“Bullshit,” John agreed.
Barnes tossed the pad and her pen onto her desk, then looked at the door and clapped her hands twice sharply.
“What are you doing?” John said.
Barnes smiled. “Just messing with you, John. But…” She was quiet for a moment. “When you were brought into the hospital, I was in the ER. That’s why I got your case and ended up taking care of you while you were here. I was also the first doctor to examine Kyra Metheny when she was admitted and…” Barnes shook her head, eyes turning up slightly as she remembered that morning. “There was blood all over her clothes, John. There was brain matter on her cheek, and flecks of bone on her clothing and matted in her hair. But there was not one single mark on that girl. Not a scratch. I’m going to be honest with you, so stick with me for a second.”
Barnes closed her eyes and thought for a moment, then spoke again. “I’m not a shrink, and I’m not spiritual by nature. I don’t go to church and, if I’m being completely honest, I don’t believe in God. But what I saw that day, John…it terrified me. It shook something inside of me, not just in my head, but in my heart. What if I’m wrong? What if there is more to the world than what I can see with my own eyes? Yes, I’m trying to help you through this, but I’m also trying to help myself.” She chuckled. “People always say, ‘Anything’s possible.’ Most of the time it’s just a toss off, a nothing statement. But what if that’s true? What if it’s true that anything is possible? It’s an amazing thought. And a terrifying one.”
John nodded slowly. “Yes,” he said, looking out the window at the slowly moving clouds, “it is.”
* * *
Leaving the hospital, John noticed a black van parked across the street. He would never have given it any special consideration—it was just a black Ford Econo-line van, one of thousands just like it—but when he saw the van, he also saw the driver’s face through the window. And the driver gave him the creeps.
In almost every way the man looked normal—square-ish head, strong jaw, crew cut hair—but there was something about him. His lips were too pouty for the face around them, too pink and moist-looking. As John watched, the man raised a cigarette to his lips and tucked the filter between his lips almost daintily. John thought he looked like the kind of man who might enjoy licking dead people. He pictured the inside of the van and saw soiled, bloody blankets, half-used rolls of duct-tape, empty fast food wrappers, moldy chicken bones on the filthy floor.
John very pointedly looked away and turned right down the street.
Behind him, he heard the sound of an engine firing up and then the squeal of a vehicle low on power-steering fluid.
Glancing back over his shoulder, he saw the van pulling away from the curb. His heart jumped in his chest and he picked up his pace, turned the corner.
And ran his face directly into the chest of one of the largest men he had ever seen.
“Sorry,” John said, backing up a step, breathing hard. “I wasn’t looking.” He looked up at the man’s face, but the sun was directly behind his head, and all he could see was a dark profile, like the moon during a lunar eclipse. Though he couldn’t see the man’s face, he got the impression that he was black.
“Don’t worry about it,” the man said, his voice rumbling, like two enormous slabs of rock grinding.
John glanced back and saw that the black van had nearly drawn even with him.
“Sorry again,” he said, and tried to move past the enormous man, but the hulk moved slightly and blocked his path.
The van pulled to the curb beside them, and a moment later, the side door slid open, the moist-lipped man hunched within, still smoking the cigarette. He smiled at John, exposing bleach-whitened teeth.
“I’ll hit you if I have to,” the huge man said, his voice a deep rumble. “Better you just get in. Easier all around, right?”
So John did.
Chapter 14
The interior of the black van didn’t live up to John’s first impression of the vehicle.
Instead of the moving garbage pit he’d pictured, he found himself riding in the lap of luxury. Deep, black leather seats, a full wet-bar on the side without the door, a plasma-screen television and all of the hardware to go with it: DVD player, VCR, even what looked to be some kind of game system. Mounted beside the TV was a rack of movies and compact discs. A mini-fridge was tucked neatly away in the joint of the L-shaped seating area. All in all, impressive. And confusing.
“Who are you?” John asked. He was shaky and felt like he still might faint. Instead of settling back into his seat, he perched up on the edge, ready to bolt at any opportunity.
The big man, who was black—almost midnight black, in fact—yawned and settled back into his seat. “Just relax, man. No need to rush with that stuff. You’ll find out soon enough.”
John felt the van ease into motion. The other man had gone back up front and was driving. Smoke from his cigarette drifted back.
“Are you going to kill me?” he asked.
The big man didn’t answer, but crossed his legs. For a long moment he said nothing, then he uncrossed his legs and leaned forward, opened the door of the mini-fridge.
“You want a beer?” he asked. His expression was friendly, his tone matching.
What the hell was going on here?
John shook his head. “No,” he said, “but if you’d just—”
“Do me a favor and shut the fuck up,” the hulk said. He twisted the cap off a bottle of Honey Brown and took a deep drink. “Ahhh,” he breathed out, satisfied, then looked back at John and smiled. “You might as well sit back, brother. We’re gonna be in this baby for a while. Speaking of which, you want to watch a movie or something? We could play some X-Box.”
* * *
Two hours later, the van pulled to a stop.
John’s two abductors hadn’t talked much during the ride, but he’d been able to pick up their names: the thin one with the wet lips was Curt, and the man-mountain was named, of all things, Percy.
