Scream Catcher (39 page)

“So that’s it?” Jude exhales. “We just go on with our lives?”

Lino answers the question the only way he can: by saying nothing and by simply cracking a kind of sad, half smile that quickly fades back into his mustache. Like a man who hasn’t any more answers he stuffs both hands into his pants pockets, shrugs his shoulders. Turning away from Jude, he heads for the open door.

But he doesn’t get far before ex-cop calls out for him.

“My wife. You promised me you’d take me to see my wife.”

The Lieutenant turns slowly back around.

“You’re absolutely right,” he says. “I gave you my word.”

Glens Falls Medical Center

Saturday, 10:29 A.M.

Rosie’s private room is located on the fourth floor, directly across from a central nurse’s station. Lino wheels Jude into the dimly lit room, pushes him directly up to the bed that holds the sleeping patient and leaves. Like Jude she has an IV attached to her left forearm. The monitors beside her record blood pressure and heart rate.

Although long dark hair veils more than half her face, Jude can see just how pale she is. The paleness tells him she’s lost a lot of blood. It also tells him she’s been through an ordeal separate from the one Lennox put her through.

Reaching out, Jude takes hold of Rosie’s hand. He squeezes the cold fingers and begins to cry. Her eyes open up then. Turning towards him she begins to shed tears.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers.

Jude just shakes his head. He wants to tell her not to apologize. What could possibly be her fault? Her body and the pregnancy had been at risk from the moment she contracted the S.P. She wasn’t supposed to strain herself in the least. But she found herself up on a mountain, fighting for her life; for her baby’s life. She did everything she could to stay alive. He wants to shout this out to her, but he cannot talk.

“I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

Squeezing her hand, Jude somehow manages to work up enough strength to speak, if only in whisper.

“Sleep,” he says. “Go to sleep.”

“I’m … sorry,” Rosie says again, eyelids falling.

* * *

For what seems forever, Jude just sits staring at his sleeping wife.

But when the door opens back up, it’s Lino who steps back inside.

He says, “They’ve arranged for you and Rosie to share a room. It should only take about another hour for them to set it up.”

Wiping his eyes, Jude looks up at the Lieutenant from his chair.

“Take me out,” he says.

Once wheeled out into corridor, Jude spots his little boy. He and Mack are waiting for him just beyond the nurse’s station. Jack shouts and runs to his father, wide-eyed and happy. He goes to hug Jude, but Lino holds him back.

“Easy young man,” he says. “Your dad is pretty fragile right now.”

The bushy-haired Jack takes hold of his dad’s free hand anyway, squeezes it hard.

Mack’s right arm is supported in a sling. He isn’t wearing the usual gray jacket, but only a white T-shirt that has a cartoon-like drawing of a muscle-bound half man/half bulldog on the front. The dog-man is hefting a barbell over his head above the words “Pit Bull Gym.” The old Captain approaches, leans himself down towards his son.

He whispers, “The doctor assures me that in time, Rosie will have no trouble conceiving again.”

Jude’s throat closes up on itself. He bobs his head, presses lips together, tries his best to swallow. Using the back of his hand, he dries his face.

Lennox won after all. He destroyed that thing dearest to he and Rosie. The child they were going to have together. Their unborn daughter.

In the end, the scream catcher wins while for Jude Parish, it’s game over.

Glens Falls Medical Center

Wednesday, September 6, 10:29 A.M.

September settles onto Lake George with a whimper.

With the Labor Day weekend fireworks, boat races, motorcycle rallies, outdoor concerts, beer blasts and barbeques now a fleeting memory, the throngs of tourists have all but abandoned the village, leaving the bars, gift shops, pizza parlors, coffee houses and arcades strangely quiet.

