Centralia (9 page)

Baldy opened both hands and turned his palms up. His eyes no longer held the shadows of hatred and contempt; he no longer appeared to thirst for Peter’s blood. There was respect in them now and maybe a hint of pity. “You don’t remember yet. You will. Give it time.”

“Time for what?”

In the distance, the low, eerie moan of a police siren sounded,
and something changed in Baldy’s eyes. The shadows had returned. He lunged at Peter with fists swinging. Peter deflected the blow coming from the left, but the fist attacking from the right struck him just below the ribs and nearly knocked the air out of his lung. He doubled to the side as another fist rained in from the left and caught him in the back of the head, sending spheres of light sailing through his field of vision. Baldy hit with tremendous force, his hands like battering rams.

Under the barrage, it didn’t take long for Peter’s knees to buckle and for the room to go dim.

Baldy’s boot landed in Peter’s side with all the force of a gunshot, shoving him against the counter. Hot-poker pain radiated through Peter’s trunk. It seemed obvious to Peter now that Baldy was a hired gun, probably sent by the same employer who had sent the threesome to Peter’s house, who wouldn’t let up until Peter was dead or the cops came. Peter had to end this. He had no other choice. An image of Karen and Lilly stuttered through his mind. He couldn’t abandon them; he had to find them.

Peter rolled to his side and swung his foot around, landing it along the side of his adversary’s knee. Baldy stumbled and lurched but didn’t go down. It was enough, though, to buy Peter the second he needed to scramble to his feet and go on the offensive.

He went at Baldy with both hands jabbing, cutting, delivering precise blows designed to induce damage that would accumulate exponentially, but the big man parried every advance. Renewed by a will to live and find his family, Peter relentlessly kept Baldy in the defensive position. He drove him back, closer to the grill, throwing punch after punch at varying angles. Finally Baldy backed up against the grill. The jolt was enough to break his concentration for a split second, enough time for Peter to slip in a jab unencumbered.
His hand connected with the big man’s nose. Baldy’s head snapped back and a fresh stream of blood trickled from his nostril, but he recovered quickly and came at Peter with a right roundhouse.

Peter stepped back and blocked the blow with both hands, then moved closer to use his weight to twist the arm behind Baldy’s back.

The siren grew louder, a low moan that escalated into a high-pitched squeal. They couldn’t be more than two blocks away.

Not giving Baldy a chance to counter his move, Peter once again drove the man toward the grill. But this time Baldy wasn’t quick enough to block with his legs. He stuck out his hand to brace himself and it landed on the grill top. Skin scorched and sweat sizzled. Reflexively Baldy lifted his hand, and Peter saw his opening to catch his rival off-balance. He drove him farther forward, doubling him over the grill until his face touched the hot surface. A scream escaped Baldy’s mouth, and his legs gave out beneath him. Peter followed him to the floor, grabbing the man’s neck with one hand and a free wrist with the other. The left side of Baldy’s face was red and raw, saliva oozed from his mouth, and hatred burned once again in his eyes.

“Who are you?” Peter hollered. “Why are you calling me Patrick? Where have we met before?”

Through his sweat and blood and vitriol, the big man smiled. “You’ll have to do better than that. Remember your training, Patrick? Huh? It’ll come back to you. It always does. And you’ll remember who I am.”

The sirens were nearly there, just outside now.

Peter retrieved the man’s handgun from under the grill and pointed it at Baldy’s forehead. There wasn’t a shadow of fear in the man’s eyes. His life meant nothing to him. But Peter couldn’t
do it. It was one thing to take down a clear and present danger, but he couldn’t murder an unarmed man in cold blood like this. Peter didn’t care who he was in another life or what he’d been trained for; it wasn’t him now. And somehow he had to believe it never really had been.

Releasing Baldy, he stood, turned, and made a dash for the rear exit.

Leaving Bentleysville behind and heading north on State Road 74, Peter was back to massaging the steering wheel, attempting to squeeze some rationality out of it. His heart still pounded in his chest, and his hands, when they weren’t working the wheel, shook like the last autumn leaf hanging on for all its worth. The confrontation with Baldy had left him upset, angry, and confused. The man apparently knew Peter, but by a different name. And though he had obviously been dispatched to take Peter out, he seemed for a moment to not want to go through with it; he seemed almost remorseful and relieved that there might be another option.

