abandoned bike — and that's when the calls started coming. You know the ones I'm talking about. 'I have Charlie and if you want to see him again put unmarked bills in a brown-paper bag on such and such a day.' 'I have Charlie and he's in a lot of pain.' Shit like that. One call came in from someplace in the Midwest — Wisconsin, I think — and that's when the feds got involved. They helped us run down all the leads. They had the manpower and the resources.
'Almost every call came from a payphone, and they were all cranks. None of 'em knew specifics about the kid or how and where he was abducted. But we had to run them down. We got a shitload more when the Rizzos went to the press — you know, try to appeal to the kidnapper. Like I said, they were all cranks. Can I ask you a personal question?'
'Go for it.'
'You married?'
'No.'
'Kids?'
'Don't have the maternal drive. That, and the fact that I'm forty now, I'm pretty sure the factory's shut down.'
'You serious with anyone?'
Darby opened her mouth, then shut it, unsure of how to answer the question. Yes, I'm in love with a guy I've known for fifteen years. There's always been an attraction between us, but I never acted on it because I didn't want the friendship to change. And just when I realized I couldn't ignore this attraction any more, he relocated to London. I haven't been over there to visit him because I'm afraid nothing more will come of it or, even worse, it will end our friendship, and, as much as I love him, I can't bear to lose that.
'There's someone in my life,' she said. 'Someone serious.'
'Good. Spend as much time with him as you can. Get married and have babies. If you can't have them, be like Angelina Jolie and adopt a whole Rainbow Coalition or whatever. That's the shit that matters. That's what haunts you at my age, all the opportunities you ignored because of the job, because the job don't mean anything in the end.'
'It matters to me.'
'Your choice. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'd like to go spend some time with my wife. At my age, I don't have much time left.'
Smith got to his feet, his knees cracking. She was staring at the wrinkles on his face, about to get up, when his head exploded.
39
It was the worst pain he had ever experienced.
They shoved him down on the chair and Mark Rizzo felt the metal spikes stab through his flesh and muscle, shattering bones. He screamed and they strapped his wrists and ankles to keep him pinned and he kept screaming until his throat was raw. As bad as the pain was — and it was excruciating, never ending waves riding up his spine like bullets and tearing through the soft meat of his brain — he dug his fingernails into the wood and willed himself to keep still, because if he moved the razor-sharp spikes would move and they would tear and shred and break.
He sat there for hours, days, he didn't know. He had a clear memory of the two big men coming back into the room, the ones with the alabaster skin and ghoul faces, and in the flickering candlelight he could see that they weren't wearing any clothes or shoes and that their genitals were missing. They moved off to the sides, near the walls, and as he lost sight of them the Archon loomed into view and spoke in a whisper: 'What is your name?' And Mark heard another voice, this one in his head, and it was screaming Don't give it to them: if you do they'll kill you, don't say it, and he had hesitated, thinking over the pain, and the two ghouls with the scarred faces and bodies raised their whips.
The first strap hit him and he thrashed around on the chair and his voice came back and he howled, the sound loud enough to pulverize stone. They kept whipping him, the straps tearing out strips of flesh, and then one of them raked something hard across his shins and he vomited until his stomach was stripped and then, through the mercy of God, he passed out.
Delirious and drifting in and out of consciousness, he would sometimes open his eyes and see nothing but the awful darkness and wonder if the whips had blinded him. Now he opened them again and through his pain-soaked haze he could see candlelight flickering across a grey-stoned ceiling. They had removed him from the chair and placed him on his back on something cold and hard and wet.
The pain came back, roaring through his body, and his limbs shook and he felt straps biting into his wrists and ankles, his throat. His head bobbed slightly to the left and he saw a dark leather strap pinning the wrist of his broken hand against the edge of a long metal table. Blood — his blood — covered his naked body and pooled across the table's stainless-steel surface. He heard a dripping sound on the floor as he bled out and he wept, thinking, I'm going to die.
The Archon's voice echoed over the cold and dusty stones: 'What is your name?'
Mark Rizzo shut his eye, weeping. They were going to kill him and it didn't matter if he said his real name or not because they -
A bolt of electricity slammed through his head and across his limbs, his vision exploding in white, and he couldn't see anything and his body bucked against the leather straps binding him to the table.
Then he fell back to the table and the pain was swept under a tingling numbness that fluttered back and forth across his limbs.
'Electroshock therapy,' the voice said. 'That was fifteen seconds. The next time it will be thirty.'
'Why are you doing this?'
'What is your name?'
He didn't answer and the electricity came again. When it was over, he couldn't move, felt his heart sputtering. Leaking.
'Thomas,' he screamed. 'My name is Thomas!'
'Thomas what?'
'Thomas Howland.'
'Where were you born?'
'Tulsa, Oklahoma. My mother's name was Janice and she died of breast cancer and I went to live with my father, Duncan. His name was Duncan but everyone called him Chris. He was a painter. Painted houses.'
'You told me you prayed for him to die.'
'I told a priest.'
'And God. God was there with you in the confessional, Thomas. I heard your prayers, and I killed your father. I caused his ladder to fall, and I let him die. To punish him for what he did to you. And when you were living in a foster home, being abused, I heard your prayers and I sent an angel to bring you to a new family, to a mother and father who were kind to you. And how did you repay my kindness? You shot my family. You killed my angels while they slept and then you fled like a coward.'
His mind was spinning, flashing back to all those times he'd been inside the truck with his stepfather, a man named Ernest. Those long drives to other states and the hours spent in the truck waiting until Ernie gave the nod and then he would get out and approach the young boy or girl, use the speech he'd been given to lure them into the truck. Riding in the truck and trying hard not to cry because he knew the boy or girl sitting wedged between the two of them would disappear into thin air and then the time would come to move on to another state, move on to the next boy or girl, more states, more victims, always more victims.
'I'm not a murderer,' he said.
'You were a liberator,' the Archon said. 'My angel. I gave you the mark.'
He felt it rise up in him, the decades-old guilt over what he'd done. He had told no one, but his guilt had
