“Son of a bitch,” Maggie murmured. Then she said loudly, “Clark! Don’t do this! Put the bat down!”
Clark’s face was hard as stone. His eyes were black. He shook his head.
“This is your life,” Maggie told him. “Don’t destroy it. Mary wouldn’t want you to do that.”
“Mary’s dead,” Clark said.
“Listen to me, Clark. I know the kind of man you are. You’re not a murderer.”
Finn grimaced and pushed himself higher off the ground. He shouted at Clark behind him. “Be a man and swing the fucking bat!”
Stride watched Clark tighten his grip. The big man’s elbows bent as he twisted the bat back behind his shoulders. Stride stood up and stretched out his arms, steadying his Glock with both hands and aiming straight at Clark’s head. The wind buffeted him. Rain poured over his face and body.
“Put the bat down, Clark,” Stride said.
“You won’t kill me,” Clark said. “Not to protect a piece of shit like this.”
They played a game of chicken, staring each other down.
“Please, Clark,” Maggie pleaded with him.
Clark’s eyes flicked to Maggie. “You know what this man did to Mary. He deserves to die.”
“That’s not up to you or me.”
The storm swooped down off the hills like the invasion of an army. Wind shrieked and drove their bodies backward. Over the furious lake, veins of lightning tore across the entire sky. The world snapped from black to white to black. Stride felt the pressure and temperature dropping. An explosion was coming.
“We have to go right now,” Stride told Clark. “It’s not safe here.”
“So go. Leave me alone.”
“Put down the bat.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Clark, Donna called me,” Maggie told him. “She doesn’t want to lose you. She’s scared to death.”
Clark hesitated.
“She still loves you,” Maggie said.
“Do it!” Finn screamed.
Clark’s eyes burned into the back of Finn’s skull, as if he could see the bat landing there. Hear the awful crack. Watch the blood and brain fly. Stride knew what was going through the man’s head. Clark wanted to feel something again. Anything.
“This won’t give you what you want,” Stride said.
“Look at me, Clark!” Maggie implored him. “Listen! There’s something Donna didn’t tell you. She’s pregnant. The two of you are having another baby.”
Clark’s eyes wrenched away from Finn. “You’re lying to me.”
“I’m not.”
“She can’t be pregnant,” Clark said.
“It’s true. I swear. This is your second chance, Clark. Don’t give it up.”
Stride thought Clark was crying, but in the rain, he couldn’t be sure.
“Mary’s dead!” Clark shouted. “Someone should pay!”
“Yes, someone should,” Maggie agreed. “But not you. Not now.”
Clark took a step backward. The fight had fled from the man. His head sank, and his chin disappeared into his neck. One hand dropped away from the bat and fell to his side. The fingers on his other hand spread open, and the bat tumbled end over end to the sand. Clark backed away and raised his hands in the air in surrender.
“Thank God,” Stride murmured. His own gun hand sagged. Beside him, Maggie holstered her gun and crouched down in front of Finn.
Clark stumbled toward the surf. He was twenty feet away, ankle deep in lake water, his hands still high in the air.
“Make sure there’s an ambulance-” Stride began, but he never finished.
The ground under his feet suddenly felt strange, as if every particle of sand clinging to his wet skin were alive.
The hairs on his head and arms defied gravity and stood at attention like soldiers. His flesh tingled. He tasted hot metal in his mouth. Stride knew what was coming. Death was hurtling through the ground.
Lightning.
Billions of ions searching for a bridge to the sky. Like a body.
He shouted a warning at Maggie, threw his gun down, and fell into a crouch, propping himself up on the balls of his feet. He squeezed his eyes shut and clapped his hands over his ears so tightly that the storm was sucked into a vacuum of silence. It didn’t last. Less than a second later, a concussion bomb cracked inside his brain, as if tacks were blowing outward into bone and tissue. His feet left the ground as he was jolted backward, lofted like a javelin. He saw a white flash through his closed eyes, felt the cold air melt into heat, and smelled the char of flesh burning.
