The Best Revenge

by Stephen White

“Tell me about him, please. Everything you remember.” Kelda did the talking.

  When Boca responded, each word was measured and intonated gorgeously, as though he’d memorized lines. “He was a thin man with new blue jeans and a plain gray sweatshirt. He was quite dirty.” He paused. “And he had frog eyes.”

  “Frog eyes?”

  “They stuck out, bulged. The way frogs’ eyes do. And, oh yes”—with the “oh yes” his voice moved momentarily from tenor to baritone—“he had powder burns on his head.”

  Kelda’s head tilted a fraction of an inch before she asked, “Where exactly?” I couldn’t understand why the precise location was important.

  Boca spread his big hand a few inches into the hairline above his forehead and dragged his fingers over his temple and right ear. “This area, ma’am.”

  “Why do you think they were powder burns?” she pressed.

  “Because they were. And because I could still smell it on him. The residue from the gunpowder. I have a nose for it.”

  Kelda said, “Can you describe him? The man at the door? Was he a strong man? With biceps like . . . like that firewood there?” She pointed at the trim pile of aspen logs stacked a few feet from the cabin. Each white-barked log was six to eight inches in diameter.

  “No. He was not a strong man. Quite the opposite.”

  “Was he tall? Thin?”

  “Yes, but not as tall as the doctor.” He nodded slightly in my direction.

  “His hair? Long, short? What?”

  “Short. Combed over.”

  I was acutely aware that Kelda was asking questions that indicated that she had suspects in mind. How was that possible? What had Tom told her during their conversation that he hadn’t told me?

  “Did he introduce himself?” Kelda asked Boca.

  “No. He merely said he was lost and he asked to use my telephone. He was trying to look past me into the cabin.”

  “Was he armed?”

  Boca reached behind him and removed something from the back pocket of his trousers. He held it flat across his palm. His hand was so large that the gun in it looked like a toy. “He was carrying this on his ankle. It made me uncomfortable, so I removed it from him.”

  Kelda said, “You took it from him? Just like that?”

  “I know some martial arts, ma’am. What I did was, I encouraged him to lose his balance. From that point on, the removal of the weapon was not particularly difficult. As I said, he was not a strong man.”

  “May I take the gun from you? Do you mind?”

  “I wish you would.”

  She lifted the gun from his hand, checked to see that it was loaded, and placed it in her shoulder bag.

  “Where is this man now?”

  “After I removed his weapon, he wriggled away from me and ran back into the woods. I suspect that he never really wished to use my phone.”

  “What about Tom? Was he armed?”

  Boca stared hard at her before he answered, as though he was looking for something specific in her eyes. Some assurance. Something. Finally, he said, “He has a shotgun with him, ma’am.”

  “Boca?” I asked. “We’d like to know everything Tom said to you. Will you spend a few minutes going over that?”

  Kelda said, “I’ve got to find Tom. I can’t be late for this.” She faced Boca. “I’m in a borrowed car and I don’t have my equipment. Do you have a flashlight I could borrow?”

  I wanted to ask what she meant by that, what she meant when she said she couldn’t be late.

  But Boca said, “Yes, ma’am.” And Kelda took the flashlight and went silently into the night.

  Before Kelda disappeared into the woods behind the cabin, she called back at me, admonishing me not to call anyone for help.

  When I opened my mouth to argue with her, she said, “There are things going on that you don’t know anything about.”

  The understatement almost made me laugh.

  Boca’s home was a single room. An alcove on the far side functioned as a bathroom; an expensive-looking high-tech toilet was visible through a hanging curtain. The entire wall adjacent to the entry door was covered with books. Mostly paperbacks. Not one appeared unread. A lamp by the bed was the sole illumination in the space.

  Boca took a minute to tend a fire in a stove in the corner before he said, “Please have a seat.”

  I took a chair at an oak table. Boca sat on the edge of his bed. The bed was neatly made. I don’t know why I found that odd, but I did. If I lived halfway to heaven all by myself, I didn’t think I’d make my bed.

