He looked at Bolton, then at the Taser.
"Whoa."
First time he'd tried one. He tended to favor a blackjack or sap for this kind of work, but Abe was always going on about how unreliable they were—hit too hard and the joe never wakes up, or not hard enough and you've got to give him a second tap, which might put him in vegetable land as well. After all, the reason for a sap was to put someone down, not dead. So Abe had lent him this baby on a trial basis. Jack was sold. The Taser was a keeper.
He glanced up and down the empty street. No one about. He popped the trunk, then lifted Bolton and dumped him inside. One thing about this trunk: Plenty of room. Enough for three or four Boltons, easy. Maybe more. Could be why Vinnie Donuts liked Crown Vies.
After slipping into a pair of gloves, he grabbed his roll of duct tape and quickly fastened Bolton's wrists behind him. Then bound his ankles, then his knees—lots of tape. As he worked he envisioned this piece of crap drugging Christy, slitting her wrists, and watching her bleed to death, all after seducing her child—their child, for Christ sake.
No more community theater for Christy, no more listening to My Fair Lady…
He looked at this smear of human scum with a legacy of four corpses and a pregnant teenage daughter and sensed the darkness he kept bottled up breaking free. He felt his lips retracting, baring his teeth. He glanced over at the bloody tire iron lying in the gutter, temptingly near.
Don't lose it… don't lose it…
… yet.
He wrapped the tape extra tight, and as he worked, Bolton's eyes fluttered open. He gave Jack a dazed look, then tried to move. When he realized he couldn't, his eyes widened in shock, then blazed with anger.
"Pussy motherfucker! Can't even fight me straight up and fair!"
Jack tore a shori strip of tape off the roll.
"Fair? You mean as in meeting on a field of honor? This from a guy who shot two unarmed doctors in the back, water-tortured a detective, and murdered his own sister while she was unconscious. Fair? You gotta be kidding."
"In a fair fight my bloodline'd kick your bloodline's ass!"
Jack fought the driving urge to shove the tape down Bolton's windpipe. Instead he slapped it across his mouth.
"A fair fight presupposes I've got something to prove to you. Dream on."
Bolton's eyes blazed with wild hatred as he began kicking and thrashing. The Taser darts were still stuck in his chest. Jack reached down, grabbed the pistol, and gave him another dose.
Bolton began a different sort of thrashing.
16
Lying awake in bed, Aaron heard something that sounded like a car door slamming outside, then the roar of a big engine racing away. He got up and peeked out the front window.
Nothing moving out there. Could have been anybody.
He'd been jumpy lately. Well, why not? Bolton had killed again and might not be through. Who knew what he'd—
Aaron started as he noticed an arc of reflected light just beyond the corner of his front yard, behind the big junipers. It looked like the fender of a car. No one was supposed to be parked out there.
With his heart thumping he padded downstairs to his study where he grabbed his pair of mini-binoculars and focused ihem on the car. lie gasped as he recognized a Miata.
Bolton had a Miata.
Aaron stood paralyzed for a moment, then snatched up his phone and punched in 911.
17
Jack cruised the Thruway truck stop lot till he found what he was looking for: an idling eighteen-wheel rig parked facing the food court and between two others of its kind. He backed up to the space between it and its neighbor to the right, then opened his trunk and hauled Bolton out. He grabbed the coil of half-inch nylon cord he'd just picked up at a Home Depot along the way, then crawled under the refrigerated trailer, dragging the struggling Bolton behind him.
He'd gone on autopilot along the way, feeling nothing, almost as if he were watching himself from afar as he looped the cord around Bolton's taped legs, tying multiple knots on knots, then secured the other end to the cab's rear frame rail. All through the process Bolton twisted and thrashed, breath snorting through his nostrils as he made frightened squeals and moans behind the tape.
When Jack finished, he looked at him. Couldn't make out his features in the dark; all he saw was a wriggling, oblong shape making faint, muffled, panicky noises.
"Having a bad day, Jeremy?" he said, raising his voice above the sound of the engine as he patted him on a shoulder. "It's about to get worse."
More whining and thrashing.
"I want you to take this personally. I'm sending you off to your greater reward this way because I don't want you identified for a while, maybe not ever. I also don't want you to die too quickly. It won't take you near as long as it took Gerhard, but long enough."
He crawled out from under the trailer and stood listening: The noise from the idling cab drowned out Bolton.
Jack returned to his car and parked it halfway between the truck and the on-ramp to the Thruway. Then he took out a sheet with the phone numbers Russ had found for him.
Two names, two numbers, two women. The widows of Doctors Horace Golden and Elmer Dalton. Nancy Golden had remarried, Grace Dalton had not. Never ceased to amaze him how many secrets could be ferreted out through the Internet.
He dialed Nancy Golden—now Nancy Emerson—then Grace Dalton. He gave them both the same message: Jeremy Bolton has disappeared from Creighton. No one's talking because no one knows where he is. Then he hung up.
Exactly thirteen minutes after the second call, a lean man in a cowboy hat and boots strode up to the cab, flicked a cigarette away, and climbed in.
Jack got out and stood by his door as the driver did some revving, then ratcheted into gear and started moving. Bolton must have worked the tape off his mouth somehow, because Jack heard him. His scream dopplered up, then down as the truck accelerated past.
He got back in and followed. The rig had barely made it to the entrance ramp when Jack's headlights picked up a gleaming line of red winding from beneath the trailer.
A line of blood… a bloodline.
… my bloodline'd kick your bloodline's ass!
Jack stared at the red streak.
There goes your bloodline.
But this was not the end of Bolton's bloodline—or Jonah Stevens's. It lived on in Thompson and in Dawn, especially in her baby. Where was Jonah's bloodline headed? The man had concentrated it for a purpose, aimed it toward some end. What?
He couldn't help thinking of Emma and his own bloodline. Where would she have taken it?
Nausea tickled his stomach. He pulled over and onto the shoulder, stopped for a few deep breaths.
Bloodline…
Had to call Levy tomorrow… set up a meet… needed some info only he could supply.
18
Hank broke off in midsentence and looked around. He'd not only forgotten what he'd been about to say, but where he was.
He looked down from his makeshift stage and saw seventy or eighty faces staring up at him. Now he remembered… he was speaking to a Kicker group in the basement of a clubhouse in Howard Beach.
But what was he supposed to say next? How could he have forgotten? He'd given this speech so many times he could repeat it in his sleep.
Something was wrong. But what?
And then he knew: Something… someone was missing.
Jeremy… Jeremy was gone.
He didn't know how or why or where, but Jeremy's light had flickered out. Hank felt it, knew it. Just as he'd known, so many years ago, that Daddy was gone and never would be coming back.