The Douglas Kennedy Collection #2

by Douglas Kennedy

  Well, I really didn’t have a clue what I was going to do next. Drive up to Coursen’s house, knock on the door, and confront him with the fact that I knew about his antics with Kelly Franklin back East and was going to expose him to the world? He’d be on to Sergeant Clark in an instant. Then the Franklins, bound by the hush money they’d been paid by the church, wouldn’t be able to finger Coursen. And I’d end up with a criminal record for, yet again, wasting police time.

  No—confronting Coursen was definitely out. But tailing him and seeing what he did with his time outside of church . . . well, that might yield something.

  The problem was, how to follow him and not be seen? In a small town someone from outside the community, driving around in a car that (damnit) had a big Avis sticker across its trunk would be immediately spotted. Given that I already had a bit of notoriety in the local restaurant and with Coursen himself . . .

  So I had no plan, no idea what I was even looking for. All I knew was that I had to find a way of getting to tag along on any “errand” Coursen might be making in the vicinity.

  Why was I so certain that he would be making such errands? Just instinct, along with the growing notion that if he kept Kelly Franklin alive after abducting her . . .

  Yes, but she was released—or, more likely, got away—after ten days. Why would Coursen keep Ivy alive for three weeks?

  Then again, what did he say to you last week during your interview?

  “She’s not dead.”

  Unless he had taken care of that bit of business in the wake of George’s suicide. After all, what was his comment on the afternoon news?

  “Tragically one must assume that she is dead.”

  Because you’ve rendered her so?

  I reached Townsend by seven and drove straight over to Coursen’s church. A stroke of luck. The parking lot was full and the church lights were on. From the shouting and roaring coming from within they were probably handling snakes and talking in tongues. A sign near the church entrance advertised this: “Monday Miracles Tonight at 7 p.m.!”

  There was certainly another “miracle” awaiting me. Larry Coursen’s Land Rover—immediately identifiable thanks to its “Preacher Man” vanity plate—was parked in its usual place. No one was in the lot so I was able to drive over to it and peer inside. Nothing unusual about it, except that the passenger seat in the front was filled with old newspapers and empty paper cups from McDonald’s and Burger King. The backseat had DVD boxes scattered everywhere. I could make out the cover that adorned all the DVD cases: a big smiling Larry Coursen, his hands raised heavenward, above which was the title: Everyday Miracles with Larry Coursen! I tested the door and discovered it was unlocked. This was small-town Canada—and in small-town Canada everyone left their doors open. Immediately I went around to the hatchback trunk and pressed the handle. It too opened and I saw that there were two dirty blankets. I also noted that this vehicle didn’t have an enclosed trunk; rather, a canvas awning was pulled across the roof of the cargo area. Suddenly an insane idea clouded my head. Were you to stow away inside, you wouldn’t be locked in. You could simply detach the awning and escape. Without further thinking, I decided to pursue this.

  I closed the trunk door and returned to my rented vehicle. I was about to leave it in a corner of the lot but then realized that this was not a very bright idea. Once the parking lot emptied after the Monday Miracles show, my rental would be left behind. Coursen or one of his staff might wonder why this one car remained. And upon seeing the Avis rental sticker on its trunk . . .

  Well, the rental car could be easily traced, resulting in me being picked up by the local sheriff.

  So I drove out of the parking lot and down onto Main Street. There was a medium-size supermarket at the far end of the street. It was open until ten p.m. I gambled on the fact that the local law wouldn’t snoop around this parking lot after hours and left it in a corner far away from the street. I checked my watch. It was 7:45 p.m. The Monday Miracles had to continue for another hour at least—and I would need a good fifteen minutes to walk back to the church. It was cold tonight—minus twelve according to the dashboard digital readout. I pulled on a wool-knit hat and kept my head bowed low as I hiked back up to Townsend Assemblies of God. But the streets were empty. I passed no one. I checked my watch again as I reached the church. 8:04 p.m. From inside the church came the electrified voice of Larry Coursen: “We know you’re there, Jesus! We know you’re right inside this church, filling us with love!”

