Inheritance: A Novel Part 46

Both of the detectives went mentally slack.

One of the detectives, speaking very slowly, said, "Yeah, that's all the questions I have. We'll call you when we find something."

"Thanks," Paul said, and stood up and left the room.

"Take me to my truck," Paul said.

He and Mike were in the car now. Mike was driving, pulling out of one of the spots in the back lot of Headquarters reserved for patrol cars.

He said, "Paul, the lieutenant wanted me to take you home. Tomorrow morning, Collins and I can get your truck back to your house for you."

"Take me to my truck," Paul said.

"Okay," Mike said. "Okay, sure, Paul. Whatever you want."

They drove in silence back to the Eastside Substation, and Mike stopped the car next to Paul's truck. Paul got his gear out of the trunk and dropped it into the toolbox in the bed of his truck and waved once at Mike and climbed behind the wheel. He drove away and never looked back.

He never saw Mike again.

When the phone rang, the first thought that went through Keith Anderson's mind was that he had overslept. It would be Levy on the end of the line, calling to b.i.t.c.h him out for being late. Anderson was so miserably tired, and it was all he could do to focus on the glowing green display of his digital clock.

"Four o'clock," he grumbled. "d.a.m.n it."

Next to him, Margie said, "What? What is it?" She sounded like she wasn't really awake.

"I got it," he said, and swung his legs out from under the covers and ran a hand over his face as he tried to focus on the caller ID.

He didn't recognize the number.

"h.e.l.lo?" he said.

Margie sat up next to him and said, "Who is it?"

He gave her a hold on a second wave of his hand and listened, and right away he was wide awake. "Paul," he said, "Paul, slow down. You're going too fast for me. Where are you?"

"I'm in a Stop-n-Go parking lot at the corner of Rosa Parks and Utley. You know the one?"

"I can find it," Anderson said. "Paul, what's going on?"

"When you get here," Paul said.

"No, Paul. Tell me. What the h.e.l.l's going on?"

"I'll tell you everything when you get here. I'll tell you everything you want to know." There was a pause on Paul's end, then he said, "It's about Rachel, my wife. She's gone. He's got her."

That last part made no sense to Anderson. The air raid siren in his head that ordinarily would have been sounding the alarm was silent, and it never even occurred to him to wonder why. He looked down at his milky white old-man legs and sighed thoughtfully. Margie was sitting up beside him now, one hand on his shoulder.

"Who was that?"

"Officer Paul Henninger," he said.

"You mean, the one who-"

"Yeah."

"What did he want?"

"He wants me to meet him as soon as possible." Anderson turned so that he was facing her. "Margie, I think all this is almost over. For better or for worse, it's almost over."

He put one hand over hers and gave her a rea.s.suring pat.

"There's so much I want to say, Margie. So many things I'm sorry for. It's like the world has been pulled out from under me and I'm standing here trying to figure out where it all went. I don't even know where to begin."

She gave his fingers a gentle squeeze.

He squeezed back.

"Did I tell you I've been seeing Bobby's face in every crowd I see? It's like...when John died. All over again."

If that worried her, she gave no sign of it. She knew him better than anybody else. Maybe she knew he had been seeing ghosts.

"We're both hurting. I'm sorry, too."

He nodded, and it amazed him how much they could say to one another without using any words. They were a team, the two of them. Two people, one love. He was, he realized, a very lucky man.

"I'll make you some coffee," she said.

He gave her a smile. "Thanks, Margie."

Paul watched Anderson's car pull into the parking lot. He crossed over to it and opened the pa.s.senger side door and climbed in. Anderson didn't speak. He sat there, waiting for Paul to make the first move.

Paul stared out the window for a moment. Then he looked at Anderson. He saw the picture of Anderson's dead son over the speedometer, and it made him think of the last time he and Anderson were together in the car.

"Turn off your voice recorder," Paul said.

Without saying a word, Anderson reached beneath his Mr. Rogers sweater and took a small, digital voice recorder from his shirt pocket. He showed it to Paul and pushed STOP. Then he put it on the dashboard.

"You're not gonna want a record of this anyway," Paul said.

"No," Anderson said, "you're probably right."

Paul told him everything. He started with his father, with the death of his father, and he told him about Mexico and Magdalena Chavarria and the murders at the Morgan Rollins Iron Works and the boy from the train yard and how the bodies disappeared from the morgue.

"But you know about that already," Paul said. "You saw your friend that night we went into the superstructure at Morgan Rollins."

"Yes," Anderson agreed. He appeared to think about that for a moment. "Is that what your father is? Is he some kind of ghost?"

"He practiced witchcraft. He tried to pa.s.s that on to me, but I killed him. And after that, he came back. So yeah, I guess you could call him a ghost. That word works as well as any. He's powerful. He used that power to come back, and he's using it now to control the dead from the morgue. Your friend at the Morgan Rollins factory, he was under my father's control. And seeing as I'm telling you this, you should probably know that I was, too."

