The Cure (26 page)

The parking lot was just as dark as all the streets had been. She supposed marauding bands of rioters had amused themselves by smashing out the pole lights. The Cadillac pulled into a parking stall quite near the street, on the far end of the lot from the hospital building. The driver killed the engine, saying, “We must be early.”

The man beside her checked his wristwatch in the moonlight through the window. “Maybe a few minutes.”

The two men sat in silence. She prayed, and did her best to breathe.

Another car pulled into the parking lot. It stopped a short distance away, its headlights aimed at them the way theirs had lit the military transport just a little while before.

“All right, lady,” said the young man beside her. “You’re on.”

He opened the door on his side and made her slide across. He pulled her out, the strong fingers of his left hand tight around her bicep. He stood her up beside the Cadillac. She lowered her face against the glare, but he put his hand below her chin and lifted it, forcing her to face into the headlights. She heard a car door open and close beyond the lights. She heard a voice say, “Yes, it’s her. Please remove the tape from her mouth.”

“She might scream.”

“Everybody’s screaming.”

It was true. The air was pregnant with the shrieks of citizens and sirens. The man released her arm and ripped the tape away in one quick motion. Then he gripped her arm again. From behind the light she heard, “You don’t have to be afraid, Dr. Williams. I just need the answers to a few questions, and then we’ll let you go. Okay?”

She did not reply.

“Do you understand, or not?”

“Yes,” she said.

“There’s too much noise. I need you to speak up.”

“Yes!” she shouted.

“Very good. Now, the first question. How much do the Keeps know?”

“The Keeps?”

“Help her understand me, will you?”

The man twisted her arm behind her back and lifted. The pain was excruciating.

“How much do the Keeps know?”

“About Brazil?”

“Of course.”

“I haven’t told them anything.”

The pain in her arm was awful. She screamed just a little.

“Take it easy” came the voice, and the man relaxed the pressure. She heard the voice continue, “Whom have you told?”

“Nobody.”

“Why should I believe you?”

“Why should I lie?”

“Help her think of a better reason.”

The man twisted her arm and raised it up again. She rose to her tiptoes, trying to reduce the excruciating pressure. She cried out again. She heard the voice behind the headlights say, “Whom have you told?”

“Nobody! I swear!”

“Let’s give her a breather.”

The man relaxed the upward pressure on her arm. She began to weep. “I’ve never told anyone. You have to believe me! It’s how I stayed hidden all this time. Why would I risk telling anyone?”

The voice behind the headlights remained silent for a time. Then she heard, “I believe her. We’re done here.”

After a few more seconds, the headlights shifted away from her as the other car began to roll. She watched the lights until the car had left the parking lot, then the young man pushed her forward, walking her across the pavement and into the surrounding darkness. Still temporarily blinded by the headlights, she did not see where he was taking her until he stopped behind another car, a different one, a Mercedes Benz. It was in terrible condition, dented and scraped all over, the safety glass of the rear window battered with a dozen blows at least. Then the driver was there with them. He bent over the lock on the trunk of the Mercedes for a few seconds, and the lid rose up.

“No key no problem,” said the smiling driver.

“Get in,” said the one who held her by the arm.

She had been passive all along, lulling them in preparation for this moment. With no warning whatsoever she twisted violently to her left. It worked. He lost his grip. She set out running toward the lights of the hospital, her bound hands swaying back and forth in front of her stomach, her bare feet slapping on the pavement as she called for help as loudly as she could. But her cries were lost among so many others, and the sirens, and the roar of the inferno, and she felt a massive weight crash into her back, one of them on her, and then she was down on the asphalt.

Looking up she saw smoke parting in the night sky above Dublin, saw the full moon up there beaming down, and the poor lost young men looking down at her beside it, and now that this was finally going to happen after all her years of dread she realized it was not as she imagined, not as she had always feared, and she wished she had not wasted so much time on faithless worries. But no, no, that was wrong. There was no reason for regrets, no condemnation now, for after all those years of dealing with her worries all alone she was in the here and now at last; she had given up her fears to God and sealed the bargain with a lawsuit.

