The Fort (21 page)

The house appeared before him only moments after his self-defeating train of thought had eked away the last of his interest in searching for it. He almost didn’t notice it. It had its back to the forest, and the backyard was fully encompassed by a tall wooden fence. Neither of the houses on either side of it was two stories, so the backyard would be basically impossible to see into. Luke could see that the fence went almost all the way to the trees.

Cutting through the yard of a neighbor a couple of doors down, he looped around into the forest and quickly came upon a cluster of popples that looked quite similar to the one the man and Molly had disappeared into. He spent some time trying to orient himself to where the fort would be in relation to where he was standing. Unless he was mistaken, Luke was pretty sure this
house was in exactly the direction they’d seen the man and Molly walking.

He cut back to the street and gave one last look to the mailbox. The address was stenciled on it, and above it the word
HOOPER
.

Luke headed back to the fort at a dead run.

42

Tim and his dad had finished tamping down about ten square feet of gravel when Stan sat down on the edge of the patio. “Go get Mom,” he said. “I want to see if she’ll be impressed with our progress yet. We’re finally getting places, thanks to your early start.”

Tim left his dad and the tamper behind him but brought the water bottle along for the trip. The ache in his arms stayed with him, though, as he slowly walked around and then into the house through the open garage door. “Mom,” he called as he walked inside and kicked off his shoes. “Dad wants you to go outside and look at the ground.”

“Did he finish it?” his mom asked from the kitchen. “It’d be amazing if he did—we haven’t even had the pavers delivered yet!”

“Not yet,” Tim said, walking to the sink and dumping out what was left of the water in his bottle, “but we’re making progress.” He turned the sink to cold and let it run for a minute before refilling the bottle.

His mom was doing some prep work on dinner, or at least that’s how it looked to Tim as he sat at the table. He considered
getting himself a snack but decided that a moment to sit trumped the growing hunger pangs in his belly.

Tammy washed her hands, then dried them on a towel before walking out through the garage. She had to go the long way around too, since the slider and the patio were out of service.

Alone in the house, Tim remembered Becca. He stood, then crept to her room, as though on some sort of clandestine mission. When he knocked on her door, Becca made some neutral sound that wasn’t a no, and he walked inside.

Becca was reading again, the same book as before, but when she saw it was him she dropped it in her lap and stared at him. “What do you want?”

“Mom and Dad are both outside. Can you call whoever was with Molly when she was taken?”

Becca narrowed her eyes. “Are you sure I’ll have time? I really don’t need Mom any further up my ass.”

“Yes, I’m positive. Just hurry! I’ll go stand by the door as a lookout.”

“Fair enough,” she sighed. “But you better let me know if they’re coming, because I’m going to be on the phone in their room. That’s like double trouble if I get busted.” Tim looked at her quizzically, and she rolled her eyes. “Jesus, sometimes I wonder if we’re really related. I can’t use the kitchen phone. Mom would be able to see me from outside. Now get out of my room and go watch the door.”

Tim ran toward the door to the garage.
We’re just lucky Mom can’t use the slider like normal, because of the patio.
He smiled, the first time he’d done that since his work on the never-ending project had started. It was finally good for something.

Tim stood waiting by the back of the family room, where he had a good view of the door from the garage. For what felt like an eternity he waited for the sound of the knob turning, or for Becca to appear and tell him that it was done. He felt weird, somehow both tense and sleepy. He was wondering if maybe this was
how high schoolers felt during exams, or how his dad felt grading exams, when he heard Becca walking from their parents’ bedroom to her own at almost the exact same moment the knob to the garage door started to turn. He slipped down the hall into the bathroom, in case his mom checked for him, and when he heard her in the kitchen again he darted off to Becca’s room.

He opened the door without knocking, slid inside, and closed it after him. “Well?”

“It was a dark green Dodge Dart, the Colombia model. Jeff, one of the guys who saw her get in, remembered.” While Tim was repeating that to himself—
dark green Dodge Dart, Colombia model
—Becca went on talking, probably stir-crazy from being grounded. “Jeff’s a pretty good guy, but…Did I tell you I’m kind of scared to hang out with anybody from that crowd again? It’s a total bummer, like, I busted ass to get in with the cool kids, and they seem pretty stupid in retrospect.”

