reach of the waves.

 

Maggie arrived at his side. “Oh, my God.”

 

Clark’s clothes were shredded, as if they had exploded off his body. His chest was laced with a massive spiderweb of burns. His shoes appeared to be melted onto his feet, and when Stride checked the soles, he saw two circular black holes. Entry and exit wounds from the massive electricity of the lightning. They were still warm when he fingered them. He picked up Clark’s wrist, which was limp and cold, and felt no pulse. He checked again at the carotid and still found nothing. When he pushed open Clark’s eyelids, the man’s eyes stared back, dead and unmoving.

 

“There’s an AED in the back of my truck,” Stride said.

 

Maggie took off at a sprint. Stride mentally took stock of the time that had passed and concluded that Clark had been lying in the sand, his heart stopped, for at least five minutes. Way too long. Stride tilted the man’s head back and lifted his chin. He pried open Clark’s mouth, pinched the man’s nose shut, and covered Clark’s cold lips with his own. He exhaled two slow breaths and watched Clark’s chest rise and fall as the air filled his lungs.

 

Stride repositioned himself and placed the heel of his right hand in the middle of Clark’s chest and laced the fingers of both hands together. He
rose up for more leverage and shoved down hard and fast, counting to thirty in his head. When he was done, he moved back and swelled the man’s chest with two more slow breaths and then frantically pumped against his rib cage thirty more times. He repeated the process again, his mind oblivious to anything around him except the time passing. Then again. And again. When he had completed the cycle five times, he pressed two fingers against Clark’s neck.

 

Nothing.

 

The clock in his head was at nearly eight minutes.

 

He continued applying CPR and was vaguely conscious of Maggie arriving next to him with the small AED box, which began to chirp instructions as she unpacked it. He alternated between breaths and chest massage as Maggie worked around him to dry Clark’s skin with a towel she had brought from the truck and then position the two electrodes of the defibrillator on his chest. She hovered over him, trying to block the rain.

 

“It’s too fucking wet,” she said.

 

“I know.”

 

Maggie turned on the machine. “Clear,” she told him.

 

Stride stopped and removed his hands from Clark’s body. Maggie pushed the analyze button on the defibrillator, which measured Clark’s heart activity and responded aloud with a discouraging message. “No charge.”

 

There was nothing to shock. No fibrillation.

 

“Goddamn it,” Stride said. He checked for a pulse and still found nothing. He bent over and continued several more cycles of CPR and then backed away as Maggie stabbed the button one more time.

 

“No charge.”

 

Ten minutes had passed.

 

Stride tried again. And again. And again. Two minutes later, there was still no pulse. No heart activity. Nothing for the defibrillator to regulate. He assaulted Clark’s chest with his fists, harder and faster, and then he heard Maggie’s soft voice at the end of the wind tunnel.

 

“Boss.”

 

He hammered and breathed, hammered and breathed, hammered and breathed. Clark’s body endured the punishment without moving. Two more minutes passed.

 

“Boss.”

 

He counted to thirty. Counted to two. Counted to thirty. Counted to two.

 

“Jonathan, it’s over.”

 

Maggie’s hand took hold of his shoulder in a grip that was gentle but unyielding. Midway through the final series of chest compressions, Stride finally stopped and sat back on his haunches. His arms dangled at his sides. He could hardly lift them now. He had known from the beginning that Clark was dead, that the electricity had savaged his heart, but it was only when he gave up, when there was nothing else to do, that the reality sank in. His head sank forward against his chest.

 

“Where’s the damn ambulance?”

 

“It wouldn’t have made any difference, boss. You did everything you could do.”

 

He knew that was true, but it didn’t bring Clark back to life. He stared at the body and leaned over and closed the man’s eyes again. Like that, Clark looked more at peace, free of his despair.

