Steel Breeze (19 page)

Where
the road widened again, Sensei slowed the vehicle and pulled into what looked
like a turnaround for snowmobiles in winter. He slid the box across his lap in
the little sedan, already dressed in his black
hakama
and
kimono
.
He took a Swiss Army knife from the glove compartment and slit the packing tape
along the seam of the box, removed the embroidered bag from within, and,
reaching into the bag, closed his hand gently around the silk-wrapped hilt of
the
katana
.

Sitting
in the driver’s seat and looking up the road for any sign of approach, any
indication that he had been noticed (there was none, but he could hear
delighted cries and splashes from the lake), he reached into the glove box
again and flicked open a slim metal case. He pinched a clove cigarette between
two fingers and put it to his lips. He lit it and, closing his eyes, took one
long meditative drag. Exhaling through the cracked window, he watched the wind
snatch the sweet vapor and shred it through the dripping black branches
overhead.

He
climbed from the little white car and, standing in the empty road, bowed to the
ghost of Mr. Kanemori in the east where a haze-shrouded sun burned unseen. Holding
the sword in his left hand, he slid it through his sash and straps, and then
pushed his left thumb against the
tsuba
, unlocking the blade from the
scabbard. The hilt ejected into his eager right hand as smoothly as ever, and
another sweet draught of clove scent wafted up into his sinuses. Soon he would
smell the iron of freshly spilled blood. The joyful shrieks echoing through the
lake air would change color through a spectrum of anguish like the foliage of
this place in autumn.

He
tossed the glowing cigarette into a wheel rut. Then, with all ceremony attended
to, he commenced to walk toward the enemy.

It
was not a walk like any in the western lexicon of foot travel. It was a
crouching, sliding step, executed with slow, gliding grace. The walk was a meditation
unto itself. With his legs and feet concealed in the black pleated folds of the
hakama
, any observers would have thought they were watching a man float
over the ground on a carpet of winds.

The
first thing he saw as he cleared the trees flanking the dirt lot was a cold
fire pit. The blackened concrete brought to mind the buildings of Hiroshima,
forever blackened with the photographic shadows of human bodies vaporized in
the blast and blown on a breeze of carbon dust at the cusp of the rolling shock
wave. Trimmed branches leaned against the concrete, their tips sticky with
marshmallow residue. This fire pit was cool, but the smell of charred flesh
tinged the air, and a film of smoke from a nearby coal fire smudged the sky
above the grassy yard where it sloped down toward the lake around the corner of
the cottage.

A
gunshot punctured the air, close and loud, then rolled across the water.

Sensei
did not flinch or alter his stride.

He
crept close to the pale turquoise wall of the cottage where the propane and
water tanks covered him from view of anyone in the yard. From this vantage
point he could see a portly, middle-aged man with gray hair, dressed in cargo
shorts and a polo shirt, scraping a spatula across a portable grill. In his
left hand he held a .22‐caliber rifle by the barrel. A girl in a bathing-suit
top and cut-off jeans reached impatiently for the gun while the man flipped the
hamburgers.

“My
turn,” she said.

But
the man didn’t give up the gun when the girl, who appeared to be about twelve
years old, tugged gently at his wrist. “Hang on a minute, Annie Oakley,” he
said. “I’m gonna show you something.”

The
pair stood in a clearing, on the edge of evening, the indigo sky fading to
deeper purple between the trees. Soon the children in the lake would notice the
air getting colder and would quit their water games, climb back up the rocky
lawn toward the smell of dinner. A dollop of hamburger grease dripped onto the
coals with a sizzle, and orange light flared up, illuminating the man’s face
for a second.

Sensei
recognized him as Bill Tibbets. Bill was slightly more scrupulous than some of
his relatives about what information he shared online, but even a single
profile picture was enough for a positive identification. Bill was a Tibbets,
and that put him on the kill list.

Bill
Tibbets waved a hand at his face, swatting away a mosquito, then slapped at
another on his forearm, leaving a smear of his own blood. He brushed his hand
on his shorts and told the girl, “Light those citronella candles, would you,
honey?” He put the spatula down and took a swig from a beer bottle, seeming to
relish making the girl wait for permission to take the rifle.

