Retribution: The Second Chances Trilogy Book Three (40 page)

“You’ll never hear any complaints there . . . but—”

“But you want the whole package.”

“Yeh, that’d be one way of putting it. And soon as possible.”

“I’m working on it.”

“That mean the doctor’s comin’ here?”

“No, it means I’m going there, on Monday, with as big an entourage as it takes. If a circus has to be made out of a visit to my OB-GYN, I say make it a big circus. If I thought he wouldn’t die of embarrassment in a waiting room full of pregnant women, I’d even take Anthony along, give him a break in the routine.”

“If it’s a big circus you want, why not take me? I’m currently ranked biggest show on earth.”

“You saw the morning papers.”

“Yeh, on telly where I’m lead story just everywhere and the newsreaders were about as animated as I’ve ever seen ’em. Knocked Reliance World Cup results off the front pages in a couple of instances and whatever the Iron Lady’s up to these days isn’t gettin’ the banners I am. Makes you wonder, actually . . . Makes you wonder when the stalking of a celebrity gets more attention than the cricket scores. Gotta make you wonder what the odds are at the betting shops.”

“You’re not suggesting—”

“Wouldn’t rule it out. Nate says since the Grillo massacre was publicized, Jakeway’s been given antihero status in some avenues of influence, referred to as ‘Jake the Ripper’ by others. Before this is done with we’ll be seein’ him glorified as the next Batman nemesis and the must-have Halloween mask.”

“Nate’s not doing anything to stop it, is he?”

“No, we’re back to the old stance—no refutations, no righteous claims, no comments that only add fuel to the fire. The truth’s gonna out soon enough. The facts’ll be known soon enough, then we’ll see who’s disappointed and who’s titillated, won’t we?’

“We will indeed, lover boy, we will indeed. Now go scrape the muck off yourself and we’ll have some lunch and talk about breaking out of here on Monday.”

“I wanna go to the arcade and the cinema and Boots and Marks Spencer and I’m gonna want tandoori and soft-serve and a stop at Leeds Castle and the—”

“Go!” She laughs at his send-up of Anthony and waves him away.

A light on the house phone blinks as she’s clearing her desk of all but tomorrow’s lesson plan. She picks up to hear a breathless Rachel say that she and Colin are wanted in the porte-cochère straightaway.

On her way to catch Colin before he hits the shower, Laurel encounters Anthony, apparently set on the same task.

“Chris is here!” the boy shouts as he runs past her toward the master suite.

Since when is that an occasion? Chris comes by on a fairly regular basis. Are pickings so lean a visit from their nearest friend and neighbor is now something to get worked up about? She hurries along after Anthony as if it were.

After shivering through another long wait, Hoop stirs from his hiding place on the upper floor of the barn. The maintenance workers are long gone and no sounds have reached him from the nearby road in an hour or more.

He creeps down a sturdy well-canted stairs and does a quick catfooted inspection of the ground floor and the three attached round buildings without figuring out what crop it was they milled and bagged here. Maybe milled’s not the right word, though, because he hasn’t seen grindstones anywhere and the press he saw on the upper floor of the barn looked like it was just for bagging. And maybe he’s wrong thinking it was grain they processed because no cereal grass he ever heard of had to be roasted before it went to market. That was a job for Kelloggs of Battle Creek; that was for the Post Toasties people to take care of.

But the roasting he’s sure about; each of the three cone-topped buildings has a fire chamber—or, in the one instance, a hearth where a fire chamber used to be—and with the one exception, openwork platforms above for whatever was roasted by the heat sucked up through those cones that work as chimneys.

He does most of his poking around on the main floor of the barn. Enough light’s stabbing through the slatted window openings for him to discover a supply of gunny sacks in one corner and several large bags of charcoal in another. Dilapidated shelves on an inside wall hold an assortment of tools that look for all the world like the ones Big Bill used for making snow shoes and fancy cribbage boards.

