KIN (30 page)

For Kara's part, she'd been sick with worry for Claire, but as strained as her relationship with her mother had been, her relationship with Claire had—and still was, she supposed—even more fragile. And for this, she did blame herself. After their father died, their mother had lost something of herself, had grown distant and stayed in that gloomy place which rendered every smile false, every kind word forced. With every passing year, it seemed as if her only goal was to find a state of consciousness that would allow her to get closer to the husband she'd lost, until her body felt compelled to follow. It wasn't fair, but it was fact, and so Kara had, without being aware she was doing so, adopted the role as guardian to Claire.

I tried
, she told herself as she rolled down the window a crack to let the smoke out. Five cars ahead, Claire smiled slightly, tucked a lock of her hair behind her ear, and opened a car door, then slid inside and shut it behind her. The cars parked between them blocked Kara's view of the vehicle, but it didn't matter. She knew who her sister was meeting here.

That bastard
. Again the anger tugged at her, tried to force her hand to the door, but she stayed where she was.
Not yet
. The longer she thought about it, however, the more uncertainty gained a foothold in her mind. Why was she here? To protect Claire from Finch? It didn't seem to make a whole lot of sense now that she studied her motives more closely. Finch wouldn't harm Claire, and what harm there was to be done, had been done over two months ago in that backwoods town. Claire had survived a nightmare that had claimed her friends. She was alive, if not altogether recovered, but that would come with time. Why then, was she sitting here, overwhelmed by the urge to rip Claire from the car and smash Finch's face in for luring her out to meet him? It was too late to protect Claire. The damage had been done, and the measure of compensation didn't exist that could ever again make her feel safe. So again: Why was she here? The answer when it came, was simple, and heavy with truth.

She was here to keep her from Finch.

He might not hurt her, but nor was he a presence she wanted in her sister's life. She had taken that one for the team, thank you very much, and there was no valid reason why he should have contact with anyone she cared about ever again. The man she had once, and foolishly, loved with all her heart, had almost destroyed her so driven was he by the compulsion to destroy himself. For him, happiness was an elusive thing, a concept infrequently understood and mistrusted when it came. He had told her stories of his past that had made her skin crawl—the abusive father, the bullying at school, the shyness he had eventually managed to cast off during his unsteady journey through puberty, the hunting trips with his father in later life which had invariably ended in arguments, and in one case, a mutual threat of murder, the alcoholism, the drugs, the fistfights. She had not been surprised when he'd accepted the call to war. He was not a happy man, nor was he even remotely patriotic. Finch was his own country, the government unstable, the population volatile. Often during their six month relationship, she had seen glimpses of the man she wished he could be, the man she suspected Finch himself wished he could be, but they were transient and towards the end, vanished altogether, leaving only the anger and the cruelty behind. She would never deny that a part of her still loved him, but it was a small part, a speck on the great wide-open plain of her hatred. He had hurt her, and he would keep going until he had hurt everyone around him.

And she would not let him do that to Claire.

*

"I'm glad you came," Finch said. "Wasn't sure the jailbreak would work."

In the passenger seat, Claire smiled. There were slight wrinkles around her mouth that did not belong on the face of someone so young, but Finch knew that no matter how old it might say she was on her I.D., what those men had done to her had shoved her headlong into adulthood. They had taken her innocence, her friends, her spirit, and left her as good as dead, for he had known Claire before the trip, had often kidded around with her while he waited for Kara outside the house, and he saw now that the light that had always danced in her eyes had gone out. Had been snuffed out. Her once lustrous blonde hair was now jet black and greasy, as if she'd dipped it in oil—a clear indication of her prevalent mood. Or perhaps it was meant to compliment the black pirate-style patch she wore to hide the scarring from where they had gouged out her eye. Either way, she did not look herself, did not look familiar to him.

"Kara was in the shower," Claire told him, looking down at her hands, absently rubbing the smooth pink nubs where two of the fingers on her left hand should have been. "So I left a note. My mother was...my mother. I'm not sure it even registered that I was leaving."

Finch thought of his own mother, at home, watching game shows and alternating between cursing the world and weeping while she reached down beside her rocking chair for one of the many vials of pills that stood like attentive soldiers around the runners.

"Everything's going to be all right," he told her, because she appeared as if she was waiting for him to say it. He draped his arm over her shoulder, gently, as he was not yet sure how she might react to a man's touch. She stiffened slightly, but did not move away, and when she looked up at him, he saw the pain in her face.

"You're going to kill them, right?" she asked, so matter-of-factly, she might have been asking a quarterback about an upcoming game.

He nodded. "That's the plan."

"Good." She went back to looking at her fingers. "I want to go with you."

"No."

She turned in the seat and glared at him. "What?"

"I said no."

"I don't care. I said I want to go, and you don't get to tell me I can't."

"Jesus, Claire...why would you
want
to go back? If what we uncovered is true, then these guys have been snatching people and murdering them for years. You might be the only person who ever lived to tell the tale."

"A tale nobody believed," she said flatly.

"I believed it. But that's beside the point. What I'm trying to say is that I can take care of this. I'm going to. There's no need for you to be there to see it. When it's over, I'll come see you, and we can talk. I'll tell you everything. But for now you need to stay here where you're safe."

She laughed, but there was no humor in it. "Safe? Here? Finch..." She gestured at the world outside the car. "Don't you get it? It doesn't matter where I go. Here, back there, France, the North Pole, it doesn't matter. I'll never be safe again. You could build a castle around me and seal it up and I'd still be what I am. And what I am is scared. What I'm
afraid
of..." Her voice broke, and she cleared her throat, then looked at him with fiery resolve. "What I'm afraid of isn't out
there
. It's in
here
," she said, tapping a forefinger against her temple. "And no matter where I run, it'll follow me, whether you kill those men or not."

