“I am the light of the world,” he said, then his heart stopped beating and he collapsed face-first into the grass.
– – –
Several miles away Lester had turned his attention to the verge along the road and found what he was looking for. The tracks were unmistakable. He recognized the smaller footprints of the girl and the wavy tread pattern of her shoes. They had crossed the corner of the field and made their way along Highway 55 towards the Saint Lawrence and the city of Three Rivers.
Lester followed.
After less than a mile the tracks stopped. At the edge of the road a single tire track formed a narrow semicircle in the dirt. Lester studied the tread patterns for a moment before heading on. Five minutes later he heard sirens coming from up ahead and moved off the road. Three police cars and an ambulance flew past, heading back towards the junction. When they were out of sight he returned to the road and resumed his walk.
He reached the river and crossed the bridge shortly after ten and carried on along Highway 55. An hour later, he stopped. The tire track was less clear here, but the tracks of the three people who had gotten out of the vehicle were not. Lester mused at the stupidity of the man. He might be dangerous, but he was also careless.
They had carried on up the road for another mile and stopped outside a ranger station.
He surveyed the site. The gate was locked and there didn’t appear to be anyone inside the small office building in the corner of the compound. Lester walked along the outside of the perimeter fence until he was shielded from the road by a truck, then scaled the fence and walked to the building. Neither of the two windows along the back wall was barred. He studied the one nearest to him and when he was satisfied the building did not have an alarm system, he picked up a stone and shattered the glass.
He found himself standing in a large white-tiled bathroom with two toilet cubicles on one end and a row of sinks and a single shower unit at the other. The first room he came to was a small lounge with a tattered couch along one wall and a flimsy table with a coffee machine piled high with old magazines.
The second door had a brass plaque on it with the word Administrateur etched in cursive letters. It was locked. He stepped back and kicked it. The bolt held, but both hinges broke and the door went flying into the room. There was a row of three filing cabinets standing against the far wall next to a large window that looked out onto the yard. Above these there were a number of framed pictures, each showing the smiling face of a man in the same uniform with a brass name-plaque underneath. He turned to the filing cabinets and surveyed the labels on the drawers, then opened the one marked Registre de voyages and pulled out the notebook tucked in front of the files. It showed a list of entries for trips made by the station’s vehicles, including dates, destination and mileage. There was only one entry for Wednesday July 19. The destination listed was the ranger station at Lisotte and the name of the person making the trip was Valerie Tremblay. The round trip distance was listed as 547 kilometers.
Lester took out his phone and called his brother.
“Have you found them?” Eugene asked.
“No,” Lester said. “But I’m close. They came through the city of Three Rivers yesterday. It looks like they were taken on from here by a local park ranger.”
“Do you need him located?”
Lester moved over to the desk, picked up the Rolodex and flipped to the T’s.
“I need a call made in French from the Three Rivers police to this number requesting he come to the ranger station at once. Tell him there’s been a burglary. The name is Valerie Tremblay.”
Lester gave him the phone number.
“Give me a minute,” Eugene said and hung up.
Lester moved to the pictures on the wall. Valerie’s was the first in the row. He studied the man’s face, then sat down at the desk and waited. Two minutes later his phone rang.
“The call’s been made. He’ll be there in ten minutes.”
Lester looked though the drawers of the desk until he found a set of keys. He unlocked the gate to the compound, returned to the office and found a road map of Quebec Province on the bookshelf behind the desk.
It took Valerie fifteen minutes. He was driving an old Saab that now looked more matte pink than red. He drove through the gate and skidded to a stop only five or six feet from the door to the office. Before Valerie could get out, Lester emerged from the building and rounded the front of the car.
Valerie lowered his window. He was about to say something when Lester reached in, put one hand behind his head and slammed his face into the steering wheel, breaking his nose. Lester kicked him into the passenger’s seat then drove out of the gate and got out to close it again.
When he got back in the car, Valerie had come around enough to be fumbling for something inside the glove compartment. Lester reached past him and pulled out a black semi-automatic Colt 45. He pushed Valerie’s head down onto the dashboard, brought the butt of the pistol down on the back of his neck and Valerie went limp.
– – –
An hour later, they reached a bridge across the Saint Maurice River. Lester left the road and crossed it, then turned off onto the first road they came to on the other side. It was a dirt track that looped around and ended on the edge of a small clearing on the bank. Valerie was still unconscious. Lester reached over and slapped his face twice. Valerie stirred. When he opened his eyes and saw Lester, he pushed himself up against the door.
“Vous etes qui?” Valerie asked.
“Never mind,” Lester said.
“Qu’est-ce que vous voulez?”
“You drove three people up this road yesterday. Where did you take them?”
The reaction was subtle, but Lester saw it as clearly as if the man had come right out and said it. Valerie shook his head and said, “Not me.”
Lester produced the map. “Show me where you took them.”
Valerie shook his head again. Lester picked up the gun in his lap and, without so much as an expression of warning, put a bullet in Valerie’s right thigh. Valerie screamed and pushed himself harder against the door.
