by Chaz McGee
The little boy who had urged on this destruction stood at the edge of the fire, his flat eyes reflecting the dancing flames. His face was solemn and his thirst for revenge satisfied. He had done what he had come to do.
His job finished, the man who had taken Tyler Matthews stood by the colonel’s van, took out his cell phone, and calmly dialed a number. I could hear it ringing nearby. A curtain at the back of the house flickered and the colonel’s worried face peered out into the darkness as he held his cell phone to his ear. He saw the flames licking at the edges of his window and shrank back in fear. “What have you done?” he cried into the phone as he placed a palm against the window glass and snatched it away, feeling the heat.
The man’s answer was serene: “You said tonight was the night I would become a man,” he told the colonel. “That I would know what to do once I started.” He paused, struggling to maintain his control. “You were right. I know now what I have to do. I hope you burn in hell.”
The man held his phone down by his side but did not disconnect it. The colonel punched wildly at the keypad on his phone, trying to sever the connection so he could call for help. With no signs of worry about being detected, the man stood only a few feet away from the house, watching the fire grow with a detached satisfaction. Suddenly, flames swept up the near side of the house in a swoop, as if someone had pulled a blanket of fire over it. Thick smoke rose from the other side, where the flames had sought and found more gasoline. It was astonishing how quickly the fire consumed the house and how little time the colonel had for escape.
I walked into the fire.
I knew the flames could not hurt me. More than that, I knew I needed to witness the colonel’s suffering. I had long sought redemption, and I had never pursued vengeance against others, knowing it would threaten that redemption. But if I hoped to understand the mysteries of my lonely existence, I knew it was imperative I acknowledge the vast power of evil every bit as much as I acknowledged the power of good.
The colonel had thrown his phone on the floor and was wheeling toward the front door, his elbows pumping in his frenzy. He skidded to a halt, turned the dead bolt key, and tugged. The door did not give an inch as the wires binding it from the outside held firm. The colonel screamed in rage but did not waste any more time trying to force the door. The air was heavy with a thick, black smoke that reeked of burning wood and melting plastic. As the colonel began to choke on the noxious fumes, he wheeled to the kitchen sink, soaked a dishtowel, and placed it over his mouth. The air was so black with smoke that I could barely see him as he wheeled frantically back down the hall toward the narrower back door. Hands trembling, he fumbled with the lock and pulled it open, only to find the way blocked by the massive gas grill. It did not stop the colonel. He launched himself out of his wheelchair and through the door, hitting the grill with a thud. It toppled over and the propane tanks landed squarely in the puddle of gasoline. He tried to drag himself forward, but the ring of fire had snaked around the corner of the house and was headed for the back stoop. The colonel smelled his hands and looked down at his now-soaked clothing, realizing what was happening. He crawled away from the grill, but the flames were upon him. It was too late. With a massive boom, the tanks exploded, the percussive wave bouncing off the brick foundation and lifting the colonel into the air. He was covered in flames now, his clothing soaked with the fuel that had been splashed around the deck. His body catapulted upward like a fireball, cleared the back stairs, and hit the concrete of the pool deck. Screaming with agony, the colonel writhed back and forth, trying to roll toward the pool, his body consumed by flames.
I saw them then—black shapes that might have been shadows from the flames dancing over the rippling, blue surface of the pool, or maybe shadows inspired by the wind that had sprung up inexplicably and was feeding the fire, causing the tree limbs to dance as if they were celebrating the death of evil. Except that the dark shapes snaking toward him were not shadows. They had a power of their own. Grasping, almost liquid black wisps were surrounding the colonel, undulating beside his burning body, inching closer and closer, as if hungry to drink from his suffering. He was screaming in fury now, his pain secondary to the rage he felt that his control had been overcome. The colonel cursed and threatened the young man who had taken Tyler Matthews with punishment, as if he could sense that the man now stood, only a few yards away, watching his torment with aloof curiosity.
