Thriller (12 page)

looking sleepy and satiated. He looked frazzled and anxious.

She’d slipped out of the room while he undressed to tell me

what he was wearing that day. She needn’t have bothered—I

would’ve known him anyway.

He carried his burden like a heavy bag.

When he got into the Volvo brought out from the hotel-parking

garage, I was already waiting in my car.

I followed him onto the 101, then into the valley. We exited

onto a wide boulevard and stayed on it for about five miles, finally making a turn at the School Crossing sign.

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He parked by the playground and sat there in his car.

It came back.

The paralytic sickness that made me want to crawl into a ball.

I stayed in the front seat and watched as he exited the car and

sidled up to the fence. As he took his glasses off and wiped them

on the pocket of his pants. As he scoped out the crowd of elementary-school kids flowing out the front gate. As his attention

seemed to fixate on one particular boy—a fourth-grader maybe,

a sweet-looking kid who reminded me of someone. As he began

to follow this boy down the street, edging closer and closer the

way lions separate calves from the herd. I watched and felt every

bit as powerless and inert as I did back when my brother

bounded down the steps of our house on the way to his first communion.

I couldn’t move.

He stepped up behind the boy and began conversing with him.

I didn’t have to see the boy’s face to know what it looked like.

The man reached out and grabbed the boy by the arm and I still

sat there in the front seat of my car.

It was only when the boy broke away, when he turned and ran,

when the man took a few halting steps toward him and then

slumped, gave up—that I actually moved.

Anger was my enemy. Anger was my long-lost friend. It

came in one red-hot surge, sending the sickness scurrying

away in terror, propelling me out of the car, ready to finally protect him.

Joseph,
I whispered.

My brother’s name.

The man slipped back into his car and drove away. I stood

there with my heart colliding against my ribs.

That night, I told Kelly what I was going to do.

We lay in bed covered in sweat, and I told her that I
needed
to

do this. The anger had come back and claimed me, wrapped me

in its comforting bosom and said,
You’re home.

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I waited at the school the next afternoon, and the one after

that. I waited all week.

He came the next Monday—parking his Volvo directly across

from the playground.

When he got out, I was standing there to ask him if he could

point me toward Fourth Street. When he turned and motioned

over
there,
I placed the gun up against his back.

“If you make a sound, you’re dead.”

He promptly wilted. He mumbled something about just taking his money, and I told him to shut up.

He entered my car as docile as a lamb.

A mother stared at us as we drove away.

I went to a place in the valley that I’d used before, when the

redness came and made me do certain things to suspects with

big mouths and awful résumés. Things that got me tossed off the

force and into mandated anger management where the class applauded when I said I’d learned to count to ten and avoid my triggers. Triggers were the things that set me off—there was an

entire canon of them.

Men in collar and vestment. That was trigger number one.

We had to walk over a quarter of a mile to the sandpit.

They’d turned it into a dumping ground filled with water the

color of mud.

“Why?” he said to me when I made him stand there at the lip

of the pit.

Because when I was eight years old, I was turned inside out. Be-

cause I killed my brother as surely as if I’d tied that belt around his

neck and kicked away the chair. That’s why.

His body flew into the subterranean tangle of junk and disappeared.

Because you deserve it.

When I showed up at work the next day, she wasn’t there.

I wanted to let her know; I wanted to ease her burden.

When I called her cell—she didn’t answer.

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I asked hotel personnel for her address—we’d always slept at

my place because she had a roommate. Two days later I went to

her second-floor flat in Ventura and knocked on the door.

No answer.

I found the landlord puttering around the backyard, mostly

crabgrass, dandelions and dirt.

“Have you seen Kelly?” I asked him.

“She’s gone,” he said without really looking up.

“
Gone?
Gone where? Gone to the store?”

“No.
Gone
. Not here anymore.”

“What are you talking about? Where’d she go?”

He shrugged. “She didn’t leave an address. Her and the kid

just left.”

“What kid?”

He finally looked up.

“Her
kid
. Her son. Who are
you,
exactly?”

“A friend.”

“Okay, Kelly’s friend. She took the kid and left. That lowlife

of a boyfriend picked them up. End of story.”

I will tell you that I still did not understand what happened.

I will tell you that I went back to the hotel and calmly contemplated the situation. That when another masseuse walked out

of her room—Trudy, one of the girls Kelly used to talk to—I said

tell me about Kelly. She’s an empath, I said.

“A
what?”

“An empath. She touches people and knows things about them.”

“Yeah. That they’re horny and out of shape.”

“She knows what they’re feeling—what kind of people they are.”

“Ha. Who told you that?
Kelly?”

I still didn’t understand.

Even with Trudy staring at me as if I’d arrived from a distant

galaxy. Even then, I refused to grasp what was right there.

“Kelly has a son,” I said.

“Uh-huh. Nice kid, too. No thanks to her. Okay, that’s not fair.

She just needs to develop better taste in men.”

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“You mean the father?”

“No. I mean the boyfriend. She’s got a dope problem—she’s

always doing it, and she’s always doing
them
. Dopes.”

“What about the father?”

“Nah, he’s kind of nice actually. A real job and everything. She

dumped him naturally. He’s fighting her for custody.”

“Why?”

“Maybe he doesn’t think junkies are the best company for an

eight-year-old. And she’s always trying to poison the kid against

him. It’s a fucking shame. You should’ve heard them going at it

in the Tranquillity Room last week.”