He wondered if it was his own.
45
The tingling in Stride’s flesh disappeared as quickly as it had come.
He lay on his back, eyes open, tasting the rain that spilled out of the sky into his mouth. The world was oddly quiet. No wind. No thunder. No slap of waves and surf. He heard himself call Maggie’s name, but the sound was muffled, as if it came from someone else at the end of a long tunnel. He heard the roar a child hears in a seashell.
His head throbbed. His limbs felt like jelly. He patted his face, chest, and legs and felt no tenderness and no burns. The soles of his shoes were intact, without any signs of melting or scorched entry and exit holes from the electricity. His clothes were wet but untorn. When he felt his neck for his pulse, he found that the beating of his heart was fast but even. However close the lightning bolt had been, and whatever path it had taken up to the cloud, it hadn’t gone through his body.
He pushed himself up on his elbows, and the beach spun like a carousel. The sound wave had scrambled his sense of balance. He closed his eyes, letting his brain right itself. When he tried to stand, his legs bent like rubber, and he fell onto all fours in a slurry of sand. The disorientation made him nauseous, and he swallowed down bile at the back of his mouth.
He tried standing again, and the dizziness made him stagger, but he was able to stay on his feet. The air around him smelled burned. Lightning continued to flicker like a loose bulb over the lake. Each flash made his eyes tighten. Somewhere in his head, he sensed that the rain that had drilled into his body was gentler now. The wind was dying.
When he took a step, his knee buckled. He felt a hand on his arm, steadying him.
“Shit, that hurt,” Maggie said. Her voice sounded as if she were underwater.
“Yeah.”
“Are you okay?”
“I think so,” Stride said. “How about you?”
“I have the mother of all headaches, but I don’t think I was hit.”
Twenty feet away, Finn groaned. Stride and Maggie held on to each other as they limped over and dropped to their knees on either side of him. He sat in a pool of water by the slab of driftwood. His fingers clawed over and over into fists, and his head swung rhythmically back and forth. His eyes were closed. Red blood trickled along his jawline from his ears.
“Finn!” Stride shouted.
He grabbed the man’s face with both hands, and Finn’s eyes sprang open. The whites were shot through with red, and his pupils were black and wide with panic.
“Can you hear me?” Stride yelled, but his own voice was distant.
Finn pummeled Stride with his hands. Stride fought to gain control of the man’s wrists and restrain him as he squirmed in confusion and fear. Finn’s chest heaved with frantic, openmouthed breaths. Stride found a pulse and felt no irregularities. His eyes flicked over Finn’s body and saw no burns, but the man’s eardrums had obviously burst when the thunder exploded over them, and Stride knew the torrent of pain had to be excruciating.
Maggie rose up on her knees beside him. “Where’s Clark?”
Stride studied the beach where he had last seen Clark standing in the water. The man was gone. He hunted in the shadows of rye grass and down the stretch of sand and didn’t see him anywhere.
Maggie stood up, swaying. “Clark!”
Stride let go of Finn, who twisted restlessly and crawled away, dragging himself with one arm. The ef
fort overwhelmed Finn, and he stopped, panting and gulping down rain. Stride got to his feet and circled slowly. He didn’t think Clark could have gone far, but it was as if the man had been sucked into a cloud. The beach was empty.
“Where the hell is he?”
Maggie pointed. A violent wave drew back down toward the lake, and as the sheet of water slid off the sand, Stride saw a body prone in the surf, nearly thirty feet from where Clark had been standing. It was almost invisible, just a darker shadow against the black shoreline. The body didn’t move as another wave surged in and completely submerged him.
They stumbled over the driftwood and ran. Maggie spilled onto her face as her legs became tangled, and Stride stopped and helped her up. She waved him on as she waited for her head to clear. Stride splashed down to the edge of the lake and found Clark’s body, which was ashen white. Each wave buried the big man in almost eight inches of water and foam. Stride dug his hands under Clark’s shoulders and dragged him higher onto the beach, away from the reach of the waves.