Someone was standing only a few yards away, watching with aloof curiosity—the little boy apparition. His head was cocked and he had his hands on his hips, legs planted wide, as he watched the colonel writhing in agony. Satisfied with what he saw, he turned and disappeared into the shadows. I was not sorry to see him go.
Sirens howled in the distance, drawing closer. The colonel heard them despite his screams, and it gave him strength. He twisted and rolled, leaving a trail of flames behind him as he cleared the concrete lip of the pool and fell in with a splash. The dark shadows that had surrounded him now flowed over the surface of the pool like black water snakes, seeking a hold until, thwarted, they fizzled and disappeared. The colonel sank to the bottom of the pool, a black cocoon of burnt flesh and tattered cloth, then struggled toward the surface again, unrecognizable as anything human, his mouth little more than a bloodred hole in a mass of blackened flesh, gasping for air.
The man who had set the fire still did not move. He stood holding the can of gasoline, watching the colonel struggle. He did not care whether the colonel lived or died. It was his suffering that had been the point. Finally, job done, he placed the empty gas can inside the door of the garage and started down the driveway.
He had made his escape too late. Fire engines were pulling up in front of the colonel’s house, followed by a squadron of department cars. Notified by an alert dispatcher, the abduction team was flocking to the scene. They knew that the fire roaring out of control in front of them had to be connected to the disappearance of Tyler Matthews. They’d recognized the colonel’s address, and there were no coincidences in their world.
Maggie and Calvano were among the first to arrive. Whatever they had discovered on the computer files that Robert Michael Martin had brought them, they now knew the colonel was part of the abduction plan.
“Oh, god,” Maggie cried as she raced across the front lawn. “Do you think he had the boy in the basement?”
“I should have run his background,” Calvano said, his face stricken. He looked like he was getting ready to dive into the flames and search for Tyler Matthews himself.
A detective I did not recognize pulled Calvano back. “Get back,” he said. “Let the firemen do their job.” Even as he spoke, more fire trucks roared around a corner and in a squeal of brakes and grinding metal more men jumped from the trucks and uncoiled hoses, forming teams and shouting their strategy for stopping the inferno.
Maggie was staring at the fire, cheeks wet with tears, certain Tyler Matthews was inside. In the red light of the fire, she looked as holy as a Madonna in a medieval painting. Calvano was beside himself, pacing back and forth a few yards away, muttering that his carelessness in not questioning the colonel’s credentials had almost certainly caused the young boy’s death. “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” he kept repeating until Maggie, at last, noticed.
“Stop it, Adrian,” she ordered him. “You weren’t calling the shots. It’s not your fault. And we don’t know anything yet. The boy may not be inside.”
“I had to let some loser like that Martin guy do my job for me,” Calvano said in disbelief. “I should have checked the hard drives myself. I should have picked up that something was off about the guy. I don’t even know if he was really paralyzed. Oh my god, I’ve been so stupid.”
“You aren’t the only one who dropped the ball,” Maggie said. “Pull yourself together before Gonzales gets here.”
Calvano could not let it go. He paced restlessly toward the house and then darted up the driveway.
He came face to face with the man who had taken Tyler
Matthews.
The man darted to the side, trying to outrun Calvano. Calvano grabbed at him, missed, and took after him a few steps too late. The man was far faster and was down the driveway in seconds, heading toward the neighbor’s yard.
“Stop or I’ll shoot!” Calvano cried, pulling his gun.
Maggie whirled around at the sound of Calvano’s voice. “Wait!” she called to him, but it was too late. As the man disappeared into the darkness of the yard next door, Calvano fired, once, twice, and then one more time, as if his hand was no longer under his control and his adrenaline had made him reckless.
“Adrian!” Maggie screamed as she ran to him. She carefully lowered his hands and pried the gun from his grasp.
“It’s him,” Calvano croaked. “It’s the guy who took Tyler Matthews. I looked him square in the face. He looks exactly like the sketch. It’s him.”
Maggie sprinted toward the side yard where the man had disappeared. He lay across the concrete of the neighbor’s driveway, sprawled facedown, his T-shirt soaked with blood. Two bullets had entered his body through his back.