There
was a paper target stapled to an oak tree some fifteen yards away where the
lawn met the woods, its inner rings untouched, the perimeter pockmarked to
reveal the golden flesh of punctured wood through the holes in the paper.

Sensei
looked at the rifle and followed the line of it up the man’s arm to the little
blossom of blood. Soon the Spirit Warrior would taste what the mosquito had. While
studying martial arts in Japan, he’d heard accounts of the Rape of China. Thousands
of Chinese heads had lined the roads on bamboo poles to demonstrate the
ferocity of the Rising Sun, thousands of bodies stripped of flesh and fed to
dogs at first…later to men. Then the war against the Australians in New Guinea
when food shortages in the bomb-scorched Pacific islands almost starved the
Emperor’s army. But for the true Spirit Warrior, there was never a food
shortage as long as there was an enemy. Soldiers were ordered not to eat fallen
comrades, but the flesh of foreign foes was known to increase one’s spiritual
vitality.

Sensei
wondered if he would have time to consume the spirit of Bill Tibbets. It would
depend upon how quickly he could work. And where was Bill’s brother, Tim? Approaching
the house, Sensei had seen a woman through a window, setting paper plates and
plastic ware around a picnic table. They would eat indoors to avoid the
mosquitoes. It was a small gathering for a reunion, but there were still
spouses and children present who were not on the kill list. He had come here to
sever a thread, to end a bloodline, to slice a name from a scroll. But events
were moving quickly now, and it was possible that the cutting would not be as
clean and precise as he had intended. The flyboys who dropped bombs on cities
didn’t care for such things, but a samurai was different. Anyone could kill
indiscriminately, but the sword was a symbol of pristine discrimination. In the
hands of the Bodhisattva Fudo Myoto, the flaming sword was an emblem of the
wisdom to separate this from that.

Sensei
watched the girl as she leveled the rifle with her eye and placed the wooden
stock in the hollow of her shoulder. Whoever she was…she was not on his scroll.
He took a deep breath and felt it flowing into his sinews and the subtle
channels that carried the
Qi
throughout his body. Speed would be of the
essence.

There
was a rustle in the branches overhead, and the cawing of an angry crow. A
flutter of black wings. Looking up, he saw that a hawk had alighted on the
tallest branch of a dead, lightning-split oak, scattering a black cloud of
scavengers. Sensei smiled. This was an auspicious omen.

The
girl had been startled, but she had not fired. Tibbets was instructing her,
adjusting the set of her shoulders. Then she squeezed the trigger, and the sound
set the hawk to flight as a new hole exploded from the gray skin of the target
tree across the field. The paper was unharmed. Tibbets reclaimed the gun from
the disappointed child and told her to run along and tell the others that
dinner was ready. She trotted toward the water, sandals flapping, ponytail
swishing.

Time
to strike. Sensei called out, “Bill! Check this out.”

Bill
Tibbets cocked his head, scrunched the worry lines on his balding pate, and
squinted at the corner of the cottage where the evening shadows had grown long
and deep. He stepped out of the circle of light cast by the bug candles,
holding the rifle loosely, as if only half aware which was in his hand at the
moment—gun or spatula. It was like leading an animal to slaughter. You spoke
its name, gave it a command, and it came to the blade.

When
Tibbets was in range and out of sight of the lower lawn, Sensei stepped forward,
drawing steel, and lopped the man’s head off in a single fluid motion, sending
it flying onto the grass near the tree line, trailing a ribbon of blood. There
was no sound from the victim but a gurgling of air escaping the severed
windpipe, a bubbling in the arterial flow for a moment, and then the dull
impact of the heavy body hitting the dirt. Sensei swung the
katana
around in a spinning arc, ending with a short stop that sent a curtain of blood
and tissue flying from the edge of the blade to patter on the leaves of a
nearby fern.

He
drew the spine of the blade across the webbing between the thumb and forefinger
of his left hand where they gripped the mouth of the scabbard, and in a
graceful flash that slowed toward the end of the motion, resheathed with
another long, low, audible exhalation. His eyes remained fixed on the eyes of
his victim as they ceased to blink.

