The Reckoning (18 page)

Nick and Mavis could see the tail end of a big blue Caddy sticking out a few feet from the shadow of the roundhouse roof. Everybody was keeping a careful distance and everybody who had an M4 rifle was leaning on the roof of his squad car and pointing it at the rear window of the caddy.

There was also a large blue panel van with State Police markings, and under that
BOMB DISPOSAL UNIT
in big gold letters. Harness cops were keeping the gawkers at a safe distance, and two short bullet-shaped guys wearing half of their BDU gear were standing talking to a large Niceville police sergeant with his back turned to Nick and Mavis. He heard the Suburban doors slam and turned around. It was Frank Barbetta.

He gave them both a huge smile. He had earbuds in his ears and dark blue wires running down to his uniform pocket. He plucked the buds out of his ears as they came up to him. “Nick, Mavis.”

“What's with the ear thingies?” asked Mavis.

“Chopin,” he said, apparently enjoying the effect this comment had on them both.

“Chopin? As in
Frédéric
, the piano guy?”

“That's right, Mavis. I'm totally about art and culture and antithetics and all that artsy-fartsy shit. And it's FREE-drick, not FRED-a-rick.”

“I think you mean
aesthetics,
Frank,” said Nick, thinking about Charlie Danziger.

“Yeah, whatever,” he said, turning to introduce the two Bomb Disposal guys from State. “This is Pete Dorn—”

Dorn, a lean young guy with a worried expression that looked like it was going to become permanent, smiled and nodded.

“And this ugly mook here is Lou Zitto.”

“I'm his cousin,” said Zitto. “You're Nick Kavanaugh, right? I heard about you. Special Forces and all that?”

“All lies,” said Barbetta. “Nick spent his war years collecting urine samples at Walter Reed. So tell Nick and Mavis what you were telling me.”

Zitto, who was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a leaping gazelle on it—under the antelope were the words
BOMB DISPOSAL TECH
:
If You See Me Running, Try to Keep Up!
—glanced across the yard at the tail of the caddy and then came back to Nick and Mavis.

“We put the thermals on it and there's
definitely
somebody in there. A big return but diffused, which makes sense, since it's kind of a warm day and he's sitting inside there with all the windows rolled up and the engine shut down, so no air conditioning. Got to be ninety inside that car. Which could also explain the heartbeat thing.”

Mavis picked up on that. “You said it was irregular?”

“No,” said Zitto. “Not irregular. It's steady okay, it's just way too fast. Like a mile a minute and staying there. That's why they called us in. Most guys who are strapped to an IED, they get nervous. Israelis use long-range mikes to pick up on stuff like that, suicide bombers—”

“Guys who suffer from premature detonation,” said Barbetta.

“Yeah, like that,” said Zitto, “so we were waiting for you, Nick. What do you want us to do?”

Nick looked at the caddy and said nothing for a minute. He'd come to hate IEDs more than anything else in the combat zone. “Have you got a robot?”

“We do,” said Dorn. “You want to send it across?”

“Can it sniff?”

“It can.”

“Okay then. Go sniff.”

Dorn looked happy and he and Zitto bopped around inside the van for a bit, emerging with a kind of steel wagon the size of a large microwave, with big fat rubber wheels, an articulated arm ending in a complicated pincer device, another short blunt tube alongside the arm, and a stalklike neck with a pair of cameras right about where the eyes should be.

“This is Lonesome Leroy,” said Dorn, looking down on the device with affection.

“On account of nobody wants to go anywhere with him,” explained Zitto.

“What's the tube?” asked Mavis.

“Shotgun. Semiauto. It's loaded with deer slugs. We use it to stimulate suspicious packages.”

“That'll do it,” she said.

Dorn had a handset with a TV screen in the middle and two joystick controls. He did something nimble and Leroy took off across the gravel at a brisk pace, watched by about twenty cops and maybe a hundred civilians and a camera guy from Live Eye Seven. As the robot got closer to the tail of the caddy, Dorn concentrated on the screen.

In the picture the rear end of the car loomed up like the Hoover Dam. Dorn was biting his upper lip while he worked the machine and looking worried.

