Angel Interrupted

Chapter 24

I sat next to the man who had taken Tyler Matthews as he drove away from the house, wondering what life had done to him to make him two separate people. He had left all feelings of goodwill within him behind in the house with Tyler. A rage now filled him, one that fed on its own momentum, rising like a tide that pushed him forward toward some unknown destination. I could not influence the emotion, because I did not understand the forces that fueled it. It was as if something profound inside the man fed it, perhaps memories of long-endured torments, but something external fed it as well. There was a source of fury coming from outside the man, egging him on.
With that recognition, I realized that I was not alone as a passenger in the car. The otherworldly little boy who had once let me pretend to push him on a swing on a fine spring afternoon was sitting in a corner of the backseat, where he had a direct view of the driver. Gone was any shred of innocence in the apparition. His childishness had been replaced by something terrifying and thunderous, far beyond either my control or my understanding. The boy barely moved and did not make a sound, yet the power he emanated was immense and ripe with vengeance.
I wondered if the man driving the car could see him. There was a connection between the two, that much was certain. The boy was staring at the man with his curiously blank eyes, eyes that lacked knowledge of life in some strange, vacant way, yet nonetheless burned with an intensity that led directly to the man and was filling him with immeasurable fury. I could feel it, and I feared for my own soul just being near that power. This was not a benign being, this small apparition of a child who had wanted to pretend he could swing, stretching his legs upward to the sky. He was not like me. He was something new to my world—and I did not think I liked him.
What I thought about him was immaterial to the otherworldly little boy. He gave me not a glance, not a single sign of recognition. All he cared about was the man driving the car. His control of the man’s emotions was relentless and it was overwhelming.
The man began to drive faster and faster, running red lights when no one else was around, taking corners too quickly and clipping the curbs, his mind tumbling with a chaos of bitter memories and cascading pains that consumed him. The faster he drove, the more the little boy in the backseat seemed to enjoy it. His eyes had begun to glitter. He terrified me.
The man grew so agitated that he missed a turn and screeched to a halt, backing up a busy road despite the near certainty someone would come up fast behind him. He swung in an arc and sped into the parking lot of a drugstore, hurrying inside while I remained mystified in the car, seeking to understand the apparition sitting behind me.
I turned around and stared at the boy. He stared back, his eyes suddenly as placid and benign as a pond on a hot afternoon. He had no quarrel with me. He had no need for me. It was as if he was looking right through me.
The man was back within a few minutes, carrying a paper bag filled with his purchases. I wondered what was inside.
Within another few minutes, I knew where we were heading. He turned into a familiar neighborhood, sped past Robert Michael Martin’s house with no sign of recognition, and kept going, past the intersection that divided the blocks around the playground from the area I had just visited: he planned to confront the colonel. He began to drive faster, consumed by a need to fight back against the man who had manipulated him into taking Tyler Matthews, and sought to orchestrate their dual ruin for his gratification.
He parked his car a quarter mile away from the colonel’s house, walking quickly past the handful of homes on the block. Each one looked deserted under the night sky. This was not a neighborhood where you moved to be neighborly. This was where you lived when you wanted to be left alone.
The colonel’s van was parked in the driveway near the ramp that led to the entrance door. Lights were on at the back of the house. The colonel was in his computer room, removing evidence before detectives arrived to search the KinderWatch files.
The man glanced toward the lit windows, confirmed the colonel was inside, and got to work. He took a coil of wire from the bag that held his drugstore purchases and wrapped wire tightly around the doorknob to the house, twisting and doubling back repeatedly. He then wound it around the railings of the ramp, over and over, snaking it up support beams and the handrail until a spiderweb of wire stretched from the edge of the ramp to the front door handle, cinching it firmly in place.
The colonel was trapped inside with no way to open his front door. If he pulled on it from the inside, he’d only tighten the wire that now bound it shut.
