Red Tide (22 page)

39

S
amuel made a noise like a bird.

“Me too,” Paul answered.

Nearly twenty years ago, on a cloudless night in the week before his sixth birthday, the MCI gas had seared Samuel’s larynx, burning the vocal cords from his throat, leaving his voice little more than an odd collection of clicks and whistles. Since that day, only Paul had been able to make out what he was saying. Samuel leaned his arms on the roof of the car and squawked again.

“We’ll do it just like we practiced,” Paul said.

Samuel swallowed in that noisy way of his and slid into the driver’s seat. His movements were slow and deliberate. Before today, his only experience driving a car had consisted of a couple of hours tooling around a deserted British Columbia parking lot early one Sunday morning, with Holmes talking him through it from the passenger seat.

His hands shook slightly as he turned the key and started the engine.

“Seat belts,” Paul reminded.

They buckled up. Samuel took a deep breath, dropped the car into reverse and backed slowly out of the parking space. He shifted gears and, with a lurch, they rolled across the parking lot toward the street.

Traffic was light. Tourist season was over. The waterfront had taken on the forlorn look of an abandoned amusement park. As they bounced into the street and started south, the squeal of tires suddenly filled the air. Paul turned his head in time to see a huge black police van slide around the corner, light bar blazing, the roar of its engine getting louder and louder as it swallowed the distance between the two cars.

“Watch where you’re going,” Paul admonished his cousin, whose eyes now bounced frantically between the rearview mirror and the street in front of the car. He made a noise in his throat that others would have taken to mean he was going to spit.

“The others will take care of themselves,” Paul said. “Go.”

“I don’t know, Officer…I mean the privacy of our guests…I’m going to have to call my supervisor.”

“We don’t have time for that.” Charly Hart clapped his hand on the desk hard enough to bounce the brochures and then slid the sheet of paper closer to the kid. “Are any of these people registered here?” he growled.

“I can’t…” the kid stammered. “My boss would…” When he lifted his hands from the computer terminal in a show of helplessness, Corso slapped the computer around in a circle and used his forearm to drag the keyboard and mouse across the desk.

“Hey now,” the young man pleaded. “You can’t be—”

The sight of the SWAT team entering the lobby froze the words in his throat. Using only his hands Sergeant Nance directed three of his men to cover the rear stairs and another trio to stand by. The six or eight guests in the lobby backed themselves up against the walls, palms flat, eyes wide. The front door opened. A middle-aged couple dragging a pair of flowered suitcases stepped inside, took one look at the unfolding scene and, without a word, beat a stiff-legged retreat back outside.

“All of them,” Corso said. “Singh and Kimberly in two forty-one. Holmes and Darling in three fifteen and Rishi and Singleton in two hundred.”

“Unless you’ve got some sort of official paperwork…I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to—” That’s when the kid noticed the huge guy with the battering ram and again his words caught in his throat. “Oh no…you…”

Rather than drive all the way down to the waterfront, where they would surely be spotted by subsequent waves of police cars and given the boot, Jim Sexton had opted for a left turn onto a narrow section of railroad right-of-way running parallel with the street. The venue looked good when they started down, but the narrow lane got thinner and thinner as they moved along. Now the KING-TV remote truck was stuck. Wedged between the slumping railroad grade and the white wall of the parking garage. The van had slid downhill and now had its side pressed directly against the cinder blocks at an angle which prevented the passenger door from being opened. “Get us out of here,” Jim shouted from across the front seat.

“Gonna tear it up,” Pete countered. “We better call a tow truck. You know how the brass are about damaging the equipment.”

“Get us out of here,” Jim shouted again.

Pete shook his head. Lifted his hands from the wheel in refusal. “Not me, man…No way I’m gonna…”

Jim stuck out his left leg. Put his foot on top of Pete’s and forced the accelerator to the floor. The van first began to vibrate and then to move haltingly forward with a metallic scream, the tires throwing up great hunks of gravel as they dragged the side of the vehicle along the uneven bricks for twenty yards before popping back out into the light, where they teetered on two wheels for a second as the van decided whether or not it was going to fall all the way over onto its side, wavering in the wind before coming to rest at such a precarious angle they were both afraid to move.

Holmes fed his final pair of quarters into the machine and pushed the button. Two dollars for water. He shook his head. In his mind, he began to recite his oft-repeated litany about how these depraved and degenerate people deserved whatever happened to them. How they were users and spoilers. How their own uncaring arrogance would be the instrument of their doom. How he was merely the arrow loosed from the bow of atonement. How…how…He stopped and cocked his head. His ears took in a sound he hadn’t heard in years but would never forget. Deep and rhythmic. The sound of good leather. The squeak of gear, of rivets and straps and the tink of metal against metal. He recognized the sound at once. The sound of soldiers moving fast. His head began to throb.

