by Tim Weaver
The wrench connected with the side of his head.
It made a dull slap, like raw meat dropped onto a chopping board, then Lima lurched awkwardly to his right, collapsing into one of the shelving units. He had hold of the gun now, but he was dazed: he looked for her, eyes drifting and failing to focus, his hands unsteadily trying to gain purchase on the floor.
Rebekah kicked the weapon out of his grip, his fingers springing open; as it clattered against the wall, his arms gave way and he hit the floor. He landed in a blanket of roofing nails, crying out in pain as he pierced himself. Almost instantly, he attempted to get to his knees again, but he was woozy. He couldn’t focus. Rebekah pressed her foot into his back and pushed him down.
She had no plan, no idea where to go from here and, for the first time, she remembered Caleb: he was still slumped against the shelves, motionless. In the frenzy, a chunk from an old boat engine had landed on his head and now he was bleeding from his scalp. He was unconscious.
Lima had started moving again.
Shit.
She looked between him and Caleb and the parking lot: coming down from Main Street, into the harbour, was a black Dodge Ram pickup, pulling a trailer, with another vehicle loaded on it: her Cherokee.
Her eyes met those of the driver inside the Ram.
Hain.
Rebekah grabbed her backpack and sprinted out of the shack. Behind her, she heard Hain’s pickup gun into the lot – but she didn’t look back. She scrambled up a concrete slope, a sea defence built to protect the town during storms, and – thirty seconds later, as she reached Main Street – began looking for help. To her horror, no one was around. Helena was deserted.
‘Help!’ she screamed in desperation. ‘Help!’
She headed towards the store where she’d slept for months, thinking of the men she’d seen outside that morning. She’d assumed they were the owners. She’d assumed they’d open the store on day one.
But she was wrong.
The store remained closed and neither man was around. She went to the bottom of Main Street where the bait-and-tackle store was.
That was shut too.
Panicked, she glanced out to the rest of the town, at the two rows of boarded buildings on either side of her. Nothing was open; there was no sign of life. It was just Hain, Lima, Caleb – and her.
But then she came out from behind the bait-and-tackle place and looked down the ramp to the harbour parking lot, two hundred feet away.
The ferry.
There were two men behind the glass of the bridge.
‘Help!’ she screamed, frantically waving her arms above her head. ‘Help me, I’m being attacked!’ Neither looked in her direction. They couldn’t hear her from this distance. ‘Help me! Please help m–’
She stopped, struck silent.
Hain had emerged, on foot, at the bottom of the ramp. Their eyes met, his expression dark as night. And then he mouthed something.
She couldn’t hear him.
But she understood.
You’re fucking dead.
She sprinted back the way she’d come, up the incline of Main Street, as Hain made a dash to his Ram. She could run, she was fit, she could go on for miles without stopping – but there was one thing she couldn’t do.
She couldn’t outrun a car.
Behind her, she heard the rev of his engine, heard the weight of the Ram’s tyres hitting the harbour ramp.
And then an idea struck her.
A desperate, stupid idea.
The Fix
Travis showered and headed downstairs.
Naomi’s funeral the day before was the major reason why he was so late in getting up: after dropping Mark at the airport for a 9 p.m. flight, he and Gaby had gone to meet a bunch of old family friends at a bar on Hillside Avenue, and had drunk too much. Booze didn’t mix with bereavement, and Gaby had got home and burst into tears, crying about her mother’s death. She’d already been sobbing pretty much non-stop for the previous two months when, completely out of the blue, Naomi had been diagnosed as terminal, and the kids had started having to travel back and forth at every new diagnosis, on every occasion when the doctors had said it wouldn’t be long before Naomi passed, only for her to rally once more.
The three times Travis had been to see his ex-wife – because it had been the proper thing to do in her last weeks – she’d told him he’d been a shitty husband, airing the same criticisms over and over, and he’d sat there and let her talk, because another argument would have been worth nothing. It was the reason, even if he hadn’t already arranged to meet Amy Houser, why he didn’t want to be at Naomi’s grave today, playing nice in a dreary cemetery on the shoulder of the Long Island Expressway.
After showering, he headed downstairs, sitting opposite Gaby at the kitchen table. They ate eggs and drank coffee and talked about everything Gaby had coming up, and at 10 a.m., Mark texted to tell him that his flight back to LA the previous night had been fine, that he was already in work and that he was missing them very much. Travis archived the text, putting it alongside some of the other messages Mark had sent over the years where he’d said unexpected things, or been uncharacteristically expressive. Travis had always had to work harder with Mark than with Gaby but these moments, although small, made all of it worthwhile.
‘Do you think people get what they deserve, Dad?’
Travis looked up from his cellphone.
‘I mean, you had a lot of cases over the years, right?’ Gaby shifted some egg around her plate. ‘I don’t know, with Mom and everything, it made me think about the kind of work you did.’
He watched her for a moment, waiting for her to continue.
‘It must have had you asking some big questions about life,’ she said, her words a little harder to form now, after the impact of the last week. She put down her fork. ‘I mean, how do you rationalize it all?’
Travis shrugged. ‘I don’t think you do.’