The man pulled keys from a pocket of his jeans and walked to the side door of the garage. He let himself in with an ease that told me he lived at this house with the colonel. In what kind of relationship, I did not know, but he knew his way around. I waited outside, one eye on the strange little boy with the vacant eyes; he had appeared at the house behind me. He was barely visible in the dark, yet I knew he was there. He was not done with the man who had taken Tyler Matthews. His need for vengeance hummed inside like a motor. He wanted to see it done.
The man emerged from the garage holding a can of gasoline. He ducked behind the house, and I followed. Quietly, without so much as a scrape, he rolled the gas grill on the back stoop closer to the back door and wedged it firmly against the frame. He poured gasoline beneath the propane tanks, soaking the wood until saturated, and then pouring even more until it formed a puddle. Done with that task, he began to splash gasoline against the wooden frame of the house, avoiding the brick foundation so he would not waste a drop. He worked with a fierce efficiency. His mind was blank, but his body burned with intensity, as if his need to avenge all he had suffered and all he had lost at the colonel’s hands had transmuted itself into a physical need.
When he ran out of gasoline, he siphoned more from the tank of the colonel’s van, kneeling in the dark and using tubing from the garage. His moves were so confident that I knew he had performed the same task many times before. I picked up on a sudden memory of his. He was kneeling beside a car on a blazing afternoon, surrounded by the desert sands and flat mountains of the Southwest, pouring stolen gas into the tank of a sedan while the colonel waited impatiently behind the steering wheel. It was a glimpse of what his life had been like as the colonel’s companion, probably moving from town to town, evading the police, sometimes hungry and living on the edge of poverty, sometimes prosperous with a profitable scam like KinderWatch to support them. But always completely under the colonel’s control, every movement dictated by his desires, as years of abuse crawled by.
His gas can refilled, the man set to work again, methodically soaking the sides of the house, not even hesitating when he was beneath the windows of the room where the colonel was transferring files onto storage drives and deleting the originals from his system, completely unaware that his victim had turned predator and was creating a hell here on earth, one designed to trap him.
There was nothing I could do. I had no power to stop the man from carrying out his plan. Nor did I know which side represented good in this battle. What do you do when evil is avenged? How do you justify stopping a force when it has rightly turned and is heading straight for those who created it in the first place? Besides, I could feel a new emotion stirring beneath the fury that drove the man to torch the colonel alive. It was a pain as deep and eternal as the oceans, with a power that ripped at his soul, leaving gashes that I knew could never be repaired. The terrible memories of his existence with the colonel tumbled over me now, flooding my mind with images so vile and emotions so painful that I thought I might combust and start the inferno myself.
How can I judge this man, so filled with pain, and say he is not entitled to revenge?
He pulled a pack of cigarettes from the drugstore bag and began to methodically light them one by one, placing each lit cigarette on the rim of the brick foundation where it met the clapboard frame. He started at the end of the house near the entrance door, as far from the colonel as he could get. Each time he laid a cigarette in place, he dragged a finger across the gasoline-soaked walls and then lightly tapped the barrel of the cigarette, as if he were anointing it. By the time he had finished with two walls, the house had begun to burn, the fingerprint of gasoline flaring and flickering up to join with the fuel-soaked wall above it. Once the first spark flared, the fire took on a life of its own, racing upward toward the roof and rimming the house itself in a ring of fire as precise as if Lucifer himself had dragged a finger around the house, leaving a trail to hell itself in his wake.
The little boy who had urged on this destruction stood at the edge of the fire, his flat eyes reflecting the dancing flames. His face was solemn and his thirst for revenge satisfied. He had done what he had come to do.
His job finished, the man who had taken Tyler Matthews stood by the colonel’s van, took out his cell phone, and calmly dialed a number. I could hear it ringing nearby. A curtain at the back of the house flickered and the colonel’s worried face peered out into the darkness as he held his cell phone to his ear. He saw the flames licking at the edges of his window and shrank back in fear. “What have you done?” he cried into the phone as he placed a palm against the window glass and snatched it away, feeling the heat.
The man’s answer was serene: “You said tonight was the night I would become a man,” he told the colonel. “That I would know what to do once I started.” He paused, struggling to maintain his control. “You were right. I know now what I have to do. I hope you burn in hell.”
