Strong Light of Day (10 page)

Luke trailed after him, then stopped and turned back toward Caitlin, suspended in that moment between her and his father. His eyes looked tentative and longing at the same time, filled with uncertainty, words forming in his head that never quite reached his mouth.

“We'll talk when I get back,” Caitlin said simply.

The boy blew the hair from his face out of the side of his mouth, just like his older brother, and nodded. Then he jogged off to catch up with Zach, the two of them following Cort Wesley to wherever he'd parked, leaving Caitlin to steer toward Guillermo Paz.

 

20

A
RMAND
B
AYOU,
T
EXAS

“How'd you know, Colonel?”

Paz pulled a business card from the lapel pocket of his olive-shaded shirt and handed it to Caitlin.

“What's this?”

“Psychic I saw earlier today. I told her I'd give you her card. She said there's a long line of people on the other side waiting to talk to you.”

“Most of whom I probably put there ahead of their time.”

“According to Madam Caterina, the line stretches too far into the past for her to know for sure.”

“Madam Caterina?”

“The psychic's name. It's on the card, Ranger.”

Caitlin pocketed the card without checking. “You're visiting psychics now?”

“When you're lost on the road, you stop in as many places as it takes to find your way.”

She let Paz see her gaze past him into the truck; its tires were so high she really couldn't see anything. “Even though you've got navigation installed on your dashboard, Colonel? Means you don't have to stop and ask anyone for directions. You can get where you're going all on your own.”

“Too bad we don't have something like that wired into our brains.”

“We do,” Caitlin told him. “It's called instinct, and you should know that better than anyone.”

Paz ran his eyes around him, seeming to take in a scene hidden by the trees, far out of range of the human gaze. “Madam Caterina told me one of the Torres boys was in trouble. She asked if they were your sons.”

“Close enough, I suppose. Don't tell me she told you exactly where to come.”

Paz stepped away from the truck, turning so the host of police and media types starting to grasp his presence could only view him from behind. From this angle, the width of his shoulders seemed to match that of the driver's side door, and the truck riding on tires almost as high as Caitlin's waist seemed normal in size when measured in relation to him.

“No, I was going to make a few calls after I left,” he told her. “When I started the car, the radio came on with a bulletin of those missing kids up here. It was a Spanish station. Details were sketchy but so is everything really. I knew right away that's what Madam Caterina was talking about.”

“You going back to see her again?”

“Would you like to join me?” Paz took a quick glance behind him at some media types passing by. “That's how people looked at me back in Venezuela.”

“You're a lucky man, Colonel. About as lucky as they come. You got a second chance when you came here, and a third one when Homeland Security hired you to lead their personal assassination squad. And now you can stand out here in the open, your whole past wiped off the board. The ultimate mulligan.”

“All because of you, according to Madam Caterina.”

“What else did she have to say on the subject?”

“She told me she saw a strong, blinding light that swallowed the world.”

“Uh-oh.”

“That was my thought too, Ranger.”

Before Caitlin could respond, D. W. Tepper reached them in a slow jog, so out of breath he dropped his hands to his knees in a crouch.

“We got to get a move on, Ranger,” he wheezed. “Chopper's already warming up. There's somewhere else we need to be, and fast.”

 

21

N
EW
Y
ORK
C
ITY

Brandon McCabe returned to his room upstairs, a bit wobbly after a stretch spent in the hotel bar to celebrate his victory. Because that's what embarrassing the shit out of the asshole who'd cost him his leg felt like. Of course, thanks to that leg, a few of Dane Corp's stockholders staying at this hotel insisted on paying for his drinks—out of guilt. He could see it in their eyes; the money they'd put into the company was partially responsible for the pesticide that had disabled him, no matter what the courts had to say on the subject. He'd taken Calum Dane down like an opponent on the wrestling mat back in high school, before he understood the depths of phantom pain, something that wasn't there throbbing incessantly.

What sense did that make? No more than him becoming a crusader on behalf of those with their own ax to grind against Dane Corp.