It’s the time of year when the leaves on the trees begin to show just a hint of the red-orange Technicolor that will come to define autumn in the Adirondacks. Boat traffic on the lake is reduced to a few scattered sailboats intermixed with the early fall lake trout and salmon fishermen. The public beach located on the far side of Lake George Park and to the immediate south of the county courthouse bomb site is now empty, its white sand as smoothed over and undisturbed as a sand trap. While the nights are filled with the Northern Lights that scoot and shoot across the wide open upstate sky in a cavalcade of yellow, white and blue hews, the early mornings have already begun to take on that crisp, alive coolness that only a native Lake Georgean can truly know.

Not five miles away from the southeastern banks of the lake, Jude has executed all the necessary documentation required of his official Glens Falls Medical Center discharge. His doctor’s best wishes and further healing instructions in hand, he’s packed up his private room, tossed out the now wilted flowers, passed out what was left of any cookies, cakes, chips and doughnuts to hospital staff, filled his duffel with both clean and soiled laundry, then settled into a wheelchair, the letters G.F.M. stenciled into the heavy plastic chair-back in white-on-black letters.

He’s lost a total of seven and a half pounds since the ordeal with Lennox began, but the weight loss doesn’t make him feel any lighter. While Rosie awaits his arrival from their home, he shares an elevator car with Mack and Jack. Staring straight ahead, he catches his reflection in the chrome doors. His face stares back at him, distorted and unfamiliar, like a funhouse mirror reflection.

Almost tranquilly the elevator glides three generations of fathers and sons gently down to the first floor where they proceed along the extended length of the narrow hospital corridor to the exit. But then Jude is barely through the automatic sliding glass doors before being besieged by the scattered reporters who shout out questions regarding his and his family’s eleven hour abduction of August 14 and 15.

“Do you plan on bringing a class action suit against Warren County for negligence?”

“Do you plan on writing a book about your abduction?”

“Can you verify the rumors that you have sold the movie rights to your story?”

“Are you moving back to New York City?”

The questions are machine-gunned as microphones are shoved within inches of his face even while being wheeled out into the parking lot. Until Mack—injured arm and shoulder ever supported in the adjustable sling—stops the chair, steps around the front, blocking any and all access to Jude and Jack.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he exclaims. “I speak to you not as the Chief of Detectives for the L.G.P.D. but as the father of my son, the grandfather of my grandson. Please leave us in peace. In time my son will release a statement regarding last month’s ordeal. But until then we ask for your patience and understanding while the process of convalescence continues. I thank you.”

But as soon as Jude is seated beside his boy in the back seat of Mack’s Jeep, the old Captain set behind the steering wheel, the ex-cop decides to break his silence.

“That was almost eloquent, Mack,” he says, eyes planted in the rearview.

Mack catches Jude’s eyes with his own. Firing up the engine, he slips his arm out of the sling, throws the transmission into reverse. One-handed he backs the Jeep out of its space.

“You know the score, kid,” he says with a shrug of his good shoulder. “Half my job is public relations.”

* * *

Mack motors the Jeep out beyond Main Street, past the village limits, onto Lake George Road. With the lake visible on the right-hand side and nothing but a near perpetual stand of pines on the left, Jude glances again into the rearview mirror only to once more spot Mack’s slate gray eyes.

As if to only add a voice to the otherwise heavy silence, he begins bringing Jude up to speed regarding the few developments that have occurred during his time in the hospital. That Wild Bill Stark—owner and proprietor of
Wild Bill’s All Day/All Night
video arcades—has been arrested, charged with providing a false alibi and falsified evidence on behalf of Hector Lennox during the August 12th Arraignment (the Acting County Prosecutor is at present also seeking out a charge of complicity to commit murder); that the Town of Lake George plans to level what remains of the courthouse building and that a memorial to P.J. Blanchfield will be erected there in its stead; that already Mack has been invited to be interviewed by several night-time talk shows regarding not only Jude’s affair with Lennox, but about domestic terror as well; that back to back memorial services for both Blanchfield and Ray Fuentes concluded last week after his charred torso was uncovered from the severely burnt-out L.G.P.D. Jeep Cruiser (their individual remains have been buried on opposite ends of the Lake George Rural Cemetery); that a day after the courthouse explosion the L.G.P.D. patrol boat and its murdered two-man crew were uncovered by divers one-hundred feet off the eastern tip of the Assembly Point Peninsula. And finally, that traces of Lennox’s body were uncovered in the rubble only yesterday morning; that not even the press knows about it since the remains, which consist of some charred teeth and a palm-sized piece of skull, are only now arriving at the FBI forensics lab in Quantico for DNA verification.