The man held his phone down by his side but did not disconnect it. The colonel punched wildly at the keypad on his phone, trying to sever the connection so he could call for help. With no signs of worry about being detected, the man stood only a few feet away from the house, watching the fire grow with a detached satisfaction. Suddenly, flames swept up the near side of the house in a swoop, as if someone had pulled a blanket of fire over it. Thick smoke rose from the other side, where the flames had sought and found more gasoline. It was astonishing how quickly the fire consumed the house and how little time the colonel had for escape.
I walked into the fire.
I knew the flames could not hurt me. More than that, I knew I needed to witness the colonel’s suffering. I had long sought redemption, and I had never pursued vengeance against others, knowing it would threaten that redemption. But if I hoped to understand the mysteries of my lonely existence, I knew it was imperative I acknowledge the vast power of evil every bit as much as I acknowledged the power of good.
The colonel had thrown his phone on the floor and was wheeling toward the front door, his elbows pumping in his frenzy. He skidded to a halt, turned the dead bolt key, and tugged. The door did not give an inch as the wires binding it from the outside held firm. The colonel screamed in rage but did not waste any more time trying to force the door. The air was heavy with a thick, black smoke that reeked of burning wood and melting plastic. As the colonel began to choke on the noxious fumes, he wheeled to the kitchen sink, soaked a dishtowel, and placed it over his mouth. The air was so black with smoke that I could barely see him as he wheeled frantically back down the hall toward the narrower back door. Hands trembling, he fumbled with the lock and pulled it open, only to find the way blocked by the massive gas grill. It did not stop the colonel. He launched himself out of his wheelchair and through the door, hitting the grill with a thud. It toppled over and the propane tanks landed squarely in the puddle of gasoline. He tried to drag himself forward, but the ring of fire had snaked around the corner of the house and was headed for the back stoop. The colonel smelled his hands and looked down at his now-soaked clothing, realizing what was happening. He crawled away from the grill, but the flames were upon him. It was too late. With a massive boom, the tanks exploded, the percussive wave bouncing off the brick foundation and lifting the colonel into the air. He was covered in flames now, his clothing soaked with the fuel that had been splashed around the deck. His body catapulted upward like a fireball, cleared the back stairs, and hit the concrete of the pool deck. Screaming with agony, the colonel writhed back and forth, trying to roll toward the pool, his body consumed by flames.
I saw them then—black shapes that might have been shadows from the flames dancing over the rippling, blue surface of the pool, or maybe shadows inspired by the wind that had sprung up inexplicably and was feeding the fire, causing the tree limbs to dance as if they were celebrating the death of evil. Except that the dark shapes snaking toward him were not shadows. They had a power of their own. Grasping, almost liquid black wisps were surrounding the colonel, undulating beside his burning body, inching closer and closer, as if hungry to drink from his suffering. He was screaming in fury now, his pain secondary to the rage he felt that his control had been overcome. The colonel cursed and threatened the young man who had taken Tyler Matthews with punishment, as if he could sense that the man now stood, only a few yards away, watching his torment with aloof curiosity.
Someone was standing only a few yards away, watching with aloof curiosity—the little boy apparition. His head was cocked and he had his hands on his hips, legs planted wide, as he watched the colonel writhing in agony. Satisfied with what he saw, he turned and disappeared into the shadows. I was not sorry to see him go.
Sirens howled in the distance, drawing closer. The colonel heard them despite his screams, and it gave him strength. He twisted and rolled, leaving a trail of flames behind him as he cleared the concrete lip of the pool and fell in with a splash. The dark shadows that had surrounded him now flowed over the surface of the pool like black water snakes, seeking a hold until, thwarted, they fizzled and disappeared. The colonel sank to the bottom of the pool, a black cocoon of burnt flesh and tattered cloth, then struggled toward the surface again, unrecognizable as anything human, his mouth little more than a bloodred hole in a mass of blackened flesh, gasping for air.
