In the fledgling stages of his attempt to locate the fount of long-life, he’d encountered more stories and legends, all of them dead-ends, than he could sort through by himself.
There were the old favorites: the Holy Grail, a chalice that, according to legend, had caught the blood of Jesus Christ at the Crucifixion; the Fountain of Youth sought so arduously by Juan Ponce de Leon; the Corazon del Dio, a magical emerald supposedly hidden away in a cave in the Brazilian rainforest. But there were hundreds of others as well, enough that Albert had eventually resorted to hiring an assistant to do the research, to go about the painstaking business of crossing each bogus lead off the list.
His search had taken him all over the world, and when his delicate condition had rendered such travel first impractical and then impossible, he had hired others to conduct his search for him. Money, for Albert, was no obstacle. Yet even with all of his resources, the years had begun to wear down his optimism. Lead after lead dismissed. Legends debunked. His assistants came back shaking their heads, or sometimes they didn’t come back at all.
But he had continued his search with the stubborn persistence of a man who was called. Three weeks ago, his blind faith had been rewarded.
That a man like John Barron existed was no revelation to Albert. What did shock him was how easily John had fallen into his hands. That such a man should not only live right here in the United States, but also have his presence, his nature, so clearly announced to the world! Reading account after account of Kyra Metheny’s healing in the papers, Albert had become convinced that in Barron lay his salvation. He had focused in on the man, waited for the press coverage to die down, and then he had sent two of his men to corral the healer, to bring him here, to Helena’s Heart, the palatial home in which he’d lived for the last five years, and which he’d rarely left over that time.
Albert tapped his cigarette ash into a crystal ashtray and stood up with some effort. His desk was on the other side of the big room, and as he moved slowly toward it, he pulled a thin silver cylinder behind him on a small dolly. A plastic tube ran from the tank to a mask. Oxygen, for his emphysema. He didn’t need it now, but by the time he reached his desk, he’d be wheezing like he’d just run two miles up the side of a mountain.
A knock at the closed door stopped his progress as he approached the desk.
“Yes,” Albert said, then immediately dragged from the mask, his wind spent. The door opened.
His granddaughter stepped into the room and waved Barron through the door.
“Thank you, Sasha,” Albert said. “You can go.” He took another puff from the mask.
Sasha pulled the door closed as she left, leaving Albert and Barron alone in the huge room. Albert walked the rest of the way to his desk and collapsed into the chair behind it. He placed the mask over his face and took several deep breaths as he watched Barron’s gaze pan around the room, taking it in. This room, Albert’s library, was one of the biggest in the house. Circular, it was fifty feet wide and high-domed. Four levels of shelves were inlaid into the walls and were home to thousands of tomes, mostly on the occult.
Albert removed the mask from his face. Barron looked at him expectantly, hands in his pockets. Albert gestured to a chair on the other side of his desk and Barron sat, his eyes never leaving Albert’s.
“You look just like any other man,” Albert finally said. “Amazing. You’d think there would be something…”
Barron shrugged. “Something what?”
“Different,” Albert said. “Something different. A marking, maybe, something obvious. On your face, or on one of your hands. Where it couldn’t be missed. Something to declare to the world your…nature.”
Barron laughed ruefully. “Couldn’t have that,” he said. “Someone might kidnap me.” He stared boldly at Albert, and there was no missing the raw anger in his eyes.
Albert nodded. “I’m sorry about that. It couldn’t be avoided.”
“Well,” Barron said, “that’s not exactly true, is it? You could have, for instance, not ordered your thugs to pick me up. Then it could have been avoided, no?”
Albert spread his hands expansively and smiled. “But then you wouldn’t be here, with me.”
Barron didn’t respond, just looked down at his hands.
“Look,” Albert said, then found himself short of breath, placed the mask back over his mouth, and took a hit of the sweet oxygen. “I understand that you’re angry about what I’ve done, bringing you here.”