“Don’t be so afraid,” she said, looking up at the young men and the full moon just behind them. “You don’t have to be.”

“What was that?” asked the driver. “What’d she say?”

And the young man who had ridden there beside her said, “Who cares?”

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY
-O
NE

S
TEVE
N
OVAK DID NOT SLEEP
for two days straight, then he lay down on the shiny vinyl floor in his office for a couple of hours and dreamed of pulling tuna through the transom gate of his cousin’s yacht. When he awoke he had a bad crick in his neck. He washed his face in the station’s public toilet room and went back out into the mayhem.

He discharged his weapon sixteen times before it was over, firing warning shots mostly, but returning fire twice. He hit his assailant both times. During calmer moments he worried they might die. He hoped to find the time to check on them at the hospital.

The total stillness of the fog-laden air that first day had been Dublin’s only blessing. It had allowed the city’s three fire trucks to contain the blaze somewhat until more trucks arrived from nearby Cambridge and Pennyton. In the end, with thirteen fire crews working they were able to limit the destruction to a five-block area. By the third day Steve still did not have a final count, although he thought maybe a hundred homes had been destroyed. It would have been much worse with the usual onshore breeze. Still, Steve did not feel grateful.

Colonel Peterson never did formally authorize the use of force or issue rules of engagement or whatever it was they called it when the National Guard gave soldiers permission to shoot civilians. But when looters started firing at his men, the soldiers defended themselves, and that got to be the way things were. For about twelve hours during the worst of things, it was pretty much shoot on sight without bothering to determine if the target was a hostile or a citizen protecting his own property. After the worst was over, Steve decided he would file a formal complaint about the colonel at some point, but the paperwork and lawyering about this mess would probably go on for years, so there was plenty of time for that. Besides, the media was all over it, and Steve figured they would have the colonel’s command at the very least. Probably have Steve’s job too, but that too was a worry for another time.

Four days into it, volunteers were still sifting through the smoldering ruins, searching for casualties. So far they were up to seven Dublin citizens dead of one thing or another. Smoke inhalation, gunshot wounds, heart attacks. Steve did not know any of the victims personally, but he knew people who did, and he understood the widespread desire for vengeance. A military truck with a loudspeaker had been weaving through the streets for the last forty-eight hours, warning people not to step outside their homes or businesses with weapons. Steve knew a few of the diehard Mainers would have no patience with that. He had seen a lot of homeless people doing their best to control the rioters, helping with evacuations, putting out small fires, but that wouldn’t matter either. A stranger took his life into his own hands walking through Steve’s town unless he wore a uniform or carried a news camera.

Driving through Dublin, Steve saw very few remaining homeless people anywhere, rioters or not. At last report nine of them had been shot dead by persons unknown, on top of the seven Dubliners who were dead from one thing or another. So that was sixteen dead so far. As crews dug through the ashes, he fully expected that number to increase.

Steve cruised past the lot where Just Right Liquor used to be. All three liquor stores at the edge of town had been targets, of course. Two got away with just broken windows, but Just Right had been burned to the ground, possibly by a few students from over at Bowditch who had joined the mayhem in sympathy with the protesters. They had pitched furniture through library and administrative building windows, and used it to build a bonfire on the mall. Downtown, Henry’s Drug Store had been ransacked again, just like the prior winter. This time they tried to burn it too, but four National Guardsmen had run them off before the fire got out of hand. Most of the storefront glass downtown had been shattered, and although the Guardsmen had managed to keep looting to a minimum down there, a lot of stolen inventory still lay where the thieves had dropped it along Main Street. Even the town hall had suffered damage. Only Willa’s shelter and the Congregational church stood untouched.

Thinking of Willa reminded Steve of Hope’s husband or whatever the man was, and that reminded him of Hope’s Mercedes. He lifted his radio’s handset. “Dave, Dave.”

After a short pause he heard, “Ten four.”

“What’s your twenty?”

“Still over here at the hospital.”

That was what he thought. “While you’re over there, would ya get that Mercedes towed for me like we talked about?”

“You bet.”

