defend himself. He rolled onto his back and started kicking at Justin’s hands. Justin swatted the man’s shoes away and made a few crazed stabs at his legs.
Barwick called out, “Justin, what’s happening?” Her voice stopped Justin in the middle of his assault. The most important thing was to protect her. She was the one putting her online life at risk. Cocky again, Justin grabbed the shovel and retreated between the trucks, back toward her voice. “Fuck you, Coyne!” Justin called out over his shoulder, for no reason but to make the lunatic aware they knew his name. “Go to hell!”
On the blue tarp, blood beginning to ooze from underneath it, Barwick looked up with a start when she heard Justin approach. He knelt beside her and took her hands in his, and she turned his left one over and started at the open wound.
“We need to get to a hospital,” she said.
Justin shook his wrist. “Naw, I’m fine. It’s just a game.”
“I mean for me,” she said. She pointed to the shovel in his hands. “While you were blinded, he smacked me with that thing.” Sally lifted her hair and on her finely rendered temple Justin could see a large bruise growing toward her eye.
“All right,” he said. “We should get out of here now. I lost sight of him, but he could try to cut us off.” He held out the knife. “Can you hold this? Or wave it around, anyway? Look menacing?” She wanted to stab Justin with it, to tell the truth. Justin had saved her with that blind tackle, but it was his insane scheming that had put her in danger in the first place. What the hell had she been thinking? And they weren’t out of it yet. She tapped her bruise with the handle of the knife and the pain meter shot to life. She might have a concussion.
Practically hanging from his shoulder with one hand and making a conspicuous presentation with the blade in the other, Sally and Justin walked out of the garage the way they’d come in. Neither mentioned to the other how relieved and disturbed they were that Coyne didn’t show himself again.
– 78 -
Joan felt Davis come to bed late, after midnight, and he settled inertly and heavily into the left side, his side, as if eased there by a dockside crane. She recognized the sigh, the murmur, the groan, and knew he wasn’t coming to sleep, but only to seek refuge from being tired, from the thing that was causing him stress and unhappiness. Oddly, even though the place he chose to hide was only inches away – was, in fact, the very spot on which they had made love countless times before and since their wedding day – she was convinced the thing he no longer wanted to face was their marriage.
She stretched an arm across his thickening belly nevertheless. “What is it?” she said.
“I’ve been keeping something from you.”
Oh God.
“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t know what you’d say. How you’d react. I know you thought I was past it.”
Wherever he was heading, this sounded bad. Bad for her. Bad for them.
“I know who did it,” he said. “I know who killed her.”
Awake now. Wide awake. “What are you talking about?”
“Sam Coyne. That’s his name. He killed AK. He was a boy in her class.”
In the dark, with the dense red curtains blocking the streetlamps and the moonlight, she could barely see his face, but his white hair reflected what little fluorescence there was in the room. He was staring at the ceiling and she wondered if he planned this, planned to tell her all along, if he knew she’d be awake tonight and planned to tell her, or if he was just tired, tired of not sleeping, tired of not telling. It didn’t matter much either way, now that she knew what had been bothering him.
“Do you know where he is now?”
“Chicago. He’s an attorney. Ginsburg and Addams.”
“No,” she said. “Shit.”
“No shit.”
“Honey, are you sure? How do you know?”
He inhaled a long breath, as if he had to tell the entire story before it expired. “Justin came to me.” He held up a preemptive hand. “I never called him. Hadn’t even laid eyes on him in years, but he came to me a few months ago. In the fall.” It came out then, not in one breath but in pieces and tangents and in forgotten bits where the tale had to be stopped and backstory recounted.
When it was done, he said, “I don’t know what to do, Joan.”
She pulled herself closer to him. “Can you call the police?”
“If the point is to land me in jail for fraud and genetic tampering, sure.”
“Well,” Joan said with a hopeful sigh. “This isn’t going to sound like much of an idea, but you could do nothing. You could let it go. A lot of lives have been disrupted or even ended because you started on this path. And I take responsibility for that, too. But if you really can’t get this guy without hurting anyone else – and by anyone else I mean you and me, of course, but also Justin and Martha Finn – then maybe it’s just time to walk away.”
Davis said, “That’s probably an excellent idea, Dr. Burton. But it might be out of my hands.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean the boy. He’s fixated on Coyne. I think he plans to do something. Something irrational.”
Joan was up on an elbow. “Do you think he’d kill him?”
“I don’t know. He’s convinced Coyne is the Wicker Man, and he’s trying to prove it.”
“God. I mean, do you think it’s possible? That Coyne is a serial killer?”
Davis frowned. “No. I mean, is he capable? Sure. He’s proven that. But Justin was obsessed with the Wicker Man before he even found out he was a clone. Before he found out he was cloned from Sam Coyne. In his head, he’s obviously put these things together on the flimsiest of evidence. You know, he plays that video game-”
“Shadow World.”
“Right. And like a lot of other gamers, he talks about the things that happen in Shadow World as if they actually happened, but then he’ll disclaim it and say something like, You know, it’s only a game… ”
“But you think he has a hard time distinguishing the game from reality?”
“No, I think he has a hard time distinguishing reality from the game. I think he looks at real life as if it’s some sort of contest. As if life is a puzzle to be figured out. That there’s an objective. Winners and losers. A purpose. And now he’s convinced his purpose for being here is to bring down Sam Coyne for murdering AK.”
Joan whispered, “How do you know he’s wrong?”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe there is something each of us is here for, and maybe our lives are supposed to be spent figuring out what that is. I mean really, Davis, Justin actually was created for a purpose. A very specific purpose. And you know what? That purpose was exactly what he thinks it is.”
Davis propped himself up on one arm. “Justin wasn’t created so that he could find AK’s killer. I wasn’t thinking clearly, and I shouldn’t have done it. The question is, what do I do now? What do I do with the knowledge that the monster that took my daughter from me is living it up as a partner at a prestigious law firm? How can I let that be? And what do I do about Justin? He’s my responsibility.”
Her hands wet with her husband’s sweat, Joan went to the closet for a towel, and she brought him a clean T-shirt, peeling the dirty one from his shoulders and drying him off the way a nurse would.
“We’ll figure it out,” she said. “Just promise me when this is over, whatever happens, we’ll stop keeping secrets and I’ll have you all to myself.”
Cooled as she lifted the dampness from his chest and arms, Davis smiled in the dark. “You’d be the first,” he said. “But I promise.”
– 79 -