“Run it alongside the passenger door,” said Zitto. Dorn maneuvered Leroy around the end of the car and trundled it slowly up the right side of the passenger door. He stopped it there and adjusted the camera stalk, raising it up until the camera eyes were level with the passenger window.

Then he raised the remote arm and brought it into close contact—very lightly—with the rubber edge at the bottom of the window.

He left it there for a few seconds, studying a readout screen on the remote.

“No explosives,” he said after a minute.

“You sure,” asked Nick. “It's safe?”

“I'm sure there are no explosives,” said Dorn. “But I'm not sure it's safe. There's a heartbeat, okay, and a thermal mass. I'm also getting carbon dioxide…and something else. Like an acid…I don't know. Never seen this signature before.”

“Get Leroy to knock on the window,” said Mavis. They all looked at her.

“Well, maybe he's asleep?”

Zitto nodded at Dorn, who raised the remote arm, extended one of the pincer claws, and tapped gently on the glass. The robot had a mike so they could all hear the metal ticking against the glass. Leroy tapped about five times and they all saw what happened next.

Something big slammed into the inside of the window, a blur of fangs and claws and wild yellow eyes, and it howled at Leroy through the glass and now something wet was running down the inside of the window, and then the
thing
came back again, screaming, clawing at the glass, and they all drew back from the picture, as if whatever it was could come straight through the camera at them.

“What the
fuck
is that thing?” said Barbetta.

“Okay,” said Dorn, still watching his chemical readouts, “now I'm getting mercapto-methylbutan—”

“And what the fuck is
that
?” Barbetta asked, still staring at the TV screen.

Dorn took a second. “I think it's cat piss.”

Nick was staring across the yard at the caddy. “Oh crap,” he said, and took off running. Everybody tracked him, a lone man in a pricey suit and expensive loafers pelting across the gravel toward the rear end of the caddy.

After a short hesitation, Mavis followed him, not quite so fleet, but she caught up to him as he got to the passenger door. “Nick, are you fucking nuts?”

Nick had his hand on the door and was nudging Leroy away with his foot. He looked at Mavis, his eyes wild, and said, “Mildred Pierce, Mavis,” and then worked the latch and tugged the door open. Mavis braced herself for an explosion, but it didn't happen. A large and unhappy Maine Coon cat recoiled from Nick as he stood in the door, hissing and spitting and showing its fangs. The interior of the car reeked of cat shit and cat piss and something much worse, the stench of human decay.

“Oh, Christ,” said Mavis. Nick, moving fast, reached in and pinned the frantic cat down, getting a hand firmly wrapped in its ruff. The cat literally screamed at Nick; it was soaking wet and Nick could feel the cat's heart hammering against its ribs, Nick plucked it off the seat, stepping back as he did so, and holding it away from his body, trapped its rear legs in his other hand, immobilizing it.

He held it up to Mavis, who was dabbing some Vicks VapoRub on her upper lip. “Mildred Pierce,” said Nick, holding the cat as gently as he could, but firmly. “The Morrisons had a cat, remember? Mildred Pierce. A big Maine Coon. Used to belong to Delia Cotton. Doug Morrison was a forensic guy for us, remember? Beau and I took the cat to him for blood work when Delia Cotton went missing.”

“Dammit,” said Mavis. “I totally forgot.”

“So did I. Hold her, will you?”

“Not a
fucking
chance,” said Mavis, backing away from the cat's murderous glare. “That thing is half sabertooth.”

“I have to check the car, Mavis. There's something dead in here.”

“
I'll
check the car.
You
hold the tiger.”

At this point Barbetta and Dorn and Zitto had come up. Barbetta took one look and one whiff and turned around to wave off the cops who were still pointing their shotguns and M4s at them.

“Guns down, people. Guns down!”

Nick tried to hand the struggling cat to Barbetta, but he backed off fast, saying “Whoa, dude, I'm like allergic—”

Mavis had jerked open the rear door. “Oh, hell,” she said.

“What is it?” asked Barbetta.

Mavis stepped back from the car, breathing through her mouth, looking paper white. “Ah Jeez, I think it's what's left of Ava Morrison.”

Nick stepped up, still stuck with the damned cat, and they all looked in at the backseat and the footwells. Nobody said anything for a while until Pete Dorn said, “Excuse me,” in a hoarse tight voice and walked off about twenty feet and sat down on a concrete block and put his head in his hands.

