The Knowing Box Set EXTENDED EDITION: Exclusive New Material

by Ninie Hammon

  He’d eventually found himself at the river watching crowds board the Belle of Cincinnati for a starlight cruise. And the questions that he’d shoved underwater bobbed back up to the surface of his mind like submerged beach balls.

  Could it possibly be true—seriously!—that there were invisible monsters among those people—that there existed a creature made out of hate more horrifying than any Hollywood-animated, computer-generated, mechanical unreality whose single-minded mission was to kill Jack, Daniel and a woman named Becca?

  That was crazy! Fairy-tale-science-fiction-horror-movie-bogeyman crap!

  He slumped back into the seat and closed his eyes, absolutely exhausted, pushed to the limit of who he was by the constant battle going on inside him.

  Bottom line: it flat-out could not possibly be true.

  But it was.

  He feared the opposing forces of those mutually-exclusive realities might actually rip apart the fabric of his soul.

  When he finally did go home, he lay in bed wide awake as the digital clock did its slow-mo numerical dance.

  “Sleep…” he’d mumbled out loud to the universe, not a prayer, really. “Please, let me sleep.”

  He’d closed his eyes, and when he’d opened them again it was morning. He’d slept soundly, dreamlessly all night. After an uneventful day shift yesterday, he’d slept just as well last night. And since today was his swing to second shift—three to midnight—he’d spent a lazy Saturday morning running errands. Even got a haircut. Jack Carpenter was beginning to feel a little like a human being again.

  Jack had stopped off for a bowl of Skyline Chili on his way back from a run, and with it resting warm in his belly, he dug into the pile of paperwork that Crock claimed had been sitting on his desk since shortly after the earth cooled off. But he couldn’t focus. He had to come up with some sort of…plan. How do you defend yourself against—?

  He was spared having to answer the question.

  The hand-held radios clipped to the uniforms of the officers in the squad room all burped out a bleat of static at the same time, followed by the dispatcher’s voice: “All units respond to a 10-70 at the Ichikawa Building, 392 Banks Road.” Ten-seventy was the code for fire.

  “Guess the chamber of commerce finally got tired of waiting and blew the place up,” Peterson said as he passed Jack’s desk on his way to the door.

  Jack doubted that. The eminent domain court case between the city and Ichikawa, Inc. had dragged out for years, and the city fathers wouldn’t likely resort to violence at this late date to remove the niggling eyesore that continued to stymie the community’s efforts to revitalize the waterfront district. Actually, the eyesore was plural; there were five of them. The Ichikawa Building housed the corporate offices of Ichikawa—Japanese for “river city.” It sat at the far end of a string of buildings owned by the Japanese company, which used the first two of them and leased out the rest. The buildings were arranged on the north bank of the Ohio River, west of Cincinnati, at the edge of what the Harrelton Chamber of Commerce considered prime waterfront access.

  The whole Harrelton police department wouldn’t ordinarily roll for a fire in an isolated office building. But next door to the Ichikawa Building was Nippon Pyrotechnics, the company’s flagship manufacturing plant, where it produced world famous Ichikawa Fireworks.

  Jack wasn’t the first man to his cruiser this time. Paco Ramirez beat him by a step. As Ramirez pulled out in front of him onto Foster Road and flipped on his lights and siren, Jack’s cell phone rang. He reached to turn it off, then saw the almost-familiar number—where’d he seen that recently?—and answered it instead.

  “Sergeant Carpenter, Harrelton PD,” he said.

  “Bowie County Sheriff Jim Clark here. Are you the Sergeant Jack Carpenter who called here asking about Victor Alexander?”

  The Texas Sheriff’s words slithered into Jack’s ear, an earwig carrying eggs that would hatch and eat his brain inside his skull.

  “That’d be me. What’s up?” he said with an indifference he definitely did not feel.

  “You call asking about him last week and he escapes this week…do you know something I need to know?”

  “He broke out? He’s…gone?” Jack hated the little-kid whine in the questions.

