“Wesley,” he said.
“What about him? Doctor? What about him?”
He slapped the seat console several times. He slapped the dashboard. He slapped the wheel. He reached into the inside pocket of his suit jacket and removed a plastic bag. It was wrapped up tight so that it was the shape of a cigar when he pulled it out, but then he held it aloft, and the bag unfurled, and I saw what was trapped inside and I felt the hissing of the night’s heat on the back of my skull.
A finger.
“It’s his,” Christopher Dawe said. “Wesley’s. He sent it to me this afternoon. He said…he said…he said unless I delivered the money to a rest stop on Route Three, he’d send me a testicle next.”
“Which rest stop?”
“Just before the Marshfield exit, heading south.”
I glanced at the bag. “How do you know it’s your son’s?”
He screamed, “He’s my son!”
I lowered my head for a moment, swallowed. “Yes, sir, but how are you sure?”
He shoved the bag in my face. “See? See the scar over the knuckle?”
I looked. It was faint but unmistakable. It perforated the lines over the knuckle like a small asterisk.
“See it?”
“Yes.”
“It’s the imprint of a Phillips-head screw. Wesley fell in my workshop when he was young. He embedded the screw head into his knuckle, shattered the bone.” He hit my face with the bag. “My son’s finger, Mr. Kenzie!”
I didn’t lean back from the slap of the bag. I held his wild eyes, willed mine to be calm, flat.
After a while, he removed the bag, rolled it back up very carefully, and placed it back inside his suit pocket. He sniffed, wiped at the wetness on his face. He stared out the windshield at Bubba’s van.
“I want to die,” he said.
“That’s what he wants you to feel,” I said.
“Then he’s succeeded.”
“Why not call in the police?” I said, and he began to violently shake his head. “Doctor? Why not? You’re willing to come clean on what you did with Naomi when she was a baby. We know who’s behind this now. We can nail him.”
“My son,” he said, still shaking his head.
“Could already be dead,” I said.
“He’s all I have. If I lose him because I called the police, I will die, Mr. Kenzie. Nothing will hold me back.”
The first drops of rain found my head as I crouched by the car door and looked in at Christopher Dawe. It wasn’t a refreshing rain, though. It was warm as sweat and oily with humidity. It felt dirty in my hair.
“Let me stop him,” I said. “Give me the bag in the trunk, and I’ll bring your son home alive.”
He leaned one arm over the driver’s wheel, turned his head to me. “Why should I trust you with five hundred thousand dollars?”
“Five hundred thousand?” I said. “That’s all he asked for?”
He nodded. “It’s all I could lay my hands on with such short notice.”
“Doesn’t that tell you something?” I asked. “The short notice, his willingness to settle for far less than he originally asked? He’s in a rush, Doctor. He’s burning his bridges and cutting his losses. You go to that rest stop, you’ll never see your house, your office, the inside of this car, again. And Wesley will die, too.”
He dropped his head back into the seat, stared up at the ceiling.
The rain fell harder, but not in drops so much as strips, sheer ropes of warm water that bled down the inside of my shirt.
“Trust me,” I said.
“Why?” His eyes remained on the ceiling.
“Because…” I wiped the rain from my eyes.
He turned his head. “Because why, Mr. Kenzie?”
“Because you’ve paid for your sins,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
I blinked at the rain and nodded. “You’ve paid, Doctor. You did a terrible thing, but then she fell through the ice, and first your son and now Pearse have tortured you for ten years. I don’t know if that’s enough justice for God, but it’s enough for me. You’ve done your time. You’ve had your hell.”
He groaned. He ground the back of his head into the seat rest. He watched the rain cascade down his windshield.
“It’s never enough. It’s never going to end. The pain.”
“No,” I said. “But he will. Pearse will.”
“What?”
“End, Doctor.”
He stared at me for a long time.
Then he nodded. He opened his glove box and pressed a button and the trunk popped open.
“Take the bag,” he said. “Pay the debt. Do whatever you have to do. But bring my son home, won’t you?”
“Sure.”
I started to rise and he put a hand on my arm.
I bent back into the window.
“I was wrong.”
“About what?”
“Karen,” he said.
“In what way?”
“She wasn’t weak. She was good.”
“Yeah, she was.”
“That might be why she died.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Maybe this is how God punishes the bad,” he said.
“How’s that, Doctor?”
He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. “He lets us live.”
35
Christopher Dawe drove home to his wife with instructions to pack a bag and check into the Four Seasons, where I’d reach him when this was over.
“Whatever you do,” I said before he drove off, “don’t answer either your cell phone, your pager, or your home phone.”
“I don’t know if-”
I held out my hand. “Give me them.”
“What?”
“Your cell phone and your pager. Now.”
“I’m a surgeon. I-”
“I don’t care. This is your son’s life, not a stranger’s. Your phone and pager, Doctor.”
He didn’t like it, but he handed them over, and we watched him drive away.
“The rest stop’s bad,” Bubba said once I climbed in his van. “There’s no way to guess at his defenses. I like Plymouth.”
“But the place in Plymouth’s probably a lot more heavily fortified,” Angie said.
He nodded. “Predictably, though. I know where I’d put the trip wires if I was in for the long haul. The rest stop, though?” He shook his head. “I can’t deal with him if he’s improvising. It’s too risky.”
“So we go to Plymouth,” I said.