Anderson looked up at him, suddenly nervous.

"I'm not now," Paul said, reading his look.

"How do I know that?"

"You don't, I guess. All I can tell you is that I mean to go after him. Maybe that will convince you. I mean to go after him, and I mean to stop this tonight. He's not going to turn me like he thinks he is. I'm going to stop him."

"He wants to turn you into some kind of witch? Is that what you said?"

"Of a sort, yes. That's probably the closest thing to what he has in mind that we would all know about. That's what I thought he meant. G.o.d, I was so naive. I was thinking he intended me to be some kind of great unifier. I would bring peace to the world. I should have known right from the start that wasn't what he meant, but I let myself believe what I wanted the truth to be. I know now that he meant something much different."

"Different how?"

"A long time ago, when he was living with Magdalena Chavarria and her grandmother, my father learned how to control this power. But he's not a perfect conduit for it. It burns him up, like too much current going through too small of a battery."

"That's what the black stuff is."

"What black stuff?"

"We found this black, gritty resin at most of the scenes. It was inside some of the bodies, too. Bobby Cantrell had it in him. We had it tested and it came back as a mixture of human tissue and cedar resin."

Paul nodded. "I guess so. I've felt that stuff, too. I felt it at the train yard."

"So your father is burning himself up trying to get to you?"

"Trying to cross over, yes. He's not a perfect conduit, as I said, but he thinks I am. He thinks I can use that power to bring about an apocalypse."

"An apocalypse? You mean, like the end of days?"

"Something like that," Paul said. "But he would qualify that. He would say the end of these days, and the beginning of a new era. All things in balance. A beginning to every end, a death for every life."

"And you believe that?"

"That he's capable of bringing this about? That certain people can learn to use that power to change the world around them? Yes, I believe that."

"Do you believe you're one of those special people?"

Paul took a deep breath. He had hoped to avoid this.

"Hold up your hand," Paul said.

"What?"

"Like this," Paul said, and put up a hand, palm towards the windshield, like he was motioning for the traffic outside to stop.

Anderson held up his hand.

"Now what would you say if I told you your hand was on fire?"

Anderson smiled. "I'd say it feels fine."

"And if I made you believe that it was on fire."

"You couldn't."

But the last word came out in a gasp of pain. Paul had already found Anderson's mind, the tendrils of his own mind reaching through Anderson, taking hold of him. Sweat was popping out all over Anderson's skin now. He began to shake, thrashing from side to side against the steering wheel and door panel and the seat. His whole body was seizing up in pain and he couldn't control it. Paul let his mind drift back from Anderson's, but he didn't relinquish his control over it.

"How about now?" Paul said.

"I don't believe it."

Paul gave Anderson's mind another shove.

Anderson screamed.

"It's on fire! Jesus Christ, stop it!"

Paul was completely in Anderson's head now. He could see what Anderson saw. He could see himself through the man's eyes, enormous and horrible. He could feel the man bucking against the pain, and yet still resisting. He believed in the pain, but not in the source.

Anderson looked up at him then, his eyes full of tears, and begged for it to stop. He was whimpering like a dog hit by a car. He was ready to do anything to stop the pain.

Paul grabbed him by the wrist and said, "It's over."

Instantly, Anderson went still. He stared at Paul with demented, feral eyes. And then, by degrees, the wildness left him and his muscles went slack. His chest was still pounding, but he no longer felt the pain. He looked from Paul to his hand and seemed surprised that it wasn't black as charcoal from the fire.

"How?" he said, panting.

"A parlor trick," Paul said. "That's nothing. Every minute that goes by I can feel the power swelling inside me. I think, if I wanted to, I could make the ground split open beneath this car and swallow it whole."

Anderson was still pale. He said, "You're not going to do that, are you?"

"I wouldn't have called you here for that," Paul said. "But you've just seen two parts of my father's plan. You've experienced the pain. That much is easy to imagine. Consider every human being on the planet feeling that kind of pain all at once. Consider somebody who could turn that pain on and off whenever he needed to. You can see where that would lead."

"Yes," Anderson said.

"But there's more. You can beat a man until he's willing to say that up is down and one plus one makes three. h.e.l.l, you can terrorize his mind to the point where he'll probably even believe it. But you can never be sure that he's truly yours, body and soul. There's only one way to be absolutely sure. To make sure that power is absolute, and that is through death. I would show you, but I think you remember pretty well what it was like seeing your friend up on the superstructure. His old life is over, and now his new life has begun-completely under my father's control."

Anderson looked thoroughly unsettled, and Paul still had enough of a handle on his mind to know that the man was drifting, his thoughts forming only with the greatest difficulty.

Finally, he said, "Why did you call me?"

"My wife," Paul said. "My father has her. It's his way, I think, of forcing my hand. Of forcing me to come to him. When I do he will try to finish what he started six years ago. He'll try to turn me to his purpose."