The Breathtaker Page 27

  He absently shot past the highway entranceway, then hit the brakes and sluiced all over the road, peanut butter in the brake lines. Swearing angrily, he jammed the truck into reverse and zigzagged backward across the road. Raindrops swarmed in the sweep of their headlights as they edged down an embankment, the front of the Loadmaster tilting precariously skyward.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Isaac put his hands on the ceiling of the cab in order to keep from cracking his skull as they skidded backward down the wet slope.

  “Getting back on the I-40,” Charlie said as he leveled it out and stomped on the gas, but then the radiator hose exploded with a loud hiss. “Shit!” He jerked the wheel as the temp gauge dipped toward zero. “What the fuck… ?”

  “I got it, I got it.” His father was out of the vehicle, rummaging around in the flatbed in the rain. He snatched a roll of duct tape and jury-rigged the radiator hose, then hopped back in and slammed the door. “Okay, go!”

  Charlie mashed his foot on the accelerator and could feel the Loadmaster’s wheels tiptoeing along the edges of a rut as they veered back onto the road. They sped toward the entrance, scenery flying past in a green blur. “It’s about time for some new brake pads, don’t you think? And maybe a new transmission?”

  “She’s a little hard to keep running at a stoplight, but once you get her rolling, she does all right.”

  “I can’t see shit,” Charlie said, squinting past his flapping wipers. “Ray Charles might as well be at the wheel.”

  “Just drive us straight into Texas, son.”

  “I sure hope you’re right, Pop,” he said with a paralyzing sense of disbelief.

  “I’ll keep honing my forecast.”

  Moments later, they were back on the I-40, heading west, streetlights floating toward them in a static of rain. Charlie’s cell phone rang, and he answered it with a pulsating anxiety. “Mike?”

  “We’ve issued a statewide BOLO, Chief. I’ve got everybody and their uncle out trying to locate the vehicle.”

  “Listen, we were wrong about Gustafson. I was just inside Rick Kripner’s house. I found the replacement teeth.”

  “Jesus Christ… you went in there without a warrant?”

  “Goddammit, he’s got my daughter!”

  “Chief…”

  “I’m telling you, Rick Kripner’s the Debris Killer.”

  “Are you sure about this?”

  Charlie took a deep breath, so dazed he could barely think straight. Sitting on his panic. “Mike? You need to trust me right now.”

  “Yeah… of course.”

  “My best guess is he’s headed for Aberdeen.”

  “Hold on. That’s my other line.”

  “Call me right back.” Charlie cradled the phone in his lap and gripped the wheel. There was a handprint in the dust of the dashboard, small and delicate. Sophie’s handprint, left there the last time she was in her grandpa’s truck. “You were right about me,” Charlie said, his gaze sweeping across the haze of blowing rain. “If only I’d been home more often… then maybe none of this would’ve happened.”

  “Sure.” His father slid him a forgiving look. “And I’m Father of the Year. We all make mistakes, Charlie. I was a fool to try to tell you how to run your life.”

  The clutch of his throat muscles choked off all sound. He felt raw and exposed, like the map spread open on the seat between them.

  “I’ll find us a tornado,” his father said. “I’ll find us a whopper. We’ll get her back, I can promise you that.”

  It reminded Charlie of all the comforting lies he’d told Sophie over the years. Your mother’s going to be just fine…

  The ringing phone made them both jump.

  “Chief? They just spotted a black GMC Sierra in Montoya,” Mike said, “heading eastbound on the I-40. They lost track of it five minutes ago, but I figure he’s headed for—”

  “The wind facility,” Charlie finished the thought.

  “Exactly.”

  He checked the rearview, his adrenaline shooting through the roof. There was nobody behind him, so he hit the brakes.

  His father’s startled eyes resembled the crinkling clouds. “What on God’s green earth are you doing now?”

  “Turning around.”

  “What for?”

  “He’s in Montoya.”

  “Montoya? But I thought you just said…”

  They bounced over the median strip. Charlie waited for a Mack truck to blow past, rattling the doors, before he swung the lumbering vehicle around and pulled into the eastbound lane again. He could hear Mike’s voice buzzing in his ear. “Chief? Should I notify the local law?”

