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  The cop spoke into a radio on his shoulder. I didn’t hear what he said, because I was occupied with trying not to faint. Miller lay still on the floor. He probably didn’t want to be shot either. He was breathing hard, and staring at the ceiling.

  “My name is Detective Harry Miller, of the Newport Beach Police Department, in California,” he said to the cop, trying to sound calm and commanding. “I came here to question Danielle Cleary for three unsolved murders in the Orange County area. She went for my weapon.”

  The cop looked uncertain. I would have, too, were I in his shoes.

  “Neither of you move,” he said. Two nurses came to the door and stuck their heads in, but the cop waved them away.

  “This man may be a cop, but he has killed several people, including my sister, and was involved in kidnapping my nephews,” I said. “He’s also a junkie. Have him tested.”

  “My badge is in my pocket,” Miller said to the cop. “I’m going to get it.”

  “Don’t move,” the cop said, but Miller’s hand was creeping inexorably towards his jacket.

  “No!” I yelled. But it was too late. Before I could see it happening, Miller had pulled another small gun from his inside jacket pocket. I dove under the bed. Three shots rang out, and it sounded like they came from two different guns. I couldn’t tell, however, because I had my arms over my head, under the bed. I got my own blood in my eyes. Something hit the floor.

  The young cop was lying on the floor, his head inches from mine. Blood was streaming from a small hole in his forehead. His eyes were open and staring into mine. I watched the light go out of them.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” Miller was saying. I could hear him scrambling to his feet. “I didn’t want to do that. That was your fault, Danny,” he said. He stood beside the bed. I could see his lower legs when I turned my head. “Get up, Danny. You’re going to help me.”

  Miller didn’t give me a chance to respond. He pulled me out from under the bed by my right leg and arm. He was stronger than he looked. Crystal meth, it’s a hell of a drug. And I was losing strength by the minute, with the blood that was seeping down my arm.

  “We’re going to walk out of here,” Miller said. He put me in front of him, and put the gun to my head. He was a few inches taller than I was, just enough for his eyes to clear the top of my head. “You are not going to try anything stupid, like trying to fight me or kick me, because if you do, I will shoot you in the head. And eventually I will get the money from your heirs. You know what that means. Messy, right? And then I will proceed to shoot whomever is in the hallway, who gets in my way.”

  I moved my head in the direction of a nod. The barrel of his gun was pressing into my temple. I didn’t want to move much.

  “Okay, then!” Miller said, like we were embarking on a great adventure.

  We walked into the hallway, Miller’s left arm wrapped very tightly around my body, holding me to him, and the right held the gun to my head. Two cops were running down the hallway towards us. Both had their weapons out of their holsters. A hospital orderly was pressed up against the wall, and a patient on a gurney looked wide-eyed.

  “Drop your weapons,” Miller yelled at the cops. “I will shoot this woman.” The cops looked at each other, and didn’t drop their guns. They were both trained on him. I hoped nobody was going to try to be a hero, ’cause I wasn’t that keen on being shot again.

  We proceeded down the hall fairly quickly, Miller keeping his back against the wall with me pressed tight into him. I couldn’t move my head, but my eyes were moving wildly, looking for an exit. As much as I didn’t relish leaving the hospital as Miller’s hostage, I thought my chances were better if we were outside where he might not be so on edge.

  We were on the ground floor. Miller backed against an emergency door and pushed through it, still holding me to him. An alarm wailed.

  We were outside, and the ground was cold on my bare feet. The cops were behind us in the doorway, ordering Miller to drop his weapon. Unsurprisingly, he chose to ignore them. He moved quickly backwards, and I stumbled. He pulled me tighter into him again.

  “We are going to get into that Lexus there,” Miller said to me. “You are going to drive.” He opened the passenger side door and shoved me into the car, pushing me over the console until I was in the driver’s seat. Miller stuck the keys in the ignition and crouched down, his gun still pointing at my head.

  “Drive,” he said. I started the ignition, and automatically looked behind me to back out of the spot. I was operating on some fear-based autopilot. All I knew how to do was what Miller said. The pain from my arm was making my brain scream.