“What if the teeth are somebody else’s?” asks Jack, lifting up his head. “Does that mean the dark monster is coming back to Lake George?”

Mack is quick to shake his head.

“On the contrary,” the old Captain responds. “It means we now have the evidence we need to prove once and for all that the old Black Dragon burned up in the bomb blast.”

Jack perks up his brow.

“How can you be sure, Grandpa?”

Jude shifts his aching body, brings his arm down around the boy’s shoulders.

“Only one other person besides P.J. Blanchfield died in the bomb blast,” he explains. “That person was Hector Lennox. I assure you, Mr. Jack, the Black Dragon … the dark monster himself … is no more.”

Looking down upon him, Jude sees the boy purse his lips, as though unconvinced.

And who can blame him?

Dark monsters, like nightmares, have a nasty habit of returning again and again, night after night.

* * *

As the Jeep Cruiser pulls onto the gravel drive of the Assembly Point Road home, Jude finds Rosie standing out on the front porch awaiting his arrival like a young bride for her war-weary husband. Catching his attention immediately is a newly created two-track that leads from the far edge of the lawn into the woods. Jude knows without asking that it must have been made by the off-road vehicles carting the technicians who attended to the spot in which Ray Fuentes was beheaded.

When the Jeep pulls up, Jude anxiously opens the door, eyes already tractor-beamed on his wife’s smiling face, long dark hair blowing off her shoulders in the lake breeze. But that’s when Mack turns back around to face his son.

“Only Jack goes. You and I have a very important appointment to keep.”

“I knew this was just a dream,” Jude grouses.

While Jack heads up the porch steps to Rosie’s outstretched arms, Mack opens his window, sticks his head out, directs his gaze towards Rosie.

“I’ll have your husband back to you in a flash,” he says. “Or two.”

But already Jude feels as though whatever Mack has up his sleeve, it’s probably going to take forever and a day.

Lake George Village

Wednesday, 12:00 P.M.

Imagine two sets of eyes gazing through a pollen-dusted windshield upon a bombed-out courthouse.

Imagine the screaming silence that goes along with it.

Mack pulls the Jeep around the temporary chain-link fence that’s been erected to protect the now federal crime scene from an overly curious public and from what up until recent days has been a salivating media. Neither adoptive father nor adoptive son offer up even a single comment about the mostly totaled concrete structure while the white Jeep Cherokee motors down the one-way access road, past the northern barren expanse of the park to the private docks below. Climbing aboard the last remaining L.G.P.D. boat, all Mack has to offer up by way of explanation is silence.

Going from car to boat is not an easy process.

Considering their many injuries, neither Jude nor Mack is moving too swiftly as they stumble and hobble their way from the back lot to the docks. But sooner than later, the old Captain is set behind the steering column of the white-on-black Boston Whaler patrol boat, motoring them out onto a calm lake bed. With his right arm still far from healed, Jude is impressed with the way Mack manages to maneuver both the boat’s center console-mounted wheel and the adjoining speed shift with his free left hand. Judging by the smile on his aging weathered face, Jude believes the old Captain is fairly impressed with himself.

* * *

For twenty minutes father and son cruise across the lake, the September breeze cool in their faces along with the warmth of the bright sun until they come to the long, narrow pine- and birch-covered Dome island and on its opposite blind side, the narrow inlet commonly referred to as Elizabeth Bay.

Having entered the still bay, Mack slows the engine to a crawl, retracts the propeller blades for fear of sheering them on the shallow rocky bottom. He allows the near idle patrol boat to glide slowly towards the decaying wood dock that belongs to a brown, cedar-shingled log cabin set up on bare hill overlooking the bay.