‘You never tried to?’
He reached across and took his daughter’s hand, squeezing it gently. At first, he thought about planing the edges of his response to give her an answer that, twenty-four hours after she’d buried her mother, wouldn’t entirely crush her. But he didn’t want to lie to her. Not now, not today. So he squeezed her hand again, and looked her in the eyes, and said, ‘I joined the NYPD in 1983, and in thirty-six years I did as a cop in total, I saw stuff that didn’t make sense. I’d go into these places, these crime scenes, and you’d see some of the things one human being was capable of doing to another, and you’d have to take a moment to try to clear your head. Because it would be impossible to understand. I mean, all the rules we set out, not just on pieces of paper, but in life – laws we don’t write down and make a big show of, we just know – in those crime scenes, they’ve all been broken. You’re just standing there, thinking, How did we even get here? To start with, there was always a small part of me, a voice in my head, that said, “You won’t solve this because you can’t comprehend it. This crime is so heinous, so immeasurably, unfathomably awful, and you’re too ordinary.”’
‘So you’re saying nothing can be rationalized?’
‘I don’t know what I’m saying exactly, honey, but I can tell you what I learned as a cop, because I think it’s pretty close to what I learned about life. It was incredible and terrifying. It surprised and delighted me, and then, in the next breath, it didn’t just pull the rug out from under me, but collapsed the entire floor. I loved it and hated it. It made me feel like a million bucks and then would deeply and profoundly hurt me. In all those years, a ton of cases passed across my desk, and I think, overall, I did a pretty decent job. I made mistakes, but I did some good things too. But I’ll tell you, it’s a hell of a lot harder to remember the good things than it is to remember the things that caused you pain. The cases that got away and I didn’t solve, they still hurt.’
After that, he told her he loved her and he knew what Gaby must have been thinking: the things he’d talked about,
the things that being a cop had taught him about life, was all an allegory for the way she would feel about her mother. She probably thought his line about the unsolved cases – the way they still ate at him, the way they overwhelmed any successes he might have enjoyed – was really just an analogy for the grief she was carrying. The death of people we love hurt more than a million astonishing moments.
But it wasn’t an allegory.
It was a literal description of how he felt: the frustration of failure, the way he’d had to retire before he wanted to, and how he’d left three people behind.
Louise Mason.
Johnny Murphy.
His sister, Rebekah.
The Murphy disappearances had fallen into his lap in that last week, and all he’d hit was roadblocks. Even their cell-tower pings – his greatest hope for finding out where they’d gone that day – were dead ends. He remembered the night he’d got that data through, the way he’d been so excited, so charged about it, then had crash-landed. The pings had charted a course for them both, from their homes in Brooklyn, out across Long Island to Montauk at its tip, and then to a small outcrop called Crow Island, a hundred miles off the coast. Travis had known then that the island tied into some of the cryptic research notes he’d found at Johnny Murphy’s place. It had also confirmed something Travis had been thinking a lot about: the two of them had gone to Long Island to catch a ferry.
Yet later that day, Johnny and his sister had returned on the ferry and back along the Expressway. Then, for reasons that Travis couldn’t work out, they had taken the I-95 north to Connecticut, where both of their phones went dead outside Stamford, approximately fifty miles from their homes. Why had they gone in the other direction? What was in Connecticut? They appeared to have no connection to the state. He’d put out a BOLO with state troopers for the sister’s Cherokee, but it had never been sighted in or around Stamford, and neither of the phones came back on again after they’d gone off.
That night, three days before he retired, was when the case died. He couldn’t figure out what had happened to either of them. He couldn’t fix it.
Nor could he fix Louise Mason.
He’d tried for three months with her, and had tried even harder after Johnny Murphy disappeared – knowing, in his heart, the two cases were connected, that one fed into the other – but, in the end, he’d failed Louise. He couldn’t find her and, worst of all, he never got to give her family an answer. Louise, Murphy, his sister – they just became three people he’d had to let go.
Until today, perhaps.
He got ready to go and meet Amy Houser.
58
A desperate, stupid idea.
It was so risky, so profoundly reckless, Rebekah almost tripped as she considered it, like her legs were fighting the images forming in her head.
Turning, trying to ignore the reasons not to do it, she kept to the side of the buildings on Main Street – obscuring herself from Hain, in the parking lot – and returned to the top of the ramp that led down to the harbour. At the bait-and-tackle store, she stopped and peered around the right angle of its wall.
The pickup was almost upon her.
She whipped back, pressed her spine against the wall, and waited. As she did, doubt put her in a chokehold, an almost hysterical fear following in its wake: she was shivering, there were tears in her eyes, her head was on fire. As she heard the Ram coming, the rattle of the trailer behind it, she realized she’d been pressing her nails so hard into the bricks, one had snapped off.
The pickup swung around the corner without stopping and headed in the direction Rebekah had been going. She launched herself off the wall and into a sprint, following directly behind the trailer so that – if Hain checked his mirrors – he wouldn’t spot her.
She had to push herself hard to keep up.
Teeth gritted.
Heart pumping.
