But the most curious thing was the blue tarp spread over a large mound of something, in the middle of the garage floor. The surface of the tarp was bumpy and irregular.
Topsoil, maybe?
The pile was about five feet across, about two feet high. Four bricks held down the corners of the tarp. George kicked one away, reached down and threw the tarp back, and took a look.
The fuck?
At first, he thought it was drugs. Oversized bags—dozens, if not hundreds—of the stuff. More than he could count, that was for sure. Could it be a pile of cocaine or heroin or some shit like that? Weren’t they both white? When you saw bags of it on TV, it was usually white.
But when you saw drugs like that on The Wire or The Shield or any of those other cop shows, weren’t they packaged up the size of bricks? And wouldn’t one briefcase full be enough to buy a small country?
These bags were much larger, like sacks. Industrial grade, semiopaque plastic. They reminded George of the large bags pool chemicals came in. He’d once spent a summer working for a pool maintenance company. But the stuff in this pile here did not give off any whiff of chlorine.
So what was it? It looked a lot like salt.
That was some huge load of salt for someone to keep in the garage. Even in the winter, you wouldn’t need that much to melt the ice on your driveway. This was enough to keep the entire New York Thruway from freezing over.
He knelt down, unwound the twist tie on the top of the bag, and opened it. Didn’t smell a thing. He reached into the bag, touched his finger to the stuff, thinking it would stick like powder, but it was more like crystal. A couple of tiny granules stuck to his finger, and he put it to his tongue.
George didn’t taste a thing, but whatever this stuff was, it burned a little.
Was this shit worth something? Was even one bag of it worth stealing?
And if he did steal it, what would he do with—
The lights came on.
George whirled around so quickly he stumbled, his ass landing on the cold concrete floor.
“Holy Jesus!” he said when he saw what was standing in the doorway staring at him.
It was a huge walking bug.
It had huge round eyes, maybe two inches across, and an all-black, shiny face. Plus, there was some strange thing sticking out of one side of its face the size and shape of a hockey puck, but black and rubbery, like the face.
It was some kind of monster.
Fuck, no, it wasn’t a monster. It was a man, in a gas mask. Like one of those things you’d see someone wearing in a war movie, or on the news when they were looking after people with the Ebola virus.
George came this close to wetting his pants.
The man in the gas mask said, “What the hell are you doing in here?” But it came out funny because of the mask. Like a bad phone connection.
“Hey!” said George. “God, you just about scared the piss out of me there! What’s with the getup, pal?”
“I asked you what you’re doing in here.”
“Nothing, just, you know, just looking around. God, you sound like Darth Vader.”
The masked man looked at the pile of bags George had uncovered.
“Why did you do that? Why are you looking at that?”
“Just wondered what it was. That’s all. I’m guessing it must be some kind of bad shit if you’re wearing a fucking gas mask. You got another one of those?”
“Who are you? You’re not with the police. You don’t look like you’re from the police.”
“No way, no, I’m no cop.”
“Did someone send you?” The voice sounded creepy through the rubber.
“Nobody sent me, man. I just wandered in. The door, it wasn’t shut. I haven’t taken anything. Don’t call the cops on me. I’m not stealing anything. Just let me out of here. I don’t know what this shit is, but I just put some of it on my tongue. My nuts going to fall off or something?”
The man stared at him.
“Listen, what is this shit? It’s not coke or heroin, right? I mean, if you’re some big-time drug dealer, I am so sorry I wandered in here, and you can be sure I’m not going to say—”
“It’s not drugs,” the man said.
“It’s sure not chlorine. I used to work for a pool company, you know? And I can tell it’s not chlorine.” George was smiling, trying to be as sociable as possible. Like he wanted to be Mask Man’s new best friend. “I mean, if it was chlorine, we could hardly even breathe, right? Sometimes, if I was over a bucket of those pool pucks, when I pulled the lid off, I’d nearly pass out.”
The man said nothing. He just stared at him through the bug eyes.
George started getting to his feet. “I’m just going to take off, if that’s okay with you. You’re not going to call the cops, right? We’re cool there, okay?”
“I’m not going to call the cops,” the man said.
George took two tentative steps toward the door, but the man wasn’t stepping out of the way.
“Just let me go.”
The man reached for a mallet from the croquet set by the door.
“Aw, come on, man. I’m just going to go.”
As he took another step, the man brought the mallet up and swung.
George threw up a defensive arm, but the man managed to connect the end of the mallet with George’s temple. Hard enough that the head broke off the shaft and landed on the garage floor.
George threw his hand to his head. “Fuck!” he shouted.
The man looked at the croquet mallet shaft in his hand, now nothing more than a striped stick with a jagged end.
He hesitated a moment, then drove it into George, just below the rib cage, through his T-shirt and into flesh. The force pushed George up against the wall, where the man kept pushing until he felt the end of the stick hit a hard surface, his breathing hard and raspy through the rubber mask.