Steve replaced the microphone in its cradle. He thought about those two words, ‘you bet.’ To his surprise, they made him feel a little weepy. In the last seventy-two hours, Dave had been unstoppable. Steve doubted the man had slept at all. He had been all over town, a calming influence wherever he went. Steve thought about his whole department, the way they had risen to this challenge, days without sleep, lives on the line, no hint of slowing down, every single one of them a hero or a heroine as far as he was concerned. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. Normally he was not emotional. Probably it was the exhaustion setting in.

He got a little more sleep that night, and a full four hours straight the next. A couple of times he thought about finding Hope’s ex husband or whatever he was and grilling him about Willa’s whereabouts, but Steve had nineteen dead for certain now, and that many actual deaths to investigate left little time for looking into something that was just a possibility. Still, Willa was a very special person, and whether she was dead or not, something wasn’t right. He would get to Riley Keep.

Colonel Peterson had been replaced by a General John Sanders, who seemed to be a master of logistics. During the general’s first two days temporary trailers arrived and were set up in a field near Teal Pond for those who lost their homes and had no friends or family to put them up. They were delighted to move out of the high school gymnasium.

Another day went by before Steve Novak got the call about the car.

Things were a bit less hectic by then, yet after seven days the body count was up to twenty three, including so called natural causes brought about by stress. The news media had long ago descended on Dublin like flies on a swollen carcass. Steve had to detail a patrolman just to keep them off his back whenever he went outside the station. Everything he did was observed with telephoto lenses, which was why he appreciated the wall of corrugated steel around Nehemiah Shore’s junkyard.

After Steve drove in through the gate, Nehemiah’s sole employee pulled it shut behind him, and the reporters who had tailed him from the station were forced to wait on the gravel road, out of sight. Dave waved to Steve from over beside the Mercedes, which was parked along with a group of cars that looked relatively clean compared to the dozens of cannibalized wrecks Nehemiah had stacked haphazardly around the yard. Steve rolled to a stop near Dave and got out of his Explorer. “Just get here?” he asked.

“Ayuh.”

Nehemiah walked up, wiping filthy hands on filthy overalls. Steve said, “Thanks for callin’.”

“You bet. Uh huh. You bet.”

Steve cocked his head to consider the skinny man. He looked pretty much as usual—greasy hair, stringy beard, Adam’s apple busy as a squirrel in autumn. The sour smell of whiskey on his breath was hard to take, even in the open air. “When’d ya first notice it?” asked Steve.

“Ha’d to say. Ha’d to say. Yestidy, mebbe. Mebbe, ayuh.”

“All right, Nehemiah. Give us a little room to work here, will ya?”

The man started nodding, and did not seem capable of stopping. “Ayuh, ayuh. I’ll be ovah there.” He waved toward the corrugated metal shack that was his office and his home.

“That’s fine, Nehemiah. We’ll call ya if we need ya.”

Still nodding, the junkyard owner walked away. After a few steps he stopped and looked back. “Wasn’t me what noticed first. Not first. Was the dogs, ya know.” He kept nodding. “Dogs first, ayuh.”

Steve sighed as he walked up to the Mercedes. He knelt beside the rear bumper and examined it carefully. His heart sank at the sight of dried blood. He’d seen enough of the stuff the last few days to know what he was looking at. He stood. “Go ahead an’ pop the trunk, will ya?”

Dave walked around to the driver’s door.

“Use a pen or somethin’,” called Steve, thinking about fingerprints.

Dave grunted and pulled a pen from his shirt pocket. He leaned in through the open window and a second later the car’s rear lid rose up with a pneumatic hiss. The stench was nearly overwhelming. Steve stood looking down into the trunk as Dave came back to stand beside him. For some reason, out of all the tragedy Steve had seen over the last week, this hit him the hardest. He wanted to throw up. He wanted to sit down in the dirt and wail at the top of his lungs. But he was Dublin’s chief of police, the man responsible for standing between good citizens and things like this, so he just looked into the trunk, pretending to be strong.

After a minute, Dave said, “Well, that about cinches it.”

“Ayuh,” said Steve, thinking about that man, Riley Keep. “It surely does.”