CHAPTER TWENTY
Despite or, perhaps, because of it, her mind screamed anyway—an internal, silent shriek that ricocheted off bone—but her throat stayed locked.
The man at the end of the bed might have been carved there.
Burly frame wedged into the motel chair, elbows on knees, gun held in both hands, the barrel level with the bridge of her nose.
Ill-fitting overalls of blue and yellow, the fabric pulled tight across his shoulders, giving him the hunched bulk of a man who’d grown wider than his clothes.
An olive-colored baseball cap threw his face into shadow, but not enough to hide the wiry grey hair bristling from his ears and nostrils.
The CCTV guy, she thought numbly.
He shifted a fraction, as if to remind her the gun was not a hallucination. “If you scream,” he added mildly, “I’ll have to do something about it. And I’d rather we… talk.”
Her heart was pounding so hard she could feel it in her teeth. The TV murmured behind him, flickering light stroking his shoulders, throwing him in and out of contrast. Some cop show, some pretend danger. The irony would’ve been funny on another night.
She swallowed, testing whether her voice would work.
“Okay,” she said. It came out hoarse, thin. “I won’t.”
“Good girl.” A dry smile. “I thought you’d be sensible. You are, after all, your father’s daughter.”
The words slid into her like a blade.
She kept her eyes on the gun. Was he the killer? Saving the knife for later? Or another monster altogether? Did it matter now? It was a semi-auto, black, compact, the whole of her world at the end of its barrel. Range: maybe six feet from the chair to the bed. No margin for error. No sudden moves.
Focus.
Distance to the door: three steps and a lunge. To the phone on the nightstand: one step and a suicidal grab. To the lamp: closer, but tipping a lamp was only useful if the man with the gun misjudged the distraction.
“Who are you?” she asked, stalling. Buying brain time.
“You know who I am.” He tilted his head, the brim of the cap shifting just enough to reveal more of his face: mid-fifties, heavy jowls, pale eyes that had the flat steadiness of someone who’d watched a lot of bad things and never looked away.
“You’re smarter than that, Agent Valentine. I’m Quinn Marsh.”
He said it with a certain flourish, as if he knew she’d know the name.
Did she? Had Poppy mentioned it in an update, a list of low-level Cox-groupies under observation, as yet lacking any concrete reason to pull them in?
She felt sure the name would have stuck.
It sounded more like a geological feature than a name.
Whatever. Something concrete was now sitting in a chair at the end of her bed.
“How did you get in?” she asked, because talking was better than not.
“Oh, it was easy.” He spoke as if they were sharing tips about parking. “You made it easy. I picked the lock when you went to Reception. Reckless, Dr. Valentine.”
“Agent Valentine,” she corrected automatically.
He gave a small, almost indulgent shrug. “Agent. Doctor. Daughter. All the same person, in the end.” He jerked a thumb behind his shoulder. “I was in the closet before you’d finished paying for your chips.”
The faint chemical note she’d noticed on returning. Not the AC. Him. The trace of some cleaner or solvent he carried on his clothes, layered over sweat and old oil.
“What’s with the outfit?” she asked.
"Overalls. It's like something out of the comic books," he said, smiling a joyless smile. "An invisibility cloak. Looks like you've come to fix something, and the world looks right through you."
Her pulse spiked, but she forced herself to breathe slowly, evenly. Panic narrowed thinking, turned options into walls.
“What do you want?” she asked.
His eyes fixed on hers. For a moment, everything else—the TV, the hum of the aircon, the thin sheets pinning her legs—fell away.
“I want you,” he said, “to listen.”
He rolled the word like something to be savored.
“Listen carefully,” Marsh continued, “because it’s the last story you’ll ever hear.”
Cold gathered in the hollow at the base of her throat. She made herself nod, small, obedient. “All right.”
“Good.” He shifted in the chair, settling in as if for a long conversation.
The gun never wavered. “First, though, let’s be clear about the rules.
You don’t reach for anything. You don’t shout.
You don’t try to run. You stay where you are, under your little motel blanket, and you keep those special agent hands where I can see them. Yes?”
“Understood.” She let her fingers flex once, slowly, on top of the thin sheet. “You’re in charge.”
“Say that again.”
“You’re in charge.” The words tasted of ash. “I’ll do whatever you want.”
He sighed, like a teacher pleased by a correct answer. “See, when people accept the proper order of things, everyone is so much happier. The Lawgiver would agree.”
Cox. The title slid through her brain like oil.