Nick went around to the driver's side, opened the door, popped the trunk hatch, went back and made sure the trunk was empty, placed the cat into it and gently—but quickly—closed the lid.

They heard footsteps, somebody running toward them. Barbetta turned and saw the Live Eye cameraman trying to close in for a shot. Barbetta went out to welcome him. His encounter with the camera guy got on quite a few cell-phone cameras and went viral on YouTube shortly afterward.

Nick pulled out his radio. “Central, this is Detective Kavanaugh.”

“Roger that.”

“I want to get in touch with the squad covering that house on Sable Basilisk.”

“Wait one, I'll patch you through.”

Nick waited, watching what was going on between Frank Barbetta and the camera guy. Apparently Frank Barbetta shared Nick's strong views on the proper relationship between the media and law enforcement. Central came back. “Detective Kavanaugh?”

“Here.”

“Well, sir, we can't raise that unit, sir.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nine Charlie isn't responding, sir.”

Nick felt his chest get tight. “Central, get some cars up there! Roll on it! Get some fucking units up there right now! Tell them to go in hot, with guns! Now move!”

His voice was flat and hard as slate and it carried across the whole yard. People stood in stunned silence, staring at Nick. For a second, anyway. And then everybody was moving. Thirty seconds later Nick and Mavis were in the Suburban and headed north at speed. Lights and sirens.

Axel was in the river. That was all he knew. He had no idea how he got there or what he was going to do about it, but he remembered from Safety Swimmers that the dog paddle was just going to wear you out and you had to get rid of your shoes, so Axel did that, all the while feeling the Tulip racing away with him like…like a dog with a ball. Now and then he could get his head above the waves and catch a glimpse of the grassy banks of Boudreau Park and he could see those girls who were playing jump rope down the way from them.

They were shouting at him and running along the bank and he tried to shout back, but then he went under again. The water was warm and brown and moving real quick, but now that he had kicked his sneakers off he wasn't going down as fast.

He looked up and saw the sunlight doing flickery light things on the waves and he felt his heart slamming around inside his chest and then he figured
I'm going to drown and be dead and they'll stick me in the ground and worms will crawl inside my mouth and nose and eat my brain and lay worm eggs in my eyes,
so he started to fight again and his head popped up and he was still only a few yards off the bank and now a whole lot of people were running and screaming and pointing at him.

The girls with the rope were screaming words at him in really high shrieky voices and one of them was tossing the rope at him.

It landed close and he made a grab at it and he almost had the handle and then he was pulled away from the shore and he went under again, started to spin sideways like the river was a spider rolling him up in a web to save him for later and a voice in his head was saying
don't fight it just go with the flow let go let go
and his arms were getting heavy and his chest was on fire but all he could say to the voice was
worms will eat me
so he kept fighting and now and then he could claw his way back to the surface and take some air in.

Now he was racing by the Pavilion and he could see people sitting at tables with glasses of beer and all the colored umbrellas with
COORS
and
HEINEKEN
and
MILLER TIME
on them and nobody ever looked at him as he went flying past them and he felt a stab of anger at all the stupid people having stupid beers while a little kid was being carried away to drown in the stupid river.

And then the water took him for a while and it dragged him deeper than before so that when he looked up the yellow dancing lights on the waves seemed a long way away and then a huge dark shadow came across the waves and the sunlight went away and he was in a dark gloomy water world and he saw a wall of concrete sliding past him and he knew he was going under the Armory Bridge.

The voice was right there in his head saying
stop fighting go with the flow
and all the fight that was in his wiry body was slipping away from him and then he slammed into something big and sort of soft and it came away with him and got swept along with him.

It felt like some kind of rubbery raft and as it raced along with the current it rose up toward the light and Axel got on top of it and let it carry him upward and in a moment he had his face in the sun again and he stayed there, gripping the raft and floating on the surface of the river.

His heart was still slamming in his chest and he was choking on river water, but after he threw up again he felt his chest clear and he could breathe and breathe so that's what he did, he just lay there holding on to the raft as the river carried them away, and he closed his eyes, and he breathed in that wonderful air for a long time, just floating and drifting, and breathing and drifting.

Axel went with the flow.