  “As of midnight Thursday. Why were you inquiring about him?”

  “Nothing urgent. He’s a…suspect…in a cold case,” Jack said. He murdered a dog named McDougal, McDo, Dougal Dog, DD twenty-six years ago. “I thought you said he was locked up, that the walls were three feet thick.”

  “I did and they are. But that won’t stop a man with a key. He had help, an accomplice on the outside.” The Texarkana lawman kept talking, but the word accomplice echoed in Jack’s head like a marble in a kettle drum.

  “A drug-fried loser like Alexander could never have orchestrated an escape from that place all by his lonesome. Shoot, it was so slick they wouldn’t have detected he was gone for hours—except the guy stopped off on his way out to murder a nurse and an orderly.”

  “Killed them by…?” Jack mumbled, but knew the answer before he asked—unconsciously mouthed the words along with the sheriff.

  “Broke their necks,” the sheriff said. Jack could hear something like awe in the sheriff’s voice as he continued. “Twisted their heads all the way around facing backward. Broke the orderly’s spine, too—how’d he do that?”

  Gratefully, it was a rhetorical question.

  “He’ll be back in custody inside forty-eight hours, though.” The sheriff’s tone was clipped and confident. “His blood test the last time we busted him looked like the runoff from a nuclear waste dump. That guy’s ingested every chemical but Tidy Bowl. He’ll be high on something before sundown, I guar-ron-tee it. We’ll catch him.”

  “I’m sure you will.”

  Actually, I’m sure you won’t.

  Jack kept the phone to his ear for a moment after the sheriff hung up, then scanned back through his call log and found the number of Wilkerson Commercial Fisheries in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He was glad to see his hand wasn’t shaking when he punched it in and that his voice was firm when he asked the office manager there if the Gypsy Baron had returned to port early. She assured him the ship was still out to sea.

  “They stay out until they get their catch,” the woman said. Jack had only exhaled half the breath he’d been holding when she continued. “If there’s an emergency, like that sailor who got hurt, the Coast Guard sends out a Med-Evac chopper to get them.”

  “One of the crew of the Gypsy Baron was taken off the ship?”

  “Uh huh. About a week ago. On Sunday night.”

  After that, Jack wasn’t talking to the office manager anymore. He was merely speaking his thoughts aloud so he could hear them and believe.

  “He’s… back on shore…”

  “Haven’t heard what his condition is, though. I don’t want to gross you out or anything, but that guy somehow got a fish hook in his eye! How do you do a thing like that—get a fish hook—?”

  Jack disconnected and sat in a silence too deep to be real, so quiet he could have heard an egg white slip out through a crack in the shell. Both of them free, somewhere out there since…his brain finished the math.

  Probably takes twelve hours to drive from Texarkana to Cincinnati.

  They’re here.

  The cell phone still in his hand, Jack punched “favorites,” then Theresa’s name. As he listened to the lonely sound of the phone ringing and ringing, a lead ball formed in the pit of his stomach.

  What had been surfacing with each new snippet view of his past were childhood memories of Theresa. The warmth of her tender hugs, how he often saw tears in her eyes when she tended the shiners and split lips his father’d given him.

  “I’m gone call the po-lice and show them what that man done to you,” she’d tell him.

  “Nobody did anything to me,” he’d reply. “I ran into a cabinet door.”

  They’d both known he was l
ying, but they’d also both known he’d die before he’d change his story, so it had become a sad little dance they did—Theresa begging Jack to let her report his various injuries and Jack holding tight to his “I tripped” stories. She’d hug him fiercely then, like she never wanted to let go, and croon “everything’s gone be alright, Sugar. You’ll see. God’s got this. Ain’t none of what’s happenin’ a surprise to the Almighty.”

  Now, it was Theresa who was in danger, and Jack was all she had. If he could stop the monsters as he’d done the creature of wasps at the school—game over, everybody pick up your marbles and go home. He’d never had a chance as a child fighting the superhuman red-haired kid and his gang, but a well-placed .40 caliber hollow-point would drop Cole Stuart and Victor Alexander like it would any other scumbag.