  I glanced again in the rear view and slammed on the brakes. Detective Paul Belliveau was standing ten feet behind the car, a gun trained on us. He wasn’t in uniform. I had never been so happy to see anyone in my life. Even D-Man. Miller screamed at me to keep going and hit my right knee sharply with the gun to get me to release the brake. Belliveau was sprinting, quickly for such a big man, to get out of the way of the vehicle, which was reversing down an incline and picking up speed. Without thinking, I opened the driver’s side door, car still in gear, and fell to the ground.

  I heard yelling, and shots, but then there was nothing. I passed out, my bad left arm under my body as everything went black.

  27

  I woke up back in a hospital room. Again.

  “They held my room for me,” I said. I felt no pain. I gazed to my right and saw that I was hooked up to IV, so some nice opiates were flowing into my bloodstream.

  Detective Belliveau was sitting at the end of the bed, looking ten years older than he had the night before. Darren was there too, with a face like thunder.

  “Is Miller dead?” I wanted to know. My throat was scratchy, and my arm was bandaged and in a sling. But I was floating on a wispy morphine cloud.

  No one answered for a minute, but their faces told me everything I needed to know.

  “Fuck,” I said, feeling like I was speaking in a dream. “Fuck.” How did he get away?

  “Fred?”

  Belliveau shook his head. He explained that Miller had shot wildly and jumped from the car at the same time I did, and shooting from both guns like something out of a Tarantino movie, managed to get away. Belliveau had thought helping me, lying unconscious on the ground, was more important. It was his instinct, he said.

  “It was a bad one,” I said. “I don’t matter in this, Paul. Don’t you get that?”

  Paul never took his eyes from my face, but he patted my foot and shook his head. He reminded me of my dad, in that movement. I closed my eyes. No more. No more loss. Morphine. Concentrate on the morphine.

  They had found Miller’s blood-stained jacket a quarter of a mile from the hospital, he told me.

  “So he’s wounded, and we don’t know how badly,” he said. I nodded. Good.

  “Pack my bags, Darren. I’m going to Maine. He’s gone to Maine. They’re all in Maine. Luke is there,” I said a little more loudly. Darren and Belliveau looked at me. “King of the Road,” I said. I knew I sounded crazy with the opiates, and it made me more impatient. “Destination: Bangor, Maine. The Orchard, Darren. God, how are you not getting this?”

  They were both looking at me strangely, and they both looked exhausted. “We are going to keep a protective detail on your family, and Matthew,” Belliveau was saying. He rubbed his hand over his face.

  Matthew.

  “How is he?” I said to Darren. “You should be with him, not here.”

  “He’s in the cafeteria surrounded by about twenty nurses and cops,” he said drily. “His mother is dead, he’s been drugged, and he watched his precious Uncle Jack die violently. Oh, and his twin brother is still missing. Other than that? Just peachy.”

  “The house is fully guarded, 24/7,” Belliveau added.

  “Skipper and Marie are coming to help us take care of them for now,” Darren said. I thought he might be saying something else, but I decided to succumb to the drugs, and e
nter oblivion.

  28

  Darren had it all arranged.

  While Skipper, Marie and a veritable army of security stayed at his house with Matthew, Darren had talked our other brother, Laurence, into going to stay at Ginger and Fred’s house in California. It had been decided that there had to be a Cleary presence at the house there, on the off-chance that Jeanette showed up there with Luke. I pictured Laurence pacing, telling bad jokes and getting in Marta’s way, and felt comforted. If Luke wound up there, he would be so safe and loved.

  Skip and Marie lived in the old Cleary house in Downs Mills, Maine, which they had nearly gutted and renovated. I hadn’t been there in three years, but as Darren said, it would be a good home base for the purpose of our trip: bring home our nephew, and kill Jeanette Vasquez.

  “I wonder,” I said to Darren on the plane. I stretched my legs, which I could almost do. We were flying first class, which was a nice treat, even if it wasn’t a private plane. “I wonder how many of them there are.” It was the thought that had been going around and around in my head incessantly.