  “No, don’t make that call just yet. This needs to happen softly.”

  “You don’t want any backup, boss?”

  “What I don’t want is some trigger-happy cop putting my daughter’s life at risk. Notify campus security and have somebody meet me in the parking lot.”

  “Got it.”

  “And get a chopper on the freeway.” He hung up, then checked to make sure that his gun was loaded. He could hear his father’s worried breathing beside him. “Been a change in plans,” he said.

  “So I gathered.”

  “Hang on, Pop,” he said as he stepped on the gas.

  4

  IT WAS 5:45 P.M. by the time they pulled into the parking lot of the Environmental Sciences Laboratories, the Loadmaster’s motor racing before cutoff, its new tires edging forward over the asphalt. Charlie spotted Rick’s GMC Sierra parked crookedly in front of the building’s entranceway. “Sit tight,” he told his father, a sick fury propelling him out of the vehicle. He took three steps before a glaring light stopped him dead in his tracks.

  “Chief Grover?”

  “What the… ?” He shielded his eyes with his hands. “Get that fucking light out of my face.”

  The campus security guard lowered his flashlight. “I was told to meet you here, sir.” He was squat and stoop-shouldered inside his beige uniform, sallow-skinned from years of working the night shift. “They said I should—”

  “Listen to me very carefully,” Charlie interrupted. “We’ve got a hostage situation inside the building. You with me so far?”

  He nodded blankly.

  “You’re going to accompany me inside. You will not use your own initiative. You will not veer from my instructions. Is that understood?”

  The guard stiffened. “Yes, sir.”

  “Just follow me and do exactly as I say.”

  He gave a tight, shocked smile.

  It was spitting rain. Charlie drew his weapon and moved swiftly across the parking lot toward the GMC Sierra. The engine idled lazily, keys in the ignition. He spotted the lucky rabbit’s foot dangling from the key chain and felt a tightening in his jaw. Black rabbit fur. With a roaring sound in his ears, he swung his light over the interior of the cab. The floor pads were green. Green carpet fiber.

  Locard’s principle…

  He switched the motor off, pocketed the keys and headed for the horseshoe-shaped entryway of the enormous concrete building, “Environmental Sciences” etched in pink marble over the front door. Skipping up the marble steps, he pushed on the double glass doors, but they were locked for the night. “Open it,” he told the guard.

  “Shouldn’t we call for backup first?” The young man stared at him nervously. They stood beneath a cone of yellow light, so close together Charlie could count the individual pores on his pasty face.

  “Open the door,” he said, coming down hard on the last word.

  Obediently the guard stooped over the access panel, punched in a security code and slid his plastic key-card through the magnetic trough. Then he threw the bolt with a sharp click and swung the door open.

  “Not you.” Charlie blocked his father’s path. He had appeared out of nowhere, out of the darkness. “Go wait in the truck.”

  “I’m coming with you.” His jaw was set.

  “We can’t afford any fuckups, Pop.”

&n
bsp; “She’s my granddaughter,” he said stubbornly.

  Charlie had learned not to go head-to-head with the old man a long time ago. A dozen razor straps across the back could be pretty persuasive.

  “I’ll keep out of your way,” Isaac promised.

  Charlie glanced at his watch. They were all out of time. He entered the cavernous yellow lobby with the two other men in tow, the heavy glass doors thwumping shut behind them. Their footsteps echoed throughout the brightly lit building.

  “This way,” the guard said, but Charlie brushed past him and led the way down a forking corridor toward a bank of freight elevators, past dark-wood walls and simple-framed pictures of proud scientists and their machines. He stood punching the Down button over and over again.

  “Come on,” he hissed through clenched teeth.

  “Yeah. That’ll make it go faster,” Isaac said sarcastically.

  “Shut up, Pop.” He pointed a finger. “You wait here.”

  “I’m coming with you, Charlie.”

  “We aren’t having a debate here.”