Although John’s first thoughts after the abduction had been for his own safety, he now understood that these men had no intention of harming him. There was a strange species of relief in that knowledge, but as they’d driven, John’s thoughts had drifted elsewhere, to Connie and her daughter. He had told Connie that he would be there in a day or two. What would she think when he didn’t show?
There were no windows in the back of the van, so John couldn’t see where they had stopped, but he heard Curt climb out of the vehicle and crunch around the outside. A couple of seconds later, he heard the gas tank cover being unscrewed, and then the pulsing flow of fuel into the van’s belly.
As he listened to the goings-on outside, he felt Percy watching him intently. Probably the big man was wondering when John was going to make a break for it, and to be truthful, John had been wondering the same thing himself. If he moved quickly, could he get into the cab of the van without being collared by Percy? He thought maybe he could; the gigantic man looked strong as Atlas but not very quick. But what about Curt then? Both men were sure to have guns on them. Even if he got out of the van, he’d only be offering himself up as a moving target.
He heard Percy laugh quietly to himself and looked at the gigantic man.
Percy hadn’t moved much since settling back into his seat a couple of hours before, but now he lifted one side of his shirt-tail, revealing a nasty-looking pistol tucked into the belt of his black jeans.
“It’s not worth it,” Percy said. “You wouldn’t get ten feet, m’man.”
Okay, John thought. Not that way, then. He sat back into the well-oiled leather seat.
“Where are we?” he asked. “Been driving for a couple of hours at least.”
“At least,” Percy said. He looked tired and bored. “Sorry, man. Sucks for us, too.”
Outside, John heard the gas stop pumping, and then the metallic scrape as Curt removed the nozzle from the tank.
“Hey,” he said to Percy, “I have to go to
the bathroom.”
“Couple more hours,” the man said. “Then you can piss all you want. Moan, too, if the notion takes you.”
“How about a phone call then?”
The giant chuckled. “Ah shit, you’re funny.”
Chapter 15
Before Phylum headed south, he’d had to take care of a few things in New York, his normal base of operations. Those few things had included: withdrawing enough money from his account to pay for whatever might need buying—it was bad form to leave a credit trail when you were in Phylum’s line of business; picking up three of his favorite suits from the Vietnamese cleaner on 5th; finding long-term care for Arbus, his 2 year-old calico; and beating the ever-loving shit out of Kimbo Perkins, the douchebag who’d been nailing Phylum’s sister for the better part of two years. The last item on the list had been the only one he’d really needed to be present for—the rest he could have taken care of easily enough over the phone. But beating the ever-loving shit out of some greasy, know-it-all, conman fuckface always felt better in person. The administration of said ass whooping had been followed by the ultimatum that Kimbo either blow town immediately and never come back, or spend the better part of the next decade paying a team of surgeons to reverse the gender reassignment Phylum would happily perform on his worthless ass, and gratis at that.
All of those tasks crossed off his mental to-do list, Phylum climbed into his black BMW X1 and headed south, feeling content and relaxed.
* * *
The drive to Charlotte was fine, pleasurable even. Mostly, Phylum stuck to the back roads as he wove through central and then southern Pennsylvania, into West Virginia, Virginia, and then down out of the mountains into North Carolina itself.
Before leaving home he had entered Barron’s address into his Garmin GPS, and the gadget’s British-accented female voice guided him along. He pulled off Interstate 85 a few miles from Barron’s home and fueled up, going inside just long enough to purchase a six-pack of Diet Coke and a family-sized bag of Cool Ranch Doritos, which he swore by. Loaded for the proverbial bear, he continued on his way.
His reason for being here was odd in some ways and totally normal in others. The voice on the phone, which belonged to the man Phylum had come to think of only as Mr. “It’s Me,” had told him there was a man in Charlotte named John Barron who needed to be “taken care of,” which Phylum had always thought a strange way to express the concept of murder. So that part was just about normal, and Phylum had no problem with it.
Although he knew very little about the company for which he worked, he understood the basic operating principle: someone has a problem he wants “taken care of”; he calls Mr. It’s Me; Mr. It’s Me calls Phylum. Who the initiating party was didn’t much matter to Phylum. What did matter was that when he got back to New York, there would be another $250,000 sitting in his bank account. That’s all there was to it. Easy Peasy Japanese-y.
And it shouldn’t go unstated that Phylum liked his job. He’d been doing it at an exceptionally high level of success for much longer than any of his contemporaries had lasted, in part because Phylum had killed most of his contemporaries. Competition being bad for business and all that. Phylum had what some might have considered to be principles, but they were uniquely his own, constructed over the duration of a childhood that had nearly destroyed him.
His father had been abusive, his mother a drunk, and Phylum himself—at that point in his life he had been Eric Wilson—a marginalized loser who’d never managed much in the way of friends. There had been beatings in the parking lot after school, trays of food upended over his head in the cafeteria, and thumbtacks left on his seats.
And then all of that had ended rather abruptly.