  “We’re not even sure she’s here, Bean,” Darren said. “We’re making this trip on Jack’s paranoid delusion about a conspiracy with his foster family.” Somehow, Darren refused to believe this was as big as I thought it might be. Yes, Jeanette and Lola and Miller may have been Jack’s foster siblings, and they had found out who he was, and that he was rich now. They were bad people. But the rest of it? He had a hard time with it.

  “Darren, trust me. I just know this.” I’d told him about my dream about Ginger, about “King of the Road,” and Bangor, Maine. He had an easier time believing in some telepathic twin bond with Ginger than he did in Jack’s stories of his childhood. “Still, she must have somebody else here. Michael, maybe? The father, though I hate to use that word? If he’s still alive, that is.”

  I knew I was flying closer to Jeanette and Luke. I knew that like I knew my own name. I trusted Jack, and I trusted Ginger. I closed my eyes.

  I felt like once this was over I could sleep for a year or two. Maybe after calling D-Man and getting a nice big unlimited supply of crack. My trusty Altoids tin with my stash was gone, taken or lost at some point in the last day or two. Physically, I had to admit I did feel stronger without it. Perhaps this was a temporary cure for addiction, I thought: hunt down and kill a few sociopaths who seemed to be intent on murdering all the people I loved. Rage and homicide in place of escape and self-destruction.

  Still. I knew that after this was over, I would be reunited with crack, one way or another. It was my reward, and for however long I decided to live, my life partner.

  I grabbed Darren’s hand.

  “If anything happens to you,” I started to say, but Darren stopped me.

  “Bean. Right back at you.” He was staring straight ahead. I knew that this had to be all hitting him at least as hard as it had me, but we hadn’t had much time to talk. I wanted to get this over with, so Darren and I could spend some time with the twins. “When this is over, Bean?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “You’re going to rehab.”

  “Darren,” I started, but he stopped me.

  “No, Danny. I don’t want to hear it. I know you’ve been clean for a few days now. And I know that just as soon as we finish this, you’re going right back to it. And if you think I’m going to let that happen…” He squeezed my hand. “Danny, I lost Ginger. I am not going to lose you too.”

  I squeezed his hand back, but I didn’t say anything. Darren released my hand and burrowed into himself, and slept.

  * * *

  Bangor International Airport is no LAX, and for that I was grateful. It was just daybreak in Maine, and when we landed the sky looked both gray and clean.

  “Home,” Darren said. He had slept fitfully throughout the flight, while my eyes were now dry and red from long hours awake.

  We made our way to the nearest rental counter to get a car, but the customer service rep said he was sorry but they were all sold out.

  His nametag told us that he was called Blake G. I wanted to know what the G stood for, but I held back, for once. “Sorry, Mr. Cleary,” he said. He made a sad face. “It’s December,” he said, “and we don’t have a big fleet here, as I’m sure you can imagine. People like to come east for Christmas month. We don’t have the Escalade you requested.”

  “No worries, Blake,” Darren said. “What do you have free for us?”

  Blake rented us a chrome-green PT Cruiser.

  “Very inconspicuous,” I said, once we’d thrown our meagre luggage into the hatch. “Good for staying under the radar.”

  “Something tells me that whoever wants to know where we are will find us anyway, Beanpole,” Darren said. “Damn, this thing is awkward to drive.” Darren was a low-slung sports car kind of guy, morally and aesthetically opposed to SUVs and other high-riding vehicles. But it was winter in Maine.

  A soft snow had started to fall, and the landscape couldn’t have looked more different than Southern California if we had beamed ourselves to Mars. I rolled down the windows manually – Blake hadn’t rented us a bells-and-whistles model – and took a deep breath of air.

  “Wow,” I said. “Smell that?”

  “What, Bean,” Darren said.

  “Smells like childhood,” I said.

  Darren was silent, trying, I presumed, to get used to the new vehicle.

