He glanced her way and seemed to catch the fear and apprehension in her eyes. Then she touched her nose. Alex waited for the cop to draw closer to him, and his expression told her he’d caught the same scent in the air she had.
Sam looked back toward where she’d found the bodies of An and Li Chin, goose bumps prickling her flesh and a chill riding up her spine. When she turned around again, the other cops had all returned, seemingly at once, and were lined up in a kind of semicircle behind the lead one. He touched his nose, just as Sam had to signal Alex.
“I see you remember me,” he said to Sam. “That’s too bad.”
30
REAPPEARANCES
“THIS DOESN’T HAVE TO be difficult,” the lead cop continued, turning toward Alex, who, like Sam, was frozen in shock. “Cooperate with us and we’ll let the girl live.”
“Who the hell are you?” Alex managed, hands tightening into fists by his sides.
“Your family, so to speak. Your real family.”
“Where are my parents? What’d you do to them?”
“We hoped this wouldn’t be necessary.…”
Alex started forward but stopped quickly, thinking better of it. “I want to know where my mother and father are.”
The man blinked robotically. “Right over there,” he said, gesturing with his eyes.
Sam turned with Alex, both of them laying eyes on the Chins lying just where she’d seen them before, as if they’d reappeared out of nowhere. The blood was back too, though no message remained written in it that she could discern.
Alex rushed to his parents, his mother first because she seemed, incredibly, to still be clinging to life.
“Mom … Mom!”
Sam tried to make sense of what was happening, what she was seeing. She felt light-headed, almost like she was going to pass out. The living room started to spin softly around her. She reached down and groped for a nearby table to steady herself.
Alex rose from a crouch by his mother’s side. “You guys aren’t real cops.”
No response.
“I’m calling the real cops,” he resumed, moving for the phone.
Alex picked up the receiver. No dial tone. Dead. Set it back down as Sam watched, remembering how her own phone had stopped working. Neat trick, sure. But how had this guy managed to make the bodies of Alex’s parents appear again out of nowhere? And what had happened to the message scrawled in blood?
“Who are you?” Alex asked, a few graceful strides placing him closer to the man, with only the coffee table separating them.
“We already told you that.”
“No, you didn’t. You’re not my family.”
“In a manner of speaking, we are. We have our orders. You must come with us, Alex.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you.”
“You don’t have a choice.”
“Try me, bitch,” Alex said, looking just as he did before laying into a rival player with a bone-crunching tackle from his safety position.
The man looked toward Sam while the eyes of the other fake cops, or whatever they were, remained fixed forward, resolutely emotionless. Sam realized the corrosive smell of something almost hot enough to burn had grown stronger. And now one of the fake cops had frozen in place, a hand stretched out before him as if he’d been reaching for something, his eyes dark and lifeless.
“This is for your own good,” the lead cop was saying. “You don’t belong here, with them.”
“With who? What the hell are you talking about?”
And then Sam realized Alex had positioned himself just over where he’d laid the tire iron down atop the coffee table.
“We’ve been looking for you a long time. Eighteen years. Your entire life. You belong with us.”
“Us as in who? You’re not cops and I want to know who you are and what you’re doing here. Why’d you hurt my parents?”
“You must come with us, Alex.”
“That sounded like an order.”
“You have no choice.”
“Yes, I do.”
And then Alex was in motion, like this was football, playing a game. The tire iron was resting on the coffee table and then it was in his hand, coming up overhead as he launched himself airborne over the table, bringing the tire iron downward at the same time.
Thwack!
The tire iron struck home, mashing what should’ve been flesh and skull. Only, the sound and feeling were more like metal on metal, steel on steel. The head he’d struck whipsawed to the side, canting as if on a piston. Alex glimpsed a huge dent, a divot dug into the spot where skin and blood should have been. The head snapped back, the depression remaining in place like a car dent.
“Alex!”