NOS4A2 A Novel

Real Life


VIC WOKE, AWARE THAT THE HOUR WAS LATE AND THAT SOMETHING was wrong.

She could hear voices, muted by stone and distance, could identify the speakers as male, even if she could not determine what they were saying. She smelled the faintest whiff of burned phosphorous. She had the muddled idea that she’d slept right through a commotion, sealed in the soundproofed sarcophagus fashioned by Maggie’s pharmaceuticals.

She rolled herself up to a sitting position, feeling she ought to get dressed and go.

After a few moments, she determined she was already dressed. She had not even removed her sneakers before falling asleep. Her left knee was a poisonous shade of violet and as fat as one of Lou’s knees.

A red candle burned in the darkness, reflecting an image of itself in the fish tank’s glass. There was a note over on the desk; Maggie had left her a note before going. That was thoughtful of her. Vic could see her .38-caliber paperweight, Chekhov’s gun, holding it down. Vic was hoping for instructions, a set of simple steps that would bring Wayne back to her, make her leg better, make her head better, make her life better. Barring that, just a note saying where Maggie had gone would be all right: “Ran to the Nite Owl for ramen and drugs will be right back xoxo.”

Vic heard the voices again. Someone kicked a beer can, not far away. They were moving toward her, they were close, and if she didn’t blow out the candle, they were going to wander into the old children’s wing and see the light shining through the fish tank. Even as this thought came to her, she understood that it was already almost too late. She heard glass crunching underfoot, boot heels moving closer.

She sprang up. Her knee collapsed. She dropped onto it, bit down on a scream.

When Vic tried to stand, the leg refused to cooperate. She stretched it out behind her with great care—shutting her eyes and pushing through the pain—and then dragged herself across the floor, using her knuckles and her right foot. What it saved in agony, it made up for in humiliation.

Her right hand grabbed the back of the rolling chair. Her left took the edge of the desk. She used the two to hoist herself up and sway forward over the desktop. The men were in the other room, right on the other side of the wall. Their flashlights had not yet swung toward the fish tank, and she thought it possible they had not observed the dim, coppery shine of the candle flame yet, and she bent forward to blow it out, then caught herself staring down at the note written on a sheet of Here Library stationery.

“WHEN THE ANGELS FALL, THE CHILDREN GO HOME.”

The paper was spattered with water stains, as if long ago someone had read this message and wept.

Vic heard one of the voices in the next room: Hank, we got a light. This was followed, a moment later, by a crackle of voices on a walkie-talkie, a dispatcher passing along a message in numbered code. There was a 10-57 at the public library, six officers responding, victim dead on the scene. Vic had bent to put out the candle, but “victim dead” stopped her. She leaned forward, lips pursed, but had forgotten what she’d intended to do.

The door behind her moved, wood scraping against stone, hitting some loose glass and sending it tinkling.

“Excuse me,” came the voice behind her. “Ma’am, could you step over here? Please keep your hands in full sight.”

Vic picked up Chekhov’s gun and turned around with it and pointed it at his chest. “No.”

There were two of them. Neither had his gun out, and she was not surprised. She doubted if most police officers unsnapped their holsters in the line of duty even once in an average year. Chubby white boys, the both of them. The one in front pointed a powerful penlight at her. The other was stuck in the doorway behind him, still half in the children’s library.

“Ay!” squeaked the boy with the light. “Gun! Gun!”

“Shut up. Stay where you are,” she said. “Keep your hands away from your belts. And drop that flashlight. It’s right in my f*cking eyes.”

The cop dropped it. It shut off the moment it fell from his hand, clattered across the floor.

They stood there, freckled and dumpy and scared, the candlelight rising and falling over their faces. One of them was probably coaching his son’s Little League team tomorrow. The other probably liked being a cop because it meant free milkshakes at McDonald’s. They reminded her of kids playing dress-up.

“Who’s dead?” she said.

“Ma’am, you need to put that gun down. No one wants to get hurt tonight,” he said. His voice wavered and cracked like an adolescent boy’s.

“Who?” she said, her voice choking up on her, wavering at the edge of a scream. “Your radio said someone is dead. Who? Tell me now.”