In amongst the tools are a couple of kerosene lanterns and a bundle of kitchen matches wrapped in oilcloth—for all the good either would do him because the only fuel cans he comes across are marked “paraffin.” He wastes no time wondering why anyone would keep canning wax in a barn and reminds himself it’s food and water he should be looking for, not curiosities.

With that thought uppermost, he bypasses the oldest tractor he’s ever seen and ignores for now the large assortment of old-fashioned farm implements, wagon parts, and horse gear taking up most of the floor space. If he’s stuck here even half as long as he was holed up in the woods, he’d better find something to eat right away and something to catch rainwater in, saying there’s no water to be had by other means.

He slips out the same partially-open door he came in through and notices what he didn’t earlier, when hiding himself was the only thing on his mind. To one side of the flat track door there’s a stone drinking trough for the horses that pulled those farm implements. And at the far end of the trough, there’s a rusted hand pump that might still work if he can come up with enough water to prime it and some way to grease its parts.

Beyond the trough, on another side of the barn, he finds a thick hedge of rhubarb that’s about done for the year. If worse comes to worse, he can probably gnaw some sustenance out of the woody stalks. That discovery braves him to venture a little deeper into the unmowed, untilled surroundings with an eye out for chickweed, soup nettles, dandelions, sunchokes, ramps, burdock, lamb’s lettuce—any of the edibles snubbed by most white men.

Exchange spring for fall, and Michigan’s U.P. for Kent, England, and he’d be able to find all those plants and more. He’d find the special spongy mushrooms that come to life in the secret place near the dead elm, and collect tight-coiled fiddleheads from the fern patch outside the shed. And he’d know just where to look for wild asparagus and the first strawberries. The hollyhocks would be started; morning-glory seed would be in the ground. The first growth of cress would be greening the edges of the creek and the cattail marshes would be alive with fresh new . . .

He stops the remembering with a dizzying shake of his head. He’s got about as much chance of revisiting any of that as he has stumbling across a Blimpie sandwich and two-liter jug of Coke on these untended grounds. Game is what he’ll have to rely on. Any kind, including the kind even his people don’t eat anymore. And he’d better be ready to eat it raw unless he wants to attract attention by building a fire in one of those chimney-houses.

Slinking back to the shelter of the buildings, he’s as dizzy as he was when he tried to shake memory out of his head and as hungry as he’s ever been in his life. Steadying himself at the bed of past-its-prime rhubarb, he cuts a couple stalks—just in case—and then stops at the horse trough, where he gives the pump handle an experimental push. It’s froze up, as expected, and the inch or two of rainwater in the bottom of the trough is full of sludge, as expected. From cupped hands, he drinks as much brackish water as he dares and reenters the barn with plans to follow it with as much woody rhubarb as his shrunken stomach will tolerate.

When he founders into the gunny sacks he spotted earlier, it’s not because he couldn’t make it all the way to the stairs and up the stairs to the better hiding place above; it’s because the sacks might wick some of the chill out of his bones. “Yes, that’s why,” he mumbles against the rumbling of his innards and the darkness closing in on all sides at five-something in the afternoon.

Was it the gripes within his gut that woke him or something from without? He won’t know till he figures out where he is and why he’s gripping a gnawed-on stalk of rhubarb like it’s his most valuable possession. But before he can get his bearings, a greater need takes hold. He scrambles to answer that need in an old rusted bucket and remains squatted over it till the worst of the cramping passes and there’s a good chance he won’t soil himself when he uncoils from that position.

Returned to the bed of gunny sacks, he now recognizes where he is and how much time has passed. According to his watch and the angle of the light piercing the window slats, more than fourteen hours have gone by—hours when he can’t be sure he was asleep or dead to the world of other causes. He can’t say for sure how much of the rhubarb he ate or if that’s what brought on the botheration of his bowels. No, it can’t have been the rhubarb, he’s tougher than that; he’s had a lot worse to eat than that, so it must have been the dirty water.