“May I…?” She swallowed. “Can I sit up? It’s unnerving having a gun pointed at me while I’m lying down.”
“Slowly.”
She moved. Inch by inch, she pushed herself up against the headboard, keeping her hands in his line of sight at all times, the sheet dragged up over her legs.
Her feet were bare. A stupid detail, but it made her feel more vulnerable, less capable of delivering the kind of kick that might knock the gun free.
He waited until she was upright, then leaned back slightly, as if granting a privilege.
“What I would like,” Kate said carefully, “is if you’d put the gun somewhere else. Not… away,” she added quickly, seeing his expression tighten. “Just—on the nightstand, maybe. Still within reach. You’d still be in complete control, and you’d be less likely to… accidentally… pull the trigger.”
“Accidentally,” he repeated, as if tasting the shape of it. “You’re worried about accidents.”
“Guns go off sometimes,” she said. “People flinch. Or their fingers cramp. Or they trip on something. And then something irreversible happens.” She tried to inject a bit of wry humor into it. “I’d prefer not to die because the Forest Suites has uneven carpet.”
He shook his head faintly. “The gun will go off when I want it to.” His voice was calm.
When.
She filed away the failure of that attempt and moved on.
“Tell me the story,” she said. “The last one.”
His eyes brightened, like she’d hit the right switch.
“Winter of ’83,” Quinn began. “Do you remember it?”
“I wasn’t born,” Kate said. “So, no.”
“Then you might remember the way your parents talked about it.” His gaze went distant, not unfocused exactly—more like he was looking at a screen only he could see.
“Still, to date, the worst winter to hit the East Coast since records began. Blizzards, ice storms, roads closed for days. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was the flu.”
He said the word like a curse.
“The hospitals were overwhelmed,” he went on.
“Not enough staff, not enough beds, not enough anything. People dying on gurneys in corridors, respiratory complications, pneumonia, collapsed lungs. Nurses collapsing, too, because they’d done three shifts back-to-back and hadn’t eaten in eighteen hours.
For the first time since 1929 people started muttering that maybe America was…
slipping. Failing to meet the basic needs of her population. ”
He glanced at her to make sure she was following.
“I read about that,” Kate said quietly. “And my Dad talked about it, too.”
“Of course he did,” Marsh said, an unmistakable blade of contempt in his voice.
“Your father would have framed it as a noble struggle against impossible odds. Doctors as heroes. Nurses as angels. All that shit.” His lip curled.
“Meanwhile, on the ground, people like us were just trying not to starve.”
He shifted again. The chair creaked.
“I was twelve,” he said. “Triple-decker house in South Boston, shook when the wind hit it. My little sister Maura was ten, my kid brother Danny was eight. Three of us in one bedroom. Our father? A ghost. If he wasn’t at sea, he was in some port, spending his pay on whiskey and whores.
His only contribution to family life was occasionally sending home a crumpled envelope with some cash, just enough to keep us from being evicted. ”
His jaw worked, muscles jumping in the stubble.
“My mother Mary,” he said softly, “kept us alive. She cleaned offices at night. Worked the line at a cannery during the day until her hands bled. On Sundays she drew and painted people’s pets for twenty bucks a pop.
Little watercolors of pugs and tabbies. Can you imagine?
” He gave a short, soft laugh. “She’d stay up ’til two in the morning to get the fur right. ”
There was a tug in his voice there, a thread of something like love, like reverence.
“Sounds like a special lady,” Kate said. Careful. Neutral.
“She was.” He looked at her sharply, as if checking for mockery.
Finding none, he relaxed a hair. “She took care of her father-in-law too. The old man couldn’t be left alone, not really.
He’d get confused, forget where he was, try to go outside without pants.
My father’s contribution to that situation was to say, ‘Mary will manage.’ So she managed. My mother always managed.”
He inhaled, chest swelling under the too-tight overalls.
“And then,” he said, “the flu came for her.”
Kate could almost see it: a thin woman stilling in the doorway, a cough that wouldn’t go away, the way bones pressed suddenly against skin.
“She got sick fast,” Quinn said. “Fever, chills, lungs filling up. But she kept working. Because if she didn’t, we didn’t eat.
One night she came home and collapsed on the kitchen floor.
Just… dropped. I called an ambulance. Twelve years old, my brother and sister bawling, granddad keening in the corner like a broken kettle.
They took her away.” His fingers tightened minutely, whitening around the gun.
“But she walked to the ambulance. She was a proud woman.”