KIN (36 page)

Finch shrugged. "All that means is Danny's cell phone is still in their house, or somewhere nearby. We didn't exactly turn the place upside down. It doesn't mean the Merrills themselves are still there."

"Hope you're right."

While they drove, neither of them commented on the thick, ugly atmosphere that surrounded the car. Dark, stagnant pools resisted the caress of current or breeze and lay still beneath skins of yellow foam. They saw few animals other than an occasional coon or possum lying on its side on the road. Vultures circled overhead, seeking carrion a little more tantalizing, a little less rotten. On all sides of the road, stretched countless miles of boggy, swampy land, all of it seeming to emanate from the plant, a large sandy-colored building fronted by a tall white chimney which coughed billowing black clouds into the sky while ugly liquid vomited forth into a putrid lake from culverts at its base. The many windows in the building's face were made of reflective glass, as if the laborers within felt more secure in their deeds if they went unseen. A chain link fence sealed off the perimeter. Behind the closed gate at the entrance stood a booth with the same reflective glass as the building's windows. It was impossible to tell if it was manned.

A place of death
, Finch thought, and was struck by the sudden, alarming notion that it might well be the place where he himself would die. It was a notion he resisted with everything in him.

He recalled something Beau had said when it became clear they had left the bustling cities far behind them, the nature-burnt leaves falling away to be replaced by spindly-limbed, skeletal trees, the air darker and less pure: "Know what's funny?" he'd said, out of the blue. "You keep mentionin' 9/11 and the World Trade Center, comparin' this to that. Mostly I haven't agreed with you, thought you were gettin' carried away with yourself, to tell the truth, but you got me thinkin' about it now."

"And?" Finch had asked, wondering if his friend had finally come around to his way of thinking. It didn't take long to realize he hadn't.

"And I think those chickenshits flew planes into those towers and killed themselves because they knew they'd never beat us on our own soil. Like you said, if they'da been on the ground, we'd have messed their shit up. So they stuck to the sky where we couldn't touch them. What they
did
though was set a trap, make the whole damn country so mad the president wouldn't have no choice but to send our troops over
there
, into
their
crib, where the bad guys'd have the advantage. It was a trap, and we fell for it."

"What's your point?"

"My point is, bro, that you and I are doin' the same goddamn thing. Walkin' into a place we don't know, to fight an enemy we know even less. And the advantage is all theirs."

"It would be," Finch told him. "If they were expecting us, and if we weren't armed."

"You puttin' too much faith in that shit, man. Way too much. Our boys had plenty of guns in 'Nam too, but they didn't know where to point 'em. Didn't know the enemy could burrow like moles and have 'em killed before they could get a shot off. Always gonna be a strike against you if you ain't familiar with where you're fightin'."

As long as he'd known him, Beau had liked to debate about matters of war, and apply his extensive knowledge of it to current events, military-related, or not. His clinically clean apartment was crowded with bookshelves, each one packed full of volumes about various historical conflicts. Ordinarily, listening to Beau ruminate about the Viet Cong, or Napoleon's folly, or Custer's ego, didn't bother him, but it did now, because he had yet to compare their present situation to any battles in which the good guys had emerged victorious.

"This shouldn't be a revelation to you, man," he'd said. "You've been out of your element before. We both have."

He was talking about the Gulf, a subject Finch preferred to avoid as much as possible. Unfortunately, given his love for such topics, Beau had no such reservations, but at least he had the tact not to mention the events at Sadr al-Qanat, events which had left Finch, for the first time in his life, contemplating suicide.

Still, in times of despair, when he kept his eyes shut for too long, he saw the woman in the black abaya—the traditional Islamic cloak—hustling toward him, arms held out, imploring. Her expression was one of pleading, of resignation, and of fear, for around her waist she wore an explosives belt. Finch had called a warning, not because he had seen the belt—which he hadn't, that would come later—but because she wasn't supposed to approach the soldiers. The previous weeks had seen a number of his comrades blown to pieces by seemingly innocuous locals, and they were now on their guard. Frequently he repainted the woman's expression, gave it a devilish aspect, a demonic leer, but in reality there had been no such thing. Only fear, incubating beneath a veil of grim acceptance.

He'd punctuated his third warning with a gunshot, and watched as a fine red mist emerged from the back of the woman's head. She was dead before she hit the ground, and later he had sat in his tent weeping and trembling, and ultimately tried to replicate what he had done to the woman, this time to himself.

Beau had walked in at that moment, a bottle of hooch in his hand, a wide smile on his face that had not lasted long.

"The fuck you doin', man?" he'd asked, though surely the fact that Finch had a gun in his mouth had made it obvious.

Beau had talked him down that night, his "we were put here to do things that ain't always pretty" speech penetrating the caul of misery and terror that had, without him sensing it, overwhelmed Finch. Beau had war stories of his own, tales of men and women murdered in the name of war. Few of them were pretty, but all, Beau contended, had been absolutely necessary.

"I see her every time I blink," he told Beau. "She's haunting me. Her eyes haunt me. I see them gleaming from the shadows, and I can't make it stop. I see her from the corner of my eye, sitting in the dark."

"Bury it," Beau had told him. "Stick it in a box and study it later. It's the only thing you can do."

Finch had, but the crawling sensation, the darkness inside had never left him. It felt like a parasite, feeding off the negative energy, and every time he was called upon to kill, it grew bigger, until it had its hooks in his mind, forcing him to question what kind of creature he was and what kind of future might possibly exist for such a thing. Before, he'd thought the enemy an almost mystical thing, an entity whose very nature meant they would not look remotely human, would be faceless, and therefore easy to destroy.

