The Last Nightingale (30 page)

“You think I don’t remember anything before being at St. Adrian’s,” Shane began. “But you’re wrong.”

“Horseshit.” Tommie pulled out his heavy-bladed knife and began testing the edge.

“ ‘I have to empty you out.’ I know why you say that.”

“I’m going to start your hundred slices with small cuts, just enough to let you taste the blade for a while. After the first fifty or so, we’ll go ahead and float you on out into the water. Before I push you off, well, I’ll do the deep ones then. Those are the ones that will bring the sharks, you know.”

“It’s what our father said to you. After he caught you with the boys. He tried to whip you until everything sinful got knocked out of you. You think I don’t remember?”

Tommie stared at him. When the searchlight flashed again, his face looked as cold as a fish. “Maybe the current will carry you on out to sea,” he replied. “Maybe it will sweep you into the bay. But most likely, the sharks will devour you within a few hours. Or a few minutes, even.”

“They tried to make you out to be garbage! They tried to take away your future and throw away your life, even though you weren’t hurting anybody. He tried to beat you until there was nothing left inside of you. So now you do it to the others because you’re still trying to make our father and your mother stop!”

“Shut up!”
Tommie screamed it at the top of his lungs, raising his knife high overhead and tensing to thrust it deep into Shane. Just before his arm began the downward stab, Shane pulled his arms from behind, tore the rope from around his neck with his right

hand and simultaneously blocked the stabbing motion with his left. He sat up just as Tommie stabbed downward again, this time driving the knife deep into the beam.

Tommie’s plan to begin with the small cuts seemed to have left him. As he struggled to pull the knife free of the beam, Shane kicked for his life against the ropes at his ankles until his feet finally pulled free. He tucked into a defensive ball just as Tommie thrust at him again, and an inch of the blade caught in his thigh. The pain made him scream into Tommie’s face, but his survival instinct flooded him with strength.

He jumped away from the beam with the fiery wound burning in his leg and screamed a howl of rage. He screamed knowing that nobody else could hear him out there, but that Tommie was the only audience that he needed for his utter revulsion at the creature that his so-called brother had become. It was likely the last sound that he would make in his life and he was leaving no doubt about where he stood. The little boy who had shuddered helpless in the kitchen cupboard now faced the killer bare-handed and poured every ounce of his life force into defiance.

It kept him from realizing what happened for a second or two after a single gunshot was fired from somewhere nearby. Tommie grunted with surprise when the bullet whizzed by inches from his head. He swore while he spun on his heels and sprinted in the opposite direction, vanishing in the inky blackness. When the search beam swung by again, there was no trace of The Surgeon.

Shane staggered under his own weight and fell to his knees in the rocky sand. He was so drained and exhausted that he barely flinched when a sharp scuffing sound came from the beach next to him and Randall Blackburn appeared at his side. For an instant he wondered if he was dreaming again, but he felt Blackburn’s strong hands clutch him.

“Are you all right?” Blackburn asked.

“He stabbed my leg. I can’t chase him.”

“Chase him?
Listen to me. You don’t go anywhere. I mean it, Shane. Stay right here. I’ve got a buggy up on the road but you’ll never find it alone, especially not bleeding like that.”

“All right. I know.”

“I mean it!”

“I know.”

Shane felt Blackburn give him a reassuring squeeze on the shoulders, then he heard the big sergeant stand up and run off in the direction that Tommie had just fled in, along the waterline toward the big signal light. His footsteps were surprisingly fast. They only receded in the distance for a few moments before they were gone among the sounds of the ocean.

Shane huddled on the ground and wrapped his arms around his knees to conserve his warmth. There was no way to tell what was happening with Blackburn, or when he might return. And the thought of Tommie somehow getting the best of the big policeman and showing up back there once again was too awful to contemplate. He could only huddle and wait. In between the periodic sweeps of the distant searchlight beam, it was as dark as the bottom of a well.