He stepped over to the edge of the mezzanine and looked down into the second-floor hallway just in time to catch a glance of a black-visored trooper jogging down the hall with an automatic weapon slung around his neck. Without willing it so, the two bottles of water slipped from his hands and landed soundlessly on the carpet.

He turned and ran. Sprinted up the three stairs, around the corner and down the hall. He jabbed the plastic card into the door lock but got only a red light for his trouble. He tried again. Another red light. He heard shouts and the splintering of wood. Then a moment of silence before the sounds of boots could be heard on the stairs. He forced his hands to work…to slowly swipe the card…to wait for the green light, before bursting into the room and slamming the door behind himself…before grabbing the wing chair from the desk and jamming its padded back beneath the doorknob in the second before the door bent inward from the force of a blow. And another and another as he dragged Bobby Darling across the room to the sliding door and the balcony beyond.

The cold night air washed over his skin as he grabbed Bobby around the waist and lifted the struggling bundle above the rail.

“Oh…no…” Bobby cried. “I cannot…”

Holmes watched the door begin to disintegrate…watched the wing chair fall to the carpet, watched a black visage fill the gap and then, with Bobby Darling pressed hard to his chest, he threw himself off the balcony into the rushing darkness below.

40

O
verhead, the banks of mercury vapor lights rained an eerie glow onto the five acres of tarmac below, bathing the scene in an ungodly purple radiance which was neither light nor dark but merely a respite from the night.

Nathan eased the van to a halt just outside the gate and rolled down the window. It was of no importance that he kept his face deep in the shadows, because the closest guy didn’t bother to look up from his fingernails. “Names,” was all he said, as if, regardless of the circumstances, everything else was unquestionably somebody else’s problem.

“Singh and Kimberly,” Nathan announced.

The other man—the one standing just inside the gate—ran his finger down a list he had on a clipboard. “Got ’em here,” he said. “They’re new.” He jammed the clipboard into his armpit and rummaged through a battered cardboard box resting against the fence.

When his hands reappeared, they held a pair of ID cards dangling from bright red lanyards. He came forward several strides and handed them through the window to Nathan, who thanked him and put them gently on the seat next to his hip.

Only then, as he stood close to the van, was the man able to catch a glimpse of Nathan. He winced and pointed. “Park over there with the rest of them.”

Nathan felt the man’s horror. He could sense discomfort with the same degree of certainty with which others could feel a spring breeze. He allowed his eyes to follow the finger toward a dimly lit area to the north, where half a dozen men with flashlights directed the parking of the cars. The way they moved their arms reminded Nathan of the men who’d guided the airplane into the gate at Montreal on the night they’d arrived, their long orange arms enfolding, beckoning them forward and forward and forward…as if toward the promise of a warm embrace. He looked over at Wesley, who sat transfixed, staring out the side window at the reason why they’d come.

“Keep your IDs in sight at all times,” the guy said and then waved hard with his arm, as if to hurry them along. “Let’s go now,” he said.

He pulled the clipboard out from under his arm and watched the taillights recede into the gloom before he turned to his partner and spoke.

“You see the face on the driver?” he asked.

“What about it?”

“Guy looked like he had a fire on his face and somebody put it out with a track shoe.” He picked at his own face with pincerlike fingers. “Looked like he had pieces of gravel or glass or something sewn all up under his skin.

“Lotta ugly people,” his partner commented.

“Not like that, man. Not like that.”

“Don’t move, man. Just stay still.”

Pete didn’t need to be told. He’d unbuckled his seat belt and had one hand out the window, hanging on to the roof, and the other locked so tightly around the steering wheel his knuckles were bone white in the gathering darkness.

“It’s going over,” he said through his teeth.

Jim waved him off. “I’m gonna move your way.”

When Pete began to shake his head, the van began to teeter. He stopped and waited for the balance to stabilize, then watched helplessly as Jim Sexton grabbed the steering wheel and pulled himself upward until his hip rested on the side of the passenger seat.

“Go on. Climb out,” Jim said.

Pete was more than willing. He used the roof for leverage, easing his hip out the window frame, until only his feet dangled inside the vehicle; then, one by one, he brought his legs out onto the door before stepping upward and disappearing from view altogether.

Jim moved carefully into the driver’s seat and surveyed the scene. The van had come to rest at a thirty-degree angle. The driver’s side wheels were a good four feet higher than those on the passenger side. All the equipment in the back of the truck had shifted downhill, making the balance even more precarious.