Blood gurgled from George’s mouth. He stirred briefly, then slid down the wall to the floor.
The man let the stick slip from his fingers, looked down at the dead man. Stood there. Breathing in, breathing out.
Good thing, he thought, that he had more than half a roll of plastic tarp left.
THIRTY-TWO
“EVERYBODY’S talking about Dad!” Ethan said at the dinner table, too excited to eat. He hadn’t touched the lasagna his grandmother had made. “He, like, jumped into the back of a truck and everything! I wish I’d seen it. I came out a couple of minutes too late, but lots of other kids saw it. I wish you’d waited. I wish you’d waited till I came out before you jumped in the truck.”
“Sorry,” David said to his son.
“This boy that you rescued, is he the son of that woman who came over here the other night?” asked his mother, Arlene. “What’s her name? I can’t think of her name.”
David nodded. “Sam,” he said.
His mother looked puzzled. “Sam?”
“Short for Samantha.”
“Oh, right. Well, I thought she seemed nice at the time, but now, I don’t know. You don’t need to get mixed up with a woman who’s got those kinds of problems.”
“You didn’t even talk to her when she was here the first time, Mom.”
“I saw her out the window and thought she was pretty. But looks aren’t everything, you know. Sounds like you did a very stupid thing. You could have gotten yourself killed.”
Don, who’d been overseeing kitchen reconstruction at their house and had arrived for dinner a few minutes late, had been brought up to speed quickly, and saw things somewhat differently.
“I’m proud of you,” he said, reaching across the table, clamping a hand on his son’s arm and squeezing. “You didn’t just stand by. You did . . . something.” David’s father seemed to choke on his words, took his hand away, and looked down at his dinner.
; “You okay?” Arlene asked him.
“I’m fine.”
“I really didn’t think about it,” David said. “I just did it.”
He’d quickly filled them in on what had happened. Sam Worthington’s former in-laws had distracted her long enough to delay her trip to pick up her son, Carl. She figured they were going to send this Ed guy—whose name turned out to be Ed Noble, if you could believe it—to grab Carl, and she was right. She’d tried calling someone else first, some private detective she knew, but he was too far away. So then she tried David, who, it turned out, was only a mile away from the school when the call came in on his cell.
David drove to within a block of Clinton Public, unable to get any closer because of all the other parents who’d come to pick up their kids, bailed on the car, and ran flat out the rest of the way. He didn’t know what Ed Noble looked like, but he caught a glimpse of Carl getting into a pickup truck, and took off after it.
The police were called, and statements given. The private eye, whose name was Cal Weaver, eventually showed up, too, and told the cops about Ed Noble coming around to the Laundromat in the morning to give Sam a hard time. The cops were still talking to Weaver, and Carl and Sam, who’d run all the way to the school, when David headed home.
He was pretty rattled.
And he hurt, too.
He had bruises on his shoulders from being tossed around in the pickup, and he’d done something to his back. And when he’d kicked that asshole in the face, he’d twisted his knee. He could still walk okay, but damn, did it hurt.
David figured he wasn’t cut out for this sort of thing.
Shortly after coming in the door, he downed as many Tylenols as the label permitted. Ethan was already home, jumping up and down with excitement, demanding details. He’d already told his grandmother that David had foiled a hit man.
When Sam had called him, he’d been busy thinking about Randall Finley’s veiled threat to tell Ethan the truth about the circumstances of his mother’s death, the son of a bitch. That had been after David had pushed Finley about whatever under-the-table deal he had going on with developer Frank Mancini.
Then his phone had rung, and he’d seen who the caller was, and he’d answered in a second.
Cheerily. “Hey!” he’d said. A call from Sam would be the best news he’d had so far that day. But it turned out not to be that kind of call.
“Where are you?” Sam had screamed. “They’re going after Carl!”
At which point his afternoon plans—he had been thinking of paying a visit to Randall Finley’s wife, Jane, to get a better handle on the man—changed abruptly.
Adrenaline kept him going through the chase and the police interview afterward, but by the time he came through the door, he was shaking. He fell into his mother’s arms and started breathing so quickly she wondered whether he was having some kind of panic attack.
David admitted he was, at that moment, overwhelmed.
“I could have been killed,” he said, realizing it for the first time. “I don’t know what the hell I was thinking. It could have gone wrong a hundred ways. He could have crashed that truck. He could have rolled it over. I could have fallen out when he was moving.”
“It was a stupid thing to do,” Arlene agreed.
He pulled himself together and got his mother to promise not to tell his father, or Ethan, that he’d temporarily lost it.
But now that dinner was over, and he was sitting, alone, on the front step of his house, he was starting to feel back to normal. A couple of beers had helped.
Now he was back to thinking about Randall Finley. David decided that whatever Finley had going on with Mancini, he couldn’t worry about it. At least, not yet. If David wanted to work with only ethical politicians, then he might as well collect welfare.