“Oh, no,” Maggie said. She barked into her radio. “I need a bus now. Hurry. Critical witness down.” She gave the address and knelt beside the injured man, placing her fingers to his neck. “Stay with me,” she told him. She probed his injuries gently with her fingers and then rolled him so that he was staring up at the stars. His face was blank, his eyes closed, his life force fading to black as steadily as a twilight sky.
“Oh my god,” Maggie said. “He’s just a kid. He can’t be more than twenty.”
Calvano stood behind her, looking down, dumbfounded, as if not quite believing that he had caused such damage. “Is it him?” he asked. “The guy who took the kid?”
“If it is,” Maggie said angrily, “you better hope to God he lives. If Tyler Matthews wasn’t inside that house—and let’s pray he wasn’t—then this man is the only one on this earth who knows where the kid is. He’s got to stay alive so he can tell us.”
Chapter 25
I stood in the center of a maelstrom of emotions as rescue teams swarmed the scene, seeking to squelch the anarchy that had erupted. The firemen crackled with energy and exuded a recklessness outranked only by their courage. The abduction squad was frantic with worry that Tyler Matthews was inside, their confidence shaken that they had not discovered the colonel’s involvement sooner. The feds were grim, as if this latest development was a personal affront to them. Noise, smoke, fear, anger: it all whirled around the house, seeming to whip the flames even higher.
An ambulance arrived, followed by another, disgorging EMTs. They moved through the chaos like beacons of light, their steady focus calming the others, causing them to pause and recover their professionalism.
“There’s another one back here,” a fireman shouted from the top of the driveway. An ambulance crew started toward him on the run, Maggie following behind them.
“Is it a child?” she screamed above the sounds of the fire.
“No,” the fireman shouted back, his face covered in soot. “Adult. Unrecognizable.” With these ominous words, he stepped aside as the EMTs raced past him. The fireman turned away from what he had seen. Having witnessed the agony of the colonel, he could not bear to look at it anymore. Even the EMTs slowed at what they saw: a blackened shape huddled over the steps in the shallow end of the pool, unrecognizable as human, a collage of black char, burnt fabric, and ruined pink flesh.
“Oh, god,” one of the EMTs muttered under his breath. His companion glanced at him and tugged at his elbow, urging him to shake it off. Another human being was in pain, and it was their job to stop it.
They did what they could.
Maggie had returned to the injured young man’s side as soon as she’d heard the second victim was not Tyler Matthews. She knelt beside him, holding his hand and murmuring to hang in there as the EMTs worked over him, assessing his wounds, slowing the bleeding, and containing infection for the moment. His eyes had opened and he stared at Maggie as if she were an angel, but he did not make a sound.
“Can I ride with him?” she asked as they loaded him onto a stretcher and began to race toward the ambulance.
“No room,” the female EMT told her. “You’ll have to follow.”
Maggie was crestfallen. I marveled at the sympathy she was able to show for the man who had, irrefutably, taken Tyler Matthews.
“Come on, Adrian,” Maggie told her partner. “Let’s get out of here before Internal Affairs arrives. Someone’s got to be by the kid in case he says something.”
“You got my gun, right?” Calvano asked.
“Yes.” Her answer was abrupt. “It’s probably going to be a while before you get it back. Nothing I can do about that.”
“Gonzales already knows, doesn’t he?” Calvano asked miserably.
“Probably.” Maggie took notice of Calvano for the first time since the shooting. She, like me, saw that something in him had changed, as if his ego had been popped by the jab of a pin and now hung deflated around him, leaving him with nothing but the saggy vestige to drag along with him. His cockiness, his confidence—it had all disappeared.
None of that had been real, I realized, his self-assurance, his self-centeredness. I had hated him for being someone who did not really exist. It was all a façade. And it all seemed like such a waste of energy now.
“Come on, Adrian,” Maggie said more kindly. “Man up. I need your help.”
