Son of Destruction

44




Dan


Rushing out of the Flordana, overcharged and crackling with frustration, Dan feels like a fugitive from the static Fort Jude Sunday afternoon. In Grammy’s room, in the Flordana coffee shop, he turned into a convict in a holding pen, waiting for – helicopter rescue? Darkness, so he could swarm over the wall and escape?

The key, he realizes. Jessie Vukovich told her story, liberating him. He drives through the soft Florida night like a death-row murderer with a last minute reprieve. He is going to confront the man Lucy sent him all this way to meet. He knows she did: the whole jewel box thing, the contents she left behind like a message to him. The thump between his shoulder blades. He finds certain details encoded. How could she not want this?

He isn’t sure how the encounter with the father will end, but tonight by God he will end it.

Darkness changes everything. By day Coral Shores looks orderly and civilized, bisected by the boulevard, with neat cross streets intersecting. It looks like a grid, but only to outsiders. At night it turns into a warren. Coordinates keep sliding around, defying his GPS. In a better world it would be a straight shot to the peninsula, but in a community committed to privacy no road is straight and nothing is clear-cut. The route Dan mapped so carefully sends him down identical side streets that turn suddenly, looping back to Coral Boulevard, unless they dead-end at a stand of trees or dump him at the edges, stymied by yet another private driveway to a protected house with its private waterfront. At night all these houses look alike; every tree on Coral Shores looks like every other tree and landmarks repeat themselves so he can never be sure whether he has been this way before.

In the dark on Coral Shores nothing is as advertised, and to make things worse he almost sideswiped a stranger’s heavy car the last time he went around that circle and discovered it was the same old circle all over again.

He’s pissed off at himself for being careless and for getting lost, and he is even more pissed because angry as he is, Dan is torn. Where he grew up hoping for better – forget Jor-El, he thinks bitterly. Werewolf is more like it, if werewolves have were-children, which would explain a few things.

This is the hell of it, then. All his life Dan has traveled on the knowledge that the man he looks like – who looks like him! – is out there, a loving stranger built from the same genetic material as him, blood and bone, fiber and mysterious power, but now . . . He’s not searching for his father the defrocked superhero, he is tracking a monster.

In a way, he’s grieving for the myth. Dan’s last remaining suspect was never a brave prisoner of war, government witness, valiant secret agent under deep cover. It’s hard, letting go of the idea of his father as a silent hero walking out of his only son’s life for good and compelling reasons. Heroic elements like honor, valor, duty did not call his real dad to serve just when he most needed him. Those are stories unhappy kids tell themselves so they can keep on going just like all the other kids.

Now, in the realm of suspects Kalen looks like the biodad. The father Dan is tracking tonight turns out to be a drunken ape who beats the women he forces into sex. Or, and this is what troubles him. Destroys them. The template he appears to be modeled on is all that and, worse: he doesn’t even know what the f*cker looks like.

Like me? He says through locked teeth, ‘I don’t think so.’

When he finds Kalen, he’ll drag the designated father-to-be outside and beat him with a tire iron, one lick for every soul he’s ruined or betrayed, including Lucy’s, One lick for every year he stole from my life. Unless all he wants is to get him down and beat the truth out of him – whatever it is. F*ck knows there are questions. F*ck knows the bastard deserves it. But even though he’s rigid with anger, a vulnerable part of Dan is in stasis, poised for the exculpating ‘Father!’ ‘Son!’ moment in which things are made right and everything is explained.

A crazy thing to expect. Kalen, in extremis, yacking up truth?

F*ck! Wrong turn.

Question. Is Kalen also a murderer? The thought darts across his mind like a spray of sparks running along a fuse. What if he torched old lady Archambault?

F*ck! Another wrong turn. F*ck! Another question.

Did he?

Wrong turn . . .

He has to wonder: wrong question?

A voice he barely recognizes fills the car. ‘A*shole, what do you want here?’ Yes he is shouting.

Not knowing makes him even angrier.

When he gets to the house he’ll break in and pounce, drag Kalen out into the street and then he will . . . Imagination betrays him. Father! Son! What would that be like? It makes him shudder.

Whatever Bradley J. Kalen is to him, whatever the gross, rotting brute of a rapist says or does or denies doing when he confronts him, He is no father to me. I will not have it. OK then, he thinks, smoking with fury. When you get to the house, smash the lock and yank him out the door no questions, no explanations, and when you drag your quarry into the light, take your long look into its face, God knows you’ve been waiting long enough. Then beat the crap out of him.

Roaring with frustration, he shouts, ‘If I can find the f*cking place!’