Final Crossing: A Novel of Suspense (4 page)

He watches as she loads her bags into a dated Camry, its paint dulled under several layers of street grime. No child seats.

She pulls out and Rudiger follows her. He keeps a distance. She takes him from busy boulevards into quieter residential streets. He sees her pull into a driveway and he drives past, knowing she can’t see him as she pulls into a garage.

He drives another block and parks his car next to a small expanse of dead grass with a play structure on it. Paint faded from age. Too cold for kids to be out.

He walks back toward her house, keeping his head bowed while his gaze remains fixed before him. No one else outside. He checks his watch.

Rudiger looks in the window next to the door and sees a messy house. The woman is unclean. Unclean people suit him not at all. He continues looking and sees no movement. No indication anyone is home except her. No car in the driveway. None on the street in front of the house. Her onecar garage was empty before she pulled in.

She’s alone. Rudiger knocks. No one comes.

He waits a moment longer. He starts humming. Rings the doorbell.

Somewhere inside he hears the steps. They grow louder as she comes closer.

Rudiger steps to the side. If she bothers to look through the peep hole, she’ll see no one.

The footsteps inside stop. A few seconds pass. Rudiger thinks he might have to force himself in. Then she unlocks the door and opens it.

Stupid.

Rudiger swings into view, smashing his fist into the bridge of her nose before she can even think to react. She falls backwards and lands hard on the floor. Carpet keeps her skull from cracking.

Rudiger shuts and locks the door as he listens to her wheezing and gurgling on the floor. He hums louder, losing himself in the rhythms of a song he can’t place. When he turns to her, she is groaning and grabbing her face. He pulls her hands from her face and drags her by the arms out of view from the front door.

He drops her arms and they thud on the hallway floor. Rudiger knows she is done. She can’t move. Can’t scream. Helpless. He quickly searches the small house. No one else home.

When he returns she stretches her face into terrified protest.
Probably was hoping I was looking for money
, he thinks. Or jewelry. But I came for her and her alone. Now she knows it.

He straddles her body and squats down over her torso. His legs pin her arms to her sides. She opens and closes her eyes, as if eventually she’d open them and he’d be gone.

“Pullee...pullee...” Her words are garbled, but Rudiger knows she is saying
please
. He’s an interpreter, after all.

She begins to cry, stopping only to choke on the blood draining into her throat.

For a second, he sees something in her eyes, a flash that pulls him back into a void. He sees the whore, standing over him, laughing as the Preacherman starts slicing up the side of his face, telling him he’s a dirty fucking boy. A sinning boy. So bad a sinner that he better hope Jesus gives him forgiveness when the Rapture comes. And that whore bitch woman just laughed as the blood poured down his face.

The vision fades.

The woman closes her eyes. Rudiger begins.

WASHINGTON D.C. APRIL 6

“YOU ’RE BACK.”
Veronica’s gaze swept over Jonas, noting the soft cast on his wrist. “Not too much worse for the wear. Didn’t get your pretty face too bruised up.”

Which wasn’t true. He still had a large welt on his forehead. Jonas dropped his briefcase on his desk, looking at the clutter. He’d only been gone for three days, but three days is all it takes in politics to lose your footing permanently.

He turned to his assistant, whom he only ever called V. Tall, athletic. Feminine to the point Jonas assumed that, at any time, only expensive lingerie separated her couture from her naked skin. She was achingly beautiful and inexplicably single, and Jonas had often been tempted to ask her out before his senses got the better of him. It was bad enough his personal life was always fucked-up. He didn’t want to do the same with his professional one.

“You didn’t come to visit me in the hospital,” he said.

“I did. You just weren’t conscious.” She brushed past him and dropped a stack of papers on his desk without explaining what they were. “It was the only time I’ve seen you vulnerable.”

A dull ache resumed in the back of his head. “Then you haven’t been around me enough.”

“I’m glad you’re okay.”

“Thanks, V. Me, too. What did I miss in the last couple of days?”

She shrugged. “Just the normal life-and-death decisions that are made here every day.”

“Anything actually interesting?”

“No. Not really.” She paused. “Except Michael Calloway. You heard about that?”

“Who hasn’t? It’s the only thing on the news.” Jonas thumbed through the stack of papers she’d given him. None of it could wait, but all of it would. “I’m catching a flight later to go to the funeral. The Senator asked me to.”

“Need anything from me?” she asked. “You mean like a date to a funeral?”

“I have just the outfit.”

“I’m sure you do. But I don’t think the point of the funeral is to have all eyes on you.” Jonas flipped through the first few pages of a brief on a bill to expand coal-mining rights in western Pennsylvania. It’ll never pass, he thought. Though if it did, it would mean huge political capital for the Senator.

“Heard you broke up with Juliette. Want to talk about it?” Jonas finally looked up and sighed. “Yeah, do you have a few hours so maybe we can braid each other’s hair and swap stories of heartache?”

“Don’t be an ass.”

“It’s my default position.”

“Well, I’m here to talk if you need me.”

“Thanks. I do appreciate it. We just...I guess she didn’t see what was worth hanging around for.”

“Then she’s a fool.”

He smiled. “More like an idiot savant.”

She offered her own crooked smile and tilted one leg forward. “More fish in the sea?”

“I’m sure there are.”

“Good.” V crossed her arms. “You get back to work, then. I won’t bug you for at least fifteen minutes.”

“Thanks,” Jonas muttered, finally sitting down. “Actually, V, can you do me a favor?”

She turned. “Of course.”

“Grab me a couple Advil, will ya?” He massaged his temples. “Actually, make it three.”

• • •

Jonas’s visits to his dad were usually reserved for the weekend when he wasn’t in the office (at least not all day) and when traffic was more an annoyance than an unyielding force of nature. Jonas didn’t know how his trip to Philly would play out and he wanted to see his father before he left. Sooner was always better than later. Later could be too late.