On the island, she’d been averaging six miles per hour tops – now she was having to do way more just to keep pace with the pickup and the trailer as it bumped its way slowly up Main Street, towards the crest of the slope.
She reached out, brushing the steel cage of the trailer with her fingers. Come on. Once the Ram hit the flat, it would be over. She tried again, tried to grab hold of a bar, breathing hard now, pulse crashing in her ears. You can do it. Come on, you can do it. She tried again, and again, her hand getting hold of the bar, then slipping. She felt herself stumble, thought it was over.
And then she had hold of it.
She almost lost her footing, the tug of the vehicle so strong – but she managed to use the momentum of the pickup to launch herself off her feet. She crunched the flats of both shoes against the back of the trailer. Her backpack slapped against her spine.
Climbing over the back gate, she paused, trying to gain control of her breathing again. To her left and right were slide bolts, keeping the rear gate of the trailer in place. She released one just as the Ram hit the flat at the top of Main Street. Inching across to the other, she swung her backpack around to her front and went to the zip pouch on top. Inside were her car keys.
She released the other bolt on the gate.
It hit the asphalt with a clatter, sparks kicking up, and immediately she felt the pickup brake: Hain knew something was up. He could feel it.
Rebekah didn’t waste any time: she moved to the left-hand side of the Jeep, opened the door as far as it would go before it hit the sides of the trailer, and slid in at the wheel. She looked at the smashed passenger window, the glass still dotted in the footwell. She saw Kyra’s pink giraffe and Roxie’s hair on the back seat. And then she pulled her door shut and hit the ignition button.
The car fired up.
She glanced at the instruments to check just how low on gas the Jeep was. There was less than a fifth of a tank left. She tried not to let it weigh on her: If I can get clear of the town, I can find the people I saw this morning. I just need enough gas to buy me time and get help.
She slammed the car into reverse.
It lurched backwards and hit the road almost instantly. The impact was so hard, Rebekah crashed forward and smashed her head against the top of the wheel. For a second, she was dazed, could feel the car swerving, out of control.
She hit the brakes.
Again, she jolted forward: she watched the trailer’s brake lights come on and everything whip to a stop. Then, in her mirror, a figure appeared behind her, at the top of the harbour ramp, by the bait-and-tackle place.
Lima.
She swung the car around, using the road and the grass either side of it to pull a full-lock U-turn, and hit the gas. The Cherokee arrowed back down the street, Lima not moving for a second – maybe disbelieving what he was seeing, maybe still unsteady – and by the time he understood what was happening, and started going for his gun, Rebekah had almost hit him.
He leaped out of the way, rolling across the blacktop, and when he was on his feet again and had the gun up in front of him, Rebekah was turning a corner. She was heading out of Helena the other way, in the opposite direction to the forest and the hostel, towards the lighthouse on the west coast.
She gunned the Jeep past the mist-shrouded echoes of old properties, knew she was driving too fast, knew it was foolish on these roads. But she kept going, her foot flat to the floor.
The further north she travelled, the more the mist thinned, until – finally – she broke from its grasp. Sun appeared, blue sky, the marbled sweep of the beach to her left, then the lighthouse. There were rock pools in a ragged line at its base and she could see that the door was still open, flapping in the wind.
She slowed slightly, leaning forward, eyes narrowing. She thought she’d seen movement at the door, inside the darkness of the lighthouse’s interior.
But had she really?
Or was she just hoping?
She looked in her mirror, checking for any sign of Hain and Lima, and then her attention pinged back to the lighthouse. Should she go and check? Should she ignore it? She was
conflicted now, unsure what to do.
As she got to the turning, she made the decision: she bumped off, onto the peninsula the lighthouse was on, stones pinging off the underside of the Cherokee, and sounded her horn. She jabbed it to start with, but the further down the track she got, the longer she kept her fist to the centre of the wheel.
No reaction.
No sign of movement inside.
Then she heard something: a distant vibration, a hum, hidden behind the crash of the ocean. It took her a second to work out what it was.
She started turning the car around.
As she did, she glimpsed it in the mist, there and gone again, drifting in and out of existence, like a ghost. And then, finally, it emerged from the fog.
The pickup.
They’d dumped the trailer.
They were coming for her, faster than ever.
59
She hit the gas.
In her mirror, she watched dust kick up behind her, a whirlwind of grey-brown earth, and then she was heading back to the Loop. To her right, as the car bumped and shifted on the fractured ground, the Ram appeared out of focus, a blurry black shape – but she could tell they were moving way quicker now, could hear the growl of the engine behind the boom of the sea.
As soon as she got back to the Loop, she veered left, away from them, in the direction of the north coast. She didn’t even brake. The car fishtailed, the turn too sharp and too fast, forcing her from one side of the road to the other. For one long, awful moment, she was unable to gain control, the engine vibrating like it was about to explode, its nose facing off towards a grass bank that dropped into a thin cluster of trees. If one wheel went over, the whole vehicle went with it.
At the last second, she saved it, righting the direction of travel. As soon as she did, she jammed her foot to the gas again, and the Jeep stuttered, jumped, then started to pick up speed. She’d lost precious seconds, could see the pickup had gained on her, but she was back in control of the Cherokee.