The squeal of tires pulled his eyes downhill, but the roof was in the way.

“What’s going on?” he shouted out the window.

“More cops.” Pete answered. “Lots more cops.”

“Shit,” Jim muttered to himself.

“What?”

“Stand clear.”

“Oh no, man…don’t…”

Jim found the accelerator and raced the engine. The roar sent Pete clawing his way up the railroad grade until he stood huffing and puffing on the tracks, his heart hammering, his shoes full of gravel. “Gonna go over, man…gonna go over,” he chanted as Jim dropped the transmission into first gear and fed it a little gas. The van inched forward, sending a cascade of loose dirt rolling down the hill.

Pete covered his eyes with his fingers as Jim began to point the front wheels downhill in a desperate search for equilibrium. He closed his eyes and began to picture the scenario where he explained to the bosses that…no, he personally wasn’t driving when everything went to shit. Had to word it just right. Not ratting old Jimbo out, but rather just calling a spade a spade. Just the way it was, man.

He peeked out from between his fingers just in time to see the upper part of the grade collapse and begin to slide down the hill. The whole slab was sliding toward a four-foot drop into the parking lot below when Jim Sexton gave the engine full throttle, sending the van crawling across the moving expanse of earth like a bug on a floating leaf.

The tires spewed up rooster-tails of dirt as the van picked up speed, gaining sufficient momentum to bounce the front wheels up onto the grassy berm separating the sidewalk from the railroad right-of-way. Pointing the nose toward the sky…lurching forward and up…and then, as if by magic, the landslide picked up speed and disappeared over the edge of the retaining wall, leaving the van sitting benignly on the sidewalk.

“Holy shit,” was all Pete could think to say.

He recalled when he used to swim in the river as a boy. When they traveled to Fessil Park to visit his mother’s sister. He remembered the way his innards seemed to cool in the muddy water, leaving him feeling nearly hollow, like a tube of skin through which the cool water flowed. In those moments, he came to understand why the people scattered the ashes of the dead upon the sacred river. How a soul could never rest until it was returned to the river from which it had sprung and so given its eternal relief from the sun in the cool currents of the underworld.

But the cold was never like this. The ache never this deep. The urge to die never this strong. Holmes took in a great gulp of air and began to scissor his legs again, mindless of direction, moving with the tide, holding Bobby Darling across the chest, pumping for all he was worth…left, right, north south, it didn’t matter…anywhere but down into the icy depths below his feet.

Bobby began to squirm in his arms. Holmes held him closer, whispered in his ear. “Parag,” he whispered. “It’s all right, Parag. We will make it.”

And then…a powerful wave pushed them sideways and down, dragging them beneath the bubbling surface for what seemed like an eternity before thrusting them up once again into the cold night air where they shook the water from their eyes and gasped for breath and then suddenly…Holmes blinked in disbelief…it seemed as if they were in a forest of great looming trees, angled this way and that, each trunk reaching for the night sky with bare black arms.

Holmes reached out, half expecting to find it all an apparition, but instead found it hard and slimy and real. He threw his free arm around the nearest tree and held tight as he swung Bobby toward the trunk.

“Hold on, Parag,” he said. “Hold on to it.”

Instinctively, Bobby complied, wrapping his arms around the slippery surface and squeezing for all he was worth. His black hair had washed completely down over his face. The chattering of his teeth made a sound like a small, badly tuned motor.

Relieved of Bobby’s weight, Holmes looked around. It took his eyes a moment to adjust to the dim light. The trees of this forest were the underpinnings of a pier. Ancient poles driven deep into the bottom of the bay. Out over Parag’s shoulder, he could see the south facade of the hotel. The current had pulled them two hundred yards south. Two full piers down from where they had gone into the water just minutes before.

And then…as he fought to control a shudder, he lost his grip on the piling and slid down under the water again, the water cresting his chin and then his nose and mouth…until his foot hit something. Something solid. He pushed off and bobbed to the surface. He looked around, loosened his grip on the pole and did it again. Just to be sure.

“Parag,” he whispered. “Parag.”

Bobby disengaged one hand from the piling for long enough to wipe his hair from his face. His lower jaw quivered violently. His lips were blue. He opened his eyes.

“The bottom,” Holmes said. “It’s right beneath us.”

Holmes watched as Bobby Darling groped downward with his foot and discovered he could stand with his chin just above the waterline.

Holmes pointed toward shore. Toward the floating dock and the sailboat and the concrete stairs rising to the street. “Just a little farther,” he said.