Chapter 22
The power was out again when they came for him.
He was in his underwear, but it didn’t matter. He didn’t care about his dignity anymore. It had never mattered much to him,
and now it meant even less.
Van knew they had come to kill him. He knew it when they came through the door. Valentine came first, Salem, and one of the
new arrivals, a short, powerfully built woman with black hair in a bristle cut. She was dressed as one of the boys, in a black
Lacoste with the alligator over her left breast, and she lumbered along like a bear, head down, shoulders rounded, her mostly
bare arms heavily but slackly muscled. She could probably tear a New York City phone book in two, arms like that.
It was the fifth time they had lost the juice today. The only illumination came from the emergency lighting running down the
length of the hallway. That lighting was Halloween colored, like candlelight burning inside a pumpkin, and turned his visitors
into orange-faced ghouls. Van flashed back to Jayne and Ronnie on Arthur’s porch, wearing troll masks. No matter how many
trolls you wiped out, Mordor always had more.
He was sitting on the edge of his bed, eating cold toast smeared with jam off the breakfast tray. It wasn’t much of a breakfast,
and it was pitiful as last meals went, but he closed his eyes and made himself taste it, really taste it: the sweetness of
the strawberry jam, the creamy salt of the butter beneath, the chewy, slightly burnt texture of the toast. It hadn’t been
much of a life, but there had been coffee with Allie, the smell of Allie’s hair in the morning, the light on her face.
“You guys mind if I pull on some—” he began, and the woman yanked him to his feet by the arm. “No? Okay, never mind.”
Salem caught the other arm, and the two enforcers buckled the bondage mittens together, his hands at the small of his back.
It was funny to think his salvation was right inside those gloves, that he could blow everyone in this room out of this world
if he could only touch two fingers to his chest. They had Glocks on their thighs, but he had a scaly nuclear weapon that talked
like a London cabbie, and all he needed to do to light it up was get those infernal mittens off.
Valentine pushed a hand back through his pale hair and Van saw a great wispy tuft of it come right out of his scalp and drift
away. Van almost laughed.
Salem and the big woman hauled him toward the door. Van said, “Does this one got a name?”
“Juneau,” Salem said.
“Never been there. Somehow I don’t think I’m ever going to get there now,” Van said.
Van thought Salem’s sidelong glance—his slight smile, his cocked eyebrow—was actually sympathetic.
“There’s still a way to turn King Sorrow aside,” Valentine said. “I’m almost sure one of you can choose to die for us. It’s
in all the literature. We can still be saved. So here’s what’s going to happen now. You’re going to offer to die in my place,
Van. Otherwise, we’re going to beat your sister to death, slowly, in front of you. It’s the classic prisoner’s dilemma.”
Van got his feet under him—his knees gave out—he was dragged—found his feet once more.
They led him past the open door of a break room just as the fluorescents came buzzing and flickering back on overhead.
Van had a glimpse of a dripping brown splash against the wall, which at first he thought was coffee.
Then he saw the spatter of tissue and hair on the drop ceiling and wondered who had shot himself.
When they dragged him past the open door to an office, he caught a glimpse of a digital clock on the desk and he saw it was only 10:47 a.m. He felt himself wilt with despair.
He might’ve had a chance if it was later in the day.
If it was ten in the evening, instead of ten in the morning, he thought he could hold out—shut his eyes and mind, deafen himself with his own screams—until King Sorrow came.
But thirteen hours and change was too long.
They hauled him past a picture window, and he had a glimpse into a conference room crowded with the soldiers in their khakis.
They were gathered around a map of the compound, spread on a table and held down with battery-operated lanterns. The lamps
threw a harsh blue-white light and gave the people in the room the cast of zombies, purple lipped and dead eyed. Many of the
warriors had M4s over their shoulders. At least one had what looked like a machete strapped to his thigh. Van fought down
a wave of laughter. A machete. A fucking machete. What was he going to do with that? Van supposed in an emergency he might be able to jump on it before King Sorrow ripped
him apart. It amazed him, the way arrogance multiplied exponentially when men gathered in groups. Arrogance was a kind of
stupor, like drunkenness.
He was glad he was sober. He was sure the time that remained to him would be easier if he was drunk or comfortably stoned.
He wouldn’t be so aware of his own bad breath or the tremble in his legs. But he didn’t want to miss the last moments of his
life, didn’t want them to blur by him. He wished he could go back and have another bite of toast, wanted to examine the flavor
of it, consider it the way a scientist would consider it.
Salem yanked the door open and led them into a concrete well five stories high. He hit the light switch out of habit, but
the stairwell remained a silo of darkness. The only light came from a couple of narrow window slits, five floors above them,
the gray gleam of an April morning on the Atlantic coast.
The concrete steps were chilly and rough under his bare feet. The staircase was narrow and required them to walk two abreast.
Salem took the inside of the stairwell so that Van had the banister on his right. Juneau went behind them, while Valentine
was in front, leading the whole sorry parade. Juneau’s breath was heavy and harsh, echoing in the stone silo. She was powerful,
but she wasn’t fast, didn’t like climbing stairs.
“Being here hasn’t been all bad,” Van said.
“I’m glad I kicked the booze and the rest of it.
This wouldn’t have been my first choice of rehabs, but it did the trick.
I think I only stayed drunk so I wouldn’t feel so bad about making Allie marry me.
We have that in common, Valentine: we’re both wardens of secret prisons.
You trapped me, but I trapped her. She’s free now, though.
I’m surprised how happy the thought makes me.
That, and thinking how many of your boys she fried like eggs. ”
“We’ll get her,” Valentine said.
“No, you won’t,” Van told him, and this time he did laugh. It felt good. “She cooked a whole bunch of you, and the barbecue
ain’t done yet. It’ll be your turn next.”