Suddenly Peter was acutely aware of Amy beside him in the truck. She huddled against the door, feet pulled up on the seat, knees to chest, biting at her fingernail.

“How did he find us so quickly?” she asked. “And who is he?”

Peter checked his mirrors to make sure Baldy hadn’t raced for his car and followed them. He didn’t know how he could with the burns he’d suffered. The left side of the man’s face was sushi raw. He had to be in tremendous pain. But he was a trained killer, a hired gun, and men like him didn’t stop because of pain. They were motivated by something deeper, something more visceral. There was a reason they chose to take life for money rather than hold down a respectable job in business or medicine.

Peter didn’t answer her directly because he had no direct answers to give. Instead he said, “We need to get rid of this truck.”

“What do you mean?” Amy said. “This is my truck.”

“It’s bugged. There must be a tracking device on it.” It was the only explanation short of clairvoyance for how Baldy had found them so quickly in Bentleysville.

“But how? How could they have known you’d come to me?” Amy put her fist to her mouth and turned her head toward the side window.

How could they have known? Peter hadn’t talked to Amy in months, not since she betrayed him and nearly ended his career, almost destroying his marriage in the process. He’d vowed to never speak to her again. How could anyone possibly have known that he would seek her help? Unless she was being watched as well. But why?

“I don’t know.”

Amy shook her head. “There you go with the I-don’t-know routine.”

“Amy, I’m just as much in the dark about this as you are.” But he wasn’t. Not quite. He’d recognized Baldy. He knew the man
from somewhere, had had contact of some kind with him, but the answer still eluded him.

“You don’t remember me, do you? . . . Patrick.”

Again Peter searched his memory, fishing to hook something tangible and bring it to the surface, but again, nothing came. The memory he’d had of Baldy had faded, and though he tried, he could not retrieve it. He thought that in it he might find some detail, some hidden trigger that would bring the full memory back into the light. But all his attempts at retrieval were futile. His mind was like a deep, dark tunnel in some subaquatic cavern. Memories, floating as effortlessly as dust on the currents of the air, bobbed near the surface but only close enough that general forms could be distinguished or a few indistinct features noticed before they disappeared into the lightless depths.

They drove in silence, heading north to put distance between them and Bentleysville and give them a lead on any pursuers that might be coming after them.

After several long minutes, Amy faced Peter and said, “Are you okay?”

Peter nodded. “Yeah.”

“Peter, did you kill him? Back there.”

“No.” But he felt he should have, and he had the odd feeling that at another time he would have. But not now. He couldn’t do it now. He was different. He didn’t know how or why, but he sensed it; he sensed that at another time he had been another man, that his past held malefic secrets that had been repressed and buried in the darkest, remotest, most godforsaken corner of his brain. And yet, at the same time, he now felt more like the man he’d always truly been, whatever that meant.

Just like that, as quick and sudden and jolting as the clangor
of a cymbal in the still of the night, another memory slammed through Peter’s mind. It was the memory he had been waiting for, searching for.

“Take the shot. You have it.”

He hesitates, his finger lingering on the cold metal of the trigger.

“Patrick, take it now!”

He exhales, depresses the fat pad on the end of his finger.

He can’t. The target is there, a thousand yards away, reclining on his patio by the pool. He’s got a drink in one hand and phone in the other. Dark shades hide his even darker eyes.

The crosshairs center on the man’s forehead. This is the finest look they’ve had at the target yet, and it’s such a clean shot. He’d be dead before anyone around him even heard the distant concussion of gunfire.

But he can’t. The target’s wife is there. She’s younger than the target but not by much. And across the pool is his daughter, no more than seven or eight. Cute kid. Dark hair, dark eyes, olive skin.

“Patrick! Take it now.” His spotter pulls away from the telescope and turns his head. Confusion hardens his face.

It’s him. Baldy.

Even after the memory faded back into the dark, cloudy waters of Peter’s mind, Baldy’s eyes remained. The man was a machine, his mind calculating and his will driven by orders dictated by a handler who was even more heartless.