 

Stride got up slowly. His wet, cold muscles complained. His hearing was coming back, and he heard a distant whine of police sirens growing closer. He could see fireworks out on the lake where the storm had slouched to the east. A few lingering drops of rain splashed on his skin. The air behind the front was steamy and warm, and his clothes clung to his body.

 

He needed to get away. “I’m going to check on Finn,” he said.

 

Maggie nodded.

 

Down the beach, Stride saw Finn pawing in the sand and pushing aside the long grass with his good arm. He looked like a scuttling crab with one claw stripped from his body. Stride cocked his head, confused, and took a few tentative steps in Finn’s direction. “What is he doing?”

 

Maggie looked. “I don’t know.”

 

“Finn!” Stride called, but the man couldn’t hear him.

 

Stride walked faster in the deep sand back toward the driftwood. Maggie lingered behind him with Clark’s body. Stride felt a formless sense of unease.

 

“Finn!”

 

Without hearing him, Finn sensed Stride approaching. Their eyes met across the dark beach, and an unspoken hostility passed between them. With increasing desperation, Finn turned his attention back to the ground
surrounding the huge tree trunk. Stride suddenly understood. He became aware of a lightness under his shoulder and when he tapped his chest, he realized that his holster was empty. His Glock wasn’t in it. As the ground current streaked toward him, he had ditched his gun in the sand.

 

Where Finn was now searching.

 

Stride broke into a run across the remaining distance. Before he could dive past the driftwood, Finn’s left arm broke free of the mud with Stride’s gun in his palm. He curled his hand around the grip, shoved his finger against the trigger, and pointed it at Stride ten feet away.

 

Stride stopped. He held up his hands. The sirens he had heard were close now. Police cars streaked down the Point.

 

“Put the gun down, Finn.”

 

Finn ignored him and trained the barrel of the Glock at the center of Stride’s chest.

 

Stride felt an old, sharp pain reawaken in his shoulder. It was a wound from years earlier, where a bullet had torn through skin and muscle and driven him to the floor. A bullet from Ray Wallace’s gun. When Stride looked at Finn, he saw Ray Wallace’s face, the same agony, the same desperation, the same intent. They were both men with nothing to lose.

 

“Don’t do this, Finn.”

 

When Stride took a tentative step, Finn jerked, waving the gun to stop him. Finn’s muscles were spastic. Stride watched the man’s index finger and worried that it would twitch on the trigger and unleash a bullet into Stride’s heart. He edged sideways, but Finn’s arm followed him.

 

“Put it down.” Stride motioned toward the ground with his palm.

 

Finn flipped the barrel up, waving Stride away.

 

They stared at each other just the way he and Ray had. A standoff over the barrel of a gun. Stride thought about Ray coming to grips with his disgrace at the hands of his own protégé. Ray, who planted a memory in Stride’s brain of bone, hair, blood, and brain oozing in streaks down the white wall. Ray, his best friend.

 

Ray, who had pulled the trigger.

 

Stride reminded himself that this was Finn, not Ray. This standoff could end the right way, but he was running out of time. Maggie called to him, and she was close. Over Finn’s shoulder, he spied the reflected glow of red revolving beacons from a squad car’s light bar. Police would soon be
spilling over the hill. All of them converging on Finn like a pack. Making him panic. Making him shoot.

 

“Maggie, stay back,” he called and hoped she could hear him.

 

Finn cringed. Beads of sweat and rain dripped down his skull. His eyes darted back and forth. Stride watched the man’s anxiety shoot up like a needle on a pressure gauge.

 

“Take it easy,” Stride told him, his voice calm and steady. “You’re okay.”

 

Behind Finn, Stride saw two silhouettes crossing the peak of the dune and stumbling to the flat sand and tall grass. Police. With his fingers spread and his arms already in the air, Stride held one hand higher than the other, hoping they could read his body language. Stop.

 

One of the figures saw his gesture and froze, but the other kept coming. The shadow who had stopped shouted a warning. “Wait!”