“Some woman,” said the guy in back, stuck in the doorway. The guy in front had raised his hands, palms out. She couldn’t see what the other guy was doing with his hands—probably drawing his gun—but he didn’t matter yet. He was jammed behind his partner, would have to shoot through him to get her. “No ID.”

“What color was her hair?” Vic cried.

The second man said, “Did you know her?”

“What color was her f*cking hair?”

“It had orange sprayed into it. Like, orange-soda-colored. You know her?” asked the second cop, the one who probably had his gun out.

It was difficult to work the fact of Maggie’s death into her mind. It was like being asked to multiply fractions while suffering from a head cold—too much work, too baffling. Only a moment ago, they had been stretched out on the couch together, Maggie’s arm over her waist and her legs against the backs of Vic’s thighs. The heat of her had put Vic right to sleep. It amazed Vic that Maggie had slipped off to die someplace while Vic herself slept on. It was bad enough that only a few days before, Vic had yelled at Maggie, had cursed and threatened her. This seemed far worse, graceless and inconsiderate, for Vic to sleep peacefully while Maggie died somewhere out in a street.

“How?” Vic asked.

“Car, maybe. Looks like she got clipped by a car. Jesus. Just put the gun down. Put the gun down and let’s talk.”

“Let’s not,” Vic said, and turned her head and blew out the candle, dropping all three of them into





The Dark


VIC DIDN’T TRY TO RUN. MIGHT AS WELL TRY TO FLY.

Instead she stepped rapidly backward, around the desk and against the wall, keeping the cops in front of her. The blackness was absolute, was a geography of blindness. One of the cops shouted, stumbled in the dark. There was a scuffle of boot heels. Vic believed that the one in back had pushed the other out of his way.

She tossed the paperweight. It made a banging, sliding, rattling thud as it skidded away from her across the floor. Something for them to think about, confuse them about where she was. Vic began to move, keeping the left leg stiff, trying not to put much weight on it. She sensed rather than saw an iron bookshelf on her left and slipped behind it. Somewhere in the blind nightworld, a cop knocked over the broom leaning against the wall. It fell with a bang, followed by a yelp of fright.

Her foot found the edge of a step. If you ever need to get out in a hurry, stay right and keep going down the steps, Maggie had told her, Vic couldn’t remember when. There was a way out of all this darkness, somewhere at the bottom of an unguessable number of stairs. Vic descended.

She moved in a hop, and once her heel came down on a wet, spongy book and she nearly landed on her ass. Vic fell against the wall, steadied herself, and continued. Somewhere behind her she heard shouts, more than two men now. Her breath rasped in her throat, and it occurred to her again that Maggie was dead. Vic wanted to cry for her, but her eyes were so dry they hurt. She wanted Maggie’s death to make everything quiet and still—the way it was supposed to be in a library—but instead everything was bellowing cops and whistling breath and the knocking of her own pulse.

She hopped down a last short flight of steps and saw a slash of nighttime darkness standing out against the fuller, more complete darkness of the stacks. The back door stood partly open, held ajar by a chunk of rock.

Vic slowed as she approached it, expecting to peer out and see a festival of cops in the muddy field behind the library, but when she looked, there was no one. They were all on the far, eastern side of the building. Her motorcycle stood alone, close to the bench, where she had left it. The Cedar River bubbled and churned. The Shorter Way was not there, but then she hadn’t expected it to be.

She yanked the door open and ducked out under yellow tape, holding the left leg stiff, chugging along in her crooked hop. The sound of police scanners carried on the rich, damp heat of the night. She could not see the cop cars, but one of them had its party lights on, and the strobe flashed against the low, cloudy murk above the library.

Vic climbed onto the Triumph, threw the kickstand up, stomped on the starter.

The Triumph boomed.

The rear door of the library opened. The cop who came through it—tearing down the tape as he spilled outside—had his gun in both hands, pointed at the ground.

Vic turned the Triumph in a slow, tight circle, wanting the bridge to be there, spanning the Cedar River. It wasn’t. She was cruising along at less than five miles an hour, and that simply wasn’t fast enough. She had never found the Shorter Way going so slowly. It was a matter of speed and emptiness—shutting her head off and riding.

“You! Get off the bike!” the cop yelled. He began to jog toward her, pointing his gun off to one side.

She steered the Triumph up the narrow road that ran behind the library, banged it into second gear, and gunned it up the hill. The wind snatched at her bloody, matted hair.