As expected, the rush-hour roads were a snarled mess and the seventeen-mile trip was a combination of misery and boredom, assuaged only slightly by an NPR Podcast Jonas had downloaded and hadn’t yet had time to hear.

He walked into the Jefferson Memory Care Residence as he always did, with a mixture of trepidation and sadness. Signed in at reception, gave and received familiar greetings with the staff, and headed back into the north wing of the building. He entered the code into the electronic keypad at the first set of doors and read the sign he’d read countless times before:
WARNING! Elopement risk. Please close door firmly behind you.

Through the doors and into the hallway. The smell was immediate and familiar. It wasn’t decay and it wasn’t industrial cleaner, but some mix of the two. Nurses and staff smiled at him as he passed. Residents offered blank stares or looked through him, as if his was just another ghostly presence mixed in with their twisted view of reality. Those with stronger minds sometimes looked at him with pleading eyes. Those people were few. Jefferson wasn’t the place you sent Aunt Betty when she could no longer remember how to use the microwave.

Jonas’s mother been the caregiver for Cpt. William Osbourne (Ret.) for the first few years. The disease had come suddenly and without mercy, as such things do. The symptoms were mild at first. At first. The worst was the fourth year. Before Jefferson. His dad still understood what was happening. Barely. The man who flew over twenty combat missions over Cambodia and Vietnam slowly decayed into a ghost who shat his pants and couldn’t remember who he was.

Then Jonas’s mother died of a brain aneurysm. No warning. She simply collapsed one day while giving her husband lunch. A neighbor coming to visit found the Captain (as he’d
always
been called) sitting on the kitchen floor, stroking his wife’s hair, as water boiled over onto the stove.

Jonas hadn’t wanted to put his father in a home, but with no siblings for help and not enough money to support a live-in nurse for more than a couple of months, he had no choice. The first facility was simple, caring, and covered by the Captain’s pension. But it took just two months for the Captain to show enough violent tendencies to be “disqualified” for treatment in a private facility. That’s when things went downhill fast.

Jefferson took in the violent cases. It was the bastion of last hope for those with advanced Alzheimer’s, hope being a place to die with a slice of dignity rather than a place to recover. Since arriving at Jefferson just over a year ago the Captain had lost all ability to speak and walk, and the best reactions Jonas could expect from his father were open eyes, an occasional nod, and the thinnest crack of a smile. Smiles were rare.

Jonas keyed in the code to the second set of doors and entered the north wing. The Captain’s room was first on the right. Jonas checked there first, but he found Carolyn—an eighty-something ex-fashion designer—asleep in the Captain’s bed. Carolyn had a tendency to sleep wherever the hell she wanted.

A familiar nurse stuck her head in the door.

“He’s in the hallway,” she said. “God, what happened to you?”

“Long story.” He walked down the hallway, finding his father in the corner at the far end.

In earlier years, the Captain made the Great Santini look like a pussy. He was the warrior who had seldom spoken, but when he did, every word carried the weight of the world with it. He was the decorated soldier. The brother among his fellow soldiers. The dedicated—though distant—husband. The man to whom duty meant everything, before that very idea became a cliché. The Captain was the reason Jonas went into the military. Not to try to please his father. But to try to be his father.

The Captain sat alone in his wheelchair, his chin touching his bony chest, his hands gripping the chair’s arms for support. He wasn’t asleep because Jonas could hear sounds emanating deep in the Captain’s throat. Sounded like humming. Jonas pulled up a cracked plastic chair and sat next to his father, silent in his attention, trying to recognize the song. After a minute he gave up.

“Hey Dad. It’s Jonas.” He leaned down and looked up into his father’s face. The Captain’s eyes opened halfway and the humming stopped. “You look good, Dad. Real good.”

No reaction. The humming started again.

In warmer weather Jonas would wheel his father outside for some fresh air and sunshine on his milky skin. Too cold for that today, so Jonas picked up one of the Captain’s hands and held it tight as he recounted the week’s events.

“Big week, Dad,” he said. “Got hit by a car. Can you believe that?” He held up his cast to prove it.

More humming.

“Yeah, could’ve died. But then I figured you would be

bored as hell if both Mom and I were dead, so I decided to live.” Jonas thought he saw a smile, but couldn’t be sure. “Got a pretty bad concussion, though. Real pain in my ass. Threw up like a drunken frat boy last night because of it. And now I have to go to a funeral for someone who was crucified. Crazy fuckin’ week.”

He looked again. The Captain was a big fan of salty language, and often a well-placed
fuck
or
shit
got a reaction. Not today.

Jonas kept talking and the Captain kept humming, their respective sounds in a rhythm and cadence that somehow worked together, the two men in worlds far apart but still somehow connected. Jonas ran his thumb back and forth over the bones in the back of his father’s hand, a gesture he never even would have dreamed of doing when his father was healthy. It was amazing, Jonas thought, how only a disease that rendered the old man demented could allow Jonas to share affection with him.

He even told his father about the flashback he had of Somalia. The explosion. Falling from the building. The little black arm, detached from its owner, lying in the dirt road next to him.

“I wanted to forget,” Jonas told him. “And I thought I had, but something made me remember. Maybe it was the accident. Maybe it was just time for me to think of it again.” But there was more, wasn’t there? The car accident. The flash of his time in the Mog. They weren’t quite separate events. There was a thread between them, one connecting the other, and Jonas understood that thread, because it also passed directly through the man sitting in front of him. It was a window on mortality, a reminder that to dust we all return, and that time is short, and life not to be taken for granted. Jonas had almost died in the Mog that day. He nearly died on the Beltway. And in front of him, the reminder that even those who survive wars succumb to unconquerable foes.