by J. A. Kerley
“Hail Asmodeus,” the man howled again, punctuating his slogan with bursts of fire. Our cruiser’s window dissolved into powdered glass. I stuck one eye above the hood and saw our assailant toss away one of the banana-clipped rifles, grab another. He jumped on the running board of the truck, stuck a foot and hand inside, flooring the accelerator and roaring in a circle as he fired, shoveling aside cars and tearing down light poles. Sparks dripped from broken wires. A store sign across the street crashed to the sidewalk.
The truck turned and started in our direction.
“Let’s book,” Bullard said. We sprinted a dozen feet to low concrete planters, dove for cover. Bullets skittered into the planters, ricochets whined.
Bullard seemed to be talking to himself and I realized he was praying. He sucked down a deep breath, stood, held his weapon in the classic double-hand stance. He narrowed an eye and emptied his clip. The truck veered left and smashed into the drugstore. The engine died. The first three feet of the vehicle’s snout was buried in the store. The naked man was nowhere in sight. Heat ticked from the truck’s engine. Bullard crept to the driver’s side, me a few paces behind.
“The bastard’s down,” Bullard said. “He’s staying down.”
The assailant had tumbled to the street, the upper right quarter of his head still in the truck cab. We stared at the man’s arms and torso, a webwork of bizarre tattoos, as if screaming his madness in ink. An automatic rifle was in his hands. Two more rifles and a shotgun were in the truck cab, plus eight sticks of dynamite.
“So what you think that was all about?” Bullard said.
I ran to the cruiser transporting Jeremy. Empty. His escorts crept from a storefront on the far side of the street, weapons drawn. Bullard waved the guns down. Smoke and sirens overwhelmed the street as emergency vehicles arrived. I ran the avenue, looking down cross streets, alleys. Every street for blocks was crawling with law enforcement.
“Any sign of Ridgecliff?” I asked every cop I saw.
There wasn’t.
I don’t think it was Epperman my brother called.
EPILOGUE
The sky was clean blue, the sun tipped halfway to the water. Gulls wheeled and keened in the hot air. Harry set his cranberry hiking shorts against the railing of my deck, leaned against the planks with arms crossed over an aloha shirt with pink shrimp frolicking in an electric-green sea. I’d been giving him the play-by-play of New York.
“They found the two uteruses in Day’s house?” he asked.
“In formalin in a jar in his apartment. Trophies. And there were seven of them, unfortunately.”
“Uh-oh.”
“When Jeremy went to the Institute, Day picked up and headed to Minneapolis. He also seems to have ramped up. There was a spate of women’s disappearances during those years. There are already four police jurisdictions involved. Given the emerging patterns, few of the cops have doubts that they’ll find Day in the thick of the horror.”
“Day would have had a son or sons, right?”
“The bodies of two young males, twenty-three and twenty-one, were found three years ago near the Canadian border. The bodies had taken a lot of punishment. No clues were ever found.”
“Maybe a rebellion in his army?” Harry wondered. “The boys got tired of Daddy? Or vice versa?”
I shrugged, drank the last chug of beer in my bottle. “Who knows?”
I looked out over the Gulf of Mexico, a sheet of glittering cobalt. Who ever knows with a monster like Jim Day? The only certainty was that Day didn’t set out to become a monster. He was created by his mother and grandmother. But who or what had turned them into monsters? How far back did the poison reach …generations? Centuries?
Harry said, “Cargyle and the young kid were Day’s new army?”
“Plus three other boys Day was ‘developing’. They expect to uncover a few more. The juvie boot camp was perfect for his kind of need. The kid Jeremy found in the hotel lobby, Billy Hoople, is nineteen, a trainee not as developed as Cargyle.”
“Cargyle was the kid the Anderson vic saw? Her happy ending?”
“Seeing a former client working NYPD’s tech services made Anderson’s day. It also made her a target when Cargyle told Day about the meeting. Cargyle was a client of Child Welfare in Newark, an ugly childhood. The family moved to New York and Cargyle got in gang trouble in his mid teens, ended up at Bridges. His tested IQ of 135 bought him a rehab stay at Camp Wilderness four years back. Day was waiting.”
“The other vic?”
“Angela Bernal befriended Cargyle while he was at Bridges juvie facility, tried to mother him. Compassion made her a target. Day also needed another mutilated female to ramp up the search for Jeremy. Like Anderson, Bernal served a double need.”
The back door slid open and a barefoot Folger stepped out, wearing a white chef’s apron over a pair of shorts and halter top, a beer in each hand. Alice had three weeks’ leave from the NYPD. She was spending the first with me, getting a first-hand look at the weather systems along the Gulf Coast. She was liking how they moved.