“You understand?” Barron said. “That’s a crock. Three weeks ago, my life was my own. I could go to work, sit and watch TV, screw around on the computer, whatever. Now…now I’m being held against my will in some kind of Xanadu. I don’t think you understand much at all, Mr. Navarre.”
Albert nodded. “You know who I am?”
“Everyone knows who you are.”
“Ten years ago, maybe. Not now. The only time my name comes up anymore is in conjunction with this or that business venture, and then only as a side-note.”
Barron looked at him evenly. “You fell off the earth. When I was a kid, your name was all over the place. I don’t think I’ve heard a single word about you since I was in college. The last thing I remember hearing is that…I think it was that you’d funded the construction of an AIDS research clinic in Africa.”
Navarre held up the oxygen mask. “Life’s little ironies. I spent most of my life trying to help others, and then this.”
“Cancer?” John asked.
“Emphysema.”
“How long do you have?”
“To live? Oh, years. If you can call this life at all. I wake up in the morning and have to be helped to the bathroom. My nurse helps me into my wheelchair, my cook makes me breakfast, I take pills, I read a book, sign papers… And then I go to sleep and do it all again the next day.” He paused, then added, “But maybe now that will all change. For now, go with Sasha. She’ll get you anything you need. My house is your house, Mr. Barron, and I want you to think of yourself as a guest here.”
Navarre pressed a button on his desk and the door opened immediately and Sasha stepped into the room.
Barron stood, glowered at Albert. “What else would I think of myself as? A prisoner? Perish the thought.” He turned and walked out of the room.
Sasha waited behind and Albert said, “Anything he wants.”
She nodded and shut the door.
Albert leaned back in his chair, feeling the pain in his chest, but feeling something else, too. Something he hadn’t felt in a long, long time.
Hope.
I could feel it coming off of him, Albert thought, just coming off of him in waves. He shuddered and closed his eyes, trying to calm the fluttering thoughts in his mind, but he was so close, so close now.
Chapter 21
It was interesting, Phylum thought as he broke down the Glock into its component parts for cleaning, the little gifts life delivered when one was proactive. His phone call with Mr. It’s Me had been informative to say the least, and for the first time in years, Phylum was really feeling something. If pressed, he wouldn’t have called it purpose—he wasn’t that philosophical—but he might have said that he was feeling “amped,” or “stoked.” Those were the kinds of words kids had used to talk about enthusiasm when he was young, and Phylum still defaulted to that kind of vocabulary in his own mind.
What he had learned from Mr. It’s Me was this: Phylum’s directive—bumping Barron off—had originated with a business man named Peter Pokorney. As Phylum had suspected, Pokorney had no ties to the usual organizations that sought out the services of an individual like Phylum—the mob, a high profile loan shark, and the rest of the like—but what he hadn’t seen coming was the true nature of Pokorney’s interest in seeing John Barron dead.
Peter Pokorney was a member in good standing of the Catholic Church. He had a wife and four grown children, a thriving import-export business, and vacation homes in the usual rich motherfucker locales: Vail, Bermuda, Malibu. He al
so had a thirty-year grudge against a man named Albert Navarre, a name Phylum recognized peripherally, but didn’t know from where. Apparently, Navarre had run afoul of Pokorney during a business dealing in the early 80s, something to do with oil rights somewhere—Phylum’s attention span when it came to banalities had never been a strong suit, and at this point he’d gently encouraged Mr. It’s Me to get back to the point—and, long story short, Navarre’s tampering had cost Pokorney millions.
Now, more than three decades later, Pokorney had caught wind of two things: one was that Navarre was extremely sick; the other was that Navarre thought John Barron, who had lately been presented in the news as a faith healer or some such ridiculousness, would be able to save him. As such, Barron had to die, not for anything he’d done directly, but because killing him would harm Navarre.
