Finn shouted. “Kill me! For God’s sake, just kill me.”
Clark heard Mary again, as if she were right there, tugging at his arm, pleading for attention. “No, Daddy, no.”
I’m sorry, baby. No mercy.
Except now the merciful thing would be to end it. There was that time when his truck had sideswiped a huge buck, and he found it in the deep weeds on the shoulder of the highway, twitching, in agony, dying slowly. He couldn’t drive away and leave it there. Donna was in the truck, and he made her stay inside and not watch. Then he retrieved a rifle from the tailgate and shot the deer in the brain.
An act of mercy.
Clark marched out of the surf. He came up behind Finn, not in front. Finn felt him there but didn’t try to turn around. Clark could see the man’s chest heaving in and out. The bald pate of Finn’s skull was like a melon balanced on the tree trunk. Clark knew it would take one swing of the bat to end it. To end both their lives. One millisecond of pain and light to put Finn, Mary, and himself out of their shared agony.
“Just do it,” Finn shouted.
Clark wrapped his fingers around the wet grip of the bat. His eyes found a misshapen mole on the back of Finn’s head and focused on it. His target. His sweet spot. He wound up and prepared to swing.
44
The Wisconsin Point was a twin sister to the Minnesota Point, separating Lake Superior from Allouez Bay with a needle of land that suffered the pummeling of waves and gales. Only an inlet of open water not even a thousand feet across separated the two splinters of beach. Unlike its Minnesota sibling, where Stride and Serena lived, the Wisconsin Point was largely undeveloped parkland, so narrow in most places that there was no room to sink a foundation. The only road leading out to the Point was a country lane called Moccasin Mike at the southeastern edge of Superior.
Stride shot through the storm on Moccasin Mike at seventy miles an hour. His windshield wipers sluiced aside the hammering rain. The road was arrow straight, but it was a roller coaster of shallow hills and dips. He didn’t see the worst of the water-filled depressions in the road until the truck was airborne and he and Maggie rose out of their seats. His breath expelled as he landed back down in moving water with a sharp jolt in his back. The truck groaned through the flooded valley and threatened to stall and float, but then the tires chewed back onto solid ground and roared up the opposite slope, cascading spray behind them.
At high speed, the truck gobbled up the two-mile stretch of highway, and Stride nearly missed the left turn to the Point. He braked hard and overcorrected, sending the rear of the Expedition into a fishtail, and then he accelerated again onto the broken asphalt. The truck lurched through a moonscape of potholes. Evergreens leaned in from the shoulders of the road, and he sheared off branches as he drove. His high beams stabbed the darkness, but all he could see was silver rain and black forest, until suddenly the truck burst free from the wilderness onto the slim peninsula and the bay opened up on his left. A roar of wind rattled the truck and threatened to spill it onto its side.
He slowed down. The thunder was a tin can banging in their ears.
“I don’t like this storm,” Stride said. “The lightning is right on top of us.”
They rocked along the uneven road for half a mile, and then Stride caught a reflection of metal in his headlights. A 1990s-era pickup truck was parked in the long grass on the right-hand shoulder by the slope that led to the lakeside beach. Clark’s truck.
He stopped the Expedition askew on the Point road. He and Maggie piled out of both sides. Maggie ran to Clark’s truck and pressed her face against the window.
“It’s empty,” she called. “They must be on the beach.”
“Call for backup.”
Stride unholstered his Glock. Maggie grabbed her phone and shouted instructions.
A muddy path only a foot wide wound between the long grass and sagging birch trees to the top of the slope. The wet ground sucked at Stride’s boots, and he slipped as he climbed, falling to his knees and nearly losing his gun. He had to sink his free hand in the dirt to push himself up. Maggie followed behind him, swearing as her heels got trapped. She kicked them off, leaving herself in bare feet.
They reached the crown of the hill, where the expanse of beach and lake opened up below them. Superior was a living thing, violent and huge, invading the puny finger of sand. Around them, the trees yawned and spun. Lightning popped in their eyes, and the circling beam of the Superior lighthouse flashed through the darkness out on the water.
At first, the beach looked empty.
“Where are they?” Maggie screamed, cupping her hand beside her mouth.
“I don’t see them!” The lightning broke again, and Stride pointed. “Wait, there they are!”
Fifty yards away, looking no larger than dolls, Clark Biggs and Finn Mathisen were on opposite sides of a giant trunk of driftwood. Finn lay sprawled on the ground, half his torso propped against the tree. Clark stood behind him. When the next flash of lightning illuminated the beach, they realized that Clark held a baseball bat in his hands and was preparing to swing with deadly intent at the back of Finn’s head.
“Stop!” Maggie shouted.
She might as well have been mute. Clark couldn’t hear a thing.
“Clark! Stop!”
Stride aimed his Glock into the sky and squeezed off a round. To him, with the gun by his ear, the report sounded loud, but he wasn’t sure the shot could be heard over the wind, rain, thunder, and surf. For a few long seconds, the beach was dark, and they were blind. When they could see through the next streak of light, they saw Clark, stopped, the bat poised high above his head, as he stared directly at them on top of the hill. Stride half expected him to swing, but Clark froze, hesitating at the brink.
Finn’s face was turned toward them. He was alive.
Stride stumbled down the slope to the flat stretch of wet sand and rye grass. He splashed through pooled water with Maggie on his heels and stopped ten feet from the slab of driftwood. Stride pointed his Glock at the ground, but he held it out from his body where Clark could see it. He studied Finn and saw that the man was badly hurt, his shoulder broken, his left hand pressed frantically on his disjointed knee, his face twisted in agony. He had bitten his lip so hard that it was bleeding.