  I think he saw me looking at the lamp by the bed. “I have solar panels on the roof. And I have a gasoline generator for backup electricity. I read a lot. I listen to jazz. Besides that, I have little use for power. There is ample wood for heat.”

  “It’s beautiful up here,” I said.

  “Yes,” Boca said. “You broke your arm?”

  “I tripped over my dog. I can be a klutz.”

  His eyes softened. “You’re a psychologist, right? That’s what Tom said.”

  “Yes, sir, I am. I’m a clinical psychologist.”

  He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. “Is Tom . . . you know, unbalanced? Is that why he’s—”

  I didn’t want him to ask me something I couldn’t reveal about Tom. Before he could finish his thought, I interrupted and said, “Tom told you . . . what he’s been through?”

  “Kind of. I knew some things already. I read newspapers when I’m in town. He told me some other things.”

  “Well, he’s been through a lot. And when you’ve been through the kind of trauma that he’s been through, well, it tends to take its toll on people.”

  My words seemed to strike my host almost like a physical blow. After he regained his composure he slowly rolled up the sleeves on his shirt. First the left, then the right. As the cuff of his right sleeve reached his elbow, I saw a tattoo that he’d uncovered on his dark skin. The art was simple. In inch-tall black letters it read “IX-XI.” From the bottom of each Roman numeral flowed a bright red tear.

  A focused pressure formed in my chest, as though a dense weight were tugging on my heart. I swallowed and nodded once, my eyes glued to the rippling forearm of this dignified man who, without saying a thing, had just whispered volumes about a chapter in the life he’d lived.

  I said, “You’re new in Colorado, Boca?”

  He almost smiled as he said, “Yes. Yes, sir, I am. Less than a year. I once lived in . . . on the East Coast.”

  I recalled his story about disarming the man at the door and guessed, “Policeman?”

  He shook his head.

  “Firefighter?”

  He nodded.

  I thought,Oh my God.

  Boca didn’t travel two-thirds of the way across the country to live by himself nearly nine thousand feet above sea level so that a stranger could pepper him with questions about the reason for his exile. That’s what I told myself, anyway. Call it intuition.

  I said, “Tom’s not crazy, Boca. He’s trying to adjust to some monumental events. I imagine after what he’s been through the past few days that he’ll have some more adjusting to do.”

  Boca shifted his weight back, resting his hands on the mattress. “You’re not sure about him, though, are you?”

  “I don’t know exactly what you’re asking.” I knew what he was asking. I just didn’t want him to be asking it.

  Boca didn’t deign to dance with me. I was getting the impression that if he ever knew the steps to the prevarication dance, he’d forgotten them before the dust settled in September 2001. He said, “You’re not convinced that he didn’t kill that girl. That’s what you’re not sure about.”

  I wanted to ask,Which girl is that? The one in Park County or the one in Maui that her friend calls Jones? But I didn’t. I still knew the steps to the prevarication dance. I knew them well. So I danced with him. “I can’t talk about that, I’m sorry. Confidentiality. I’m sure you understand.”
r />   But Boca’s suspicion was right. Despite his assertion that he’d never been to Hawaii, I wasn’t at all sure about Tom Clone. Kelda’s disclosures that afternoon about Jones’s journal and her fears about Tom Clone had haunted me since I’d heard them. Sam Purdy’s suspicions had aggravated my own. My doubts about Tom, which had germinated shortly after I’d first met him, had spent the past few hours growing with the alacrity of Jack’s beanstalk.

  “With all due respect, Doctor, Tom needs your help. Your own doubts aside.”

  “I know he does.” I did know that Tom needed my help. In my heart, though, I wasn’t certain that the sentiment I expressed to Boca was as sincere as my words.

  Boca said, “People . . . sometimes have to do things even when they’re not sure. For the sake of humanity, sometimes we must reach out a hand. Sometimes we all must step into the darkness. The step may lead nowhere, but sometimes we all must take it.”

  My breathing stopped. “Thank you,” I said.

  “Yes,” he replied.

  He scratched absently at his forearm.