And so Pokorney had contacted Mr. It’s Me, and Mr. It’s Me had contacted Phylum, and so the world worked and had worked forever. Only…something had changed for Phylum; not because of the possible involvement of religion—no, he was still more than happy to kill Barron and fully intended to honor his contract to do so. He wanted the $250,000 and felt certain that, despite the conversation he’d had with Mr. It’s Me the night before, the money would still find its way into his bank account, just as planned. What had changed had to do with the woman he’d shot in Barron’s apartment the day before. It was the nature of what she was that had captivated Phylum’s attention.
For the first time in his adult life, a stage of his existence that had been defined by the very simple precept that Phylum was the wolf and the rest of them—which was how Phylum thought of everyone else save for his sister—were sheep, the balance had been disrupted. He didn’t understand the precise nature of the woman he’d encountered the day before, but there was no avoiding the simple truth of the matter: Phylum was fascinated. More to the point, he was offended. That there was another wolf out there, maybe even a stronger wolf, was an obscenity, and it was a condition he would not suffer.
And so he would kill the woman. He knew that she was also after Barron, so the math was pretty simple: find Barron—which he had to do anyway if he still wanted the money, and he did—and he’d find the woman.
That was what had brought him here, to Five Forks, a shitty little town in Virginia. He had checked into the Five Forks Motel the night before, and then driven early in the morning to the address Mr. It’s Me had given him over the phone. If Phylum had been unable to find Barron in Charlotte, he’d be here, nabbed by Navarre’s people. The need to break into Navarre’s home to complete his assignment would complicate things slightly, but Phylum didn’t mind. It had been a while since he’d been required to stage a head-on home invasion, and he anticipated finding out whether his skills had atrophied.
From the edge of the woods he had scoped out the palatial home in which Barron was supposedly being held, then returned to his motel room to plan.
As he dabbed oil onto a rag and began to work through the pieces of the pistol one by one, Phylum’s mind wandered back to the woman. Her hair, her eyes, the swell of her breasts. Yes, he thought, he was going to kill her, but maybe not right away. He wanted to fight her again, to get her into some contained place and really go at it. No guns this time. Hand to hand. Fists and teeth and nails.
He set down the barrel of the pistol and picked up the spring, ran the rag over it, imagining the fight, the battle, thrusts and parries, roundhouse kicks and uppercuts, blood and sweat, the raw clash of bone on bone. He felt himself growing hard.
And when it was all over with, when the woman was his to do with as he pleased, would he fuck her? Oh yes, he thought. Most certainly.
Even beaten down and tied up, he thought she’d fuck like a cornered lunatic.
Chapter 22
As they had driven last night, two things became clear to Mary Ann. The first was that Doug was dead. The other was that, in time, this woman, this creature, would kill her, too. She would use her until she was no longer needed, and then she would shoot her, or cut her throat, or something worse.
After taking her from the lawn outside the church, the woman had led Mary Ann to a rusted-out Toyota parked in the deepest shadows of the parking lot. She’d shoved Mary Ann in behind the steering wheel, and then gone around to the passenger seat.
Sitting there as the woman made her way around to the other door, Mary Ann had nearly jolted with a sudden realization: this might be my only chance! When the woman grabbed her outside the church doors Mary Ann was so firmly enmeshed in her own terror that running never seemed an option. But now…
In the space of two seconds her brain mapped out a plan.
Open the door, back through the church lawn—keep away from the church, she’ll kill every one of them if you lead her inside—to the sidewalk on the other side of the hedges. From there, the nearest businesses were, what, a quarter of a mile? Could she stay ahead that long? Could she even run that far? And if she found a business open at this hour, what then? Call the police, she guessed—
The passenger side door opened and the woman climbed in beside her, closed the door, leaned back, and smiled at Mary Ann.
“In way of introduction,” the woman said, “I’m Rose. You don’t need to tell me your name—I already know it. There are keys in the ignition. Start the car and drive.”
Mary Ann stared at her, wanting to talk, wanting to run, but all she could do was swallow dryly.