  This last word was pronounced with an extended wail. It was followed by shrieks and howls from the congregation. I glanced around the parking lot. Not another person was in sight. Under cover of all that high volume of religiosity I walked quickly to Coursen’s vehicle. I pressed the handle. I grabbed the blankets that had been stuffed into the back of the trunk space. They smelled old, musty—and were cold to the touch. I slid into the trunk, then had to work at lying flat while reaching out with my left hand and attempting to slam the trunk door behind me. It took three tries—but, after watching it nearly catch twice, I yanked extra hard and the trunk slammed closed. I was in. As the awning was covering me, I was also in darkness. I had to shift around a great deal to find a fetal position that was even moderately comfortable. When this was achieved I reached into my jacket pocket and turned off my cell phone. Then I checked the time again. 8:12 p.m. It wasn’t just dark in the car, it was also cold. I pulled on my gloves. I zipped my jacket right up to my neck. I covered myself with the thin, putrid blankets. I waited.

  An hour went by, during which time I found myself frequently thinking: What possessed you to pull such a deranged stunt? At least twice in that first hour, I was on the verge of disengaging the awning, climbing over the backseat, out a side door, and vanishing into the night. But just when the cold and the dark and the fear were about to defeat me I heard voices outside and cars starting up. Too late, too late. You’re stuck now.

  I checked my watch again. 9:14 p.m. But no sign of the Preacher Man. Cars continued to leave the lot. Then at 9:43 p.m., there were footsteps outside, followed by voices.

  “The thing is, Carl,” Larry Coursen said, “if Brenda keeps phoning me day and night, someone’s gonna put two and two together. I mean, every time I walk into the door of my house Bonnie is ripping me a new asshole, telling me she’s gonna expose me blah, blah, blah. The denial thing—the line that Brenda is so suffering she keeps having to call me—will only go so far. So you’ve got to go talk to Brenda again and make it clear that silence is golden here, that she doesn’t want trouble from me. Tell her, once things calm down, I’ll be around again. You cool with that?”

  “I’m cool, brother,” the other voice said.

  “And next month, once all this has blown over, we can look into getting the parish to buy you that GMC Acadia you’ve been after—for pastoral purposes, naturally.”

  “Yeah, naturally.”

  And they both laughed.

  Jesus Christ, Coursen had been screwing Brenda. This subplot didn’t exactly astonish me—I’d wondered myself on several occasions whether there was a romantic link between them. But to hear Coursen speak about it in such a blatantly cynical way to one of his henchmen . . . well, it seriously unsettled me, perhaps because I was stuffed in a corner of the trunk of his car, shivering with the cold. “Make it clear that silence is golden here, that she doesn’t want trouble from me.” If he found me stowed away in his vehicle, how would he ensure my silence?

  The front car door opened. I held my breath, hoping my teeth—slightly chattering with the cold—wouldn’t be discernible. I heard Coursen slide into the driver’s seat and fumble for his keys. Then there was the sound of an engine turning over and the whoosh of air as the heater was turned on full blast. From the speakers situated around the car came this voice—a supersmooth baritone speaking in a deeply motivational way about Optimizing the Whole You.

  “Now today we’re going to look at ‘Saying No to the Negative.’ Wherever you are right now
—right this very instant—I want you to say, out loud, right now: ‘I AM SAYING NO TO THE NEGATIVE!’ ”

  And Larry Coursen did just that. Saying no to the negative he put the car into gear and drove off.

  We didn’t travel far—maybe four, five minutes maximum. En route the motivational CD continued to play, exhorting its listener to: “Treat the negative like a cancer—and one which you can stop from metastasizing.”

  “I want you to say that now out loud: ‘The Negative is a Cancer—and I won’t let that cancer eat me up.’ ”

  Yet again Larry Coursen did as demanded. Having asserted that the Negative is, verily, a Cancer, he braked to a halt. The engine cut out. The heat—which had hardly kicked in as yet—died. A car door slammed. And then he did the unthinkable: with a telltale beep-beep he locked the car and also primed the inside burglar alarm.