Now
he reached between his knees and slapped the pleats of his
hakama
out to
the sides so that he could kneel in
seiza
. He drew the short blade, the
tanto
,
and with the casual confidence of a surgeon cut the blood soaked polo shirt
away and sliced into the corpse’s pasty flesh, removing the liver with flawless
efficiency. No motion of the knife was superfluous. All was executed with
ceremonial concentration, unhurried grace, and cool equanimity. He felt no rage
and no fear as he rose from the ground and tossed the liver onto the grill
among the charring hamburgers. The fire flared again as the dripping blood
sizzled and smoked on the coals.

Sensei
thought of the profile pictures. Even at the advanced age of seventy-five, his
memory was diamond sharp. While his meat cooked, he walked down the lawn to the
dock in search of familiar faces.

Chapter 19

The haunted
house where Shaun Bell had spent an October chopping the heads off of wax
dummies was deserted now. Approaching the familiar building, he felt an ache of
nostalgia for simpler days, and wondered—not for the first time—how it was that
the police had never come looking for him after Sandy Parsons was beheaded. After
all, how many locals had watched him do the deed, sending a wax head flying on
the crest of a wave of theatrical blood without so much as clipping an errant
lock of hair from the mannequin’s wig?

But
those days were gone. The owners of the Palace of Pain had packed up and moved
south, leaving the abandoned shell of the attraction to finally settle into the
business of the authentic neglect and decay that it had for so long artfully
imitated.

Bell
drove his secondhand Saturn up the long dusty road to the barn behind the
Palace. The boy lay sleeping on the back seat with his hands cable-tied. They’d
been on the highway for a while, and Bell figured the stress must have knocked
the kid out. Either that or he was only pretending to sleep to get his
kidnapper’s guard down, planning to kick him when he opened the door. But the
kid was only four. Was he really capable of that kind of plotting?

Kidnapper.

Bell
had been thinking about that word for a while now. He was already a killer, so
he couldn’t say why it felt uncomfortable adding this to his list of felonies. If
his role in the boy’s life remained kidnapper only and didn’t progress to
killer, then it would be a step back from the precipice. Yes, he had killed, but
he had not yet killed a child. Sensei was now hundreds of miles away, but Bell
could still feel the momentum of his master’s wishes like a gale-force wind at
his back, pushing him forward, at times lifting his feet off the ground.

He
got out of the car and watched the kid through the window. The boy didn’t stir
when Bell closed the door. He stood silently for a moment, staring through the
film of brown dust they had picked up on the back roads, and when the boy still
appeared to be sleeping, he had a momentary flash of panic. Was the kid still
breathing? Had he suffocated under the duct-tape gag? A peculiar mixture of
fear and relief welled up in his chest as he wiped the dust from the window and
narrowed his gaze to the boy’s torso, looking for the rhythm of respiration.

The
boy’s shirt was rising and falling. Bell let himself breathe in again.

At
this very moment Sensei might be wiping the blood from his blade, confident
that Bell had already cut this final, low hanging fruit from the Parsons’
family tree.

Would
Sensei feel
confident that his apprentice had completed the task he had been trained for? Or
did the old man doubt his
yamato damashi?
The last thing the old man had
said to him on his way out the door with his suitcase in hand was the same old
farewell they had established years ago, a teasing refrain: “Don’t start
watching TV.”

Bell
vividly remembered the first time they had sat down in front of one to watch a
program together, one of the only times, back in California. Mr. Hashimoto
didn’t have a TV in his apartment, but he had asked Shaun, while his parents
were at work, if they had a VCR connected to theirs. Of course they did. The
old man had fetched a tape from a mailing envelope, and together they watched a
documentary about the atomic bomb in rapt silence. Shaun had learned that the
tens of thousands vaporized in the flash were the lucky ones. The effects of
the radiation made the Nazi showers and ovens look like amateur hour. In quiet
moments, the stories of the survivors still echoed in his mind: the mother too
weak to lift the wreckage from her burning children as they pleaded and
screamed in agony; the farmer who bred mutant animals after the black rain fell;
the smiling bomber who told the camera, “The target was there just as pretty as
a picture…. I made the run, let the bomb go. That was my greatest thrill.”