  “What exactly are we doing here?” he said, once we were on the highway, heading north. The sun had come out, hard and clear.

  “We’re going to find Luke and you’re going to take him back to Toronto with you. And then I’m going to end this,” I answered lightly. “We’re going to Skip and Marie’s. Home base.”

  “We are,” Darren corrected. “Going to end this.”

  “Darren,” I said, but he interrupted me.

  “Why in the name of fuck do you think I’m here, Danny?” he said, and I watched his knuckles turn white on the steering wheel. “Tell me that.”

  “To get revenge,” I answered.

  “Right,” he said. “But where would I rather be?”

  “With your nephew,” I said.

  “You are correct, sir,” Darren answered. “But we made a pact. Remember? I’m in this as deep as you are,” he said. He glanced over at me, and I instinctively watched the road for him.

  “Somebody needs to take care of Luke and get him to safety. And,” I said, to cut off any further arguments, “we need a gun.” I was looking in the passenger side mirror. I kept expecting to see someone following us. I hoped that if someone was, it would be Dave. I had a feeling that we were going to need help.

  “Correction,” Darren said, smoking furiously. “We need several.”

  * * *

  After Mom and Dad were killed and the old house was empty, Skip and Marie had offered to buy out the rest of the sibs, but none of us really wanted the few grand any sale of the old house would have given. We all liked the idea of Skip in the place, and knowing he was there made us all feel, I think, like we still had a home to go back to.

  Best of all, for Darren and me just now, we knew where the key was hidden, and better yet, where Skip kept the weapons.

  Dad had always had plenty of guns, for hunting and target practice, and Skip had kept up the tradition. He didn’t have the heart for hunting, didn’t have the taste for it, and even less for cleaning and eating the gamey meat. But he liked tradition, and the contents of Dad’s gun locker in the basement would still be cleaned and oiled regularly.

  “I feel funny about this,” I said, as we turned off the paved secondary road and onto the rutted dirt road that led to the old homestead.

  “I know,” Darren replied. “This thing has terrible suspension.” The car was bouncing a lot, but he exaggerated it, bobbing up and down in his seat and making his voice sound all wobbly.

  “No, I mean about going to the old house,” I said, and saw that Darren had been kidding. “Sorry. I’m a little tense
.”

  “I know, Bean. Me too.” We were a few miles away, and the morning had turned sunny and bright. I rolled my window down and stuck my head out, like a dog being taken for a drive. It helped.

  “I keep thinking about Dave,” I said, after settling back into the vehicle and rolling up the window. We weren’t in Orange County anymore.

  “Oh, do you now,” Darren said. “Oh, really.”

  “Shut up,” I said. “You know what I mean. I haven’t seen him since I left him at my apartment that day.” The day I had gone to meet Jack for lunch. The day we had been in bed together again and I could almost feel what it would be like to be whole again.

  The day Jack died.

  We were both silent for a minute. I wouldn’t think about Jack yet. I couldn’t. When the time came – when I had gotten Luke to safety, when I had killed Jeanette and any other of this twisted “family” who might be involved, I would bury Jack my own way. Jack and Ginger. The two biggest loves of my life.

  I didn’t know how much Dave knew about where things stood now – that Matt was safe, that Jeanette had Luke – or how he knew anything at all. Though I supposed he could be talking to Chandler York, Fred’s lawyer. I sincerely hoped so. I made a mental note to call Chandler’s office from Skip and Marie’s and find out myself if he knew anything at all about Dave or his whereabouts.

  We drove another ten minutes in silence, and then we were turning into the old driveway.

  “Wow,” Darren said. “Place looks the same, huh.”

  It did, and it didn’t. I climbed out of the car and was hit with the old familiar smell of fresh wood, from the mill two miles away. Something about the quality of the light – so different from anyplace else I had been, and so evocative of childhood – made my eyes water.

  But the house had recently been painted a nice deep green, and Marie had done a lot of landscaping. Not to my taste, but if you liked fake wooden wells painted bright red and a walkway lined with big rocks painted white, then it was the place for you.