Maggie could not ride with the young man to the hospital, but no one was going to stop me. I was inside the ambulance before the crew was, perched on a bench right behind the driver’s seat, where I could watch the EMTs at work. They loaded the young man without any judgment about whether he was worthy of saving. I marveled at their objectivity. They sat on either side of him, checking his vital signs, hooking up intravenous drips, swabbing out what wounds they could. They did not care if he was a criminal or a victim. I could feel in each of the technicians an intense core of determination—as if they had anointed themselves knights sworn to defend all life against death, to the death, regardless of whether someone deserved it. They were not saving lives; they were fighting death.
“Why didn’t you let her ride along?” the male EMT asked his colleague.
“She wants something from him,” the other EMT explained. “She’d pounce on every groan or movement he made, wanting to talk to him. I can’t deal with that. We’re dealing with enough here as it is.” A monitor began to beep and she quickly adjusted one of the clear bags of fluid dripping into one of the man’s arms.
There was little they could do, really, given the devastating wounds, but their vigilance was relentless—and their stubborn refusal to give up on him was keeping him alive. As the young man lay in the dusk between life and death, his life force vibrated like a piano wire, swinging from faint to louder again, then fading away, only to be brought back once more. They were not going to let him die.
I could feel nothing else from him, just that faint thread of life and the remnants of whatever had kept him alive through all the years of the colonel’s abuse: his will to survive. Whatever pain he had felt, whatever memories he held, they were of no importance now. His fight was simple: his body would either live, or it would die. Nothing else mattered.
We raced through the town, sirens screaming and red lights flashing, leaving a wake of chaos as cars pulled frantically to the side and then sought to recover from our passing. I saw the looks of terror on the faces of the drivers as the ambulance raced past. Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.
We reached the hospital at virtually the exact same moment as the ambulance carrying the colonel, though he was little more than a ruined body. That he was still alive was no testament to his strength, I thought, but rather the judgment of a universe that had decreed he had not yet suffered enough to pay for the suffering he had caused.
A team of doctors and nurses rushed to meet us as we pulled up to the emergency room entran
ce. As my luck would have it, the great Christian Fletcher was back on duty, newly refreshed, and the first to take control. He took one look at the colonel and ordered him taken upstairs to the burn unit for “pain control.” There was nothing else that could be done for him.
The young man was another story. Within seconds, the EMTs had summarized his condition to Fletcher and handed over the paperwork. As the young man was wheeled inside the hospital, a squadron of nurses fulfilled every order that Fletcher barked on the run. His authority was absolute; his concentration even more so. When Maggie and Calvano arrived a moment later, Fletcher was too engrossed in saving the young man’s life to even notice that Maggie was watching.
Have I been wrong about him? Could a man so devoted to saving lives take a life, as someone had taken Fiona Harker’s? As she watched him in action, it did not seem possible. And were he and I really all that different from each other? He fought to win the battle of the flesh. I fought to win the battle of the soul.
They were moving the young man into a trauma room. The nurses had changed from the warm, nurturing women I had observed days before into steel-strong instruments of efficiency, ruthless in their competence. They worked together as one, removing the boy’s clothing and sterilizing the wounds. Fletcher did not even have to ask for an instrument or suggest an adjustment in the equipment now surrounding the man’s body like a crowd of robotic onlookers. The nurses always seemed a step ahead of him, anticipating his needs.
Fiona Harker had once been one of them, I remembered. How ironic it would be, I thought, if the young man before me died because Fiona Harker was not here to help save him. She had been the best, the medical staff insisted, but if she had been better than the nurses I saw before me . . . oh, how very many lives she must have saved before hers was taken.
Maggie pulled aside one of the attendants and was outlining the situation in an urgent whisper, explaining the need to talk to the injured man as soon as they could, that he might be the only one who knew where the missing boy was. The attendant nodded, understanding, but jumped and then froze—as did everyone in the entire area—when the emergency room doors banged open and the federal agents stepped inside, looking like a posse of gunslingers about to take over the town.