Vic cycled up the back road and around to the front of the building. The library fronted a wide avenue, crowded with police cruisers, the night twitching with strobes. At the sound of her engine, men in blue turned their heads to look. There was a small crowd as well, held back by yellow sawhorses, dark figures craning their necks, hoping to see a little blood. One of the cruisers was parked right across the narrow road that looped behind the library.

You’re boxed in, shithead, she thought.

She wheeled the Triumph around, back the way she had come. The Triumph dropped down the pitch of the road as if it were dropping over a cliff. She threw it into third gear, continuing to accelerate. She rushed past the library, over on her left. She dived down toward that muddy half-acre field where Maggie had been waiting for her. A cop waited there now, next to Maggie’s bench.

Vic had the Triumph up to almost forty by now. She pointed it toward the river.

“Just work, you motherf*cker,” she said. “I don’t have time for your bullshit.”

She banged it into fourth gear. Her lone headlight rushed across the blacktop, over the dirt, out onto the muddy brown turmoil of the river. She rushed toward the water. Maybe, if she were very lucky, she would drown. Better than getting fished out and locked up and knowing that Wayne was going to Christmasland and she couldn’t do a thing about it.

Vic shut her eyes and thought, F*ck it f*ck it f*ck it f*ck it. They were perhaps the only true words of prayer she had ever been able to utter with all her heart. Her ears roared with the sound of her own blood.

The bike slammed up onto the muddy ground, punched across it toward the river, and then she heard wood hammering under the tires and the bike began to slew and slip. She opened her eyes, found herself shuddering through the darkness across the rotting old boards of the Shorter Way Bridge. At the other end was only darkness. The roaring in her ears was not blood at all but static. A storm of white light whirled between the cracks in the walls. The whole lopsided bridge seemed to shudder around her under the weight of the bike.

She rushed past her old, cobwebbed Raleigh and was pitched out into damp, buggy, pine-scented darkness, her back tire clawing at soft earth. Vic planted her foot on the brake that didn’t work and grabbed reflexively at the brake that did. The bike turned sideways and slid. The ground was covered in a springy bed of moss, and the Triumph bunched it up under its tires like loose carpet.

Vic was on a slight embankment, out in the piney woods somewhere. Water dripped in the branches, although it was not actually raining. She kept the bike up while it did a sideways judder across the ground, then cut the engine, snapped down the kickstand.

She looked back into the bridge. At the far end, she could see the library and that freckled, whey-faced cop standing at the entrance to the Shorter Way. He rotated his head slowly, looking at the entrance to the bridge. In another moment he would step inside.

Vic squeezed her eyes shut and lowered her head. The left eye hurt, as if it were a metal bolt being screwed into the socket.

“Go away!” she yelled, gritting her teeth.

There was a great clap of sound, as if someone had slammed an enormous door, and a shockwave of hot air—air that smelled like ozone, like a burned metal pan—was flung out at her, almost blew over the bike, and her with it.

She looked up. At first she could not see much through the left eye. Her vision out of that eye was obscured by blurred patches, like splashes of muddy water on a window. But from the other she could see that the bridge had popped out of existence, leaving behind tall pines, the reddish trunks glistening from a recent rain.

And what had happened to the cop at the other end? Vic wondered if he’d put a foot over the threshold—or stuck in his head. What happened if some part of him was over the edge, on the bridge?

She visualized a child poking fingers under a paper cutter and then bringing the long blade down.

“You can’t do anything about that now,” she said, and shuddered.

Vic turned, taking in her surroundings for the first time. She was behind a single-story log house, light glowing in a kitchen window. Beyond it, on the other side of the cabin, was a long gravel lane leading back to a road. She had never seen the place before, but she thought she knew where she was, and in another moment she was sure. As she stood astraddle her bike, the back door opened and a small, thin man appeared behind the screen, looking up the hill at her. He had a cup of coffee in one hand. She could not see his face but recognized him by shape alone, by the tilt of his head, even though she had not seen him in more than ten years.

She was at her father’s house at last. She had given the cops the slip and made it back to Chris McQueen.





Dover, New Hampshire


A LOUD CLAP, LIKE THE WORLD’S BIGGEST DOOR SLAMMING SHUT. An electronic squeal. A deafening roar of static.

