City of Windows--A Novel

by Robert Pobi

  Whitaker pulled out her little rhinoceros pistol. “Are you taking this with you?”

  Lucas looked down at the semiautomatic. Then at his children. Then at Erin, who was watching the conversation without being able to hear what was being said. Then back at Whitaker. “I’m good.”

  Whitaker rolled her eyes. “One day, your principles are going to get you killed.” She slipped the pistol back into the holster as the pilot swung the chopper around the tip of the island.

  The lighthouse blasted a beam of bright white through the squall, and the interior of the aircraft blossomed supernova, which had all the kids shield their eyes. Then they were past, and the pilot brought the bird down on the ice-covered beach.

  Lucas leaned forward and gave Erin a kiss. Then he smiled at the kids, hollered I love you guys, and stepped out into the storm.

  Whitaker asked, “What are you going to do?”

  “Don’t worry.” Lucas looked up the hill at the lighthouse. “I have a plan,” he lied.

  97

  Montauk Lighthouse

  He stood in the dark on the welded iron stairway that served as the spinal column for the tower. It thrummed and vibrated with the shifting building, transferring the energy from the storm outside, down through the bedrock, and up through the soles of his feet. It felt as if the structure were stretching.

  There was every reason to believe that she would come this way. Of course, she might do something else completely. Ruby Quaid had proved to be smart. And she performed exceptionally well under pressure.

  But being here felt right.

  He stripped the cord from the Coke machine downstairs, soaked up his footprints with a mop from the utility room, and went looking for a way to end this thing.

  When they had revamped and renovated the lighthouse a few summers back, they had switched to an LED fixture that, for all practical applications, ran on little more current than your average toaster oven. But the old mains were still wired into the box; the big junction was bolted into an alcove halfway up the staircase. The key was tucked into a hole in the stone above.

  After rigging his defensive gamble, he stepped onto the small rubber welcome mat.

  He wondered if she’d even show up. Whatever she did next, it would be smart; it would be out of character for her to start making mistakes now. But even if you factored in her youth and stamina and determination, the past week had to have been rough. Fatigue was always the big one; everything else was secondary.

  But some people always had more rocket sauce in the tank. What had Kirby said? A little hate goes a long way.

  And Ruby had most definitely gone a long way. Nation-states had trouble fielding people who could do what she had. And she was really little more than a child, a young woman with a rifle.

  His teeth had been chattering for a while when one of the doors in the building opened. The stone structure took in a massive gulp of arctic air, then pressurized, and the door slammed somewhere down in the dark.

  He fought the shivers building up as he listened, straining to hear the sounds of human clatter above the storm breathing through the cracks in the building. There were footsteps. Something was dropped. A zipper being undone. Grunts. Something heavy—probably the Coke machine—being dragged across the stone floor.

  Then the footsteps faded for a few moments—a silence that was marred by another heavy machine being dragged across the floor, no doubt the back entrance. Then the footsteps came back.

  And someone began to climb the steps.

  98

  Southampton Sheriff’s Department

  The FBI chopper touched down in the parking lot, a makeshift landing pad denoted by two dozen magnesium flares thrown down in the snow. As soon as the skids stopped bouncing, the door opened and Whitaker climbed out. She helped the kids and Lemmy out first, followed by Erin. They all ran for the open doors of the station house, hunching to keep below the slowing rotors.

  When the aircraft was empty, Whitaker walked over to the big man in sheriff’s gear standing at the edge of the burning almost-circle and asked, “You Hauser?”

  He nodded, and she came back with, “Thanks for all the help on the phone.”

  A troop of deputies stood behind him, cradling shotguns and looking like they expected an invasion at any moment.

  The big man replied, “After your call, I spoke with your SWAT team, and right now they’re still—” He checked his watch. “Six to eight mikes out.”

  Whitaker took that in. “I don’t think we have time to wait. We need to quarantine the tip of the island, but we might have a problem up at the lighthouse.”

  “Problem?” Hauser asked as they headed to the station house.

  “We might have a sniper up there.”

  Hauser stopped. “I just sent three cars up there.”

  99

  Montauk Lighthouse

  As they stared at each other, something sparked between them that at any other time would have been an understanding. About why they were here; about why she had done what she had; about why she was still trying to do it. And about who they both were.

  But he couldn’t figure out why she had gone after his family. It was petty, which was something he wouldn’t have pegged her as. And looking down at her, at the freckled face rimmed by the fur collar, he saw all the broken children who had come through his life, and he got it; he represented all the things she either hated or had not been allowed to have.

  She had never really been allowed to be a child. Not when her parents had pulled her out of society to teach her their fanatical interpretation of God’s word. And not after her family was dead and she was being raised by a bitter woman who wanted revenge for what had happened to her sister and brother-in-law’s family. Ruby Quaid’s life had been taken away at Bible Hill, and she never got it back.

  Lucas’s focus went from her eyes to the muzzle of the rifle pointed straight up, back to her eyes.

  Her focus shifted from his one good eye, down to the thick electrical cable with the exposed copper end he was holding on to, then back to his eye.

  He needed to stay in control of the situation. “This can end.”

