Kim said, “Like you can’t afford it,” and Richard looked at Jenny, showing his dimples. “Where’d you find this kid?” he said.
Jenny said, “You’re a perfect match, the two of you.”
Kim and Richard swapped smiles, as if truer words had never been spoken.
Jenny sat on a stump and watched them, giggling and rough-housing, having a shoving match over who was going to unpadlock the shed door. It made her feel warm inside. Whole, somehow, as if her entire life had been a journey, with this stump and this fine day and these two dear people as her destination.
Kim said, “Oh,
look,
a bald eagle,” and when Richard turned to look she snatched the key from his hand. “Psyche.” Then she had the door open and Richard was helping her dig out the fishing gear.
Jenny got an Indian blanket out of her knapsack, spread it open on a patch of grass and stretched herself out, her head shading a paperback novel.
“’Bye, Mom,” Kim called from the shoreline. There was an aluminum fishing boat moored next to her in the sand. “We’re gonna go catch dinner.”
Jenny waved, watching as they launched the boat. She read for awhile after that, then set the book aside and rested her head on her folded arms, feeling the sun sink into her back like a drug.
Soon, she was fast asleep.
* * *
Jack’s preliminary inquiry began on September twenty-sixth. On the afternoon of the thirtieth, Sam Shorthouse and Jim Blaylock, the officers assigned to the case, led him up the short flight of stairs from his holding cell to the courtroom. Earlier, it had come out in conversation that Jack had anesthetized a colleague of theirs following a gunshot wound, and the men resumed talking about it as they clattered up the metal steps.
“Y’know, Jack,” Sam said, pausing outside the prisoner’s entrance to the courtroom. “Now that I think of it, I may’ve even met you when Brian was in the intensive care. Yep, I believe I did.”
“Brian was one tough old boy,” Jack said.
“You got that right,” Blaylock said.
Without being asked, Jack faced the wall. Sam removed his shackles and handcuffs, then opened the door and led him to the Plexiglas prisoner’s booth, a distance of about twelve feet. The courtroom was packed again today, the victims’ families occupying the first several rows, the public and press crammed into whatever space was left. A number of detectives were also present, including Wes Fransen, seated next to the Crown.
Dressed in slacks and a white shirt, Jack made the short trek with his head erect, impervious to the glares and muttered profanities from the crowd. He took his seat quietly, staring calmly ahead while Sam secured the booth and the judge took his place at the bench.
For the next hour and forty minutes the prosecutor argued points of law. Before the first hour had passed, heads had begun to nod and impatient rustlings could be heard throughout the courtroom. Even the judge, the picture of intentness at the outset, sagged visibly in his seat. When the prosecutor finally sat down, the judge glanced at his watch and ordered a ten minute recess.
Sam Shorthouse and Jim Blaylock rose stiffly from their chairs next to the prisoner’s booth and Sam unlocked the door. When Jack stepped out, Sam took his left arm and Jim reached for his right.
With predatory swiftness Jack seized Sam’s wrist and threw his weight back, whipping Sam into his wide-eyed partner. Their foreheads met with a pistol crack and the two men crumpled to the floor. Jack stepped over them, grabbed the nearest member of the audience and hauled him over the balustrade. Before he could open his mouth to scream, Art Doogan—a skinny kid of twenty whose older brother Dan was blown apart by a high pressure surge in a Med Center OR—lay dead at Jack’s feet, his spinal cord severed at the base of his skull.
In the few seconds that had passed, the stunned paralysis of the onlookers broke into a bright sizzle of panic. Startled screams rose, and the spectators in the seats nearest Jack leaned away from him like reeds before a hurricane. Jack reached into them and pulled out a girl of seven, Roxanne West, Bad Brad’s big sister. The girl’s father made a grab for her and Jack struck him in the throat, knocking him into the row of seats behind him.
Now he held the child to his chest, turning to face the guards, their weapons finally drawn. Jack clutched the child’s windpipe.
“Don’t—move,” Jack said, freezing the assemblage. He looked at the judge. “Touch that panic button, your honor, I’ll kill the girl. And before I walk out of here, I’ll do the same to you.” He turned to the guards. “Boys, you put those popguns down.” When they hesitated, Jack raised the girl’s chin with his knuckles. “What’s your name, sweetheart,” he said, shifting his body, using the child as a shield. He relaxed his grip on her throat. “Go ahead. Tell everyone your name.”