It had ended when Phylum’s tormentors began to suffer a series of very unfortunate mishaps. No one had been able to prove anything, but everyone knew who was responsible for Mark Sefferin’s brakes failing, for Kyle Parker’s fall down the basement steps at his sister’s graduation party, and for Katie Bartlett washing up dead and naked and repeatedly raped on the bank of the Crum Creek not two days before the graduation party her parents had planned. Yes, they all knew, but there was no proof, and then one day, he started hearing the kids at school referring to him as Phylum. Curious as to why, he’d cornered a sophomore girl in the ladies room and demanded to know. After wetting herself, she told him that a couple of the kids in biology class had been joking about how no one even thought he was human—that he wasn’t even in the same phylum as humans.
That had made Eric smile, and then he had stopped being Eric and became Phylum for good.
* * *
He left the BMW in a Harris Teeter parking lot and headed toward Barron’s complex on foot. The Beemer was a little flashy to take on a job like this, and he didn’t want to attract the wrong kind of attention.
The complex was walled and gated, and there were, for some reason, a few reporters loitering around the entrance, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. So Phylum made his way into the woods where he would have some shelter and hopped the wall.
He’d seen this kind of place before, plenty of times. It was the sort of situation in which only the very young or the very apathetic would choose to dwell, a roughly circular track of identical buildings, all arranged around a central pool, gym-facility, and poorly-maintained tennis courts. Phylum passed people as he walked, searching for Barron’s building—college students, moldy oldsters who probably worked at Wal-Mart or in the local Hobby Lobby…
Ah. Phylum stopped, checked the notepad in his breast pocket and climbed the stairs to the second floor of the building. He stood in front of Barron’s door for a moment, looked around, shrugged and then knocked. He put a smile on his face and waited, but he heard nothing from inside. He knocked again and waited for a few more seconds, then let his smile fall.
He figured there was no use breaking in. He was here to kill this guy, after all, not to do his fucking laundry. It would just have to be tonight. Thus decided, he left.
Chapter 16
At a little past nine o’clock that night, Rose knocked on the door of John’s apartment, listened for anything from within, heard nothing. Hmm. She was starting to feel confused and concerned.
The night before, after ditching her ride with the Mexicans in the Firebird, Rose caught on with a long-hauler passing through Charlotte. The first hints of dawn were showing—a lightening of the sky by degrees, from black to dark blue—and Rose knew she was on the verge of a bad situation. She didn’t know what she’d been expecting to happen when they reached the city, but passing into, through, and then out of Charlotte-proper to the north, the eastern horizon now taking on a pink-stained hue, Rose had felt nothing more than the vague sense of anticipation that had held onto her for the past several weeks.
And then, maybe five miles north of the city…
“Hey,” she’d said, sitting up straighter in the shotgun seat of the wide cab, “can you let me out here?”
After the truck pulled away, Rose had found herself standing on the side of a four-lane expanse of asphalt called Harris Boulevard. Not too far down the road, lit by bright roadside lamps, she could see the white and red sign of an Outback Steakhouse jutting from a declivity. Further down, past the restaurant, was a well-lit plaza of shops with another brightly-lit sign reading: HARRIS CROSSING PLAZA.
None of it meant anything to her, but at the same time, it did, and she’d found herself walking with a sense of purpose.
Across Harris Boulevard, dodging a couple of speeding cars, through the almost empty lot of a Harris Teeter supermarket, and then half a mile down another wide street.
And then into the Davis Oaks apartment complex.
So close, her mind had whispered, so close now, so close…
Following a winding road around the well-treed complex, past the pool, lit a brilliant and unnatural blue, past the darkened clubhouse, and then, minutes later, climbing the stairs to a green door on a second-floor landing. 208 on the door, th
e numbers silver, faux-elegant.
Everything inside of her had cried out for her to kick down the door, to dispatch whatever poor soul lay beyond, to reclaim her life…but the horizon flared with the first light of sun, and Rose knew that in moments she would grow tired and torpid. It would be dangerous to do this now. And so she had resolved to return the next night, retraced her steps, pried up the door of a storage unit not far from the apartment, and slept on the concrete floor until the sun had gone back down.
Now she was back, but something was different.
No longer did she feel any special attraction to the apartment, not as she’d felt burning inside of her during her long trek up from Jacksonville. For the last couple of days, she had been drawn like a magnet to this place, pulled completely against her will toward a fate she didn’t understand. And now that she was here, standing in front of this door, she knew instinctually that something had changed. No longer could she detect the nearly radioactive power that had summoned her here, but just as a physicist might gauge with a Geiger counter, she sensed that the source of the power had passed this way, could still intuit with the primal, unthinking part of her that this was a pooling-place. There was no denying the strength of the force that had guided her here.
Out of her bag she took a wallet-sized black rubber bundle and unfolded it, pulled forth a thin file and a tube-shaped prong about the width of a paper clip. A glance both ways, then she went to work. Thirty seconds later the lock rolled over and she was in.
She shut the door behind herself.
Dark.
Her eyes were good in the low light, but it had been bright on the landing and it took her sight a moment to adjust. There, better. Things were starting to come into focus now, the outlines of furniture and walls blue in the almost black.
Rose listened, but heard nothing, strained for anything, breathing, the rustle of sheets, but it was totally silent. The apartment was empty.