Tabitha Hutter shouted and flung her headphones down.

Daltry, sitting on her right, flinched but kept his own headphones on for a moment longer, his face screwed up in pain.

“What just happened?” Hutter asked Cundy.

Five of them were packed in the rear of a panel truck that said KING BOAR DELI on the side—fitting, considering they were jammed in like sausages. The truck was parked next to a CITGO station, across the road and a hundred feet south of the drive that led up to Christopher McQueen’s house.

They had teams in the woods, closer in to McQueen’s cabin, shooting video and using parabolic microphones to listen in. The footage and sound were being broadcast back to the truck. Until a moment ago, Hutter had been able to see the driveway on a pair of monitors, rendered in the supernatural emerald of night vision. Now, though, they showed only a blizzard of green snow.

The picture had gone out at the same time they lost their sound. One moment Hutter had been listening to Chris McQueen and Louis Carmody speaking in low voices in the kitchen. McQueen had been asking Lou if he wanted coffee. In the next instant, they were gone, replaced by a furious blast of radio hiss.

“Don’t know,” Cundy said. “Everything just went down.” He jabbed at the keyboard of his little laptop, but the screen was a smooth face of black glass. “It’s like we got hit with a motherf*cking EMP.” Cundy was funny when he swore: a dainty little black man with a piping voice and the trace of a British accent, pretending he was street instead of MIT.

Daltry tugged his own headphones off. He peeked down at his watch and laughed: a dry, startled sound that had nothing to do with amusement.

“What?” Hutter asked.

Daltry turned his wrist so she could see the face of his watch. It looked almost as old as he was, a watch with a clock face and a tarnished silver band that had probably been tinted to look like gold once upon a time. The second hand rolled around and around, moving backward. The hour and minute hands had both frozen perfectly still.

“It killed my watch,” he said. He laughed again, this time looking toward Cundy. “Did all this shit do that? All your electronics? Did all this shit just blow up and wipe out my watch?”

“I don’t know what did it,” Cundy said. “Maybe we was touched by lightning.”

“What f*cking lightning? You hear any thunder?”

“I did hear a loud clap,” Hutter said. “Just as everything cut out.”

Daltry put a hand in the pocket of his coat, tugged out his cigarettes, then seemed to remember that Hutter was sitting beside him and gave her a sidelong glance of wry disappointment. He let the pack slip back into his pocket.

“How long will it take to get video and sound restored?” Hutter asked.

“It could’ve been a sunspot,” Cundy said, as if she hadn’t spoken. “I’ve heard the sun is kicking up with a solar storm.”

“Sunspot,” Daltry said. He placed his palms together, as in prayer. “You think sunspot, huh? You know, I can just tell you went to six years of college and majored in neuroscience or something, because only a truly gifted mind could talk himself into such utter horseshit. It’s dark out, you autistic f*ck.”

“Cundy,” Hutter said, before Cundy could come around in his chair and start some kind of male dick-measuring contest. “How long before we’re back online?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Five minutes? Ten? To reboot the system? Unless there’s a nuclear war going on out there. In which case it’ll probably take longer.”

“I’ll go look for a mushroom cloud,” Tabitha Hutter said, getting up off the bench and doing a shuffling sideways walk toward the rear doors.

“Yeah,” Daltry said. “Me, too. If the missiles are flying, I want a smoke before we get wiped out.”

Hutter turned the latch, opened the heavy metal door to the damp night, and jumped down. Mist hung beneath the streetlights. The night throbbed with insect song. Across the street, fireflies lit the ferns and weeds in gassy green flashes.

Daltry lowered himself down beside her. His knees cracked.

“Christ,” he said. “I thought for sure I’d be dead of something at this age.”

His company did not cheer her but only made her more conscious of her own aloneness. Hutter had believed she would have more friends by now. The last man she’d dated said something to her, shortly before they broke up: “I don’t know, maybe I’m boring, but I never really feel like you’re there when we’re out to dinner. You live in your head. I can’t. No room for me in there. I don’t know, maybe you’d be more interested in me if I were a book.”

She had hated him at the time, and hated herself a little, but later, looking back, Hutter had decided that even if that particular boyfriend had been a book, he would’ve been one from the Business & Finance aisle and she would’ve passed him by and looked for something in SF & Fantasy.