“Start it,” the woman—Rose—said, putting her hand over Mary Ann’s on the wheel. “Start the car. I won’t tell you again.”
Mary Ann groped blindly for the key, found it, twisted. The little car thought it through for a second, then started with a burp that settled into an uneven growl.
“Where?” Mary Ann started to say, but then she saw something on the woman’s sleeve, something red, and her hand flew to her mouth, where it hovered, quivering, like a giant moth.
The other woman looked down and saw the blood, smiled grimly. She said, “I won’t tell you that you’re wrong. If it’s any consolation, it didn’t take long, and it wasn’t what I wanted.”
Tears came to Mary Ann’s eyes as she thought of Doug. Sweet Doug, patient Doug. The man who had gotten her through two miscarriages. The man who had proposed to her on one knee at the North Carolina State Fair five years ago outside of the Tunnel of Love. The man who had stopped smoking and drinking because he knew his indulgences frightened her. The man who rolled over in the night and draped his arm around her stomach, pulled her in tight…
Dead.
Mary Ann’s hands tightened on the wheel until the plastic squelched and her knuckles went white as bone. “You bitch,” she said past clenched teeth, feeling the hot salty tears running down her face. “I’ll kill you.” A sob tore itself from her then, and the rage was suddenly gone, replaced by a black, empty mineshaft of loss.
“Yeah, well,” Rose said. She wasn’t looking at Mary Ann and seemed uncomfortable. She shifted in her seat, picked a nail. “We can talk about this later if you still want, but now you have to drive.” In her voice, the barest note of sympathy.
Mary Ann wiped her eyes. And she drove.
“How do you know John Barron?” the woman asked, looking intently at Mary Ann.
Mary Ann said nothing, just stared ahead at the dark road.
“I found your number in his apartment,” Rose said. “Tell me what you know about him.”
But Mary Ann was swimming inside her own mind. “This can’t be happening,” she whispered. “No, no…”
“Hey!” Rose yelled and grabbed Mary Ann’s wrist, squeezed. “Concentrate. Tell me what you know.”
Still shaking her head, Mary Ann found the strength to say the two words she could find. “Fuck you.”
Apparently understanding that she wasn’t going to get any information out of Mary Ann, at least for the time being, the other woman sat back in her seat.
* * *
Occasionally, Rose gave directions, told her to take this or
that exit, but none of it made any sense to Mary Ann. The route seemed haphazard.
But it was okay, because Mary Ann was coming back to herself. Minute by minute, mile by mile, she was getting to where she needed to be.
At a little after three in the morning, they stopped for gas in a small town in southern Virginia. By this time, they had been driving for almost four hours, and Mary Ann was getting tired. Coming down, she thought. It was almost unfathomable that she should be able to feel this way. Doug was dead and she was tired. But the thought did little to change the basic complexion of things.
She’d been sitting in the car while Rose pumped gas, but now she opened the door and got out, earning an angry look from her captor.
“What are you doing?”
“I need to pee,” Mary Ann said, “and I’m tired. If you make me keep driving, we’re going to end up wrapped around some tree.”
For a long moment, Rose considered Mary Ann’s words, then she nodded toward the small station building and said, “Go ahead. Don’t take long. I’ll be watching.”
She headed straight for the bathroom, head down, drawing a look from the clerk behind the counter. Once inside, she sat down on the closed toilet seat, buried her head in her hands, and cried, sobbing in throat-scoring bursts.
A gentle knock at the door stopped her. She sniffed back tears and said, “Yes?”
“You okay in there?” A male voice. The clerk.
Mary Ann opened her mouth and then immediately shut it with enough force that her teeth actually snapped together. What had she been about to do? If she told the clerk that she needed help, to call the police, as she’d been about to do, she’d only be thrusting him into harm’s way. There was no way she’d be able to explain the situation, not in a way that would let him know the danger he was already in. No, she couldn’t do it. She wouldn’t. There was enough blood on her hands already. Doug’s blood. She wouldn’t cost another man his life.