R
ANDALL
B
LACKBURN
SPRINTED
across the rocky sand into the opaque night. The flashes from the sweeping navigational beam gave him brief glimpses of his surroundings, barely enough to keep his direction oriented. He fell to the ground several times, abrading the skin on his palms and his knees and sending him scrambling to recover his pistol. He lost valuable seconds with every stop, and the resistance of the night and the terrain made him growl in frustration. He could only hope that Kimbrough was having the same difficulty, that somehow he would not continue to have the Devil’s own luck as he had done for so long around the Barbary Coast.

The thin strip of sand beach ran out near the narrowest part of the strait. Blackburn stopped, using the sweeping beam to look for alternate routes. But all of the land leading away from Golden Gate point was so flat that he knew Tommie would be visible in the beam if he fled in that direction. Blackburn decided that his quarry must have continued over the rocky shoreline that was formed by a long stretch of seawall boulders. They were the size of elephants, with jagged fragments of smaller rocks filling the spaces between.

Blackburn jumped to the top of the first one, immediately caught his foot on a patch of slime and went down face forward between the big rocks. He struck the fragmented stones with a series of impacts. A fiery burst shot through him when he felt the ribs on
his right side crack and separate, jabbing his flesh from within. He screamed with pain, but his voice barely carried over the sounds of the surf. When he was able to climb to his feet, he felt as if he had a spear tip lodged in his side.

On any other occasion, in pursuit of any other fugitive, this would be the point where the chase was abandoned for another day, even though he still had five shots left in his pistol. He was no longer sure that his right arm could hold steady enough to aim and fire.

But this quarry was The Surgeon. Nothing could blur the terrible joy that the man took in his crimes—Blackburn had encountered his demonic leavings time and time again. The Surgeon was attempting to kill Shane Nightingale at the moment that Blackburn managed to creep up on them. It was their shouting match that lured his attention along that strip of beach, and he knew that if he had arrived a few seconds later it would have been for nothing.

So he pulled himself to the top of the next boulder, waited for a flash from the searchlight, then leaped to the next one. This time his footing held. He managed to make it from rock to rock without falling again, by timing his movement to the light beam. Each time it flashed by, he checked out his next potential landing spot on the top of the next rock. He also kept tuned to the rocks out in front of him, and after his first six or seven leaps, he caught a glint of reflection about twenty yards ahead. The search beam had caught the wet leather of Tommie Kimbrough’s long coat and reflected off of it, giving Blackburn a sure fix on his position.

He felt his heartbeat jump into high speed and pump him with so much adrenaline that he barely noticed his broken ribs. He threw himself into a reckless pursuit and double-timed it to make two leaps per light flash. That closed the distance by at least half, but by then the rocks ran out again and there was another stretch of a narrow, rocky beach. He was close enough to hear Tommie’s footsteps speed up on the flat ground. That was going to end it. His injuries would never permit him to catch the athletic killer in a sprinting contest.

He staggered to a halt, gasping, and managed to raise his gun by holding up his right arm with his left hand. He pointed the barrel in Tommie Kimbrough’s general direction and waited for the next searchlight flash. When it came, he saw that The Surgeon was surprisingly close. He adjusted his aim in the flash of the light beam, then fired into the inky darkness where Tommie Kimbrough had just been. There was no way to tell if the shot found its mark. But now that he was back on a flat strip of beach, Blackburn was able to keep walking forward in the dark until the next pass of the beam. It finally arrived and swept the strip of rocky sand.

The beach was empty.

“Nooo!” Blackburn bellowed. He spun in all directions, but there was nothing to see. When the beam made its next pass, he saw with certainty that Tommie had not headed back inland. Minutes dragged. In order to scan the landscape, he was forced to wait for each new sweep and take one direction at a time. Finally, he turned out to face open water and waited for the next flash.

And then at last, there it was: the brief reflection of light off of the wet leather of Tommie’s long coat. He was not far offshore, perhaps twenty-five yards, attempting to quietly drift off into the bay on the rising tide. He had escaped notice so far by not breaking the surface with his arms or legs.