  Jack would simply have to kill them before they had a chance to kill him.

  There it was then.

  Between one heartbeat and the next, Harrelton, Ohio, Police Sergeant Jack Carpenter—the guy in the white hat who’d dedicated his life to protecting the innocent from lawbreakers—turned his back and walked away from the law. He would shoot Cole and Victor on sight. No preliminaries. No warnings. No “keep your hands where I can see them.” As soon as he spotted either one of them, he would put a bullet in the man—two, actually. First shot to the chest; second to the head. Just like you would a mad dog.

  Surprising how that resolve cleared the fog out of his brain.

  The law enforcement officer within Jack surfaced then long enough to point out, oh by the way, that the use of deadly force was perfectly legal if there was a “clear and present threat that a suspect intended to kill or cause grievous bodily harm” to someone else—which pretty much defined Stuart’s and Alexander’s whole reason for existence.

  But that part, and the fact that what he was planning would never be ruled a righteous shoot, didn’t count anymore because Jack was no longer a police officer. He was a soldier and they were the enemy. He would cut them down the moment he saw them because Daniel, Emily, Andi and Theresa…and Becca would never be safe as long as Cole Stuart and Victor Alexander continued to draw breath. And there was nobody in the world to protect them but Jack.

  He called Daniel. The call went immediately to voice mail, meaning Daniel’s phone was turned off. After the beep, Jack spoke in a level, stern voice. “Daniel, Cole and Vic are here—right now! Get Emily and Andi and Theresa and run. Don’t tell anybody where you’re going. Just drive—get out of Cincinnati, go to Dayton or Indy or Louisville, find some obscure motel, check in and stay there until I tell you it’s safe to come back. Now, turn your phone back off and don’t turn it on again for any reason. Emily’s, too. Your number’s on the church website and anybody with the computer skills of a fourth-grader can track the location of a cell phone. Use the motel phone and call my cell every two hours. I won’t pick up unless I have something to tell you.”

  Jack started to hang up, but didn’t. After a pause, he said, “Dano, might be a good idea somewhere along in here to…pray.”

  He hung up, sat frozen for a moment, then the silence roaring around him was broken by the dispatcher’s voice, rasping over his radio. “Unit four”—that was Jack—“proceed to River Road and assist in crowd control.” Jack hadn’t even pulled out of the station parking lot!

  For years, he’d been telling police recruits that “training will take over as the default if you let it.” He did. He flipped on his lights and siren and headed toward the Ohio River.

  * * * * * * *

  Emily sat still, didn’t notice the slowly growing pond of white Elmer’s glue that was puddling beneath the bottle hanging forgotten in her hand.

  Did she love Jeff Kendrick?

  How could she even think about it when a horrible darkness as black as the far side of the moon seemed to be descending all around her. Something evil was endangering everything and everybody she loved!

  She…loved?

  Dan.

  Dan in the emergency room, holding her steady and tight, as if the force of his strength alone could protect her, shield her from their shared horror.

  His words from Thursday night. Calm. Kind, even. Telling her there were monsters out there right now plotting to kill him!

  What would she do if she lost him?

  Lost him? Hello. Why was she worrying about losing what she wasn’t even sure she wanted to keep?

  What she felt with Jeff was fierce and passionate and powerful.

  An atomic bomb was powerful, too, burned hot and bright…and destroyed everything it touched.

  If anything happened to Dan, what would—?

  “Are you Ok?”

  Emily jumped at the words—Jeff’s words—spoken out loud by Mary Sexton who was peering at her, or trying to as she adjusted her new bifocals to bring Emily’s face into focus.

  “Why, sure I’m…why do you ask?”

  “You looked—I don’t know—forlorn, I guess.” Emily started to come up with an explanation, but there was no need. Mary’s observation had been as surface as every other conversation she’d ever had with any of the women in the group. If Emily’d dared to tell them she was not Ok, they wouldn’t have had a clue what to do with a revelation like that.