  I knew that beep-beep sound because my old VW had the same kind of alarm system. Once primed, any upward movement inside the car itself would trigger it. I was certain that we had pulled up in front of Coursen’s house, given how short a distance we had traveled from the church. The fact that he had electronically set the car alarm could only mean one thing: He was going in for the night, leaving me to freeze while crammed like a balled-up fetus in his trunk.

  Idiot, idiot, idiot.

  I started to cry—for the stupidity of my actions, for the way I had again shot myself in the foot with a machine gun, for the fact that my mental state was still calamitous, for the realization that my grief for Emily hadn’t dissipated one bit in the fifteen months since the accident.

  I must have cried for a good ten minutes. When this wave of anguish finally burned off, I decided that I would simply jump up and release the awning, then clamber over the backseat, open a door, and hightail it down the street. It would take Coursen a good minute to react to the alarm—and I would be far away at this point.

  And then what? Back to my sad little life. Back to the days doing work that I found only marginally interesting. Back to the small apartment—and the empty evenings. Back to everything I did in order to distract myself from the deep-rooted sadness that I simply couldn’t shake. Back to the realization: You are simply marking time.

  So why abandon ship now? Why run off when you might just find out . . .

  You know what you’re going to find out? That Coursen drives his car between his home and his church . . . and that you are going to be stuck here until some point tomorrow when he leaves the car unlocked and you can hopefully hightail it out of here and not get apprehended by the law or by Coursen and his henchman . . .

  This internal debate was overshadowed by a far larger concern: I urgently needed to pee. For around an hour I had tried to ignore the pain in my bladder and the sense that I was about to burst. Now I knew I was courting renal failure if I didn’t do something about it instantly. So I pulled one of the blankets off me, folded it several times over, somehow managed to pull down my jeans and underwear, then shoved the blanket behind me and let go.

  It was all ferociously grubby and depressing but the relief was enormous. When I was finished I folded the now-sodden blanket one more time and carefully shoved it to a far corner of the trunk. Then I pulled up my jeans, rezipped my parka, and wondered if I would be able to make it through the night without succumbing to frostbite.

  A small blessing arrived: sleep. I nodded off for what seemed like minutes. But when I awoke and checked my watch it was 2:43 a.m. We were on the move again. That’s what had jolted me awake: the beep-beep sound of the car alarm being disengaged, the driver’s door opening and closing, the engine turning over, the heat coming on full blast, and the God-awful motivational CD blaring as Coursen drove us off.

  We were on the road for over an hour and a half, a long drive during which Coursen repeated platitudinous catchphrases about “The Need to Assert Me,” “The Way Forward Without Fear,” and “I Can Master Anything and Any Situation.” The motivational speaker unnerved me as he tried to convince his audience that “Everything Can Be Overcome if You Want to Overcome It.” His smoothie-smoothie voice was cloying and infuriating. I switched him off. I listened to the road.

  For around forty minutes, the road seemed well-paved, with few bumps or changes of gradient. From what I could also discern we were the only car out here tonight, one or two roaring trucks (or, at least, I presumed they were trucks) breaking the aural loneliness.

  But then we took a sharp right turn and the road changed. Suddenly we were driving along something half-paved and jolting. Every forward movement of the car seemed to throw me up against the back wall of the trunk—and I could only hope that Coursen didn’t wonder what load was in the back causing all this commotion. But the CD was still blaring its motivational bromides and the heat was on full blast and the grind of the tires on the rocky road so constant that it must have blotted out the shake, rattle, and roll of my body in the trunk.

  On and on we drove. I glanced repeatedly at my watch as ten minutes went by, then fifteen, then . . .

  We slowed down and came to a complete halt. The engine died. The door opened, but there was a pause as Coursen seemed to be getting something out of the glove compartment of the car. Then the door slammed shut and I could hear his footsteps walking away from the vehicle. This time he did not, thankfully, trigger the car alarm.

  Once the sound of the footsteps had died away I waited a good five minutes before daring to reach up and hit the system that spun away the canvas roof of the trunk. Getting up took some work. I had been cramped in this space for over eight hours and every joint in my body felt as if it had been glued tight. But the relief of actually being able to move again was counterbalanced by sheer unadulterated fear. Fear of where we were. Fear of what I might find. Fear of what Coursen might do to me if he found me . . .