They reached the first concrete landing. Van leaned, looked over the railing at the drop, then straightened up and walked
on.
“Tell me again about the prisoner’s dilemma,” Van said. “How’s that one work?”
“Do you know anything about game theory? It’s a numbers thing.”
“The only numbers I know about are the ones I’ve rolled,” Van said, and he smiled at the memory of smoking pot with Colin
Wren, blue haze and sweet spice. Colin’s good CIA-sourced pot always made Van feel like it was Christmas afternoon, gave him
a sense of snowed-in, childlike contentment, all the presents open and waiting to be played with. Weed had never been that
good again. It wasn’t just that he couldn’t find the same quality of ganja in New York. The experience hadn’t improved with
time. Mostly the drugs had taken things away from him: had stopped him from seeing his own life, from seeing his own wife.
Sober and clearheaded, he kept picturing Allison in the bright clear light of early May, that strong, bold, innocent light.
He could almost imagine her with someone else—a woman—her head resting on the other’s shoulder, both of them enjoying a morning
together, coffee and silent companionship. He wished she hadn’t been taught to hate the one thing that might make her happy.
“In the simplest version, you’ve arrested two outlaws.
They’ve both committed a killing, but you can only prove it by getting them to rat on each other,” Valentine said.
“There’s no physical evidence. There’s one thing you can prove: you can send them to jail for stealing a car together .
. . they were arrested while driving it.
So that’s one year in jail each. But you separate these two murdering scumbags—let’s call ’em Donna and Donnie—and you offer them each a deal.
If Donnie will tell the truth about Donna’s part in the murder, he won’t be charged and she’ll go to jail for life.
If he won’t play ball, and Donna tells the truth, he’ll go to jail for life, and she’ll get off scot-free.
If they’re both willing to testify against each other, the DA will only ask the judge for twenty-year
sentences for each.”
“I don’t see how it applies,” Van said.
Valentine looked back with undisguised disgust. “How do you not—look, you fucking hillbilly stoner. They’re obviously both going to tell on each other. They’d rather do twenty years, or none,
than risk jail for life. Self-interest always trumps loyalty.”
They went on. The stairwell echoed with the scuff of their shoes. When they reached the next landing they would be on the
ground floor. That’s where they’d leave the stairwell and head to the garage, Van thought. They had half drowned him there
the last time; this time it would be Donna’s turn, and there would be no going halfway about anything. He looked thoughtfully
over the railing again and walked on.
“Obviously, with you and your sister,” Valentine said, panting, “it isn’t quite the same. But the deal you have with King
Sorrow—he’s going to kill all of us, unless one of you offers yourself as a substitute. You’ll ask King Sorrow to take you
instead of us, to make us stop. Stop what we’re doing to you, sure, but more important, stop what we’re doing to her.”
There was a window on the ground-floor landing and another on the floor above. Van found himself climbing steadily into a
pearlescent and forgiving light.
He clicked his tongue, gave his head a little shake. “Nope. It don’t work, my son. The logic don’t hold.”
“How do you figure?”
“So Donna, we’d play Monopoly or something, and if she was about to go bankrupt, bitch would get so pissed she’d toss the board so no one could win. And that’s the problem with your little game theory.”
“That your sister is a sore loser?” Valentine said.
“No,” Van said. “That we both are. Trouble with your dilemma is, it only works if you still have both of us.”
Van stopped dead, just as Juneau was climbing the step behind him. He snapped his head back into her face and heard her nose
break with a dry, brittle crunch. She yelled, tottered, and Salem turned to grab her before she could go crashing back down
the stairs, and that was Van’s moment to move. He leapt forward, body-checking Valentine into the black metal railing. Valentine’s
eyes flew wide, and for one delicious second it seemed he might go over the railing. But he grabbed the banister to steady
himself and Van went straight by him, no time to stop.
He hit the third landing and wheeled around, climbing the steps toward the fourth and final floor. All of them were yelling
behind him. He began to laugh, a kid running from his mother across the yard. He felt lightheaded, the stairwell above him
seeming to rotate like the lens of a kaleidoscope, and he remembered his roller skates grinding across asphalt, remembered
whirling in a hoop around and around Arthur Oakes, the two of them making their stand in the fall night. It seemed all his
adult life he had been flying around and around in manic, pointless circles, while Arthur stood fast, the one secure thing
in the world he could reach for when he was almost too dizzy to remain on his feet. How he had loved the big, quiet man and
his steadiness, his unshowy decency. How he had wished he could’ve been more like him.
Donovan jumped up the steps three at a time, like a man racing to his beloved, a man who has been apart from his wife for
far too long. He dashed up the last flight of stairs into the morning brightness. There was a fire door to the roof on the
landing, but he didn’t bother with it. It might be locked. He glanced back into the stairwell. Salem was six steps away, huffing
as he heaved himself up the stairs. Juneau was a full flight behind him, gasping for breath.
Van had time to look out the narrow slot of the window.
He shoved his face to the embrasure and saw the ocean a quarter of a mile away, beyond the hangar roofs, out past a band of sun-bleached seagrass.
The grass rippled and flowed, an ocean of rippling yellow itself.
The sky boiled with gray, cold-looking storm clouds, but they were rent in places, and the sun cast a rippling light across the water.
He was surprised to find himself grinning.
He was grateful for it, to have been allowed this last look at the sea.
Salem was two steps away when Van put his waist against the black metal banister, tilted forward, and let himself drop. The
floor, four stories below, rushed up at him out of the darkness. He felt like he was falling into bed, like he was falling
into Allie’s arms.
What a thing, to fall and be caught by love at the end.