  “You got lots on your mind, don’t you, Sweetie, what with your little girl getting shot…well, let’s not talk about something awful as that.” She gestured around at women gathering up purses and car keys. “We’re all going to go on now. I got to fix supper for Harold.”

  Then she smiled, displaying perfect white dentures. “There’s only that one bouquet of balloons left to attach to the grape arbor.” Mary nodded to where the handyman on a ladder was tying the ends of strings to the top of a trellis, then grimaced as if something smelled bad. “And we’ll be back tomorrow after church to finish up. You about done?”

  “Just this last S,” she said, trying to smear the pond of glue out over the letter. “Actually, I’m waiting for Andi. Beth Young is dropping her off after gymnastics, so I’ll work until she gets here.”

  The ladies filed out, their chatter like the chirping of birds in the woods. In the quiet that followed, Emily could sink back into her memories of Jeff, like settling down into the glory of a hot tub after a cold swim. She wallowed in them for a moment, the images creating a visceral reaction all over her body. Then her mind turned to Dan.

  Dan, who could die any minute at the hands of a monster.

  Jeff, who was the brightest light she had ever known in all her life.

  Are you Ok?

  She sat unmoving, so still she was aware of her own pulse, the steady whump, whump, whump sound of her heart pumping blood through her veins. Then she wiped glue off her fingers on a tissue and fished her phone out of her purse. She typed a brief message, but wasn’t ready to send it. Not yet. She stared at it, the words in orderly rows on the screen.

  The cell phone suddenly rang. She jumped in surprise and her finger tapped send.

  “Is this Emily Burke?” a woman’s voice asked. But she continued in a rush before Emily could respond. “This is Bernice Higginbotham, Emma’s friend, and I wanted to call and let you know how sorry I am I couldn’t do that favor she asked of me.”

  Emily sat back on her heels.

  “What favor?”

  “She wanted to borrow my handyman today, but I just couldn’t give him up. He was already under the house and I was going to send him on along soon’s he finished. But it got so late and he’s still down there.”

  Emily’s mind spun.

  If Bernice didn’t send the…

  Shoes appeared in front of Emily. Work shoes. Emily hung up on Bernice Higginbotham in mid-babble and let her eyes travel up the body of the man who owned the shoes until she was staring into the face of the “handyman.” He was grinning at her, his sickening body odor settling around her like a fog.

  Then Andi screamed, a shriek as thin as a paper cut. Emily turned to the sound and saw the child in the doorway leading from the
sanctuary into the Fellowship Hall. The little girl was staring in shock and horror at the man standing in front of Emily, her face contorted in a mask of fear and loathing.

  It dawned on Emily laboriously, like lifting something heavy, that Andi was screaming at something Emily couldn’t see.

  CHAPTER 28

  The only access to the “Five Uglies,” as proponents of the waterfront project had dubbed the buildings along the Ohio River, was down River Road. It led off Conway Street across a football-field-sized area of marshes and mudflats and ended in front of the middle building at Banks Road, which branched out from there to dead ends in both directions. The center building, Ohio Agri-Business, Inc., was the largest, a warehouse full of farm equipment—tractors, hay-balers and grain combines that looked like gigantic grasshoppers pregnant with triplets.

  The building east of the farm equipment warehouse was the smallest of the five. It was farther back from the road than the other four, set directly on the riverbank in a small grove of trees. Tall black letters on the side identified it as Kobayashi Paper Products, a storage facility and distribution center for paper goods manufactured by the Japanese company’s three plants located upstream in Pittsburgh.

  The last building in the string was unnamed and had no signage for a reason. That’s because it was full of whiskey—Kentucky bourbon whiskey to be exact—thousands of barrels of it aging in racks five stories high.

  Jack had worked in a bourbon warehouse one summer and marveled at the way the racks were ingeniously constructed so workers could use gravity to roll the five-hundred-pound barrels on their sides without heavy equipment. It reminded Jack of one of those contraptions where a round stone is placed in a slot at the top and then rolls to the bottom through a series of slanted tunnels.