  “This is all there is.”

  Lucas nodded down at the cable in his hand. “You don’t have a lot of options.”

  The muzzle of the rifle moved in small circles as she spoke. “I’ve watched lots of people die. It’s easy.” In that instant, she really was just a little girl. With freckles and a rifle. “Dying don’t take nothing. Living? That’s something else.”

  “Why do you think I’m here, freezing my ass off, looking for you? Because you need someone on your side.”

  “You ain’t my friend.”

  “You’re right—I’m not. I don’t keep weak people as friends.”

  “You think I’m weak?”

  “I know you’re weak. You could have taken what happened to you and turned it around, but you went out and did the same thing that was done to you—you destroyed a lot of good people just because you could. You’re just like everyone else out there; you have no imagination.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “How is it not true?”

  She was silent for a few furious seconds as the building vibrated in the storm. “They killed my family.”

  “Your father had plenty of chances to make good decisions, and he pissed them all away. You want to blame someone, blame him. It’s not a very complicated equation.”

  “There are people who believe in what I did.”

  “Sure there are. Stupid people. Uninformed people. Bad people. No one else has to die,” he said. “Not even you.”

  She smiled at that. It was a lost, lonely smile. “The bad guy always has to die.”

  Lucas shook his head. “The universe doesn’t believe in good and bad, right or wrong. It’s a violent place, and you are just a fractal representation of the chaos.”

  She seemed to think about that for a second before nodding. “Yes,” she said. “I am.” And
she began to lower the muzzle.

  Lucas threw his prosthetic hand out. Trying to stop her. Trying to get her to listen. Trying to save her life.

  But she was no longer interested.

  He released the cable.

  The muzzle was down now. Almost at his chest.

  The wire unfurled.

  Lucas had time to flinch before the air went electric as current sparked from the copper braid to the metal steps in a single flash of blue that grounded Ruby Quaid with 480 molten volts of pure Con Edison. She bellowed like Karloff as she got hit with enough current to jump-start a small star. There was a staccato pop-pop-pop as her muscles contracted, breaking bones and shattering joints, and she squeezed the trigger while she danced in place. The muzzle flashed, sending a round into the wall as every atom in the immediate universe surged through her skeleton.

  Her lips sharked back, and there was another great twitch, and her jaw slammed shut, taking off her tongue and bottom lip.

  Her head kinked to one side and her eyes crossed and her hair caught fire.

  There was another Jacob’s ladder weird blue flash outside as the main transformer for the property blew in one massive bang, and the whole shithouse shorted out.

  All the light bulbs in the 130-foot shaft exploded in one final eruption of electricity and blown glass.

  And then it was over.

  She stood there, on fire. Crackling in the dark.

  But without the current to pull her strings, gravity took over, and Ruby flopped back into the stone wall. She let out a grunt as her lungs collapsed, sending out a final breath of black dust that slipped away in the air current.

  Lucas stepped off the small rubber mat that had separated him from a trip to the promised land. All he saw were the melted soles of Ruby’s smoking boots, and the air smelled of burned hair and melted nylon, and the familiarity of it all was too much, and he bent over and threw up.

  100

  Lucas sat on the front steps to the lighthouse. The electrical building down by the maintenance shed was on fire, the blown transformer too much of a boost to contain. The flames licked into the sky, sending a feather of greasy smoke up into the snow coming down. He had called Whitaker and she was on the way with the cavalry.

  The first of the Southampton Sheriff’s Department vehicles blew through the trees in the distance, a fleet of lights flashing behind. The SWAT team had been sent back to New York; whatever there was to clean up could be handled through the joint efforts of the local SD and the FBI.

  And here they were.

  Lucas hoisted himself up. There was a slight tingling in his skeleton, and he was aware that his being alive was more than a minor miracle. His prosthetic limbs offered the opposite of protection from current; if nothing else, his metal arm and leg converted him into the kind of potential human electrical disaster that AC/DC wrote songs about. The possibility of bad things happening was greater than he had wanted to admit.

  The big Chevy Suburban barreled through the corner on Old Montauk Highway, fishtailing up Lighthouse Road, and Lucas recognized the wheelmanship as Whitaker’s. The half dozen vehicles behind her took the corner at a more restrained pace, and he smiled in spite of the taste of puke in his throat and the smell of fried human being in his nostrils.

  The Suburban stopped in front of the steps, and a forest of faces peered at him from the interior. Erin was in the passenger’s seat, and the kids were in the back, waving and grinning like the world’s tiniest cheerleading squad. Lemmy had his butt pressed up against the window.

  Whitaker and Erin stepped out at the same time.

  “You okay?” they asked in stereo.

  He shrugged because it was the simplest answer. Then he jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. “She’s about forty steps up.”

  “Is she okay?”

  He shook his head. “Not really.”

  Whitaker came around the front end and headed up the steps to the lighthouse.

  Behind her, doors on the six official vehicles opened, spilling law enforcement officers out onto the snow.

  Erin came over, and he pulled her into a hug. Her nose crinkled up, and she said, “You smell like a melted Frisbee.”