His thoughts slurring the way his words must have downstairs, McCabe stepped into his hotel room, thinking how his missing leg never throbbed when he was wearing his prosthetic, as if the space-age plastic somehow fooled his nervous system. He was pretty sure he must've left some of the toy soldier legs inside it, because he could hear something clacking about when he walked, like the sound of pennies dropped into an old-fashioned piggy bank.

McCabe closed the door behind him and flicked on the light.

“Evening, son,” greeted Calum Dane, as he wedged a toothpick between his teeth.

*   *   *

Dane sat in the room's easy chair, draped in the thin spray of light that left him mostly lost to the shadows.

“Oh, that's right,” Dane continued, the chair's leatherlike material creaking as he pushed himself out of it, “you're not my son. I wish you were, since then I'd have a chance to say good-bye. Didn't get that with the boy I lost in Afghanistan.”

Dane started the kid's way, Pulsipher falling into step behind him as if held on a leash.

“Sit down,” Dane ordered Brandon McCabe, his words a bit garbled by the toothpick wedged in his mouth. “I said, sit down.”

McCabe eased himself to the edge of the bed, gingerly, to avoid putting too much weight on his prosthetic.

“Nice performance today. Tell me who put you up to it and I won't break your other limbs.”

“You're guilty and you know it, you son of a bitch,” McCabe said, trying to sound brave.

“Not so easy sounding tough when you're not in public anymore playing to the crowd, is it, son?”

“Huh?”

“I'm going to say it again. Give me the name of whoever put you up to this.”

McCabe laid his palms down on the bedcovers, seeming to hold himself up. “I have no idea what you're talking about.”

“I'm talking about a setup, son,” Calum Dane said, easing his arms from the sleeves of his jacket and handing it to Pulsipher as if he were a coatrack. “I'm talking about someone sending you to disrupt Dane Corp's shareholders meeting. Since I don't know who, I also don't know why. Could be it's somebody with a plan to short my stock, hoping to depress its value. Could be a competitor looking to fuck us in the marketplace or with the FDA.” He stopped and shook his head, seeming displeased with himself. “Please excuse my language, me setting a bad example for a fine, upstanding young man like yourself who's already suffered enough.”

“What's that mean?”

“That you're a solid citizen, son.”

“I was talking about what you meant by ‘suffered enough.'”

Calum Dane took another step toward McCabe, his broad shoulders blocking the bulk of the room's light shed by the single desk lamp, before it could reach him. “I meant that you don't need to suffer anymore.”

McCabe tried to look like he wasn't scared, and failed. “I don't know what you want from me.”

Another step. “Yes, you do, 'cause I already told you. I want to know who put you up to this, who's paying the freight. Right now you're the guy trapped in the middle. In over his head, let's say, through no fault of his own. I'm going to assume somebody sold you a bill of goods, took advantage of your disability by using you to get me. I imagine they may have auditioned others for the role, but you're the one who got the call and a decent paycheck to go with it.”

Dane started tapping the hotel room's stuffy air with a fresh toothpick, in rhythm with his thinking, some revelation apparently striking him.

“Tell you what, son, I'll make you a deal. Whatever those folks paid you to pull this charade, I'll double if you give up their names. What do you say?”

“You owe me a leg,” the kid said. “How about you give me back what the doctors sawed off and we'll call it even?”

“We back there again?”

McCabe made himself look as strong and sure as he could. “I never left. You took my leg with that poison you spread, and unless you can give it back to me we've got nothing to talk about.”

Dane shook his head, looking honestly disappointed. He looked down at Brandon McCabe sitting on the edge of the bed and thought of his own boy getting blown to pieces in Afghanistan for no good reason at all. McCabe looking at him smugly, secure in the degree of insulation and protection being disabled afforded him. Who picks on a cripple, right? Dane had no idea what exactly was in the coffin the army sent back. It had been a closed casket at the funeral that had drawn thousands, and plenty of his boy's friends looked a lot like Brandon McCabe.