Maggie arrived at his side. “Oh, my God.”
Clark’s clothes were shredded, as if they had exploded off his body. His chest was laced with a massive spiderweb of burns. His shoes appeared to be melted onto his feet, and when Stride checked the soles, he saw two circular black holes. Entry and exit wounds from the massive electricity of the lightning. They were still warm when he fingered them. He picked up Clark’s wrist, which was limp and cold, and felt no pulse. He checked again at the carotid and still found nothing. When he pushed open Clark’s eyelids, the man’s eyes stared back, dead and unmoving.
“There’s an AED in the back of my truck,” Stride said.
Maggie took off at a sprint. Stride mentally took stock of the time that had passed and concluded that Clark had been lying in the sand, his heart stopped, for at least five minutes. Way too long. Stride tilted the man’s head back and lifted his chin. He pried open Clark’s mouth, pinched the man’s nose shut, and covered Clark’s cold lips with his own. He exhaled two slow breaths and watched Clark’s chest rise and fall as the air filled his lungs.
Stride repositioned himself and placed the heel of his right hand in the middle of Clark’s chest and laced the fingers of both hands together. He rose up for more leverage and shoved down hard and fast, counting to thirty in his head. When he was done, he moved back and swelled the man’s chest with two more slow breaths and then frantically pumped against his rib cage thirty more times. He repeated the process again, his mind oblivious to anything around him except the time passing. Then again. And again. When he had completed the cycle five times, he pressed two fingers against Clark’s neck.
Nothing.
The clock in his head was at nearly eight minutes.
He continued applying CPR and was vaguely conscious of Maggie arriving next to him with the small AED box, which began to chirp instructions as she unpacked it. He alternated between breaths and chest massage as Maggie worked around him to dry Clark’s skin with a towel she had brought from the truck and then position the two electrodes of the defibrillator on his chest. She hovered over him, trying to block the rain.
“It’s too fucking wet,” she said.
“I know.”
Maggie turned on the machine. “Clear,” she told him.
Stride stopped and removed his hands from Clark’s body. Maggie pushed the analyze button on the defibrillator, which measured Clark’s heart activity and responded aloud with a discouraging message. “No charge.”
There was nothing to shock. No fibrillation.
“Goddamn it,” Stride said. He checked for a pulse and still found nothing. He bent over and continued several more cycles of CPR and then backed away as Maggie stabbed the button one more time.
“No charge.”
Ten minutes had passed.
Stride tried again. And again. And again. Two minutes later, there was still no pulse. No heart activity. Nothing for the defibrillator to regulate. He assaulted Clark’s chest with his fists, harder and faster, and then he heard Maggie’s soft voice at the end of the wind tunnel.
“Boss.”
He hammered and breathed, hammered and breathed, hammered and breathed. Clark’s body endured the punishment without moving. Two more minutes passed.
“Boss.”
He counted to thirty. Counted to two. Counted to thirty. Counted to two.
“Jonathan, it’s over.”
Maggie’s hand took hold of his shoulder in a grip that was gentle but unyielding. Midway through the final series of chest compressions, Stride finally stopped and sat back on his haunches. His arms dangled at his sides. He could hardly lift them now. He had known from the beginning that Clark was dead, that the electricity had savaged his heart, but it was only when he gave up, when there was nothing else to do, that the reality sank in. His head sank forward against his chest.
“Where’s the damn ambulance?”
“It wouldn’t have made any difference, boss. You did everything you could do.”
He knew that was true, but it didn’t bring Clark back to life. He stared at the body and leaned over and closed the man’s eyes again. Like that, Clark looked more at peace, free of his despair.
Stride got up slowly. His wet, cold muscles complained. His hearing was coming back, and he heard a distant whine of police sirens growing closer. He could see fireworks out on the lake where the storm had slouched to the east. A few lingering drops of rain splashed on his skin. The air behind the front was steamy and warm, and his clothes clung to his body.
He needed to get away. “I’m going to check on Finn,” he said.