The man who had set the fire still did not move. He stood holding the can of gasoline, watching the colonel struggle. He did not care whether the colonel lived or died. It was his suffering that had been the point. Finally, job done, he placed the empty gas can inside the door of the garage and started down the driveway.
He had made his escape too late. Fire engines were pulling up in front of the colonel’s house, followed by a squadron of department cars. Notified by an alert dispatcher, the abduction team was flocking to the scene. They knew that the fire roaring out of control in front of them had to be connected to the disappearance of Tyler Matthews. They’d recognized the colonel’s address, and there were no coincidences in their world.
Maggie and Calvano were among the first to arrive. Whatever they had discovered on the computer files that Robert Michael Martin had brought them, they now knew the colonel was part of the abduction plan.
“Oh, god,” Maggie cried as she raced across the front lawn. “Do you think he had the boy in the basement?”
“I should have run his background,” Calvano said, his face stricken. He looked like he was getting ready to dive into the flames and search for Tyler Matthews himself.
A detective I did not recognize pulled Calvano back. “Get back,” he said. “Let the firemen do their job.” Even as he spoke, more fire trucks roared around a corner and in a squeal of brakes and grinding metal more men jumped from the trucks and uncoiled hoses, forming teams and shouting their strategy for stopping the inferno.
Maggie was staring at the fire, cheeks wet with tears, certain Tyler Matthews was inside. In the red light of the fire, she looked as holy as a Madonna in a medieval painting. Calvano was beside himself, pacing back and forth a few yards away, muttering that his carelessness in not questioning the colonel’s credentials had almost certainly caused the young boy’s death. “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” he kept repeating until Maggie, at last, noticed.
“Stop it, Adrian,” she ordered him. “You weren’t calling the shots. It’s not your fault. And we don’t know anything yet. The boy may not be inside.”
“I had to let some loser like that Martin guy do my job for me,” Calvano said in disbelief. “I should have checked the hard drives myself. I should have picked up that something was off about the guy. I don’t even know if he was really paralyzed. Oh my god, I’ve been so stupid.”
“You aren’t the only one who dropped the ball,” Maggie said. “Pull yourself together before Gonzales gets here.”
Calvano could not let it go. He paced restlessly toward the house and then darted up the driveway.
He came face to face with the man who had taken Tyler Matthews.
The man darted to the side, trying to outrun Calvano. Calvano grabbed at him, missed, and took after him a few steps too late. The man was far faster and was down the driveway in seconds, heading toward the neighbor’s yard.
“Stop or I’ll shoot!” Calvano cried, pulling his gun.
Maggie whirled around at the sound of Calvano’s voice. “Wait!” she called to him, but it was too late. As the man disappeared into the darkness of the yard next door, Calvano fired, once, twice, and then one more time, as if his hand was no longer under his control and his adrenaline had made him reckless.
“Adrian!” Maggie screamed as she ran to him. She carefully lowered his hands and pried the gun from his grasp.
“It’s him,” Calvano croaked. “It’s the guy who took Tyler Matthews. I looked him square in the face. He looks exactly like the sketch. It’s him.”
Maggie sprinted toward the side yard where the man had disappeared. He lay across the concrete of the neighbor’s driveway, sprawled facedown, his T-shirt soaked with blood. Two bullets had entered his body through his back.
“Oh, no,” Maggie said. She barked into her radio. “I need a bus now. Hurry. Critical witness down.” She gave the address and knelt beside the injured man, placing her fingers to his neck. “Stay with me,” she told him. She probed his injuries gently with her fingers and then rolled him so that he was staring up at the stars. His face was blank, his eyes closed, his life force fading to black as steadily as a twilight sky.
“Oh my god,” Maggie said. “He’s just a kid. He can’t be more than twenty.”
Calvano stood behind her, looking down, dumbfounded, as if not quite believing that he had caused such damage. “Is it him?” he asked. “The guy who took the kid?”
“If it is,” Maggie said angrily, “you better hope to God he lives. If Tyler Matthews wasn’t inside that house—and let’s pray he wasn’t—then this man is the only one on this earth who knows where the kid is. He’s got to stay alive so he can tell us.”