He touched his father’s shoulder.
Turning, standing, the dead man was not Warren Dantry but Henry, his face blue, his lips gray, reaching for Luke’s throat.
Luke sat up, mouth dry, skin clammy with sweat. Aubrey, fully dressed again, hair wet, sat watching him from the other bed. She had turned on the television and as he looked at the screen he saw the pictures of the two men killed in the alley. Chris and the poor officer.
He reached for the remote, turned up the volume. No arrests in the double shooting. No suspects as of yet.
‘I’ll be back.’
He walked down four streets and at a busy intersection, found an ancient pay phone in front of a convenience store. But it was too close. He took a bus a few miles away, found another convenience store with a pay phone. He fed it quarters and dialed the police, said quickly and clearly, ‘I called in earlier the tip on the murdered officer. The two people responsible for shooting him may also have a connection to the train bombing in Texas, and they are working on a bigger attack called Hellfire, but I don’t know what it is.’ He hung up. He could have said something about Henry; he hadn’t. Why? He owed Henry no loyalty. But his mouth had not been able to form the words, to say what he believed about Henry as an absolute truth. He picked up the phone to dial it again, then slowly hung up.
He knew the awful truth: he wanted to deal with Henry himself. He wanted Henry weak and vulnerable in front of him, to be forced to admit he used and betrayed Luke. Accountable, for only a few moments, to Luke for taking Luke’s well-intentioned work and building an obscenity from it. It was a disquieting realization, and it gnawed at his heart during the trip back to the motel.
When he got back to the motel room, Aubrey had turned to another news channel. Authorities in Alaska were reporting that a trio of Seattle men had been arrested trying to sabotage an oil pipeline near Sitka. They had been caught with a few homemade bombs, devices powerful enough to have torn an expensive hole in the pipe and shut down delivery capacity for days. The men were allegedly ecological extremists; but the stock market had reacted to this late-afternoon news with a feeling of havoc narrowly averted, especially after the week’s earlier pipeline blast in Canada. Oil prices soared to new records and the rest of the market cratered for the day. Millions vanished on paper.
‘Seattle,’ Luke said. ‘I found some extremist environmentalists in Seattle that I handed over to Henry. This could be them.’
‘Or not.’
‘I can’t hear about an attack, or a political crime, and not think it’s connected to the Night Road right now. My God, I gave him so many names. Even if there were only fifty or so that were serious, that’s a million per terrorist.’
‘Life has a soft underbelly,’ Aubrey said. ‘I mean, if just a few people wanted to wreck the economy, they could, with surgical precision. Just by hitting us where we’re vulnerable. Our energy. Our food. Our communications.’ She looked at him, sadness in her eyes. ‘If they scare enough people, they will change how we live.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Look at 9/11, what a few people can do with so little. Nineteen guys. The whole operation cost a half-million. These guys could cause so much more suffering with so much more money. Not just one big attack. Maybe a whole, long series. An onslaught of terror.’
Then the next story was about Eric but they did not mention Eric’s name. The screen showed police tape cordoning off the condo building on Armitage. No witnesses, no description of a shooter, except three people – a man and a woman, pursued by another man – had run into traffic, nearly causing a major bus crash. The anchor said, ‘We’re told the power across the Lincoln Park area had failed due to a computer glitch, although no problems elsewhere in the power grid have been reported, and ComEd is investigating the situation…’
She smoothed her damp hair back from her head. ‘You sort of stink, Luke. You might want to shower.’
He hadn’t gotten clean since the cottage near the flooded river. He ducked into the bathroom, stood under the stinging spray, lathered his body with soap. A warm gratitude dawned in his chest that she was sticking with him; he didn’t want to be alone. He didn’t like putting his grimy clothes back on but he had no choice. He’d lost his knapsack with his clothes at Chris’s studio.
Aubrey lay curled under the sheets. Dozing. He moved to his own bed and doused the light. He realized he’d left the bathroom light on. He got up, switched off the light and walking in the darkness back to his own bed, he inadvertently hit his shin against her mattress.
She sat up with an abbreviated scream.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Sorry, Aubrey.’
‘I’m okay. I thought – I dreamed I was back in that cabin…’
‘It’s okay.’ He sat on his bed. ‘I had a bad dream earlier.’ He could hear, in the dark, the rustling of the sheets on her bed as she eased back down on the mattress.
She said, ‘I was sure – when I was chained to that bed – no one was ever going to find me. I was going to starve to death. Or die of thirst. An ugly death alone. I don’t even like to eat lunch alone.’
He laughed, very softly, and she sighed and then she cried, for Eric, for the life he’d stolen from her.
Luke watched the moonlight that came in the room from the barely parted curtains. He looked over at Aubrey and for a moment he didn’t realize that she was holding a hand out toward him.
He took her hand.
‘Just for now,’ she said. He knew. He understood.
‘I thought I was going to die in that cabin, too,’ he said. He closed his hand around hers. His breath seemed to pause. She drew him to the bed. They nestled together, both hungry for warmth, both exhausted, hearts and minds tattered by crisis.
Then her mouth turned to his, needy, hungry, a kiss that said I’m just so thankful to be alive. He covered his mouth with hers, slowed the kiss, broke it. Her lips tasted of coffee.
‘Bad idea,’ he said.
‘I don’t care. I’ve been living a bad idea for days. I didn’t love him any more. He’s ruined my life. I can’t… I just need…’
He knew. The need to feel alive, to not be deadened by the horror. She withdrew from the kiss, almost shy, and then he touched the hem of her T-shirt, felt her lift her arms, wanting to be free from the fear. He tugged the shirt off her head and eased off her bra. He pulled off his own shirt and leaned in close to kiss her again. The silver of the Saint Michael’s medal touched her naked breasts.
‘What’s this?’ She fingered the medal, the angel’s wings.
‘Saint Michael. My dad gave it to me before he died. He’s supposed to keep me safe, he said.’ Aubrey studied the medal in the cold bar of moonlight from the window, cupping it in her palm, then she ran the medal along the silver chain and put the angel on Luke’s back.
‘It tickles me,’ she said.
‘Okay.’ She closed her eyes and Luke felt her fingertips begin to push his boxers from his hips.
The lovemaking was gentle and comforting and good and they both slipped into warm sleep. In the deep of the night Luke awoke at the sound of a door shutting down the hall. He thought he should stay awake, stay on guard in case Mouser and Snow worked more sick magic to find them but he knew they couldn’t, that he and Aubrey were safe, they were invisible. But he stayed awake for a long hour, thinking not of the woman curled in the shelter of his arms, sleeping in abject relief of momentary safety, but of Henry.
Thinking of what he would do when he saw Henry, the king of lies, the false face, the betrayer, the serpent who could say trust me and turn the words to poison.
Luke was steeling himself, he realized, for murder.
28
They both slept until late in the morning, the sunshine crafting through the windows. Luke awoke and she lay next to him, watching him.
‘Shouldn’t have,’ she said, but she offered a shy smile. He saw what he thought was regret in her eyes. She blinked it away, as if she knew it lingered, and gave him a warm kiss on the mouth, followed by a chaste kiss on the forehead. She kept her hand on his flat stomach. ‘But I’m not sorry that we did.’