But the thing with Ethan? There was no way David was going to put up with that. He couldn’t allow Finley to have that kind of control over him.
David got up, opened the front door, and called inside: “Ethan!”
His son bounded down the stairs, came outside. “Yup?”
“Let’s you and me take a walk.”
“Where?”
“Nowhere in particular. I just want to talk.”
“Is this about Carl? Because I know I’m not supposed to get in cars with strangers. Or pickup trucks. So you don’t have to give me that lecture.”
“That’s not what I wanted to talk to you about, but yeah, you should never get into a car with someone you don’t know.”
“I just told you I know that.”
“Okay.” He placed his palm, briefly, on his son’s back as they walked down the sidewalk. “Did what happened to Carl scare you?”
Ethan shrugged. “Not really. I don’t know. I didn’t really think about it that way. Is that what you wanted to talk about?”
“No. I wanted to talk to you about your mom.”
“What about her?”
“She died when you were only four—”
“I know.”
“What I was going to say is, because you were only four, it was hard to explain a lot of what happened.”
“You mean like what happens to someone when they die? Like, if they really go to heaven, or they’re just dead?”
David glanced down at the boy. “That’s another discussion. No, I mean, there are a lot of things about your mom I didn’t tell you at the time, that I kept from you, because it would have been hard to understand at that age. But you’re older now, and there’s things you probably should know. Things you should hear from me, instead of hearing them from somebody else. It kind of helped that we moved away for a while after she died, and no one knew us in Boston. And by the time we moved back here, people were kind of done talking about her.”
“Okay,” Ethan said.
“The first thing you need to know is, regardless of anything your mom did, or what anyone might say about her, she loved you very much.”
“Okay.”
“The last thing your mother did, before she died, was to make sure nothing bad happened to you. There was a very bad man, and he was threatening to hurt you, and she stopped him.” David hesitated. “She killed him.”
“Yeah,” Ethan said. “I kind of knew that.”
“I know there’s bits and pieces of this that you know—you’ve probably heard your grandparents talking about it when they didn’t think you were listening. The thing is, even though she loved you more than just about anything else in the world, your mother wasn’t a very good person.”
Ethan glanced up at his father. “I know.”
“You know?”
He nodded. “I’ve read all about her.”
“You have?”
Ethan nodded. “There’s lots of stuff about her online. That she had a different name when she was born, that years ago she cut off the hand of that guy she killed, that she stole some diamonds that turned out to be—”
“You know all this?”
Ethan stopped. His lip quivered. “Am I in trouble? I just wanted to know. Anytime I’ve ever asked you about Mom, you just said there wasn’t much to tell, and so then I would ask Nana and Poppa about her and they said I should talk to you, so I Googled her instead. There’s a whole bunch of stories. Most of them are from around the time everything happened, like, after she died.”
David felt an enormous weight coming off him, but at the same time, he felt saddened.
“I should have guessed that you’d do that. It’s pretty impossible to keep anything a secret these days. Especially from kids.”
“Yeah.”
“So, how’d you feel about what you found out?”
Ethan shrugged. “I don’t know. A bit weird. But it was also kind of cool.”
“Cool?” David said sharply.
Ethan recoiled from his father’s ton
e. “I don’t mean cool, like, as in cool, neat. More like, you know, cool, interesting.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to jump down your throat. I think I understand.”
“Like, I’m glad that you’re sort of normal and ordinary, but it was kind of, you know, neat that my mom was someone people were talking about. I mean, if she was still alive, it would be awful, but because it happened a long, long time ago, it’s not so bad.”
To him, five years is an eternity, David thought. For me, it was yesterday.
“Is that it?” Ethan asked.
“Is what it?”
“That’s why you wanted to talk to me?”
“Yeah.”
“So can we go back?”
“Yeah, sure. Come here.”
David pulled the boy into him, put his arms around him. But Ethan pushed back.
“Dad, we’re on the street,” he complained, twisting his head, looking up and down the sidewalk.
“Sorry,” David said, releasing his grip. “Don’t want to embarrass you.”
“You can hug me when we get home if you still want to.”
“I might. I just might.”
When they got back to the house, they found two people waiting for them. Sam Worthington and her son, Carl. Her car, slashed tires replaced, was at the curb.
“Hi,” David said.
“Carl,” Sam said, prodding her son.
“Mr. Harwood, thank you for what you did today,” the boy said.
David smiled. “No problem.”
Turning his attention to Ethan, the boy said, “Do you have trains here, too?”
Ethan shook his head. “Just at my grandpa’s house. But Nana—that’s my grandma—made some blueberry pie, although you have to be careful not to get it on your shirt because it won’t come off.”
“That sounds okay,” Carl said, and the boys ran into the house, David and Sam watching them go.
David said, “How are you doing?”
“Okay,” Sam said. “Got my tires replaced, although I don’t know how I’ll pay the Visa bill when it comes in. The cops are looking for Ed and my ex-in-laws. They figure they’ll try to sneak back to Boston.”