There
was a dusty television in the house he and Sensei shared in Port Mavis now, but
it was seldom on, and when it was, always tuned to the news. Watching reports
of drone strikes in Afghanistan, Shaun wondered if American flyboys still got a
thrill when firing at a wedding party with a joystick from a trailer in the
Nevada desert. The mathematics of war enraged him. There was no honor in it. Two
countries invaded for two towers, and two atomic bombs for Pearl Harbor.
Two
.
Fat Man and Little Boy.

But
recently Shaun had begun to wonder if Sensei also killed more for the thrill
than for the mission.

He
walked through the dust to the barn door, put his shoulder to the wood, and
slid it along the stubborn track. Inside the barn, moldy hay lay in mounds left
over from the days before the Jensen family had turned a farm into a Halloween
attraction. Wedges of sunlight sliced through the darkness from the window
seams and traced an angular geometry of gold dust across the dark green hull of
a well-maintained tractor. Bell hesitated and then looked back at the car where
the boy slept. He scanned the stark landscape for other vehicles tucked into
the shelter of the house, anything he might have overlooked while driving in,
any sign of occupants. He had planned to park his car in the empty barn to hide
it. But if the tractor was here…had Jensen really abandoned the place? Wouldn’t
he have sold the machine? The thing was in top shape, relatively new. Jensen
had used it to cut the corn maze each year, and while he probably wouldn’t have
trailered it to Georgia, he certainly wouldn’t have just left it to rot. You
might not be able to sell off a bunch of homemade animatronic ghouls, but you
damn sure could sell a tractor in New Hampshire.

Bell
stepped back out of the gloomy barn into the full blaze of day and rolled the
door closed again. He would have to find somewhere else to conceal the car.

If
I don’t find someone home.

He
ran to the cover of the cornfield and crept along its edge to the rambling
farmhouse that had been converted into the Palace of Pain. The Jensen family
home was an outbuilding across the road, little more than an apartment atop a
garage. The residence wasn’t visible from the gravel road he had followed to
the customer parking lot (a muddy field cordoned off with ropes and barrels
each October) but when he came to the end of the corn maze, he could see that
the driveway beside the apartment was vacant. The place had an uninhabited look
to it, the composite result of too many subtle details for him to put his
finger on.

There
was no one here. He ran back to the car, only now realizing that he hadn’t
locked it. One of the rear doors was open and the boy was wriggling onto the
ground like a fish flopping on the deck of a boat. His eyes were wild and red. At
the sight of Bell, a muted scream trumpeted through the duct tape and mostly back-drafted
through the kid’s snot-clogged nose.

Bell
slowed to a jog, then to a walk. Even if his quarry could manage to get to his
feet right now, there was nowhere to run to. He reached the car and bent to
pick the boy up but had to shuffle backward to avoid a flurry of flailing
kicks. He should have cable-tied the kid’s ankles too, should have at least
done it while the kid was sleeping in the car, but now it would be impossible. Somehow
he’d assumed that the boy would walk on his own two feet when they got here,
but why should he? Bell would have to carry him like a sack of potatoes—an impossibility
if the kicking continued.         

Bell
stood back and gave the boy time to kick himself out, to exhaust the urge.
The
Boy.
The Kid.
He’d been avoiding thinking of him by name. By
thinking of him only as
the boy
, or
the kid
, he’d been
dehumanizing him in preparation for the slaughter. He forced himself now to
embrace that ugly word.
Slaughter
. It tasted rancid in his mind. Was he
going to slaughter Lucas like a pig at what used to be a farm and was now a
house of horrors? The tape over Lucas’s mouth changed the look of his face,
robbed it of almost enough personality to help Bell gain some distance. But the
boy’s eyes were so big that it was little help.
I’m doing it again
, he
thought.
Lucas has big, expressive eyes
, he thought.
And right now
they are expressing pure hatred
.

Lucas
had managed to stand up, but now he toppled into the dust again from kicking
out too far. His head bounced off the car door on the way down, and he became
still except for a steady shudder that would have been a crying fit if not for
the tape.

Bell
stepped forward and touched the back of Lucas’s head. The unwashed hair felt
coarse, yet delicate against his palm. Lucas didn’t recoil immediately at the
touch, not in a way that would indicate a pain reflex. He turned his head and
looked at his captor’s face with a darkly furrowed brow that surprised Bell with
its maturity. It was amazing how quickly children learned to imitate the
expressions of their parents. Did Desmond Carmichael wear that serious, dark
expression so often that his son had picked it up like a regional accent?