  One of the freight elevators stopped at lobby level, its metal doors rocking open, and the three of them stepped inside. It seemed to take forever for the doors to jostle shut again, and then, shoulder-to-shoulder, they descended into the bowels of the building. Charlie gave his father a grim look, but the old man simply averted his gaze, while the security guard kept one hand on his holstered handgun.

  “You ever use that thing?” Charlie asked him.

  “Yes, sir. I was in the ROTC.”

  “Good. You’re my backup.”

  “What’re we looking for, sir?”

  “White male in his early thirties, average height and build, brown hair, brown eyes, wire-rim glasses. He’s got a girl with him… she’s my daughter.” The elevator landed with a jolt and a mechanical whir, and Charlie held the guard’s eye. “If you hurt her… if you cause any injury to her person… I’ll shoot you dead.”

  Beads of sweat collected on the guard’s upper lip. “I… I’ll be careful.”

  “You’d better be.”

  The elevator doors shimmied open, and Charlie ventured out into the corridor alone. Icy fingers of light stabbed through the overhead gantries, and the walls emitted a maddening hum, like a broken chord on a player piano. He made a ninety-degree turn into a higher-ceilinged corridor, where he carefully scanned his surroundings before motioning the others forward.

  The test facilities were locked up tight for the night. Charlie tried each door, while the security guard fumbled with his overcrowded key chain. They hurried past one dark, unoccupied space after another, little bronze plaques beside each door identifying the tow tank facility, the signal-light structure, the wind tunnels.

  “Try this one.” Charlie waited impatiently while the guard unlocked the door and switched on the lights. They stood in the sodium glare of the hangar-sized wind-tunnel section when something caught his eye—a wisp of smoke curling up from the back of the facility.

  He shot through the maze of cubicles, refrigeration pipes and electrical cables lining the walls, until he reached the eighty-foot-long boundary-layer tunnel. He could see white smoke wafting against the observation windows of the test section. “Get a fire extinguisher!” he shouted at the guard as he clambered up the ladder.

  “That isn’t smoke,” the guard hollered back. “It’s some kind of chemical they use to make the wind visible… the same stuff they use in skywriting.”

  The door wouldn’t budge. Charlie noticed a pencil wedged in between the handle and the metal plate, jammed in there good. He worked it back and forth, and all of a sudden, it snapped off in his hand.

  The brittle spring made a loud squawk as the door shot open, and a thick white mist spilled out, nearly choking him to death. Gagging and coughing, he hung back a beat. “Willa?” He felt a sudden shyness around the edges of his feelings for her. A certain tenderness or fear. Fear of losing her. It made him hesitate to move forward.

  The white toxic substance had filled the entire test chamber. He shot inside and lost himself in the dissipating mist; he stumbled around, trying to clear the air by waving his arms, but it didn’t do much good. He knew enough to turn on the fans. “Willa?” he said, then coughed as if his lungs might explode. “You in here?”

  He bumped into a pair of legs sprawled across the floor, and he dropped to his knees. She wasn’t wearing any protective gear. She lay very still in her jeans and lab coat with its pockets full of keys and pens and those little notebooks she was always scribbling in. He took her by the arms and dragged her toward the exit, but her face was so pale—skim-milk pale—that he bent to feel for a pulse. Fear pounding through his fingertips.

  She wasn’t conscious. She was barely breathing. Her eyes were shut. Her lips were blue. “Breathe,” he said, pinching her nose shut, tilting her head back and blowing a single breath into her lungs.

  No response.

  “Hey.” He gently slapped her face. “Willa?” Frantic. Terrified. We just fell in love, and already you’re leaving me? “Willa!” His voice rebounded off the tiled walls as the white stuff continued to exit out the doorway in ropy twists and gusts. He leaned over and blew another breath into her lungs.

  She coughed. Sputtered. Sat up. “Charlie?”

  He almost laughed with relief. “You okay?”

  “No, I’m… yes.” She looked dazed.

  He turned to the guard. “Call an ambulance!”

  The guard got on his portable.