“Roxanne,” the girl said, sobbing. Her pink dress was hiked up in front, revealing the stitched crotch of her clean white tights. Her feet dangled doll-like in the air.
“Do you want to die, Roxanne?”
Roxanne shook her head. Tears streamed from her wide green eyes.
Jack returned his attention to the guards. “Put them down.”
The guards dropped their guns and stepped away.
Then Jack was bolting for the exit, the child still clutched to his chest. The guards bent to retrieve their weapons, but by then Jack had dropped a passing officer in the hall, snatched his sidearm and turned to pump a round into each of the advancing guards. Roxanne, weightless in his grasp, clapped her hands over her ears and let out a shrill scream. Jack swung the weapon in a menacing arc over the crowd, watching with amusement as they scattered like rats.
Then he fled through the main exit, press cameras flashing, Fred and Lorna West’s only surviving child dangling from his arms. At the foot of the concrete steps he vaulted a low hedge and crossed the courthouse lawn, stuffing the 9mm Sig-Sauer into his belt as he ran.
At the curb a young man was helping an elderly woman into an idling Bronco. Jack rounded the hood and got in on the driver’s side, shoving the terrified girl ahead of him. The young man barely had time to pull the old woman out of the way before Jack gunned the vehicle into the street.
An instant later a half dozen officers rushed out of the courthouse with their weapons drawn, but by then Jack was away, whizzing over the Pretoria Street Bridge, then bearing west along the Rideau Canal.
* * *
Within minutes of Jack’s bold escape a priority one call went out to every available agency, lighting up computer screens and mobile digital terminals all over the city. The first sirens rose in the courthouse parking lot, but soon, dozens more could be heard, converging on the area from all directions. Roadblocks were established at all points of egress from the city and agents were dispatched to all centers of public transport. A massive net was spread over the city in the hope that Jack Fallon might blunder into one of its strands.
But Detective Wes Fransen didn’t much share that hope. Before his eyes the body count had taken a savage escalation. And if it hadn’t been clear before, it was abundantly so now. They were dealing with a vicious deviant, without conscience or fear.
And it had a hostage.
Wheezing, Fransen piled into a squad car and joined the chase.
* * *
Jack left the canal at Bronson Avenue and proceeded south to the Carleton University campus. Here he slowed to the posted limit and glanced at his tiny hostage. She sat rigid on the seat beside him, one knee showing through her tights, torn during the sudden violence and confusion. Her oval face was wet with tears, but she made no sound.
“You know,” Jack said, “a big girl like you should be wearing a seat belt.”
Silently, Roxanne obliged.
“That’s better. Now tell me, Roxanne. May I call you Roxanne?” The child nodded. “Okay, then.” Jack pulled into a huge parking lot and began gliding through the rows of vehicles. It was 2:05 PM. “Where do you live, sweetheart?”
Roxanne buried her chin in her chest and sniffed. “Mister Fallon, are you going to hurt me?”
“Of course not, peanut. I’m going to take you home. But I can’t do that unless you tell me where you live.”
Roxanne looked up at him. “Did you kill my baby brother?”
“No, honey.” He pulled into a reserved space between a Caddy and a burgundy university service van, switched off the ignition and faced the trembling girl. “Your brother died because someone tampered with his medications. But it wasn’t me. I’m just an actor. You saw all those cameras when we left the courthouse?” Roxanne nodded, perplexed but listening intently. “Well, all that was for TV. You and I are going to be in a movie. Won’t that be cool? They haven’t caught the real bad guy yet.”
“A movie?”
“Sure.” Jack ruffled her hair. “You’re gonna be famous.”
“You mean it?”
“I swear. Now, sit tight a sec. We need a new set of wheels.”
As Jack climbed out Roxanne said, “I live on Holmwood Avenue. Two seventy-one and a half.”
Fifteen minutes later Jack dropped Roxanne off in front of her house, the left-hand third of a plain brick triplex a mile from the university. At first the child was reluctant to get out. “Nobody’s home,” she told him. “Can you wait till someone comes home?” Jack smiled and told her to sit on the porch, her folks would be along any minute. Roxanne thanked him and promised to watch TV that night, so she could see herself and her new friend, Jack.