 

Stride recognized the voice of the policewoman from Superior they had met earlier. He also recognized the other woman, who ignored the warning and ran toward Finn, screaming his name.

 

It was Rikke.

 

“He can’t hear you,” Stride called to her. He added, “Finn has a gun.”

 

Rikke stopped in her tracks. She stood behind Finn, twenty feet away. She wore an untucked, misbuttoned white shirt and navy shorts. Her once sleek long legs were lumpy like tree trunks.

 

“
Finn!
” she shouted, but her brother didn’t react.

 

Stride pointed behind Finn, gesturing toward Rikke. When Finn didn’t move, Stride took two careful steps backward, giving him space. He pointed and gestured again. Finally, with a painful flick of his head, Finn turned and saw his sister.

 

“Everybody stay where you are,” Stride called.

 

Finn swung the barrel of the gun to his left, and Stride understood. Finn wanted him and Rikke both in his line of sight. Stride debated standing still, but then took slow sideways steps down the beach until Finn could watch the two of them without turning his head.

 

Rikke’s eyes were locked on Finn. When she took a step toward him, Finn immediately raised the Glock and jammed the barrel into the side of his own head. His finger was tight on the trigger.

 

“Easy,” Stride told her.

 

“This is between him and me, Lieutenant,” Rikke said. She took another step, and Finn shook his head violently and shoved the barrel harder against his skin.

 

“He’s not kidding,” Stride warned her.

 

“I know what he needs,” Rikke said.

 

Her fingers came together, meeting at the first button on her shirt, which she undid. Finn’s eyes followed, wide and staring. She separated another button and pulled the flaps of her shirt apart, revealing a V of white skin. Finn inhaled loudly through his nose. His entire body trembled, as if he were wracked with chills. His mouth fell open, and he drew the gun slowly away from his head.

 

“I’m sorry for what she did to us,” Rikke told Finn. “I’m sorry for what we became.”

 

Rikke detached the rest of the buttons, letting the flaps dangle, and then used her fingernails to push the collar back off her shoulders until the shirt slid off her arms and fluttered to the ground. Her stomach bulged over the waist of her shorts. Her left breast drooped like an underfilled water balloon, its nipple flat and pale pink. Her other breast was a wrinkled cross of scars.

 

She sank to her knees and spread her arms wide, beckoning Finn to her bare skin. She was crying. He was crying. Finn made a mewling noise like a trapped kitten and sloughed his body toward her.

 

They were almost touching when another wrenching, involuntary spasm shuddered through his body. His finger twitched on the trigger.

 

The gun was still pointed at the meat of his skull.

 

Finn’s expression turned to glass as the bullet tunneled through his brain. Fire and noise cracked open the beach. Rikke wailed, and Stride saw one last flashback of Ray Wallace’s face before he was jolted back to the present, where Finn slumped forward, lifeless and free.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PART FIVE
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Fear of Heights

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

46
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Serena stood apart from the cluster of mourners while they prepared to bury Finn Mathisen in the Riverside Cemetery. She tugged her trench coat tighter. Her black hair swished around her face. They were beyond the southern edge of Superior, out past the railroad tracks and landfill, in sloping fields dotted with pines whose branches reached for the gray sky like praying angels. Water gurgled over stones in a creek beside the path. The lawn was lush and neatly trimmed.

 

She stood fifty feet away from the ceremony, beside one of the larger marble headstones on the wooded slope. Finn didn’t have a big crowd. Rikke was there, ramrod straight, her face a severe mask. Everyone kept their distance from her. Serena didn’t recognize the dozen or so strangers, but she saw Jonny, Maggie, and Tish standing in a trio. She knew she should be at Jonny’s side, but she had never met Finn or Rikke and didn’t want to intrude on anyone’s grief. The truth was that it gave her a convenient excuse to be far away. She liked cemeteries but hated funerals. She didn’t mind death but hated dying. If something had to end, she simply wanted it to be over.