"Why do you want to come if it won't change anything for you?"

"I'm alive and I shouldn't be," she said sadly. "And I don't know how long I'll be able to last with that voice telling me I should be with my friends, but in that time I'd like to see those men, and those
children
, understand what they did to us. To feel the pain and the fear they were so fucking
eager
to inflict on us. " Her eyes shimmered with tears. "I want to know they're dead. Maybe it will change things, maybe it won't, but I need to be there. I need to see the world put back on its axis, things put right, even if I don't belong in it anymore."

"Don't say that."

"It's true."

"You still have people, Claire."

"Who? You?"

"No. Your Mom, and Kara. You still have people who care about you and who'll protect you. The rest of us have been left with nothing."

She looked squarely at him. "Do you blame me?"

"What?"

"For what happened? Do you blame me?"

"Don't be ridiculous, of course not. You didn't make it happen."

"But does it make you mad that I lived and Danny didn't?"

He avoided her eyes for a moment. The truth was, in the beginning, he had been mad at her. He might even have hated her a little for being the sole survivor, questioned fate as to why she had been chosen above the others. But it had been a passing thing, the hate quickly redirected to the proper target, where it deepened, grew potent, became rage.

"I'll take that as a yes," she said to his silence and he quickly drew her close.

"No," he said. "I'm not mad that you survived. Not mad at you. I blame
them
because that's where the blame belongs."

Head resting against his shoulder, she asked, "Do you think it will go away when you've killed them? The pain?"

"No," he answered truthfully. "I don't think that'll ever go away. Not fully. Not after what you've gone through."

"I wasn't talking about me."

He smiled tightly, her hair tickling his chin. "I don't suppose it'll go away for either of us."

"Then why bother?"

"Because it's how it needs to be."

She pulled away from him, folded her arms. "So can I come?"

"No."

"Why?"

"I'm spoiled for reasons, Claire. Firstly, forget about those fucking lunatics down there for a minute. What do you think Kara will do if she finds out I've taken you back?"

"Who cares?"

"I care, and you will too because she'll have the cops on our asses so fast we won't even see their lights before I'm in jail and you're back under house arrest. Christ, you know as well as I do that Kara wouldn't stand for it. She'd make my life a living hell."

Though she shook her head, Finch could see in her face that she knew he was right. "Plus," he went on, "You've been through enough bad shit. You don't need to be put back in harm's way after escaping it once just to see
more
bad shit."

She fell silent, almost sulking, but he understood her feelings. They were the same as his own. Behind all the pain in Claire's face, he recognized the fear, the grief, and the kind of stark, utter hatred that could only be sated by vengeance.

"Did you bring your phone?"

Quietly, she nodded, and slid it out of her jeans pocket, then handed it over. Finch inspected the cell phone. A slim, silver Nokia. Nothing much different from the kind of phones most of the kids were carrying around these days. "Keep it," she said.

"I don't need it. Just the number. I have a friend who will know if we can use it to trace the signal to whoever answered it, or at least to
where
they were when they answered it. Danny's phone needs to be on, I guess, for us to have any hope of tracking it. If it isn't…" He shrugged.

"You didn't need to see me for that. I called you. You already have my number."

"I wanted to see you." When she said nothing, he nudged her shoulder. "Hey."

"What?"

"I'm sorry, all right? I know why you need this. And I can't stop you going alone. You just can't come with me."

A moment more of silence, then she cracked the door and stepped out of the car. She had grown so thin since Alabama he could see her shoulder blades pressing like incipient wings against the thin blue plastic of her raincoat. "Then who needs you," she said and slammed it shut before he could say anything further.

In the rearview, he watched her—a nineteen-year-old girl once pretty and vibrant, now bitter and prematurely aged—as she walked back to where he knew her sister was waiting.

-27-

"Hello Miss Daltry, and isn't it a fine morning?" the pawnbroker said cheerfully, his pudgy face molded around a large thick-lipped smile. Louise resisted the urge to look over her shoulder at the urban snowscape framed by the grimy storefront window behind her. It was a horrible day in almost every conceivable way, and as a result she had little tolerance for people like Rag Truman, who felt compelled to find the upside of everything and would probably keep on smiling even if he looked down at himself and realized he was on fire.

She hurried to the counter—a glass cabinet marred by greasy fingerprints, within which gold and silver jewelry on black velvet cushions sat next to nickel-plated revolvers, an assortment of cell phones, lighters, hunting knives, men's ties and women's silk scarves. Behind Rag was a blue steel door with a card reader to the left. A small red light showed that it was securely locked. A faded sign read: PRIVATE. All around were high metal shelves, packed with treasures for the undiscerning eye. There was so much of it in the musty room, it made Louise claustrophobic, but she acknowledged that a lot of that might not be the size of pawn shop, rather the feeling that a net was rapidly being cinched tight around her.

"I have somethin' that might interest you," she told the pawnbroker.

"Do you indeed?" He leaned closer, his hands braced on the cabinet, large ring-studded fingers smudging the glass. Evidently all the fingerprints there were his own.

Louise nodded, put her hand in her coat pocket, and then hesitated. Since taking the life of the man in her apartment, it was as if her senses had been enhanced. Her hearing, in particular, seemed to have strained itself, so that now the slightest sounds, once innocuous, registered as potential threats. As she stood there, frozen, fingers pressed against the soft material of the pouch in her pocket, she could hear the whistling of Rag's breath through his nose, the moist click of his dentures as he poked at them with his tongue. And outside, on the street, every engine sounded menacing as cars carved channels in the slush. She expected sirens at any moment as the police came to take her in. The thought of them rushing at her, guns drawn, broke her paralysis. She withdrew the pouch from her pocket and tossed them onto the cabinet between Rag's hands.