“I’m glad you could help. Same for your friend,” said Tim, once he was sure he had the car’s make and model down. “But what you guys did, and then didn’t do, was pretty awful. Ripping off a bunch of jerks is one thing, but then you lied to the cops, even when one of your friends was in trouble.” He stood.

“So what now?” Becca asked, but like she was only mildly interested. Tim wondered if she’d heard anything he’d said.

“Now I think we have to find that car, and then…Well, after that, I don’t know.”

“Just don’t do anything stupid, OK? And keep us out of it. How about just an anonymous phone call telling them about the car?”

Tim scoffed at that. “There’s no way they’d believe it. That Van Endel guy is so used to getting lied to, or at least thinking he’s getting lied to, that I doubt he’d even follow up. And if he did, whoever has her would just lie his way out of it if the cops did stop by. Not that they would. They probably made like a million of that car.”

Becca frowned. “I can’t recall seeing many of them, not around here, anyway.” She paused, then cocked her head as if realizing something. “Do you think Mom and Dad will let us go see the fireworks?”

“I don’t know,” said Tim. “But it won’t matter too much. Everybody lights them off all over the place anyways. Either way, we’ll get a show.”

43

Hooper woke up stuck to the floor. His leg had soaked through the towels, and it now felt as though an industrial-strength adhesive had been used to bind him to the cement. Amy was either asleep on her side or pretending to be asleep. Not that it mattered now—Hooper had no use for her at the moment. As bad as he felt, she couldn’t have been more useless. He grabbed the gun, ignoring the plate and the bottle of Everclear for now, and then tried to stand.

His leg came free of the floor slowly, making a sound like a giant zipper as it parted ways with the cement. A hot, fresh wave of pain blasted off the wound. Without touching it, Hooper waved a hand near it and felt a palpable heat rising from it. Holding on to the wall near the stairs, he tested his weight on the leg. It would work, barely. He knelt, then slowly extended his arm so he wouldn’t fall, and grabbed the ball gag. He stood again, then hopped on his good leg over to the pole that Amy was tied to. Once there, he slid down and then slipped the gag into her mouth. She stirred but did not wake as he attached the harness and then tightened. He seemed to recall her yelling out for help, but he could have been wrong. The memory of the basement surgery flashed back at him,
and then a darker cloud ran through his mind. That kid or possibly even kids in the woods.

Hooper might not have been well enough at the moment to go after them, but he smiled, imagining himself with two healthy legs. The smile didn’t last long, though, as there came a thunderous explosion from outside. Hooper scrambled, pain be damned, to the window. What he saw took his breath away.
Fuckin’ Charlie is fuckin’ bombing the goddamn town!
There could be no other explanation; mortar bursts were erupting throughout the night sky, exploding shrapnel in deadly glory, exactly like the shrapnel that had nearly killed him back in the shit, back in the jungle.

Hooper ducked as a shot roared up from somewhere impossibly close to the house and exploded with precision next to it. Something in his mind popped, and he fell to the ground, shaking in a violent dance on the floor.

Some minutes later, he forced himself to sit up, cringing at the sound of the bombs bursting in the air. His injured leg was literally trembling, pulsing with his beating heart. Scared to look at it, but knowing he had to, Hooper began to turn his head, then stopped when he saw the stretch marks mottling the swollen skin. Scrabbling like a drunken crab, he began spinning on the floor, taken by madness and pain and screaming inaudibly at the same moment a mortar exploded and the back of his leg rubbed on the floor. The shock was too great. He expelled urine and shit from his body in a great flood and then lay in it, morbidly cooling off as the mess of fluids gave away the heat it had gained in his body.