  “Hello to you, too.”

  “Is it really over?”

  “Yes.”

  And with that, she sank her face into his chest and began to cry.

  After a few moments, he asked her, “You ready to go home?”

  “Home here?”

  “No. Home to the city.”

  Erin turned to the kids in the car. “Who wants to bring Uncle Dingo Christmas presents in the hospital?”

  The kids hollered a unanimous I do!, and Lucas smiled for what felt like the first time in his life.

  “So let’s go,” he said. “But you drive.”

  “They won’t mind you stealing their SUV?”

  “You’re kidding, right?” And with that, he climbed in and snapped on his seat belt.

  Erin started the 4 × 4 and swung around in a tight arc, and they headed down the hill to Old Montauk Highway. Lucas watched the spire of the lighthouse in the rearview mirror, fire from the blown transformer licking up into the sky. By the time they were on the highway, the dark building had been swallowed by the storm, the only visible point being the shed that was still on fire.

  In a few minutes, he was asleep.

  101

  Columbia University Medical Center

  From the hall, Lucas watched Dingo entertain the kids from his hospital bed. He was wearing a candy necklace they brought him and trying to get Hector to put a bedpan on his head, an idea the other children thought was wonderful. There were presents on the windowsill, half-hidden by torn wrapping paper and recycled Christmas bows. If there was one thing Dingo was good at, it was entertaining kids, even when he could barely keep his eyes open.

  He wasn’t able to sit up yet. There were two tubes that vented liquid from his body, one from his lung and the other from his bladder, but he was now out of the ICU and already making bad jokes.

  When Lucas held out his new passport with the gold eagle embossed on the cover, Dingo said that he was no longer sure he wanted it. Then he smiled and took it from Lucas’s hand, only to point out that they could have used a better photo. Like hate, a little humor went a long way.

  The bureau was combing through the rubble that Ruby Quaid had left in her wake and, along with the dead, there were a lot of questions to answer. Kehoe had gone into damage control mode—Ruby Quaid most definitely did not fit the narrative handed down by the politicians, and now, with hindsight being the mother of invention, the double-speak, finger-pointing, ass-covering, and plain old lying had already started.

  In the end, Kehoe’s motives for pulling him aboard hadn’t been all that complicated. He had most definitely needed Lucas—the results proved that. And if it had turned out to be a foreigner following the bent decree laid out by some invisible man in the sky, Lucas could have been relegated back into mothball mode with no one the wiser and only a few pieces of silver missing from the coffers. He had paid lip service to the Frenchman narrative while simultaneously setting Lucas loose to do that thing he did. More of that strategic thinking he was known for. Which wasn’t really any big surprise—people don’t change, not really.

  Of course, when Lucas lined it all up, the job had been more than just Kehoe making the right choices; it had also been an olive branch of sorts—a partial apology for how he had reacted all those years ago. For words spoken and deeds done. Which said a lot about his character.

  All to stop a girl with a rifle.

  When it was all tallied up, there were fourteen dead bodies in her wake if he included collateral damage like Atchison’s partner. And of course there was Ruby herself. And they’d probably find more. It was a remarkable accomplishment when you thought about it.

  That night on the train, Lucas had figured a lot of it out. Not the whole story, but he’d turn out to be correct on the broad strokes.

  The
y were exhuming the remains of the dead Quaid children, and Lucas was certain they’d learn that one of the girls—one of those little corpses from Bible Hill—would turn out to be Myrna Mercer’s biological daughter, Doreen. Myrna and Grant had no doubt loved their nephews and nieces, but with Grant in a wheelchair and the cabin to manage, taking in five children would have been difficult. So their daughter spent time with her cousins up on Bible Hill, and they spent time with Carl and Elisabeth Quaid’s children one at a time. What was it that Myrna had said?

  I lost my blood up there.

  At the time it made sense. Now, it made more.

  She had lost her own daughter. And raised Ruby as her own child, as Doreen.

  And Myrna’s mission of revenge had been born, delivered to the girl she was raising as her own with the force of Scripture behind it, teaching Ruby that it was not only her responsibility to go after the people who had killed her family but also her sacred duty.

  They had cashed out the settlement—the blood money, as she rightly called it—years ago, a little at a time so as not to raise any suspicions. They stored it until Ruby needed financing. Myrna had been at the trial back in D.C. and it wasn’t hard to imagine her staring down all the agents responsible for murdering her family, quietly etching their names in blood somewhere on the hate-filled walls of her mind. Myrna’s plan was borne. Years later, the man responsible for Quaid’s arrest—Donnie Doowack—surfaced, and planning became action. Ruby went out into the world with a backpack of money, a hunting rifle, and head full of bad ideas.

  After getting to New York—or was it before?—setting up another identity would have been simple. She changed her name and started up a new life—one that included two trips a month to D.C. to call Myrna, which was really just a smart way of establishing an alibi. And in New York, the waitress job was just something for her to do in case anyone came asking about how she lived. But she spent her weekends and evenings with Kirby. And his militia friends. Learning about urban warfare and how the police operated and where to source everything from fake identification to specialized ammunition to SWAT uniforms.