Bell
lifted Lucas by the shoulders and set him on his feet.

Lucas
broke into a run, cutting across the field for the tree line. Bell watched him
run while reaching into a duffel bag on the passenger seat for a few extra-large
cable ties. Then he gave chase with long strides and swept the boy up in his arms.
He flipped him sideways and fell to his knees, trying to hold the small body
still while absorbing kicks to the gut as he fumbled to get the cable ties
threaded and locked. He should have taken the kid’s sneakers off in the car and
made it harder for him to run, harder for him to land a kick with impact. The
kid
.
Maybe that was best.

It
took most of Bell’s strength to subdue the boy and bind his legs. Even then,
the flailing continued for a moment, rippling out from the child’s midsection,
and making him look like an undulating eel. Finally, the squirming stopped, the
futility of it sinking in, until the only sound was the rapid, ragged intake of
breath through the nose. It sounded like it could be hyperventilation.

Bell
didn’t like the look or the sound of it, so he braced himself for the screaming,
and ripped off the tape.

But
the screaming didn’t come. The boy just dragged in deep, panicky draughts of
air, his eyes closed, tears cutting trails across his dirty cheeks. Eventually
the gasping slowed to a deep heaving, which soon took on a tone, a slow rising
whine that grew into a fit of crying. The tension in the little body had
dissolved into helplessness. Bell slung the boy over his shoulder and carried
him with both arms wrapped around the bound legs, half expecting to feel tiny
teeth biting into his back.

They
passed the entrance of the corn maze and continued along the wall of rustling
stalks. The only sounds were the sporadic chatter of birds and insects and the
coarse botanical gossip of the stalks as they swayed in a gentle breeze. Bell
remembered how he had cut his fingers trying to pull one of the stalks from the
ground in an idle moment one day, paying for the attempt when the edge of a
husk surprised him with its sharpness. It was a lesson to him that a sharp
enough blade didn’t need to be made of steel to cut cleanly. At the right angle
and speed, even paper could cut. As he trudged past the rows of corn with the
boy over his shoulder, he reflected that he would need to be careful with this
one. Sometimes it was the smallness of things that made them dangerous.

Bell
remembered last year’s corn maze. Every year Jensen chose a theme for the maze,
a design that could be seen from the air and, after cutting it, had a crop
duster photograph it for the website and brochures. Last year it was a spider
web, but a peculiar one: an intricate labyrinth of dead ends with only one true
path leading out. It took most patrons most of an hour to find their way back
to the Palace of Pain after being led to the giant spider topiary in the
middle. More than a few people had to raise the red poles they’d been given
upon entry to signal that they were hopelessly lost and giving up the game.

It
looked like the web maze was still mostly intact. The winter had roughed up the
corn with freeze and thaw, but the field hadn’t been razed.

Lucas
was snuffling now, his respiration almost normal. Bell hurried his pace to get
into the building before a second wind of kicking or screaming started up. Hurrying,
but not breaking into a run (that might jar the kid into resistance), he jammed
his hand into his jeans pocket and fished out the key he’d retrieved from under
a whiskey barrel beside the barn. Thank God the key had still been there. It
nagged at him that this was one more sign that maybe the place wasn’t abandoned
for good, that maybe Jensen would be back, but there was no time to worry about
that now. Better to take it as an auspicious omen: if the key hadn’t been under
the barrel, Bell would have had to break a window or kick in a door, all while
handling the boy.

The
entrance hall was claustrophobic by design. The decorations hadn’t been
removed. Long strands of dusty, theatrical Spanish moss hung from the ceiling
and crawled across the sculpted foam walls, which had been spray-painted in motley
shades of gray-fade to create the appearance in low light of a stone crypt. At
the end of the hall a ninety-degree turn, invisible until one reached it, led
to an arch, usually lit with a black light to make the neon-green inscription
glow but now dark. Bell had passed under it countless times and knew that it
established the theme of the attraction. Beneath an inverted pentagram were the
words: IN MY HOUSE THERE ARE MANY MANSIONS.