She was also liking how her life was opening. She finally had a road map of her interior landscape, a map stretching from Evangeline Prowse’s past to Alice Folger’s future. She was still trying to fathom how a mother she’d never known had given her life to ensure that Alice kept hers. And that a father she’d never figured on knowing was as near as a desk down the hall, inspiring her, exasperating her, challenging her to new heights, and through it all remaining her staunchest supporter. In short, acting much like a father.
Sometimes life’s circles leave me breathless.
Shelly? Suffice to say that his life, too, had opened. He would always grieve for the singular love of his life, but his joy at having a daughter was thrilling, and when he laughed – now a regular event – I swear it sounded like dimes raining into a punchbowl.
Alice and I had concluded that exposing my relationship with Jeremy at this point would change nothing. It saved a lot of needless explanations all around.
“Anyone want to explain the long faces?” Alice said, handing Harry and me fresh brews. “Or should I think it’s me?”
Harry smiled. “We were talking about Jim Day, Miz Folger. And we just closed that chapter. Time to move to happier discussions, like what’s for supper?”
“It’s Alice, Harry, and as for chow, I’m having my maiden foray into making seafood gumbo. It’s okay to make it with canned tuna, right?”
She winked at me, retreated to the kitchen to attend a bubbling pot of shrimp and crab.
Harry turned to watch a pair of dolphins just past the last sandbar. There was a squall on the horizon, a smudge of dark clouds joined to the sea by a curtain of rain. The storm would blow eastward and die when it rained itself out.
“Heard anything from Jeremy?” Harry said, still looking seaward.
“Not a word. He was in New York long enough to have enlisted a dozen afflicted citizens to jump at his call. He finds and controls those folks as easily as you and I put on shoes.”
Harry turned from the water, pushed his blue-framed shades to his forehead, looked me in the eyes. “I know it all hasn’t had time to settle. But have you noticed how Jeremy stayed one step ahead of everything?”
I sipped, nodded. “Self-preservation instincts. He’s an incredible planner.”
“Good word, planner. All starting when he finally decided to tell his story to Doc Prowse.”
“He held his past inside a long time, Harry. It was ready to come out.”
“Maybe it wasn’t the only thing ready to come out.”
“Pardon, bro?”
Harry ticked off points on his fingers. “Your brother’s story got the Doc investigating Day, pulling him into the picture. Jeremy tutored the Doc in the slickest way out of the Institute, got her to make the tape that brought you to New York. He had Day scoped out at Camp Wilderness. How about Sirius? Didn’t that fit just perfect?”
“You’re losing me, Harry. Wha
t are you saying?”
“It’s interesting that everything fell together the way it did. Who was Jeremy’s biggest threat if he ever escaped? Jim Day, now deceased.”
“You’re suggesting – ?”
“I’m suggesting that your brother seems able to control about anything, given the right opportunities and ample time to plan.”
Harry’s words triggered Day’s description of my brother: He’s a wickedly bright boy. Give him enough time to plan and he could get into the main vault at Fort Knox.
Into it? I wondered. Or out of it?
Harry gestured between the mainland and the sea, meaning the whole country, the world, everywhere.
“Jeremy’s out there, Carson. He’s brilliant, adaptive, and learning more ways to game the system every day. You ever think that might have been the big plan all along?”
I started to argue. Couldn’t find the words. Alice slid open the door, smiled a smile so bright it shamed the sun.
Said, “Who’s ready for a feast?”
Acknowledgments
Thanks as always to my wife, Elaine, for putting up with my frequent spur-of-the-moment trips from Kentucky to coastal Alabama where, ostensibly there to write and research, I am often found fishing.
Special thanks to Mike Ward, Supervisor, Kentucky Medical Examiner’s Toxicology Laboratory, for superb ideas and input regarding various nasty substances. I employed his ideas at my whim, and any errancies are mine alone.
Thanks also to Julia Wisdom and Anne O’Brien of HarperCollins UK for excellent input and editing.
And finally, thanks to all the folks at the Aaron M. Priest Literary Agency.
About the Author
Blood Brother
J. A. Kerley worked in advertising and teaching before becoming a full-time novelist. He lives in Newport, Kentucky, but also spends a good deal of time in Southern Alabama, the setting for his Carson Ryder novels. His love of the suspense genre was sparked at age thirteen, when his father gave him a collection of Saint stories by Leslie Charteris. When not writing, J. A. Kerley likes to relax in the mountains with his fishing rod.
Also by J. A. Kerley
The Hundredth Man
The Death Collectors
The Broken Souls
Little Girls Lost
Copyright
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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