“Last week…when? What day?”

“I don’t know. He comes by to drop off money for the kid.

Tuesday, I think.”

Now it was coming. And it wouldn’t stop coming.

“What time Tuesday?”

“I don’t know. After lunch. Why?”

Look at it. It wants you to look at it.

Tuesday, I think. After lunch.

“What does he look like, Trudy?”

“Geez…I don’t know. About your height, I guess. Glasses. He

didn’t look too fucking terrific after seeing her. She told him she

was going to take the kid and disappear if he didn’t drop the

whole custody thing. You know what I think? Her boyfriend

wants that child support.”

About your height. Glasses
.

Don’t look. Do not look.

Tuesday. After lunch.

When he argued with her in the meditation room, and then

walked out looking anxious and upset.

Tuesday.

When he drove to his son’s school.

Tuesday.

When he tried to tell him that he was fighting for him and to

please not believe the things his mother said about him. When

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he reached out to make the boy listen, but his son pulled away

because all that poison had done its work.

“The boy,” I said. “He has brown hair. Cut real short—like a

crew. He’s sweet looking.”

“Yeah. That’s him.”

I’m an empath, she said. I’m touching this bad man, this sexual

predator, and what can I do about it—nothing, because the police

won’t believe an empath like me. He’s coming Tuesday at two, but

what can I do? Nothing
.

How?

How did she pick
me?

How?

Because.

Because she’d made me open that secret pocket.

Because one day they’d pointed me out to her—one of the

masseuses—oh
him,
stay away, an ex-cop who used to beat people half to death.

But she didn’t stay away—she came down to the basement

room where I punched holes in the wall. She talked to me. And

then I ripped that pocket wide open for her and spilled my

dreadful secrets all across the bed.

My brother. My guilt. My anger.

My trinity.

A kind of religion with one acolyte, and one commandment.

Vengeance is yours.

He’s a bad man, she said. He’s coming Tuesday at two. Tuesday.

At two.

This man who loved his son. Who was simply trying to protect him.

From her.

Why,
he said, standing at the top of that sandpit.
Why?

Because anger is as blind as love, and she gave me both.

I will tell you that a drought took hold of L.A. and turned the

brush in the Malibu hills to kindling. That twenty-million-dol-
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lar homes went up in smoke. That the drought dried up half the

Salton Sea and sucked the water right out of that dump, and that

a man disposing of his GE washing machine saw the body

wrapped around an old engine casing.

I will tell you that he was ID’d and the bullet in his heart identified as a Walther .45—the kind security guards are partial to,

and that a mother came forward and said she’d seen him being

coerced into a car near her son’s school by another man.

I will tell you that the wheels of justice were grinding and turning and rolling inexorably toward me.

I will tell you that I am not liked much by the police officers

I once worked with, but there is a code that is sometimes thick

as blood. That makes an ex-partner whom you almost took down

with you get hold of bank records so you might know where a

Kelly Marcel has been using her VISA card.

I will tell you that there’s a motel somewhat south of La Jolla

where the down-and-out pay by the week.

I will tell you that I drove there.

That I saw her drop the boy at his grandmother’s, who lived

in a trailer park by the sea.

That the boyfriend took off for parts unknown.

That it’s down to her.

I will tell you that I sit in a dark motel room.

That I’ve pulled the shades down tight so she won’t see me

when she walks in. So she’ll be sure to turn away from me to

switch on the light.

I will tell you that I hear her now, the slam of her car door, the

crunch of gravel leading up to her door.

I will tell you that my Walther .45 has two bullets in it. Two.

I will tell you the door is opening.

I will tell you that finally and at last the dark no longer scares

me, that there is a peace more comforting than anger.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

Who do I say this to?

This I
won’t
tell you.

I won’t.

James Rollins’s
Sandstorm
(2003) and
Map of Bones
(2004),

were departures from his usual work. His prior thrillers were

all stand-alones, with a separate cast of characters. But in

these two, Rollins introduced his first series with recurring

characters. He pursued that course based on input from his

readers and from personal desire. For years, fans had contacted him and asked questions about various cast members

from his earlier thrillers. What became of Ashley and Ben’s

baby after
Subterranean
(1999)? What is the next port of call

for the crew of the
Deep Fathom
(2001)?

Eventually, Rollins came to realize that
he
wanted to know

those answers, too. So he challenged himself to construct a

series—something unique and distinct. He wanted to build

a landscape of three-dimensional characters and create his

own mythology of these people, to watch them grow over the

course of the series, balancing personal lives and professional,

some succeeding, some failing. Yet at the same time, Rollins

refused to let go of his roots. Trained as a biologist with a degree in veterinary medicine, his new series, like his previous

thrillers, folded scientific intrigue into stories of historical

mystery. His new characters belong to
Sigma Force
, an elite

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team of ex-Special Forces soldiers retrained in scientific disciplines (what Rollins jokingly describes as “killer scientists

who operate outside the rule of law”). Finally, from his background as a veterinarian, the occasional strange or exotic animal often plays a significant role in the plot.

And this short story is no exception.

Here, Rollins links his past to the present. He brings forward a minor character, one of his personal favorites, from

his earlier stand-alone thriller
Ice Hunt
(2003). Joe Kowalski, a naval seaman, is best described as someone with the

heart of a hero but lacking the brainpower to go with it. So