  I considered the possibility that Boca was inviting me to comment further on his tattoo, and maybe, maybe, to hear about one time that he’d reached out a hand and stepped into the darkness, but I decided that in the absence of a more direct summons from him, the best thing I could do was to move on.

  Some distant thunder echoed through the Indian Peaks.

  I said, “We get monsoons each summer. Did you know that? Some-times people who are new to Colorado don’t know about the monsoons.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Monsoons? Like in India? It rains all the time, that kind of monsoon?”

  “Not all the time, but it rains. Every July the storms come up from the Gulf of Mexico and the Gulf of California. I thought for a while that the storm that passed through here earlier this evening was the start of the monsoons. It’s been dry on the Front Range so far this summer.”

  “Monsoons?” he mused. “Everybody’s been warning me about winter. I didn’t know about the monsoons.”

  “You don’t have to worry about the monsoons unless you’re a farmer. Too few are bad. Too many are bad. Hail is bad. The lightning can be a problem up here. But for most of us they come and they go. They’re just summer storms. They just . . . are.”

  He was staring into the blackness beyond his window as though he half expected to see the monsoons coming over the Divide right that minute.

  “So do you have neighbors up here, Boca?”

  He looked at me with some suspicion. I thought he was puzzled by my small talk.

  “The closest cabin is almost a half mile away. A guy comes up on weekends and works on it. Other than that, his cabin’s empty. Next closest neighbor is a quarter mile past him.” He smiled. “May I offer you some tea? It will just take a moment. The stove’s hot.”

  “No, thank you. Do you know the guy who’s fixing up the cabin?”

  “No, sir, I do not. He’s a young man who drives a green SUV that he washes frequently. People in town tell me that his name is Oliver. He and I have not spoken. Not once.”

  “Did Tom say anything else while you were waiting for us to get up here? Anything that would help us understand what we should do next?”

  “The older I get, the fewer truths I know. But one truth I know well is the face of fear. When he walked in my door, Tom had that face.” Boca’s voice moved again from tenor to baritone. “His eyes were hooded with dread. His words sang the song of disbelief. His spirit sagged under the burden of despair.”

  He was reciting something, I thought. Some stanzas from some anthem he’d read or written once after a personal sojourn in hell. I thought I knew the hell. At least I knew it the way I knew about things like Tora Bora and the Gaza Strip.

  I’d seen it on television.

  When he went on, it was as though he could hear my thoughts. “Tom was a man who’d walked halfway to hell and he wasn’t sure yet whether or not he was going to make it back out.”

  “That bad?”

  “He kept saying that he spent the last few days getting fear lessons.”

  “Fear lessons?”

  “Yes, sir. Have you had fear lessons yet in this life? Tom had his lessons right on this mountain. I could see it in his face. And the good Lord knows I’ve had mine.”

  “I don’t know . . . what you mean.”

  “You will. When the time for your fear lesson comes, you’ll know it.”

  A sharpcraaaack punctured the night.

  I jumped. Boca didn’t. But his eyes filled with tears.

  He said, “I’m afraid that was a gunshot.”

  “Shotgun?” I asked.

  “I’d say a handgun.”

  He stood and walked to the corner of the large room.

  I noted that he was as far as possible from the door.

  I said, “I’m going to go check on Kelda and Tom.”

  “If you don’t mind, I’m going to stay here.” He reached into a drawer and pulled something out. A whistle. He handed it to me. “Blow that once or twice and I’ll call nine-one-one. I’m sorry but it’s the best I can do.”

  He’d said,“When the time for your fear lesson comes, you’ll know it.”

  As I closed the door behind me, I had an inkling.

  CHAPTER 55

  The thunderstorm that passed earlier in the evening had temporarily transformed the mountain air from arid to almost humid. I felt a chill as I stepped away from Boca’s cabin.

  I allowed my eyes a moment to adjust to the blackness and my ears to adjust to the silence. Since the shot had fractured my illusion of safety, I hadn’t heard another sound from outside. Not a call for help, not a whelp of pain, not labored breath, or careless footsteps.