“Where did you take them?” Lester asked again. He sounded calm and perfectly reasonable, as if he thought Valerie might not have heard him the first time.
“Fuck you!” Valerie said through clenched teeth and Lester shot him in the other leg. This time Valerie shouted several profanities in French and closed his eyes. Lester lowered the barrel of the gun until it was pointed at Valerie’s right kneecap. The man’s face changed, defiance giving way to terror in a single blink of the eye. Lester pulled the trigger. The top half of Valerie’s knee exploded in a shower of red meat and bone. Somehow he managed to stay conscious. He was crying and praying in both English and French. His pleas came in gasping spasms between sobs that sounded more like the howls of some wild animal. Lester moved the barrel to the other knee.
“Where did you take them?” he repeated.
In the end it was the calm, not the gun or the pain, that broke him. Valerie would never have believed that a man could be this violent and stay so serene. Through the fog of agony he considered his friend, whose name was almost certainly not Maurice, and how he might fare when this monster caught up with him. He didn’t know who Maurice was – had never asked – but he knew the man could be dangerous. But he had also concluded long ago that Maurice was a good person doing good things. The kind of things, he had suspected, that couldn’t be done in the light of day by people in official positions. The fact that this creature was after him seemed to vindicate that belief. He thanked God that he didn’t know more than he did, because something told him the man in the seat next to him couldn’t be lied to.
“Lake Commissaires,” he said and pointed to the lake on the map.
“Where exactly?”
Valerie tried to focus on the map through his watering eyes and placed a finger on the shoreline where he had dropped them off.
“Good. Where were they going?”
Va
lerie shook his head and Lester confirmed his suspicions by not pursuing the matter. Instead he raised the barrel of the pistol to Valerie’s abdomen.
“Consider yourself among the lucky,” Lester said.
Valerie had no idea what he was talking about and he didn’t care. He heaved in a final breath and spat a mouthful of blood into Lester’s face. “Go to hell!”
For the first time in his adult life, Lester felt the iron grip on his emotions falter. The man was smiling at him through bloody red lips. And he was laughing. Lester raised the gun to Valerie’s face and emptied the entire magazine into it. Valerie’s features disappeared one at a time in a spray of blood, tissue, bone and gray matter. The window behind him shattered. Lester reached over, opened the door and kicked the body out onto the ground. He climbed across the seat and out of the car and began kicking the corpse until he was panting with effort. He stood over the body, his chest heaving, and looked up at the cloudless sky. Behind the rage, something unfamiliar was shining through a thin crack in his mind. A saner man would have known it for what it was; fear.
Lester looked at the gun in his hand and dropped it, as if the gun itself had been the source of his rage. He was suddenly overwhelmed by the certainty that the man lying at his feet had somehow infected him. It was the taste of Valerie’s blood on his own tongue that had set him off. Was it not then possible that something in that bitter metallic substance was now spreading inside him? The very thought of it threatened to send him into another fit.
When he felt a little calmer, Lester dragged the body to the back of the car and piled it into the trunk. He got back in and used a strip of oily cloth he found in the glove compartment to wipe the blood from his own face, then picked up the map and pierced it with his finger at the point Valerie had shown him.
Chapter 36
Houston, Texas
Thursday 20 July 2006
0900 CDT
Mitch came around for the third time at nine o’clock on the day following his arrest. The first time he woke he had been in the back of a car. That memory was vague. He thought it had been at night, although he couldn’t be sure. The car had been moving fast and the motion had made him want to keel over and vomit again. When the car finally stopped, someone – he thought it had been the driver – had stuck something sharp into his leg and the lights had gone out again.
The second time was a little clearer. He had been strapped to a seat with a shoulder harness. The first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was bright green light coming from a narrow gap only a few feet in front of him. When his eyes regained their focus, he had seen it was an instrument panel flanked by two men wearing pilot’s headsets. One of them had looked back and seen him, then said something into his mouthpiece. A moment later, the man sitting next to Mitch – Mitch hadn’t even seen him – raised a syringe over his thigh and the world had swum away again. That had definitely been at night. He could remember seeing stars through the windows.
This time at least he wasn’t moving. He looked around the room, closed his eyes to make sure he really was awake, then opened them again.
He was sitting on a white leather couch in a room that looked like it might have been lifted off the set of a space opera. Everything was white, from the polished linoleum floor to the ceiling tiles. It hurt his eyes to look at it. It took him a minute to realize he didn’t have a hangover any more, which was strange because the last time he’d gotten drunk it had lasted almost a week. Aside from being a little drowsy and extremely confused, he actually didn’t feel too bad.
He was about to stand up when he heard footsteps approaching the door. It opened and two people entered the room. The first was a tall woman with long blonde hair tied back in a ponytail. The man who came in behind her was at least three inches shorter and looked no older than twenty-five. Both were wearing white lab coats. The woman had a stethoscope around her neck. She put her hand out and the man handed her a clipboard. She studied it briefly, and looked up at Mitch. “Mr. Rainey, how are we doing today?”
“I’d be doing a lot better if I knew what hospital this is,” Mitch said. “And how I got here.”