  “My respirator stopped working,” she said, “and I couldn’t breathe. I tried the door, but it was stuck.”

  Shaken and enraged, he rocked her in his arms. “I need to find Rick. Do you know where he is?”

  She shook her head, then threw her arms around his neck and held on tight, seeming to understand the implication of his question but unwilling to face it just yet. “He took the keys to the Doppler van,” she said.

  “The Doppler van?” He turned to the guard. “Is the Doppler van missing from the parking lot?”

  The guard’s confused eyes pulled closer together. “It wasn’t registered to be checked out tonight, but I noticed it was gone.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “About fifteen minutes ago. They do that sometimes, borrow the van without telling anyone. They always bring it back, though.” His voice rose defensively. “I made a note of it on my rounds roster.”

  Just then a piercing cry came from out in the corridor. “Charlie?” It was his father.

  “Be right back,” he told Willa.

  “Yeah, go.” She smiled bravely at him. “I’m fine.”

  “Stay with her,” he told the guard, then clambered down the ladder and ran back into the main hallway. “Pop?”

  “Down here.”

  Around the next corner, he found his father standing near an open door, creamy white light spilling out into the corridor. The bronze plaque read “Missile Launcher Chamber.”

  Isaac’s eyes were wide with fright. “It was open.”

  “Stay back.” Aiming his gun, Charlie approached the doorway with extreme caution, like a man walking into a den of rattlers. Breathing through his mouth, he took a single step into the room and swept his gun around. “Police!”

  The missile launcher chamber appeared to be empty. A long orange pipe, held in place by two metal supports, occupied the center of the rectangular room. Charlie felt his heart in his throat, right up near his gag reflex, as he crossed the chamber toward the long plate-glass window at the back of the room, his footsteps echoing off the tiled walls. Through beads of condensation on the glass, he could see a large water tank inside the closet-sized space and nothing else.

  He lowered his weapon. “All clear,” he said, and his father cautiously entered the room.

  Just then Charlie caught something out of the corner of his eye—a glint of light. At the far end of the chamber, in the center of a plyboard panel, dangled an object that was startlingly familiar to him.
Sophie’s silver locket was the one piece of jewelry she would never take off. The necklace dangled from a penny nail and made a soft clinking sound. A wild sweat broke out on his face. “Jesus Christ…”

  His father stepped directly in front of the panel.

  “No!”

  Isaac turned and eyed him questioningly.

  A snap of compressed air, and the air cannon exploded, an eight-foot-long wooden stud flying out of the barrel and hitting his father center-mass with a thundering crunch. A small wavering sound of protest passed from Isaac’s lips as it pierced him through and blew him backward into the wall.

  Charlie sank to his knees, everything turning prickly for an instant. Heart pounding crazily. He couldn’t catch his breath. From a tunneling darkness, he could hear faraway screams. “Oh my God… oh my God…”

  Then he realized those screams were coming from him. He blinked away the dazzling red spots floating in his field of vision and looked down. Blood spiked his uniform front. He stumbled to his feet and crossed the room to where his father was pinned like a bug to the wall.

  “Pop?” He checked for a pulse. “Pop?” The lurid light revealed too much. The missile had penetrated Isaac’s chest cavity, his heart visible and pulsating weakly through the entry wound, an adjacent collapsed lung exposed. There was blood everywhere. Pooling down around his ankles.

  “Pop?” Charlie stared into the meat of his father’s face. His lips were so gray they looked like pipe smoke. Isaac tried to speak, then went completely still.

  Charlie attempted to remove the wooden stud from the wall, grunting and tugging, but it wouldn’t budge. Cradling his father upright in his arms, he applied pressure to the wound, but there was a tremendous amount of give. The torn heart had stopped beating; he could count the broken ribs. “Pop?”

  The old man’s pupils were of differing sizes, and there was no reactive movement when Charlie touched one of the lenses with a tentative fingertip. Fixed and dilated. His hair reminded him of milkweed fluff. He paused to comb a few stray strands from that frozen face with trembling fingers, then heard a voice inside his head. His father’s voice.