Calum Dane looked down and found himself looming directly over the kid, with no memory of taking the steps that had gotten him there. His breath felt hot as it pushed out of his mouth, noisy since it was suddenly the only sound in the room.

“Who put you up to this?”

“Nobody.”

“That's a load of shit, son. Pissant like you couldn't have come up with that show you put on by yourself. Hell, maybe they paid you to cut off your leg, too.”

McCabe tried to make himself look defiant. “Get out of my room.”

“Be glad to. Once you tell me who's behind this.”

“Nobody. Maybe your boy stepped on the land mine on purpose to avoid ever having to set eyes on you again. And I heard you got another boy they took away from you because you beat the shit out of him.” McCabe tried for a smirk that didn't quite materialize. “But I heard that wasn't the only thing you did to him.”

Calum Dane had never had an out-of-body experience, didn't believe such things existed. Which is why it felt so strange to him when he seemed to
see
himself lurch downward and punch Brandon McCabe square in the jaw.

Time froze.

Then it started up again.

Dane's knuckles erupted in fiery pain an instant after feeling the crunch of bone beneath the skin that split into a neat gash between the kid's cheek and jaw. The kid plopped backwards atop the bedcovers, eyes going glassy as they fixed on the ceiling. Then Dane watched himself reach down to McCabe's jeans and thread his hands up to find where his prosthetic was fitted into place. He twisted, pulled, yanked, twisted again, and pulled harder until he felt it come free.

And watched the kid's face fill with fear and shock, eyes bulging as if they were seeing what was to come next.

Calum Dane saw it a moment later, saw himself raising Brandon McCabe's prosthetic leg into the room's stale air and bringing it down hard.

Thwack!

He wasn't sure what cracked on impact, the kid's face or the plastic leg. Decided it must've been the leg when the next three impacts yielded the same sound and the upper portion of the prosthetic seemed to be breaking away from the lower.

Dane didn't care, just kept hammering the kid with it, left to right and back again, feeling his own breath deserting him from the exertion and only then realizing he had no idea how many times he'd actually struck McCabe. He thought he remembered the kid first crying out in pain, begging for him to stop. That was followed by a gasping, a wheezing, and then nothing. All of it a blur amid a reality caked over by a thickening haze, like mist from hot water steaming up a glass shower so you can't see what's outside it.

The mist finally cleared from Calum Dane's vision.

And he saw the kid's face reduced to what barely passed for pulp, flesh-colored splinters and shards protruding from it. Dane realized he was still holding the fractured remnants of the prosthetic leg by half a foot, all that remained of it, coated in blood and skin and sinew, some dripping down to the bedcovers in thick globs.

Dane tossed it aside and realized he was gasping for breath, awakening as if from some kind of trance that left him looking at Brandon McCabe's face pulped into mashed potatoes. He remembered hammering a frog to death with a rock as a young boy, how much he loved hearing the plopping sound and feeling skin and bone smashed under his control. He'd never felt so powerful and strong as in that moment and had sought to recover that same sensation his entire life. He'd come close numerous times, but this was the first time he'd ever replicated the feeling in its entirety, actually exceeding the original one.

But I heard that wasn't the only thing you did to him.

The kid's hands and feet were still twitching, and Dane watched until they spasmed, seized, and stopped. The scent of blood was like heavy copper hanging in the air, sweet and sour at the same time. He remembered there'd been no scent with the frog, other than something acidic and bitter rising from beneath the rock. Standing there over the remains of Brandon McCabe, Calum Dane remembered for the first time how that had disappointed him.

That's why this time was better.

Dane felt Pulsipher's hands on his shoulders for the first time, trying to draw him backwards. He swabbed a sleeve across his own brow, feeling it pick up a thin bit of bone, and realized he was still holding what was left of the kid's leg.

“Here you go,” Dane said tossing it atop the kid's corpse. “So you can't accuse me of taking this one from you too.”