She smiled. It was the kind of smile you might offer someone who was clearly insane, but not dangerous. She turned to the man beside her. “Where is his profile? I don’t see it here.”
“Doesn’t have one,” the man said.
“Then what’s he doing here?” she asked.
“Security breach,” the man said and pointed at the clipboard. “He’s cleared. Authorization came through last night. They want him sedated all the way.”
She studied Mitch for a moment then turned and left the room without another word. The man looked at Mitch apologetically, but said nothing.
“Okay,” Mitch said. “Is someone going to tell me what’s going on?”
The man only looked at him. He seemed as uncomfortable as Mitch himself. Mitch was about to ask again when the woman returned.
“I suppose it had to happen sooner or later,” she said. “Still, it would have been nice of Brendan to let us know before he arrived.”
She looked at Mitch. “I’m not sure keeping him sedated for the whole trip is a good idea. I want confirmation from Brendan before I authorize it.”
“Hey,” Mitch said. “Do you mind? I’m sitting right here. Now is someone going to tell me what the hell is going on?”
The woman regarded him for a moment and said, “Mr. Rainey, we’re truly sorry about the manner in which you were apprehended. If you bear with us a little longer, I’ll see what I can do about answering at least some of your questions.”
“Okay,” Mitch said. “That would be swell. In the meantime, could you at least tell me where I am?”
She looked from Mitch to the man beside her and back, apparently unsure how to proceed.
“I’ll be right back,” she said and left the room again.
Mitch stood up. The man by the door seemed to interpret this as an act of hostility and took a step back. “Mr. Rainey, please take a seat. She’ll be back in a minute.”
“Take it easy, pal,” Mitch said. “I’m the guy who doesn’t know where the hell he is, remember? The guy who just woke up on a couch in a fucking postmodern version of Narnia?”
The man took another step back and reached for the door handle. Mitch took another step forward.
“Oh no you don’t,” Mitch said and began walking toward the door. The man quickly shut it and Mitch heard the lock turn.
“Well, that’s just fucking great,” Mitch said, locking his hands together above his head.
A minute later he heard the lock turn in the door again. He was expecting the woman to return, but this time it was two men who must have weighed at least four hundred pounds put together. Both were wearing the same lab coats, although to Mitch they now looked more like the uniforms orderlies wear in mental hospitals. One of them had a syringe in his hand.
“Hey, back off,” Mitch said. “I want to speak to the doctor. Where is she?”
“Mr. Rainey,” the man with the syringe said, “This will be a lot easier if you cooperate.”
“Yeah, not gonna happen,” Mitch said.
He jumped over the couch and backed away until he reached the wall. The men split up, each moving to opposite sides of the room. Mitch made a dash forward, intending to jump back over the couch and head for the door. He had barely left the ground when a hand grabbed his arm and pulled him down. He hit the floor on his back and the air rushed from his lungs. A moment later, he felt the needle prick his left shoulder.
The last thing he saw as he raised his head was the doctor. She was standing in the doorway smiling at him sympathetically.
Chapter 37
Lake Commissaires, Quebec
Thursday 20 July 2006
1800 EDT
Lester had been sitting behind the wheel of the Saab for over an hour trying to figure out what to do next.
He had found the road easily enough. The fresh tracks of the vehicle Vale
rie had taken them in could be seen coming and going. Finding their tracks had presented no challenge either. But then the trail had ended. He’d found the boathouse and cursed when he saw it was empty. Tire marks and footsteps were easy enough to follow, but a boat left no tracks and the lake was huge.
In all the time he had been sitting in the car, he had not seen a single boat on the water or another car on the road. This was dead country, a place made for hiding.
He considered calling Eugene to let him know what he had found but the idea insulted his pride. There had to be a way.
According to the map, the lake was almost fifteen miles long, making a blind search impossible. But the boathouse was located where it was for a reason, and unless it was simply to fool the likes of him, he thought what he was looking for would be somewhere directly across the lake and within walking distance of the shore. That meant a camp, or possibly even a dwelling of some kind.
He consulted the map again. There was a small town named after the lake several miles up the road. He started the car and drove back to the main road.
Two miles beyond the town, he found a narrow dirt road leading off into the trees in the direction of the lake. A slanted, rusting sign advertised a hunting shop a quarter mile on. Below the sign someone had tied a piece of cardboard with the word BAR written in black marker pen.
The hunting shop was closed, but the bar was open, if bar was really the right word. It was little more than a brick annex with a door and a window. A neon sign hung in it, advertising Molson Dry Beer, although half the letters were no longer illuminated. Above the door a small wooden board said De Commissaires in charred black letters. There were two old pickup trucks and a red ATV parked outside.
De Commissaires was as big a disappointment on the inside as it had been from the outside. Just an oblong room about twenty by forty feet. At the back, a makeshift counter made of unpainted plywood stood resting on two sawhorses. The walls had been painted white long ago, but were now yellow with smoke, except in a few places where a picture or poster had recently been taken down.
Origin - Season One Page 17