Hooper lay there for a long time. As terrible as the endless barrage was, he seemed to be safe. The ground wasn’t rumbling like it had back in the shit, and no one was screaming in pain from shrapnel, like he had been on that awful night of fire and lead.
No one came for me then, and they won’t now, either.
Help hadn’t come until the next morning; those pussy medics had had to wait until the area was clear to come get him. The men around Hooper had died slowly, their screams sputtering out like motors running
out of fuel.
Not again, not again
, thought Hooper, a moment of clarity allowing him to see the filth he was lying in. The moment begged for another, and Hooper all but dragged himself to his feet, his injured leg leaking blood and pus as he dragged it behind him to the bathroom, his foot turned sideways and the leg dying the slow death of rot.

Hooper turned on the shower, then all but fell in. He was in a boat racing up a Vietnamese river, but he shook the false thought away. Hooper had never been upriver, downriver, or on any river that wasn’t in Michigan. Still, the memory had come from somewhere, and it felt real enough. He slowly lowered himself to a sitting position in the shower, tearing off the curtain and landing on his ass with just a few inches to go. He threw the curtain aside and let the shower work its magic of cleaning his mind and body. Slowly the shit, piss, blood, and pus were scraped off of him by the slowly warming stream, and it felt wonderful, the best feeling in the world.

Clarity came to Hooper in violent waves, memories from the shit interspersed with movie memories that seemed more and less real at the same time. Also in there were thick blasts of Amy, both the new and the old one. Amy before Vietnam, wearing high-cut denim shorts and laughing with her friends outside in the driveway. Hooper brooding in the house as his mom wheezed and fucking groaned on her respirator. That same Amy moaning beneath him, or was it crying? It hadn’t mattered then, but it seemed to now, for some reason. The new Amy came to him then, Amy strapped to the pole, begging for water. What had he fed her in the last few days? Three or four pieces of dried toast, a few glasses of water?
The bitch deserves it
, another voice said plainly.
She ran, she let that VC motherfucker shoot you.
Another seizure wracked Hooper, and he danced the sleep of the dying in the bathtub, every noise but a death rattle escaping his body.

The cold woke him up violently, helped along with the pain from his leg. He was no longer being blasted by the shock of the
pain. It came in waves now, attacking his nervous system like the barrages the VC kept throwing at his long-ago-destroyed emplacement. He knew that risk was past, that he’d been home for years, but every single Fourth of July explosion told him otherwise, each blast a death knell for the men around him, who were a mix of shadows, screams, and spilled blood. Hooper shouted with them, adding his own voice to the raucous sounds of a world gone mad. History and the present were flashing back and forth in ugly intervals, wounds suffered long ago finding a place alongside those of the present. Hooper lay in the shower, letting the water run over him as though it could make him pure.

44

The afternoon had yielded no hits, and Van Endel was starting to think the holiday might have cut down on the night trade. He was wrong, though, and was almost depressed over it. Even hookers deserved a day off, but from the look of things, most of them had decided that dusk on the Fourth of July was still a perfectly fine time to offer their wares.

Van Endel and Martinez had circled the blocks where the women were most apt to be walking. The men’s district was a little farther north, though the job opportunities were basically the same. Finally, Martinez spotted a woman they’d talked to before, a rough-looking black hooker who said her name was Candy. “Hard Candy,” she’d told them—if a john got too pushy or tried not to pay, that is. Van Endel pulled the car to the curb and let Martinez get out first, then followed her. Women tended to make them less jumpy, doubly so after the last eighteen months of steady disappearances.

“Is that Candy?” Dr. Martinez called out, in a voice that was almost as much a lie as the girl’s name. “I know that’s my girl Candy. You remember me?”

“I don’t know you, White Bread,” said Candy. “Now get the fuck out of here.”

Van Endel was between the two women almost immediately, holding his badge in one hand and the picture of Molly in the other.

“Candy, I know you recognize us,” said Van Endel. “I’m the detective that you hate talking to.
I’m
white bread. Dr. Martinez here is more of a tortilla in ethnicity, and her you like, if you recall correctly.”

“Oh shit, Doc,” said Candy. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean no harm, but you looked like this white bitch from some church that’s been buggin’ the shit out of us lately, and chasing away the money and the men too. She could keep the men, but the money, that’s a problem,” said Candy with a smile so vivid and full of life that it was almost heartbreaking. Van Endel didn’t figure she gave that look to too many people, and it was sweet enough to take some of the hard living off of her face.