The eyes of the woman had changed his mind.

And then he'd been called upon to kill again and again, and despite what he'd been told, he had remembered every one of the faces, every glint in the eyes of those who'd fallen before his gun.

Why then, had he thought this would be any different?

"You scared six shades of shit out of that Sheriff," Beau said. "Me too, by the time you were done."

Scared myself too
, Finch thought. Everything he'd done to the Sheriff had been governed by the same automatic impulse that had driven him in Iraq after the death of the woman, the knowledge that—as Beau had said—though it would not always be pretty he was fighting for more than his own survival. They'd needed McKindrey's knowledge to have any hope of seeing the operation through and he had switched on a dangerous part of himself to ensure they got what they came for. But perhaps "switched on" wasn't the right way of saying it because it suggested control, and that was something he most certainly did not have over the more frightening aspects of his character. Often, it came unbidden.

He looked out the windshield at the dark shadow of a mountain a few miles ahead of them. In the fading light, it looked crimson, alien, something from a Martian landscape.

"Hood Mountain, I assume" Beau said and unfolded a map, his finger tracing a line from Columbus all the way down to Alabama and further, to where a thin thread turned away from highway and entered a geographically barren area.

He looked at Finch. "Looks like we found 'em."

*

When he stepped inside and Claire had the door shut behind him, her demeanor changed completely. Gone was the weak weepy girl who had hugged him, kissed him right on the lips, and sobbed her delight at the sight of him outside. Now her face was serious, her eyes intense as she shoved him aside, moved to the small narrow window beside the front door and peeked out. After a moment, she let the curtain fall and offered him an apologetic smile.

"Sorry about that. I wanted to make sure she was gone."

"Who?"

"My sister. The woman you met. Her name is Kara."

"She seemed nice," he lied.

"Yeah, she usually does. Then you get to know her."

She turned and walked ahead of him to the kitchen. Helplessly he stood, awaiting instructions on what to do next. The abrupt change in her manner confused him, and now he wasn't so sure she really was all that glad to see him.

In the kitchen doorway, she turned. "C'mon."

He followed. "I'm glad to see you," he said, with an uncertain smile.

She had moved to the sink and was filling a glass with water from the faucet. She nodded, tossed back a pair of white pills and noisily drained the glass. Afterward she closed her eyes and sighed.

Pete still stood at the threshold to the room, feeling awkward.

"Why did you come?" she asked him in a coarse tone.

"I said I would, 'member?"

"Not really."

Pete's smile faded. He wondered what had happened between the driveway and the house to bring such a sudden change upon her. "The night I drove you to the hospital," he explained. "We was talkin' about singin'."

"I don't like to sing," she said.

Encouraged, Pete stepped further into the room. "That's right! You said that, then you told me come see you soon's you was better."

"Then you're early," she said.

He wasn't sure what that meant, and so said nothing, just watched as she set the glass down and turned, leaning against the edge of the sink, her arms folded as she appraised him. "Pete."

"Yes Ma'am?"

"
Why
did you come?"

"I said I would. I promised."

"You already told me that. I want to know why else you came."

"To see how you was. To see if you was all right."

"And?"

"What?"

"And how am I? How do I look?"

"Tired, I guess," he said truthfully. "And different."

"Different how?"

"Your hair," he said. "And the patch."

Absently, she fingered a lock of her dyed hair. "Do you like them?"

"I dunno," he said. "I like the patch I guess. Makes you look like a pirate."

She gave him a slight smile. "You want something to drink?"

"That'd be nice."

"What do you want?"

"Coke's fine, or hot chocolate."

"Haven't got hot chocolate." She jerked open the refrigerator hard enough to send some of the myriad magnets on the door flying. Wide-eyed, Pete followed their trajectory, then looked back to Claire.

"Are you mad at me for comin'?"

"Nope," she said and withdrew a liter of Coke from the fridge. "I'm glad you're here."

Only slightly relieved, he said, "Okay."

"Because," she continued, unscrewing the cap from the bottle, "You're going to drive me to Elkwood."

She slammed the bottle down on the table, and didn't offer him a glass.

"Drink fast," she said.

-33-

Thunder grumbled over the city. Kara parked the car and looked out at the drab gray building in which she worked. The clock on the dashboard told her she was already an hour and fifteen minutes late, but she couldn't care less. Her mind raced with thoughts about the boy who'd showed up at their door. He'd wanted to see Claire, and it was clear by her sister's reaction that the visit had been a welcome one, eliciting more emotion from her than Kara had seen in months. So, though she'd been against the idea, maybe it would work out to be a positive thing in the end.

You don't really buy that, do you?

She couldn't help but grin at her own pessimism, but it was true. She
didn't
buy it. The kid's connection to the events that had chewed Claire up and spit her out would only justify her dwelling on them for another while, and that was counter-productive to their cause.

Cause. What cause?
she asked herself. Naturally she wanted Claire to recover, and soon. But how much of that was for Claire's benefit, and not her own? How much of it was simply a selfish desire to be as free of her sister and all her emotional baggage as Claire wanted to be of her? Kara felt cruel even thinking it, but no reassuring mental voice hurried to debate the theory.

Kara had a life. Granted, not much of one, and even Claire couldn't be blamed for the worst of its deficiencies, but the idea of being her sister's keeper forever made her chest tighten. It couldn't happen. It wasn't fair to either of them. And what good was she really doing anyway? Trying to curb her sister's self-destructive impulses of late seemed to be having the opposite effect. Claire appeared to be waiting for the opportunity, the right moment before she took that final step over the precipice into the abyss where the demons she had escaped would welcome her back and rend her asunder.