  I could hear my own heart beating. I could also hear Diane’s admonition:“You have a baby, Alan. Don’t go!”

  The alternative? Not going.

  Not going meant allowing my two patients—Kelda and Tom—to survive this puzzle on their own. My job, I reminded myself, was to help them surviveafter they’d survived this trial. Or the next trial. Or the one after that.

  What had Diane said? The goal isn’t to help patients get better, but rather to help them get better equipped. How did this fit?

  I didn’t know.

  I was tempted to go back to my car and wait for Sam Purdy to arrive. I fingered the whistle. A single blow and a fraction of an hour later some fine deputies of the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office would descend on these woods.

  But Tom Clone didn’t trust them.

  And Kelda James had been clear that she didn’t want them around.

  Who did I trust?

  Not Tom, not Kelda. My gut said I could rely on Boca. But if push came to shove—and push was perilously close to coming to shove—I was planning to trust the Boulder County Sheriff.

  I clambered down the steep driveway and listened some more for some indication of where anybody might be.

  The roar of a second gunshot splintered the night. Almost simultaneously, I thought I heard the distinctive ping of a slug impacting rock. My breath snagged in my chest.

  Fear lesson,I thought.Is this my time?

  It was. Boca was right. I knew.

  Without another moment of hesitation I raised the whistle to my lips. I blew.

  The second I stopped, a tattered voice called out, “Who’s there?”

  Tom Clone was still alive.

  Wishing I had Boca on my flank, I moved in the direction of his voice.

  It was my step into the darkness.

  CHAPTER 56

  The burning in Kelda’s lower legs was so intense that she could no longer tell if the sensation was one of searing heat or freezing cold, and the bones in her legs felt as though someone had been pinging them with a ball-peen hammer. The two Percocets she’d swallowed on the way up Boulder Canyon had had about as much impact on her pain as a couple of M&M’s.

  She was trying to maneuver down the dirt road near Left Hand Creek
without using the flashlight that Boca had given her. She stopped every few steps to listen for a sound to guide her.

  She desperately wanted to escape the darkness, to flick on the flashlight, but she knew that the beam of precious light would act as a magnet for the black hole at the end of the barrel of every gun in the forest. She attempted to quell her fears by trying to decide whom she hoped to find first.

  Tom? She absolutely had to find Tom, but she was worried about what he knew. What had he figured out on his own? What had Ira told him?

  Ira? Oh, Ira. Baby. What would she do when she found Ira? Even the brief conversation with Boca left her concerned that Ira hadn’t covered his trail well. The trail to Ira would lead back to her.

  That trail would destroy her.

  And the guy who’d come to the door of Boca’s cabin? She thought he was one of the Park County cops who had tried to roust Tom and her on their way from the penitentiary. But where was the other one? The one with the big arms and the attitude? Prehost? Where was Prehost?

  Kelda figured that when she stumbled on one of the cops, she’d find the other. Despite the fact that Boca had managed to get the backup gun from one of them, she figured they were still pretty well armed.

  The first sound that alerted her was the snap of a twig. She flattened herself into a ditch by the dirt path.

  Deer? Bear? Lion?

  She wished. She knew she wasn’t that lucky.

  The second sound was a man groaning as though he’d been punched high in the gut.

  Kelda held her gun steady, pointed into the night in the direction of the groan. The Sig weighed as much as a watermelon.

  Five seconds passed. Ten. Her legs throbbed. She imagined a bed of frozen peas.

  A sudden wail rapidly swelled into a scream as a person sprinted from the evergreen forest onto the road about thirty yards in front of her. Kelda’s brain was trying to make sense of the noise and the shadows and the silhouettes.

  The runner seemed to be turning toward her.

  A breathless voice came from the shadows. “Stop, damn it! I’ll fucking shoot you. I will.”

  The voice wasn’t Ira’s. And she didn’t think it was Tom’s. She thought she recognized it, though; it was the voice from the green Toyota pickup that had followed her home to Lafayette two weeks before.