Waving, Jack pulled away in the burgundy service van.
“
Oh
. I think I’ve got something.”
Kim’s bobber twitched, then submerged in a spiral of bubbles. Her rod whipped over almost double.
“Okay,” Richard said. “Don’t panic. Give him some slack.”
Kim let the fish run for several seconds, then jerked the rod hard and began reeling in her catch. She couldn’t believe the fight in this mysterious creature. She could feel its power in her shoulders.
Now the fish broke the surface, arcing up, shivering against the hook in its mouth, beads of lake water dazzling around it.
“Oh, Richard, look at him. He’s beautiful.”
“Yeah,” Richard said, “he’s a beaute. Play him, sweetie.” He grabbed the net and positioned himself by the gunwale “Almost got him...”
The fish appeared at the end of Kim’s taut line, rising hard and full of fight from the depths, and Kim thought of her own rise from darkness, her own determined fight. Oddly, she felt no kinship with the fish, only understanding. There was no fear in this creature, just a pure and furious determination to be free.
It made one final bid, banking away from the boat, churning the water to a boil. Then Richard had it in the net.
“Look at this puppy,” he said. “Pickerel. Gotta run five, maybe six pounds.” He lay the net in the bottom of the boat, pressed his boot over the fish’s gills and reached for the hook in its throat.
“Here,” Kim said. “Let me.”
Richard shifted and Kim pressed her own foot over the fish, pinning it to the ribbed aluminum floor. Leaning closer, she studied its glassy eye and, feeling nothing, wondered if something was missing from her. She stroked the creature’s flaring gills, the raised spikes of its dorsal fin, new sensations of slime, wildness and detachment. Then she went after the hook. It was in deep, and after a minute of tugging Richard handed her a pair of needle-nose pliers. With the coolness of a surgeon Kim grasped the hook and twisted it free. Something from deep in the fish’s guts came out on the barb and Kim regarded it with mild curiosity. Then she picked up her catch, most of the fight played out of it now, and dropped it into the wicker creel. She smiled at Richard as she rebaited her hook.
“Beat that,” she said, casting her line again. “Maybe we should work out some kind of deal. You know, like, whoever catches the least fish gets to clean them all?”
“Not worried,” Richard said. “Oh—I’ve got a whopper.”
He made a big show of battling what turned out to be a six inch sunfish that bit him as he took it off the hook then managed to wriggle over the side to freedom.
Laughing, Kim turned her face into the sun. She felt...
alive
. It was a rich, guiltless feeling, one she could hardly believe herself capable of. There was a lightness in her now, a buoyancy she couldn’t attribute solely to her loss of weight. It reminded her of a cartoon she’d seen someplace, a pack mule standing next to a horse at a hitching rail. The horse wore only a saddle and stood comfortably erect, while the mule stood swaybacked beneath a load of prospecting equipment, its belly almost dragging in the dirt. The animals faced each other, the mule’s expression puzzled, and the caption read: “What load?”
That was how she felt, as if some enfeebling load had been magically removed, a load she’d become aware of only in its absence. The bulk of it came off when she found out about her father. It hurt at first, hurt terribly, the unexpected enormity of it; but strangely, once the initial shock had passed, it simply stopped mattering. Letting him go had been not only easy, but the most liberating experience of her young life. Through all of these lonely, guilt-fraught years, she had not been the bad one. He had.
She snuck a peek at Richard, still griping about the killer sunfish, and smiled a secret smile. He wasn’t her father—she would probably never know who her real father was, nor did she especially care to—but he was her friend. She sensed this as clearly as she sensed her mother’s love. He liked her very much and was coming to love her, to picture her always in his life. It was in his voice when he spoke her name, in his eyes when he smiled at her. It was in the way he instructed her in the use of oils, so patient, ignoring the outbursts over which she had no control. He understood her frustrations, having seen some of the drawings she’d done...before, and labored with her daily to repair the connections between hand and eye. One morning she’d become so enraged trying to get her fingers to obey, she’d demolished both canvas and easel in a single violent swipe, then rampaged through the studio. And Richard had caught her and held her in a way no adult male had ever held her, with compassion, acceptance and love. And the rage had fallen away. “You’re an artist, Kim, a wonderful, gifted artist. What you do is uniquely your own. Don’t worry, you’ll get it back, I know you will.”