Amy nudged Peter’s arm. “Hey, you there. Will they keep coming?”

Still trying to process the memory that had hijacked his mind, Peter looked at Amy and found fear in her eyes. For an instant, the duration of a single tick on a clock, he wished he would have killed Baldy. But back in the café, there was something in the man’s eyes.
It was brief and Peter would have missed it altogether had he not been paying attention, but he saw a humanness there, an emotion that belied the actions of a killer with a rock for a heart. Besides, killing Baldy wouldn’t have stopped them. Whoever was after him seemed to have unlimited resources, and if Baldy was erased, another would take his place. Wanton killing would offer no solution to this problem.

“They will,” he said. “They won’t stop until they get what they want.”

“And what’s that?”

“Me, I think.”

“But why?” She was crying again.

Peter said nothing. He thought of the recurring dream he had. The house, the rooms, the locked door. The shadow that paced back and forth, back and forth. The answer was behind that door; he was sure of it. There was a part of his life he couldn’t remember, something from his past that was hidden in the room behind the locked door. Half of him was afraid to find out what it was, afraid to open that door and face the other self who resided there, afraid he might be something this Peter Ryan loathed, someone violent and hateful and driven by a carnal need to take life. Someone Karen would despise and Lilly would fear. Like Baldy. But the other half of him knew he needed to open it; he needed to face whatever was there, needed to look it in the eyes and find the truth. His questions would be answered, the mystery solved. His life would be exposed for what it really was once and for all, and he could deal with it and move on.

He needed to find the key. He needed those answers.

A few miles down the road, they passed through a small, one-intersection town called Marsville. It wasn’t much: one blinker
light, a hair salon, a small grocery store, a hardware store, and a few dozen aging homes, most in need of updates and repairs. East of Marsville, a half mile past the last home, they came upon a large packaging plant rising out of the countryside like an alien mother ship that had been buried for centuries beneath the Indiana soil and only just recently broken loose. To the left of the plant, a sprawling parking lot held at least a thousand vehicles. Captives of the alien race who enslaved them with hard labor.

Peter pulled the truck into the parking lot and headed for the back corner. There he found an empty spot and shut off the engine. “Get anything you’ll need. We’re leaving it here.”

“Leaving what?” She looked at him questioningly.

“The truck.”

“
My
truck?”

“Your truck. It’s bugged, Amy. If we keep driving it, we might as well have a flashing sign on the roof.”

“So find the bug and get rid of it.”

Peter shifted in his seat so he faced her. “Amy, listen to me. We don’t have time to search the entire truck. It could be anywhere. They know where we are
 
—”

“Who’s
they
, Peter? You keep saying
they
.
They
are after us.
They
are coming. Who are
they
? Huh? Who?”

He didn’t know, and she knew he didn’t. His ignorance was a glaring blemish on the face of this entire ordeal. Peter swallowed and tried again. “There’s probably someone headed to this location right now. We need to move quickly. We can’t keep driving the truck. It stays.” He declared the last two words with the same finality that a judge would use to deliver a death sentence.

Amy pursed her lips and nodded subtly. “I just need the keys.”

Peter handed her the key chain. “Do you carry tools?”

“There’s a small toolbox behind the driver’s seat.”

It didn’t take Peter long before he found an old blue Honda Accord that would do nicely. The owner would report it stolen, but how many blue Accords were on the road? And fortunately, the car was unlocked. Folks in rural Indiana, where the incidences of grand theft auto were as rare as Nessie sightings, weren’t as cautious as those in the city.

After switching the Accord’s license plate with that of a royal-blue Ford Fusion parked a few cars down, it didn’t take him long to get the car started using a screwdriver and hammer. Surprisingly, though he had no memory of ever hot-wiring a car using a flathead screwdriver, his hands instinctively knew what to do.

Amy slid into the passenger seat and eyed Peter suspiciously. “Where’s a research geek learn to do that?”

Peter shifted the Accord into reverse. “I think you know the answer to that.”

“Right. You don’t know. You’re beginning to scare me, Peter.”

“Beginning to?”

“You’re right. I’m already there.”