He stopped at the car and used his left hand to support himself against the roof while his right fitted the key into the lock. He opened the door and saw himself reflected in the glass of the side window, then another reflection joined his, hovering behind his shoulder. It was a bird, a monstrous dove with a white face and a dark beak and human eyes buried deep in its sockets. It raised a wing, but the wing was black, not white, with claws at the end that held something long and metal in their grip.
And then the wing began to beat with a soft swishing sound, and he felt a new, sharp pain as his collarbone was broken by a blow. He twisted, trying to get to the gun in his pocket, but another bird appeared, this time a hawk, and this bird was holding a baseball bat, a good old-fashioned Louisville Slugger designed, if held in the right hands, to knock that baby right out of the ballpark, except now the Slugger was aimed at his head. He couldn’t duck to avoid the blow, so he raised his left arm instead. The impact shattered his elbow, and the wings were beating and the blows were raining down upon him, and he dropped to his knees as something in his head came apart with a noise like bread breaking, and his eyes were filled with red. He opened his mouth to speak, although there were no words for him to form, and his jaw was almost torn from his face as the crowbar swung in a lazy arc, felling him like a tree so that he lay flat on the cold gravel while the blood flowed and the beating went on, his body making strange, soft sounds, bones moving inside where bones had no right to move, the framework within fracturing, the tender organs bursting.
And still he lived.
The blows stopped, but the pain did not. A foot slid under his belly, levering him upward so that he flopped onto his back, resting slightly against the open door, half in, half out of the car, one hand lying useless by his side, the other thrown back into the interior. He saw the whole world through a red prism, dominated by birds like men and men like birds.
“He’s gone,” said a voice, and it sounded familiar to Merrick.
“No he ain’t,” said another. “Not yet.”
There was hot breath close to his ear.
“You shouldn’t have come here,” said the second voice. “You should have just forgot about her. She’s long dead, but she was good while she lasted.”
He was conscious of movement to his left. The crowbar struck him just above the ear and light shone through the prism, refracting the world in a red-tinged rainbow, turning it to splinters of color in his fading consciousness.
daddy
Almost there, honey, almost there.
And still, still he lived.
The fingers of his right hand clawed at the floor of the car. They found the barrel of the Smith IO, and he tugged it free of the tape and flicked at it until he could reach the grip, pulling it toward him, willing the blackness to lift, if only for a moment.
daddy
In a minute, honey. Daddy’s got something he has to do first.
Slowly, he drew the gun to him. He tried to lift it, but his wounded arm would not hold the weight. Instead, he allowed himself to fall on his side, and the pain was almost beyond endurance as splintered bone and torn flesh shuddered from the impact. He opened his eyes, or perhaps they had always been open, and it was just the new waves of pain provoked by the movement that caused the mist briefly to lift. His cheek was flat against the gravel. His right arm was outstretched before him, the gun lying on the horizontal. There were two figures ahead of him, walking side by side perhaps fifteen feet from where he lay. He shifted his hand slightly, ignoring the feeling of his fractured bones rubbing against one another, until the gun was pointing at the two men.
And, somehow, Merrick found the strength within himself to pull the trigger, or perhaps it was the strength of another added to his own, for he thought he felt a pressure on the knuckle of his index finger as though someone were pressing softly upon it.
The man on the right seemed to do a little jog, then stumbled and fell as his shattered ankle gave way. He shouted something that Merrick could not understand, but Merrick ’s finger was tightening on the trigger for the second shot and he had no time for the utterances of others. He fired again, the target larger now, for the injured man was lying on his side, his friend trying to lift him, but the shot was wild, the gun bucking in his hand and sending the bullet over the recumbent figure.
Merrick had the time and the strength to pull the trigger one last time. He fired as the blackness descended, and the bullet tore through the forehead of the wounded man, exiting in a red cloud. The survivor tried to drag the body away, but the dead man’s foot caught in a storm drain. People appeared at the door of the Old Moose Lodge, for even in a place like this the sound of gunfire was bound to attract attention. Voices shouted, and figures began to run toward him. The survivor fled, leaving the dead man behind.
Merrick exhaled a final breath. A woman stood over him, the waitress from the bar. She spoke, but Merrick did not hear what she said
daddy?
i’m here, Lucy.
for Merrick was gone.
Chapter XXXIII
While Frank Merrick died with his daughter’s name upon his lips, Angel, Louis, and I decided on a course of action to deal with Caswell. We were in the bar, the remains of our meal still scattered around us, but we weren’t drinking.
We agreed that Caswell appeared close to some form of breakdown, although whether caused by incipient guilt or something else we could not tell. It was Angel who put it best, as he often did.
“If he’s so overcome with guilt, then why? Lucy Merrick has been missing for years. Unless they kept her there for all that time, which doesn’t seem too likely, then why is he so conscience-stricken now, all of a sudden?”
“ Merrick, perhaps,” I said.
“Which means somebody told him that Merrick has been asking questions.”
“Not necessarily. It’s not like Merrick has been keeping a low profile. The cops are aware of him, and thanks to Demarcian’s killing, the Russians are too. Demarcian was involved somehow. Merrick didn’t just pick his name out of a hat.”
“You think maybe these guys were sharing images of the abuse, and that’s the connection to Demarcian?” asked Angel.
“Dr. Christian said that he hadn’t heard of anything involving men with bird masks turning up in photos or on video, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing like that out there.”
“They would have been taking a chance by selling it,” said Angel. “Might have risked drawing attention to themselves.”
“Maybe they needed the money,” said Louis.
“But Caswell had enough to buy the Gilead land outright,” I replied. “It doesn’t sound like money was an issue.”
“But where did the cash come from?” asked Angel. “Had to have come from somewhere, so maybe they were selling this stuff.”
“How much does it go for, though?” I said. “Enough to buy a patch of unwanted land in a forest? The barman said that the land wasn’t exactly given away for free, but it didn’t cost the earth either. He could have bought it for the equivalent of nickels and dimes.”
Angel shrugged. “Depends what they were selling. Depends how bad it was. For the kids, I mean.”
None of us said anything more for a time. I tried to create patterns in my mind, to put together a sequence of events that made sense, but I kept losing myself in contradictory statements and false trails. More and more, I was convinced that Clay was involved with what had occurred, but how, then, to balance that with Christian’s view of him as a man who was almost obsessed with finding evidence of abuse, even to the detriment of his own career, or Rebecca Clay’s description of a loving father devoted to the children in his charge? Then there were the Russians. Louis had asked some questions and discovered the identity of the redheaded man who had come to my house. His name was Utarov, and he was one of the most trusted captains in the New England operation. According to Louis, there was paper out on Merrick, a piece of unfinished business relating to some jobs he had undertaken against the Russians sometime in the past, but there were also rumors of unease in New England. Prostitutes, mainly those of Asian, African, and Eastern European origin, had been moved out of Massachusetts and Providence and told to lie low, or they had been forced to do so by the men who controlled them. More specialized services had also been curtailed, particularly those relating to child pornography and child prostitution.