Relentless (12 page)

“Now,”
Clitherow insisted. “You can’t prove he Tasered you.
I
can’t prove he killed my mother and father, but he did.”

The air seemed to have thickened, offering such resistance that I came to a halt.

“I can’t prove he killed Margaret, my wife, but the sonofabitch did. He did. It was him.”

As he spoke, I stepped out of my study, into the foyer, from which I could see the hallway that served all the ground-floor rooms.

“I can’t prove he killed Emily and Sarah….” Clitherow’s voice broke on
Emily
and faltered to a halt on
Sarah
.

He’d had two daughters. Both under the age of ten.

Although much journalism has become advocacy in our time, I read various sources of news for the challenge of sifting the facts from the deceit and the delusion. So many people close to a novelist as well known as John Clitherow could not have suffered untimely deaths without exciting the nose for blood that still can wake a beguiled reporter to recognize genuine injustice. But I had seen nothing about this storm of homicide that tore his life asunder and blew him into hiding.

If Waxx had visited our house only once, if I had not been Tasered, I might not have believed Clitherow’s claims. His story was cogent, his narrative voice convincing; yet the high body count—and the consequent implication that Waxx was not merely a sociopath of epic proportions but instead virtually a fiend—was flamboyant in a way that his novels never were.

Recent events reminded me, however, that truth is paradoxical, that it is always stranger than fiction. We invent fiction either to distract ourselves from the world—and thus from the truth of things— or to explain the world to ourselves, but we cannot invent truth, which simply
is
. Truth, when we recognize it, always surprises us, which is why we so seldom choose to recognize it; we abhor profound surprises and prefer what is familiar, comfortable, undemanding, and pat.

I didn’t know John well enough to feel his grief as sharply as perhaps I should have, or to grieve properly for him. I had never met him except through the mail, and I had not even seen photos of his wife and daughters.

Inhibiting grief, of course, my growing apprehension not only darkened my mind and heart but also inspired a physical agitation
that drove me into the hallway—then to the sidelights flanking the front door, in expectation of seeing a black Cadillac Escalade in the street.

In lieu of pity, I felt a nervous sympathy for John, and when I tried—inadequately—to express my condolences, I did so with a commiseration as tender as compassion but more remote and hopeless.

I don’t think he needed or wanted commiseration. He had lost too much to be able to take consolation from anyone’s sympathy.

John listened only until he regained his composure. In a voice fractured but not shattered, he interrupted me, speaking with greater urgency than ever: “Waxx has resources that seem supernatural. You can’t overestimate his capabilities. He doesn’t give you breathing room. He keeps coming back and back, and back. He’s relentless. Kill him if he gives you the opportunity, because killing him is your only chance. And don’t think going to the cops will help. Funny things happen when you go to the cops about Waxx. Right now, for God’s sake, just run. Buy yourself time. As soon as you can, abandon your car, don’t use your credit cards or cell phone, don’t give him any way to find you. Get out of there. Get the hell out of there.
Go!”

He terminated the call.

I keyed in ⋆69, with no expectation that he would answer but with the hope that this call-back function would display his number. If he did not discard his disposable phone in favor of another, as he said that he would, I might be able to reach him later, when we were safely away from the house.

He proved to be as cautious as he had urged me to be. He could not be reached by ⋆69, and no number appeared on the screen of my cell phone.

Turning away from the front-door sidelight and the view of the street, heading toward the stairs, I shouted, “Penny! We gotta go!”

Her reply came from the ground floor, from the back of the house.

Off the kitchen, in the laundry room, I found her with a pile of luggage. She was pulling a big wheeled suitcase into the garage.

I grabbed two bags and followed her. “Something’s happened, it’s worse than we thought.”

She didn’t waste a precious second asking what the something might be, but instead muscled the suitcase into the back of the Ford Explorer.

In a crisis, she functioned more like a Boom than a Greenwich, very much the daughter of Grimbald and Clotilda, working quickly but calmly, confident that she would be well out of the zone of destruction when the end of the countdown came.

Other luggage had already been loaded. With the bags remaining in the laundry room, the cargo space of the SUV would be packed from end to end and side to side.

“We need to travel light,” I said, as Penny headed back toward the laundry room. “What is all this?”

Materializing beside me as I shoved two more suitcases into the Explorer, Milo said, “Stuff.”

“What stuff?”

“Important stuff.”

“Your stuff?”

Suddenly cagey, he said, “Could be.”

He wore black sneakers with red laces, black jeans, and a long-sleeved black T-shirt on the chest of which, in white block letters, was the word PURPOSE.

Already, Penny returned, pulling another trunk-size suitcase with wheels.

“Where’s Lassie?” I asked as I hurried toward the laundry room.

“Backseat,” Penny said.

I fetched the last two bags and brought them to the Explorer.

“There’s one more thing upstairs,” she said.

“No. Leave it.”

“Can’t. I’ll be just a minute.”

“Penny, wait—”

“You can close the tailgate.” She dashed from the garage into the house.

Loading the last of the suitcases, I said to Milo, “Get in the backseat with Lassie.”

“What’s going on?”

“I told you. A little trip.”

“Why the hurry?”

Closing the tailgate, I said, “Maybe we have a plane to catch.”