This starts him thinking what all he’d do with unlimited clean water besides drink it. He’d wash himself and wash his clothes; he’d make a calming soup of whatever natural ingredients he could find; stew whatever game he could catch and rebuild his strength.

He’s sinking into darkness again when scratching-tapping sounds jerk him back to the light. The sounds come in fits and starts, fade in and fade out like whatever’s causing them is playing with him—mocking him from a safe distance.

With what strength he has left, Hoop struggles into a low crouch, arms himself and readies for a struggle. The struggle, when it comes, is with the rooster that showed him the way under the fence. And it’s not much of a struggle. Its head comes off with one smooth slash of the blade—one symbolic slash of the blade, a person could say.

He grabs for the body before it can stagger far, takes a deep energizing draught of the blood spurting from its neck before stripping feathers off in haphazard handfuls and biting into the tough muscular breast of the bird. His jaws soon tire; he’ll have to stop for awhile, but the benefits of this savagery are already coursing through him; his thinking’s already improved to the extent he now recalls that charcoal doesn’t give off any smoke to speak of.

“Place has a certain charm hasn’t it?” Emmet says as they lay claim to a round table on the banquette side of the Richoux Tea Room and Restaurant.

“I hadn’t noticed.” Nate says, taking the inboard seat rather than recall an unnerving experience by sitting where he did the last time he breakfasted here. “Convenience and low profile are all I’m looking for these days.” He lays out several pages of notes and a pen.

Emmet lights a cigarette, an obvious stall and not his usual style unless something’s forthcoming that could rival Brownie Yates’s revelations of a month ago.

“We can save time and avoid repetition if you fill me in on what you’ve been told of Chris’s find.” Emmet eyes the stack of notes.

“I’ve plenty of time and I don’t mind some overlap. You first. From the beginning.”

Not given to dramatic gestures, a forceful exhalation of smoke is another indication of Emmet’s reluctance to proceed. But once started, he pauses only to order coffee and toast from a hovering waitress and to butt the unfinished cigarette. With minor embellishment, he describes what’s already known,—what’s already included in Nate’s notes—that Chris Thorne made a sobering find yesterday that could change the very nature of the ongoing crisis.

For the sake of corroboration, Nate pretends to be vague about exactly where this discovery took place. “They’re saying it was some distance from the road and strictly a hideout. Did I understand that correctly?”

“You did. The campsite was deep into the wooded area of Chris’s acreage, too far removed for Jakeway to monitor activity on the road. But once they were summoned to the scene, the police determined that someone—allegedly Jakeway—had a watching post adjacent the road. A beaten-down spot behind a dry-stone wall, it was, and just opposite the Terra Firma gates.”

“Jesus,” Nate mutters even though he’s heard this before.

“The constable who briefed you last evening, did he go into detail about what was found at the campsite?” Emmet says.

“Depends on what you mean by detail.” Nate refers to his notes for the corresponding entry. “I was told the bike and the bundled items found in the tree definitely belonged to Jakeway, as substantiated by clerks at the Middlestone sporting goods store and by personnel at the Weald Guest House.”

“Were you told that Jakeway left behind all his possessions in the manner of the previous abandonment—to include current means of transportation, camping equipment, money, spare clothing, and elements of disguise? Oh, and they tell me there was a journal of sorts and some sort of purchased souvenir item, neither of which have been properly analyzed as of yet. But all signs would indicate he’s scrapped the Hector Sandoval persona, much as he did his true identity at the New Jersey venue.”

“What are we talking about here? He dumped another set of documents? What’s the significance? What
else
am I missing?” Nate uncaps the pen, adds these details to his deficient supply.

“We’re talking about whether or not he’ll attempt morphing into someone or something else because yes, he did dump the phony passport and driving license. Amongst the senior constables, that action holds tremendous significance. They suggest he’s gone wholly rogue at this juncture.”