Hutter and Daltry stood together in the almost empty parking lot. She could see into the CITGO, through the big plate-glass windows. The Pakistani behind the cash register kept flashing them nervous looks. Hutter had told him he wasn’t under surveillance, that the federal government thanked him for his cooperation, but he almost certainly believed that his phone was tapped and they were eyeing him as a potential terrorist.

“You think you should’ve gone to Pennsylvania?” Daltry asked.

“Depending on how this turns out, I might go tomorrow.”

“F*ckin’ horror show,” Daltry said.

Hutter had been getting voice mails and e-mails all night about the house on Bloch Lane in Sugarcreek. They had the place covered in a tent and you had to wear a rubber suit and a gasmask to get through the door. They were treating the joint like it was contaminated with Ebola. A dozen forensics experts were in there, state and federal, pulling the place apart. They had been excavating bones from one wall of a root cellar all afternoon. The guy who had lived there, Bing Partridge, had melted most of the remains with lye; what he couldn’t destroy he stored, much the way a bee stores honey, in little cells, lightly mudded over.

He had not gotten around to dissolving his most recent kill, a guy named Nathan Demeter from Kentucky—the corpse that Vic McQueen had mentioned on the phone. He had vanished a little more than two months ago, along with his vintage Rolls-Royce Wraith. Demeter had picked up the car in a federal auction, more than a decade before.

Its prior owner was one Charles Talent Manx, former resident at FCI Englewood in Colorado.

Demeter had mentioned Manx in the note he’d written shortly before his death by strangulation; he had misspelled the name, but it was pretty clear whom he was talking about. Hutter had seen a scan of the note, had read it herself a dozen times.

Tabitha Hutter had learned the Dewey decimal system and then organized the books in her Boston apartment according to it. She had a plastic box filled with carefully handwritten recipes, ordered by region and food type (main course, appetizers, desserts, and one category labeled “p.c.s.,” for postcoital snacks). She took private, almost guilty pleasure in defragmenting her hard drive.

She sometimes imagined her own mind as a futuristic apartment with a clear glass floor, clear glass stairs, furniture made out of clear plastic, everything seeming to float: clean, dustless, ordered.

But it wasn’t like that now, and when she tried to think about what had happened in the last seventy-two hours, she felt overwhelmed and confused. She wanted to believe that information brought clarity. Not for the first time in her life, however, she had the disconcerting notion that it was often the opposite. Information was a jar of flies, and when you unscrewed the lid, they went everywhere and good luck to you trying to round them all up again.

Hutter inhaled the mossy-smelling night, shut her eyes, and cataloged the flies:

Victoria McQueen had been abducted at age seventeen by Charles Manx, a man who had almost certainly kidnapped others. He was at that time driving a Rolls-Royce Wraith, the 1938 model. Vic got away from him, and Manx was jailed for transporting her across state lines and murdering an active-duty soldier. In another sense Vic had not escaped him at all. Like so many survivors of trauma and probable sexual assault, she was made a prisoner again and again—of her addictions, of madness. She stole things, did drugs, bore a child out of wedlock, and burned through a string of failed relationships. What Charlie Manx had not been able to do she had been trying to do for him ever since.

Manx had spent close to twenty years locked up in the FCI Englewood Supermax. After drifting in and out of a coma for most of a decade, he had died this past spring. The coroner had estimated his age at ninety—no one knew the exact number, and while he was still cogent, Manx had claimed to be a hundred sixteen years old. The body had been snatched from the morgue by vandals, creating a minor scandal, but there was no question of his death. His heart had weighed 10.2 ounces, a bit light for a man of his size. Hutter had seen a photograph of it.

McQueen claimed she’d been assaulted again, just three days ago, by Charlie Manx and a man in a gasmask, and that these men had driven off with her twelve-year-old son in the back of a vintage Rolls-Royce.

It had been reasonable to doubt her story. She’d been badly beaten—but her injuries might’ve been inflicted by a twelve-year-old struggling for his life. There were tire tracks on the lawn, but they could’ve been made by her motorcycle as easily as by a car—the soft, wet earth held no usable prints. She claimed she’d been shot at, but forensics had failed to recover a single bullet.