“Do we have a plane to catch?”

Giving him a dose of his own inscrutability, I said, “Could be.”

“Is it the Northern Hemisphere?” he asked.

“Is what?”

“Where we’re going.”

“What does it matter?” I asked.

“It matters.”

“Get in the backseat, scout.”

“I should ride shotgun.”

“That’s your mother’s job.”

“She doesn’t have a shotgun.”

“Neither do you.”

“So let’s draw straws.”

“Can you kick someone’s butt?” I asked.

“Whose butt?”

“Whoever’s. I need a butt-kicker riding shotgun.”

“Mom could kick anyone’s butt.”

“So get in the backseat.”

“Guess I will.”

“That’s my boy.”

“Northern Hemisphere is important.”

Climbing into the car, he looked so small that I couldn’t help thinking about Emily and Sarah Clitherow. The possibility of losing Milo pulled my nerves as taut as violin strings.

Penny seemed to be taking a long time. I began to feel that I had not properly conveyed to her the grim nature and importance of the new development or the greater urgency that it imposed on us.

The big garage door had not been raised. The side door remained locked. Milo would be as safe here as anywhere. Yet I was reluctant to leave him.

Penny had gone upstairs alone. At least Milo had Lassie.

“Stay put,” I shouted to the boy, and I sprinted into the house.

As I strode through the laundry room, a telephone rang.

This shrill call tone was different from that of our house phone and that of the cell in my shirt pocket.

In the kitchen, I heard the unfamiliar ring again. It seemed to come from the utility closet that backed up to the laundry room.

The closet contained no phone—unless it belonged to someone hiding there.

   In the nearest corner stood a broom, and I seized it, judging that stiff bristles jammed in the eyes would be as effective as any thrust I might make with a knife, which in any case was not as near at hand as this more domestic weapon and would require a closer engagement with Waxx than I relished.

As the call tone shrilled a third time, I opened the utility-closet door, revealing a twelve-foot-deep, five-foot-wide space with a gas furnace against the back wall. Fluorescent light from the kitchen intruded far enough to confirm that no one crouched in wait for me.

Using the broom, I brushed up the light switch and stepped into the closet as the phone rang a fourth time.

A common gas furnace is to me a mystery of engineering no less complex than a 747 and no less intimidating than a nuclear reactor. My incompetence with mechanisms and machines, and my deep wariness of them, are exacerbated, in the case of a furnace, by the presence of pressurized gas lines.

Yet even I knew that the furnace had not come from the factory with a cell phone epoxied to the face of it, and that in fact no phone had been there previously.

Wires trailed from the phone to a curious construction on the floor, beside the furnace. This ominous assemblage included a digital clock displaying the correct time, several items that I might not have been able to identify even if I’d had time to study them, and what appeared to be a block of clay of the kind with which children played, gray and oily.

On the fifth ring, the display screen lit, and the phone somehow accepted the call. Then it produced—or received—a rapid series of varied tones that might have been a coded message.

On the digital clock, the time changed from the correct 7:03:20 A.M. to the incorrect 11:57:00 P.M.

Even I, ignorant of most things mechanical, knew that our best interests would not be served if we were still in the house when the clock displayed midnight three minutes hence.

Suffering no heroic delusion that I could safely dismantle this device, I backed out of the utility closet and threw down the broom. I raced up the back stairs, shouting for Penny.

As I reached the top of the stairs and stepped into the short arm of the L-shaped upstairs hall, Penny turned the corner from the longer hall that served her studio and the master suite. She carried an artist’s portfolio large enough to hold several paintings of the size that she had lately been creating for
The Other Side of the Woods
, the book she would publish next autumn.

She said, “Cubby, a phone’s ringing, but it’s not ours.”

Our house had two furnaces, one for each floor. When I pulled open the door of the nearby utility closet and switched on the light, a phone like the one downstairs answered itself; wired to another clay-brick package, it produced a series of varied tones that surely were
coded instructions. A digital clock identical to the one in the first closet switched from the correct time to 11:57:30 P.M.

Two and a half minutes and counting.

In spite of her childhood and adolescent experience of colossal destruction, Penny made no attempt to disarm the device but hissed “Waxx” as if it were a curse word, and plunged down the back stairs, two at a time, and across the kitchen, with me so close behind that the toes of my shoes might have scuffed the heels of hers.

Bursting from the laundry room into the garage, she slapped a wall switch, and the roll-up door began to rise.

As I clambered in behind the steering wheel, Penny swung up into the passenger seat, tossed the Explorer keys to me, glanced in the back, and said, “Where’s Milo?”

The dog sat in the backseat, ears pricked and alert, but the boy was gone.

   Shouting for Milo, Penny and I flew from the Explorer as if we had been ejected by a device installed by James Bond’s favorite car customizer.

If the boy was in the garage, he apparently was in no condition to answer our calls. Penny hurried to search in, under, and around the sedan in the second parking stall, while I returned to the house.

I thought of John Clitherow. He had been Waxx’s primary target, but the critic had first taken John’s family.

The greatest punishment is not your own death but instead the loss of those you love. How much worse that loss must be if you have to live with the bitter knowledge that those who trusted and relied on you had been dealt early deaths as surrogates for you, punished for your offenses.