Maggie nodded.
Down the beach, Stride saw Finn pawing in the sand and pushing aside the long grass with his good arm. He looked like a scuttling crab with one claw stripped from his body. Stride cocked his head, confused, and took a few tentative steps in Finn’s direction. “What is he doing?”
Maggie looked. “I don’t know.”
“Finn!” Stride called, but the man couldn’t hear him.
Stride walked faster in the deep sand back toward the driftwood. Maggie lingered behind him with Clark’s body. Stride felt a formless sense of unease.
“Finn!”
Without hearing him, Finn sensed Stride approaching. Their eyes met across the dark beach, and an unspoken hostility passed between them. With increasing desperation, Finn turned his attention back to the ground surrounding the huge tree trunk. Stride suddenly understood. He became aware of a lightness under his shoulder and when he tapped his chest, he realized that his holster was empty. His Glock wasn’t in it. As the ground current streaked toward him, he had ditched his gun in the sand.
Where Finn was now searching.
Stride broke into a run across the remaining distance. Before he could dive past the driftwood, Finn’s left arm broke free of the mud with Stride’s gun in his palm. He curled his hand around the grip, shoved his finger against the trigger, and pointed it at Stride ten feet away.
Stride stopped. He held up his hands. The sirens he had heard were close now. Police cars streaked down the Point.
“Put the gun down, Finn.”
Finn ignored him and trained the barrel of the Glock at the center of Stride’s chest.
Stride felt an old, sharp pain reawaken in his shoulder. It was a wound from years earlier, where a bullet had torn through skin and muscle and driven him to the floor. A bullet from Ray Wallace’s gun. When Stride looked at Finn, he saw Ray Wallace’s face, the same agony, the same desperation, the same intent. They were both men with nothing to lose.
“Don’t do this, Finn.”
When Stride took a tentative step, Finn jerked, waving the gun to stop him. Finn’s muscles were spastic. Stride watched the man’s index finger and worried that it would twitch on the trigger and unleash a bullet into Stride’s heart. He edged sideways, but Finn’s arm followed him.
“Put it down.” Stride motioned toward the ground with his palm.
Finn fl
ipped the barrel up, waving Stride away.
They stared at each other just the way he and Ray had. A standoff over the barrel of a gun. Stride thought about Ray coming to grips with his disgrace at the hands of his own protйgй. Ray, who planted a memory in Stride’s brain of bone, hair, blood, and brain oozing in streaks down the white wall. Ray, his best friend.
Ray, who had pulled the trigger.
Stride reminded himself that this was Finn, not Ray. This standoff could end the right way, but he was running out of time. Maggie called to him, and she was close. Over Finn’s shoulder, he spied the reflected glow of red revolving beacons from a squad car’s light bar. Police would soon be spilling over the hill. All of them converging on Finn like a pack. Making him panic. Making him shoot.
“Maggie, stay back,” he called and hoped she could hear him.
Finn cringed. Beads of sweat and rain dripped down his skull. His eyes darted back and forth. Stride watched the man’s anxiety shoot up like a needle on a pressure gauge.
“Take it easy,” Stride told him, his voice calm and steady. “You’re okay.”
Behind Finn, Stride saw two silhouettes crossing the peak of the dune and stumbling to the flat sand and tall grass. Police. With his fingers spread and his arms already in the air, Stride held one hand higher than the other, hoping they could read his body language. Stop.
One of the figures saw his gesture and froze, but the other kept coming. The shadow who had stopped shouted a warning. “Wait!”
Stride recognized the voice of the policewoman from Superior they had met earlier. He also recognized the other woman, who ignored the warning and ran toward Finn, screaming his name.
It was Rikke.
“He can’t hear you,” Stride called to her. He added, “Finn has a gun.”
Rikke stopped in her tracks. She stood behind Finn, twenty feet away. She wore an untucked, misbuttoned white shirt and navy shorts. Her once sleek long legs were lumpy like tree trunks.
In the Dark aka The Watcher Page 31