Also, more damningly: McQueen had secretly contacted a woman, Margaret Leigh, a heartland hooker and drug addict who seemed to have information about the missing child. When McQueen was confronted about Leigh, she fled on a motorcycle, taking nothing. And had disappeared as if she’d dropped down a mine shaft.

Ms. Leigh had been impossible to locate. She had drifted through a series of shelters and halfway houses in Iowa and Illinois, had not paid taxes or held a job since 2008. Her life had an unmistakably tragic arc: Once she had been a librarian and a beloved if eccentric local Scrabble competitor. Leigh also once held a reputation as something of an amateur psychic, of occasional use to law enforcement. What did that mean?

Then there was the hammer. The hammer had been on Hutter’s mind for days. The more she learned, the heavier that hammer weighed in her thoughts. If Vic were going to make up a story about being attacked, why not say Manx had come at her with a baseball bat, a shovel, a crowbar? Instead McQueen described a weapon that had to be a bone mallet, just like the one that had gone missing with Manx’s body—a detail that had never appeared in any news report.

Finally there was Louis Carmody, Vic McQueen’s occasional lover, father of their child, the man who had driven her away from Charlie Manx all those years ago. Carmody’s stenosis was not a put-on; Hutter had spoken to the doctor who treated him, and she had confirmed he had suffered from one, possibly two, “prestroke” events in the space of a week.

“He should not have left the hospital,” the doctor said to Hutter, as if Hutter herself were to blame for his departure. In a sense she was. “Without an angioplasty, any strain on his heart could initiate an ischemic cascade. Do you understand? An avalanche in the brain. A major infarction.”

“You’re saying he could stroke out,” Hutter said.

“At any minute. Every minute he’s out there, he’s like a guy lying down in the middle of a road. Sooner or later he will be run over.”

And still Carmody had walked out of the hospital, grabbed a cab to the train station half a mile away. There he’d bought a ticket for Boston, presumably in some half-assed attempt to throw law enforcement off, but then walked down the street to a CVS where he made a call to Dover, New Hampshire. Forty-five minutes later Christopher McQueen arrived in a pickup, and Carmody got into the passenger seat. And here they were.

“So. What do you think Vic McQueen was into?” Daltry asked.

The tip of his cigarette flared in the dark, casting an infernal light on his seamed, ugly face.

“Into?”

“She made a beeline for this guy Bing Partridge. She hunted him down to get information about her son. Which she did. She said so, didn’t she? She was obviously involved with some reprehensible shitbuckets. That’s why the kid was grabbed, don’t you think? She was being taught a lesson by her business partners.”

“I don’t know,” Hutter said. “I’ll ask her when I see her.”

Daltry lifted his head, blew smoke into the pale mist. “I bet human trafficking. Or child pornography. Hey, that makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“No,” Hutter said, and began to walk.

At first she was just stretching her legs out, restless to move. Walking helped her think. She put her hands in the pockets of her FBI windbreaker and took herself around the deli truck, down to the edge of the highway. When she looked across the road, she could see a few lights from Christopher McQueen’s house through the pines.

The doctor said that Carmody was lying in the road, waiting to get run down, but that wasn’t quite right. It was worse than that. He was strolling up the middle of the street, willfully walking right into oncoming traffic. Because there was something at this house that he needed. No, correction: that Wayne needed. It was important enough that all other considerations, including Lou’s own continued survival, could be set aside. It was there in that house. It was two hundred feet away.

Daltry caught up to her as she was crossing the road. “So what are we doing now?”

“I want to sit with one of the surveillance crews,” Hutter said. “If you’re coming, you’ll have to put out that cigarette.”

Daltry dropped it in the road and stepped on it.

When they were across the highway, they walked along the gravel margin. They were forty feet from the drive to Christopher McQueen’s cabin when a voice called.

“Ma’am?” someone said softly.

A small, stout woman in a midnight blue rain jacket stepped from under the boughs of a spruce. It was the Indian woman, Chitra. She held a long stainless-steel flashlight in one hand, but she didn’t switch it on.

“It’s me. Hutter. Who’s here?”

“Myself and Paul Hoover and Gibran Peltier.” They were one of two teams positioned in the trees, watching the house. “Something’s wrong with the equipment. The bionic dish quit. The camera won’t turn on.”

“We know,” Daltry said.

“What happened?” Chitra asked.

“Sunspot,” Daltry said.