  I inched my way up from the trunk and looked out through the car windows. A landscape pitch-black, bar one low light in the immediate distance. I pulled myself headfirst over the backseat—there was no other way to negotiate it—breaking my fall with my hands. Then I straightened myself up and—as slowly and quietly as possible—I opened one of the back passenger doors. I got out, but didn’t close it behind me. A boreal wind immediately hit me. Movement was difficult—my body felt rigid—and the darkness was all enveloping. But I forced myself to walk slowly toward the light in the distance. I couldn’t see the ground beneath my feet. I had no idea what I was heading for; if I was traversing the edge of a cliff, a body of water, a path that would suddenly give way, sending me into free fall.

  All there was up ahead was the light. Step by step, I inched my way toward it.

  As I drew nearer, I could vaguely discern the outline of a structure. With every footstep the structure came into sharper silhouette. It was a shack. The light was inside the shack. And from within the shack was the sound of a male voice—Coursen’s voice—panting and heaving and simultaneously shouting stuff.

  I was now maybe ten yards from the shack. There was a door directly in front of me and a small window to the left of it. I crouched down and headed for the window. Reaching it I sat below it, listening now to Coursen’s rhythmic breathing and the moans of a female voice.

  I dared to raise my head and glance through the window. What I saw was . . . unspeakable. A girl—maybe twelve, thirteen years old—was positioned on a filthy mattress, naked from the waist down. A shackle, attached to a chain, was around her left ankle. Coursen, his trousers pulled down, was on top of her, thrusting in and out of her while berating her at the top of his voice. I sat down again, not knowing what to do next. That’s when I put my hand out and discovered a shovel that had been left against this side of the house. My hands were drenched with sweat as I touched it, my heart going insane in my chest. I felt for the handle of the shovel. It was long, substantial. I carefully got myself into a crouching position. I grabbed the shovel with two hands. From inside the shack Coursen’s rant was getting louder, the girl’s cries even more frightened, extreme. Still hunched
down I inched my way nearer to the door. It was closed, but looked flimsy. One, two, three, and . . .

  I kicked the door in and came rushing toward Coursen, screaming. He jumped up, startled. That’s when I caught him in the stomach with the shovel. He doubled over and I brought the shovel down on the top of his head. He reeled away from the blow, stumbled a few paces, then fell to his knees, not moving, blood cascading down his face.

  On the mattress the girl was howling like a wounded animal. I dropped the shovel and went over to comfort her, but she shrieked when I tried to put my arms around her.

  “It’s OK, it’s OK,” I said, even though I knew that all this was the antithesis of OK. The girl was filthy, the lower half of her body covered in bruises and cuts. There were open sores around her lips, embedded dirt in her fingernails. The shackle on her leg had cut deep into her skin and looked septic, as if gangrene had set in. To the left of the mattress was a bucket from which came a distinct fecal smell. Her hair was matted, her scalp scabby. But it was her eyes that really frightened me. They were hollow, sunken, devoid of any emotion except horror.

  “Ivy MacIntyre?” I whispered.

  She gave a tentative nod. I nodded back, then looked over at Coursen. He had slumped to the floor. I grabbed the shovel again. I approached him, raising it above me, ready to strike again if he dared move. But he was half conscious—and judging from the bemused look on his face, seriously concussed. When I prodded him with the shovel there was only a groan as a response. His trousers were still down around his ankles. I reached into one pocket and found his car keys and a big chain with around ten keys attached to it. I pulled them both out, prodded him again with the shovel and saw that, stuck into the inside pocket of his leather jacket, was a gun. I reached for it, pulled it out, my hand shaking as I held its flat, cold handle. I put it inside my own pocket, then returned to Ivy. She was curled up on the mattress, shaking. I went to work with the keys, trying each one in the lock attached to the shackle. The eighth one opened it. As I carefully lifted the shackle off her the extent of the damage done to her ankle became apparent. The iron mangle had eaten into her flesh. There was exposed bone beneath the septic wound.