She was almost at the car door when the man approached her. He came from the trees that hid her property from the view of her neighbors. He was small and hunched, with long dark hair that trailed his shoulders and eyes that were almost black, like those of some underground, nocturnal creature. She was already reaching for the Mace in her bag when he struck her backhanded across the face and she fell. He knelt on her legs before she could react again and she felt the pain in her side, an immense burning as the blade entered below her ribs and began to tear its way across her stomach. She tried to scream but his hand was over her mouth and all she could do was wriggle impotently as the blade continued its progress.
And then, just as she felt that she could take no more, that she must surely die from the pain, she heard a voice and saw, over the man’s shoulder, a huge hulking figure approach, a beaten-up Chevy idling behind him. He had a beard and wore a leather vest over his T-shirt. She could see the tattoo of a woman on his forearm.
“Hey!” said Bear. “The fuck you doing, man?”
Cyrus had not wanted to use the gun. He had wanted this done as quietly as possible, but the big and strangely familiar man now racing up the driveway left him with no choice. He rose from the woman before he could finish his cut, took the gun from his belt, and fired.
Two white vans took the Medway exit off I-95 and followed 11 through East Millinocket toward Dolby Pond. In the first van were three men and one woman, all armed. In the second sat another man and woman, also armed, and the Reverend Aaron Faulkner, who was silently reading his Bible on a bench in the back of the van. Had one of the state’s medical experts been on hand to check on the preacher, he would have found that the old man’s temperature was virtually normal and that all signs of his apparent ill health had already begun to fade.
A cell phone disturbed the silence of the second van. One of the men answered, spoke briefly, then turned back to Faulkner.
“He’s coming in to land now,” he told the old man. “He’ll be waiting for us when we get there. We’re right on schedule.”
Faulkner nodded, but did not respond. Instead, his eyes remained fixed on his Bible and the account of the trials of Job.
Cyrus Nairn sat behind the wheel of the Nissan at the Black Point Market and sipped a Coke. It was a warm evening and he desperately needed to cool down. The car’s a/c was busted. It didn’t matter much to Cyrus anyway: once the woman was dead he would ditch the car and head south, and that would be the end of it. He could suffer a little discomfort; after all, it was nothing compared to what the woman was about to endure.
He finished the Coke, then drove toward the bridge and dumped the can from the window into the waters below. Things had not gone according to plan over at Pine Point. First, the woman was already leaving the house when he arrived, and had gone for the spray in her bag, causing him to take her outside. Then the big man had come along and Cyrus had no choice but to use his gun. He had been afraid, for a moment, that people would hear but there had been no immediate fuss, no clamor. Still, Cyrus had been forced to leave hurriedly, and he did not like rushing his work.
He checked his watch and, his lips moving silently, counted down from ten. When he reached one, he thought he heard the muffled explosion from Pine Point. When he looked out of his window, smoke was already rising from Mary Mason’s burning car. The police would arrive soon, maybe the fire department, and they would find the woman and the dead man. He had preferred to leave the woman dying, not dead. He wanted the noise of the ambulance, the distraction to the policeman MacArthur and his colleagues, even at the risk of her being able to provide a description of him. He suspected that he might not have cut her enough, that she might even survive her injuries. He wondered if he had left her too close to the car, if she might not already be burning. He didn’t want there to be any doubt about her identity. They were minor issues, but they troubled Cyrus. He wanted to be able to work on the redhead without interruption. The prospect of capture, though, did not concern him: Cyrus would die before he would go back to prison. Cyrus had been promised salvation, and the saved fear nothing.
To his right, a road curved up into a copse of trees. Cyrus parked his car out of sight then, his stomach tense with excitement, proceeded up the hill. He cleared the trees and passed a ruined shed to his left, the white house now glowing before him, the dying sunlight reflecting from its glass. Soon, the marsh too would be aflame, the waters running orange and red.
Red, mostly.
Mary Mason lay on her back on the grass, staring at the sky. She had seen the hunched man toss the device into her car, the slow fuse burning, and had guessed what it was, but she felt paralyzed, unable to move her hands to stem the bleeding let alone pull herself away from the car.
She was weakening.
She was dying.
She felt something brush her leg, and managed to move her head slightly. A long trail of blood marked the big man’s painful progress toward her. He was almost beside her now, hauling himself along by his ragged and bloodied fingernails. He reached out to her and grasped her hand, then pressed it against the wound in her side. She gasped in pain, but he forced her to maintain the pressure.
Then, slowly, he began to drag her by the collar of her shirt toward the grass. She screamed aloud once, but still she tried to keep her hand pressed to the wound until at last he could pull her no farther. He lay against the old tree in her yard, her head resting on his legs and his hand upon her hand, keeping the pressure on, the expanse of its trunk shielding them both from the car when the device exploded moments later, shattering the glass in the automobile and the windows in her house and sending a blast of heat rolling over the lawn and the tips of her toes.
“Hold on,” said Bear. His breath rattled in his throat. “Hold on now. They’ll be coming soon.”
Roger Bowen sat in a corner of Tommy Condon’s pub on Charleston’s Church Street, sipping on a beer. On the table before him lay his cell phone. He was waiting for the call to confirm that the preacher was safe and on his way north to Canada. Bowen checked his watch as two men in their late twenties passed by, joshing and pushing each other. The one nearest stumbled against Bowen’s table, sending his cell phone tumbling onto the floor. Bowen rose up in fury as the young man apologized and replaced the phone on the table.
“You fucking asshole,” hissed Bowen.
“Hey, take it easy,” said the guy. “I said I was sorry.”
They left shaking their heads. Bowen watched them climb into a car outside and drive away.
Two minutes later, the phone on his table rang.
In the seconds before he pressed Receive, it might have struck him that the phone was a little heavier than he remembered, and that the fall to the floor had maybe scuffed it some.
He hit the green button and put the phone to his ear, just in time for the explosion to tear the side of his head off.
Cyrus Nairn stood in front of the house, clutching a map and looking puzzled. Cyrus wasn’t much of an actor, but he figured that he didn’t have to be. There was no movement from the house. He walked to the screen door and stared into the hallway beyond. The door was well oiled, and opened silently. He moved slowly inside, checking the rooms as he went, ensuring that each one was empty, wary of the dog, until at last he reached the kitchen.
The big man stood at the kitchen table, drinking soy milk from a carton. He wore a T-shirt that read “Klan Killer.” He looked at Cyrus in surprise. His hand was already moving to the gun on the table when Cyrus fired and the carton exploded in a shower of milk and blood and the big man tumbled backward, breaking a chair as he fell. Cyrus stood over him and watched as the emptiness entered his eyes.