on them. Rainey knew that Martin was crazy, but Martin would be fixated on other enemies had Paul not put him away. Could it be that the injuries Martin’s gunners had given Paul might be sufficient to allow him relief from further vengeance? A worthless left hand, one eye, a permanent limp? Not hardly.
Paul should have killed Martin, Rainey thought, or at least gone along with letting the DEA do it. But Paul had refused for reasons of his own. Perhaps he simply hadn’t had the courage. It was cowardly to let the law handle it- put Martin in jail. As if a jail might hold the man! Fuck! When Rainey allowed his mind to run this trail, it became dark, and he was truly haunted, enraged that Paul was alive while his own family wasn’t. He would trade Paul’s troubles for his own in a heartbeat, he decided. Even given the pains Paul had suffered, he was the luckiest man alive. Such tormenting thoughts made Rainey have to fight to keep from seeing Paul and Martin in the same light.
He thought a great deal about the message he had received the night after Doris and George’s funeral. He had been staying in a motel room because he’d had no intention of sleeping in an empty house. Two of his agents had insisted on guarding his room. That night he had let the agency’s real doctor give him a shot, but sleep was slow in coming. Before he’d dozed off, the Episcopal minister who had performed the funeral service had talked the agents into allowing him into the room, and he’d tried to talk to Rainey about God’s plan. Rainey had known the minister meant well, but he had exploded. “Fuckin’ get out before I kill you!” he’d railed at the frightened man in the collar. “No God who lets a madman slaughter my wife and children is worth talking about! Get out!” Then he had grabbed up the minister and thrown him into the hallway, where he’d hit the opposite wall and landed on all fours. The two agents standing there outside the door had been shocked beyond words, seemingly frozen in midthought like department-store mannequins. The minister had cowered, covering his face with the sleeve of his coat.
“No more visitors,” he had said matter-of-factly. Inside he’d been boiling, but at the height of his rage he would, as often as not, calm outwardly even as the temperature inside him soared. Had he been armed, he might well have emptied the gun into the preacher.
The minister had not returned, nor had the guards tried to gain entrance. Rainey had taken the Bible, which the preacher had dropped onto the bed, and hurled it against the wall. “Give me back my family, God. Or leave me alone!” he had yelled. Then, remembering how much religion, and that poor minister, had meant to Doris, he had cried himself to sleep.
Later, after sleep had enveloped him, he had distinctly heard Doris calling, and he had awakened from the first sleep since the night before George and Doris had died. Doris had been standing beside the motel room’s bed in her gown, and she’d been crying luminous tears.
“Rainey. I can’t find them,” she had said. “Where are our babies?”
Rainey had felt a great conflict of emotions. Fear was not among them. He had held out his arms and Doris had slipped into them, and the great void of emptiness had been lifted from his heart and he had wept tears of joy. He had felt her moist face against his chest, and he had tried to console her by rubbing her hair. “It’ll be all right, baby,” he’d said through the free-flowing tears. “You’ll see, we’ll find them. We’ll get them back.”
She had cried. “There’s nothing out there, Rainey. Nothing but voices in the dark. Rainey, I’m so afraid and it’s so cold.”
“We just have to keep looking. Want me to come with you?”
“Rainey. The voices say that none of us can be together until the circle is closed.”
“Until what? I don’t understand.”
“The book will tell you,” she’d said. “Please, I need my babies.”
Then she was gone, and his arms had closed around nothing. She had been there, he had smelled her perfume, her breath had been warm against his chest. He was wide-awake and had not imagined it. It had been as real as anything he had ever experienced.
He had turned on the light, and the Bible had been opened on the floor. He had slid from the bed and crawled to the book. He’d touched it, and it had been hot as a coal. He’d withdrawn his hand and then touched it again. Pages had turned slowly and then stopped at a place where the minister had drawn a box about a series of lines. Numbers 35:18–19. Rainey’s blood had frozen as he’d read.
“… the murderer shall be put to death. The avenger of blood, when he meets the murderer of his own, shall put him to death.”
It was God’s judgment. There was no forgiveness for Rainey, nor would his family’s souls be joined, until Martin was dead.
And while Rainey had studied the Bible, he’d had another verse stick in his mind. It had dealt with Paul’s allowing a man like Martin to live with a hate burning inside him. A hate that would have to come back a thousand times stronger and blacker when it fermented.
Exodus 22:6.
“When fire breaks out and catches in thorns so that the stacked grain or the standing grain or the neighboring field is consumed, he who kindled the original fire must pay for the damage.”
19
The cougar stood contemplating Paul, her big brown eyes locked on his. Then she sprang, leaping easily over his head and hitting the steep trail ten feet behind him. Paul turned and watched her lope off, disappearing into a wall of thick mist. He didn’t feel fear; he was instead filled with an overwhelming sense of sadness and loss.
Paul awoke disoriented and encased in that sadness. He lay frozen in the hotel room’s bed until reality set in. It was after four A.M. according to his Rolex, and even though he had been asleep for only three hours he knew he wouldn’t be going back to sleep. He climbed out of bed and sat naked in the chair nearby while he thought. The weight of the past few days and the days ahead were overwhelming him.
Paul stood up and looked at his body, which was lit by the small amount of light that found its way in from the street through the sheers.
What if I fail? The answer was easy. If I fail, they will die. If I am wrong on any assumption, misjudge one piece of evidence, or misinterpret any action by this lunatic, they will die as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow. Martin doesn’t care about anything except punishing me. I can’t ever lose track of that. This is only about Martin and me. The rest, including Thorne’s, Joe’s, and Rainey’s dead families, is all window dressing.
Paul was plagued by doubt. He knew he was too far from the action, but he was afraid to move closer for now. He wished he knew if it was fear of his family’s rejection, of their judgment, or fear that he would fail because he wasn’t up to the task. He hadn’t had one night’s uninterrupted sleep since he had left the mountain.
He even worried that he was not as worried as he should be, or not about the right things. For instance, he didn’t want to face a decision on Rainey’s mental state, in particular his ability to make judgments-his grasp on reality. It was entirely possible that Rainey’s mind was a deep and dark place filled with twisting serpents. Sometimes Paul saw things reflected in Rainey’s eyes that alarmed him. A shallowness to them, a lack of emotion that didn’t make sense; he had to be boiling inside. And he was turning into something of a religious fanatic, reading the Bible constantly. On the other hand, he rarely mentioned what he was reading. What was the man thinking?
Problems demanded decisions, and he hoped he was making them as fast as he needed to. He didn’t feel the conviction that he had found so natural before the Miami incident. Oddly, no one seemed to notice what a mess he was inside. Maybe the mask was holding up, or maybe that just spoke volumes about other people’s needs.
The man in the mirror held his attention as the light and shadow acted in concert to take his body back six years. The diffused light softened and hid the scars; the light defined the bulk, outlined the body. His face, the right side deep in shadow, appeared normal. But he knew that if he turned on the lamp, he would see the mutilated stranger he had faced every day for six years. Martin did this to me. He knew that he should blame Martin for what he had lost, but he didn’t. He had thought he hated the man. He had spent a lot of the past six years brooding over Martin. But no matter how he tried, he did not hate Martin. Despite everything the man had done, what he felt was more pity than hatred.
Paul remembered dreaming of the cougar. He had been climbing up the side of a mountain and had come face-to-face with her. He should have been afraid but wasn’t. Awake, he knew where the dream had come from. As a boy of eight or ten, Paul had accompanied Aaron and a hunting party of some neighbors who had set out to kill a