Blackburn realized that with the current rising, Tommie could simply float his way right into the great Bay and then swim for any random landing point along miles of shoreline. Anyone who could outrun Blackburn across a beach lined with slippery boulders could manage to do that much.

There was no chance of swimming out to catch him, with broken ribs. The Surgeon was making his escape, right out there in front of him. Blackburn’s frustration was worse than the pain.

In desperation, he dropped to the ground and kneeled on his right leg while keeping his left foot flat, so that he could use his left knee to stabilize his shooting hand. Then he aimed in the general direction of Tommie Kimbrough’s escape path and waited for the
next flash. When the beam swept by, he got a solid fix on the coat’s reflection and emptied five shots. He saw the second shot hit home just before the light went by, and felt sure that the third one would have also hit the mark. The last two were well-aimed guesses.

The next pass of the beam showed nothing but black water. He waited and watched for another pass, then another, and another. Then he caught the crucial glimpse, only a few yards from where Blackburn aimed his shots; the low, floating body rolled slowly in the current. He watched it for three more sweeps, growing more convinced with each one that he was looking at a floating carcass.

A flash of white foam exploded next to the body and the long leather coat spun violently in the water. Something out there had just taken the first bite.

The infamous “Surgeon” had become his own final victim.

When Blackburn heard a footstep behind him, he whirled with all the speed that his fading strength allowed, wondering if Kim-brough had an accomplice. He was ready to go down using the empty pistol as a fighting club, but when he tried to raise his right arm, the pain was so sharp and intense that he lost his balance.

Shane grabbed him in time to keep him from falling to the ground. “Did you get him?”

“What? Yeah. I told you to stay back there.”

“I heard the shots. But are you sure?”

“Positive! I said ‘stay there,’ as plain as—”

“No! Are you sure you got him?”

“Look out there, wait for the next flash.”

A moment later, the beam swept across the water. The water was calm and the rising tide was bare.

“You see him out there anywhere?”

“No.”

“Well, I saw him out there. Big as life, with something already gnawing on his carcass and ruining his nice leather coat.”

Shane strained his eyes to penetrate the darkness, hoping for any glimpse of Tommie Kimbrough’s body, any confirmation that
the killer was gone. He kept it up for a minute before he finally nodded and exhaled. “All right, then.”

Blackburn sat down on the rocky shoreline with him. “He’ll likely wash up somewhere close by. If there’s anything left.”

What Shane would have loved to do, given the chance, would be to use his bare hands to tamp down the earth on top of Tommie Kimbrough’s grave until it was as hard as stone. He turned to Blackburn.

“My leg is still bleeding, and you don’t look so good.”

Blackburn smiled when he noticed that Shane wasn’t stuttering at all anymore, but under the circumstances he saw no reason to bring it up. He felt himself growing woozy enough to swallow his pride and let the kid help him to his feet. Then he placed his good left arm around Shane’s shoulder and guided both of them on a slow trek back to his rented taxi.

Vignette paced back and forth in the moonlit spaces between the cemetery trees, walking fast, digging her heels in with every step and spinning so hard on the turns that her knee joints hurt. Still nothing slowed her down. The powerlessness of the moment was sheer torment. She needed the sense of focus that the violent pacing gave her.

Vignette tried not to hate being a girl, to loathe being small, to detest being young. But those were all the qualities that prevented her from being of any use in helping Shane. She could not lose him. She could not. She could never let the world give her a dream come true of a big brother—even if she had to goose the world pretty hard on several occasions to make it happen—and then have him taken away again, just like that.

At some point in whatever it was that she was doing, she caught a flicker of shadow from the front area of the cemetery, up by the main gate. The flicker happened again, showing that it wasn’t a shadow, but a silhouetted form.

Somebody was walking into the graveyard. One person, alone. Not a woman, but someone in pants and a shirt, someone with short hair like Shane’s. Someone was walking like Shane walked, hurrying toward her, covering the last few steps to her with a beaming smile. When he put his arms around her without a single word, hugging her just right, not too strong, she had more joy and exaltation shooting through her than she could stand without breaking into pieces.