Long Road to Mercy (Atlee Pine, #1)(5)

“Talented? Not the way I would describe it.”

“But surely talent does come into play. It’s not an easy business, regardless of what society thinks about it. The ones you arrested weren’t in my league, of course, but you have to start somewhere. Now, you seem to have made a specialty of it. Of going toe-to-toe with the likes of me. It’s nice to aim high, but one can grow too ambitious, or become overconfident. Flying too close to the sun with the wax betwixt the wings, that sort of thing. Death so often results. Now, it can be a divine look, but not, I think, on you. However, I’d love to try.”

Pine shrugged off this deranged soliloquy ending with the threat against her. If he was thinking of killing her, that meant she had his attention.

She said, “They were all operating in the West. Here, you have wide-open spaces without a policeman on every block. People coming and going, lots of runaways, folks looking for something new, long strips of isolated highways. A billion places to toss the remains. It encourages…talent like yours.”

He spread his hands as wide as he could with the restraints. “Now see, that’s better.”

“It would be far better if you answered my question.”

“I also understand that you came within one pound of making the U.S. Olympic team as a weightlifter when you were in college.” When she didn’t respond he said, “Google has even reached Florence, Special Agent Atlee Pine from Andersonville, Georgia. I requested some background information on you as a condition for this meeting. You’ve also earned your own Wikipedia page. It’s not nearly as long as mine, but then again, it’s early days for you. But long careers are not guaranteed.”

“It was one kilo, not one pound. The snatch did me in, never my best pull. I’m more of a clean-and-jerk girl.”

“Kilos, yes. My mistake. So actually, you’re a bit weaker than I thought. And, of course, a failure.”

“You have no reason not to tell me,” she repeated. “None.”

“You want closure, like the rest of them?” he said in a bored tone.

Pine nodded, but only because she was afraid of the words that might come out of her mouth at that moment. Contrary to Tor’s assertions, she had prepared for this meeting. Only, one could never fully prepare for a confrontation with this man.

“You know what I really, really like?” said Tor.

Pine kept staring at him but didn’t react.

“I really, really like that I have defined your entire, pathetic life.”

Tor suddenly leaned forward. His wide shoulders and massive bald head seemed to fill the glass, like a man coming in through a little girl’s bedroom window. For one terrifying moment, Pine was six again and this demon was thumping her forehead with each word of the rhyme, with death to the one last touched.

Mercy. Not her.

MERCY.

Not her.

Then she let out a barely audible breath and involuntarily touched the badge on her jacket.

Her touchstone. Her lodestone. No, her rosary.

The movement did not go unnoticed by Tor. He didn’t smile in triumph; his look was not one of anger but of disappointment. And then, a moment later, disinterest. His eyes hollowed out and his features relaxed as he sat back. He slumped down, his energy, and with it his animation, gone.

Pine felt every cell in her body start to shut down. She’d totally just screwed this up. He’d tested her, and Pine had not risen to the challenge. The boogeyman had come at midnight and found her lacking.

“Guards,” he bellowed. “I’m ready. We’re done here.” As soon as he finished speaking, his lips spread into a malicious grin and Pine knew precisely why.

This was the only time he could order them around.

As they came in, unhooked him from the ring, and began to lead him away, Pine rose.

“You have no reason not to tell me.”

He didn’t deign to look at her.

“The meek shall never inherit the earth, Atlee Pine of Andersonville, twin of Mercy. Get used to it. But if you want to vent again, you know where to find me. And now that I’ve met you—” he suddenly looked back at her, a surge of ferocious desire flashing across his features, probably the last thing his victims ever saw “—I will never forget you.”

The metal portal shut and locked behind him. She listened to the march of feet taking Tor back to his seven-by-twelve poured-concrete cage.

Pine stared at the door a moment longer, then wiped the lipstick off the glass, the color of blood transferred to her palm, retraced her footsteps, retrieved her gun, and left ADX Florence, breathing in crisp air at exactly one mile above sea level.

She would not cry. She hadn’t shed a tear since Mercy had vanished. Yet she wanted to feel something. But it just wasn’t there. She was weightless, like being on the moon, nothing, empty. He had drained whatever she had left right out of her. No, not drained.

Sucked.

And, worst of all, what had happened to her sister was still unknown.

She drove a hundred miles west to Salida and found the cheapest motel she could, since this trip was all on her dime.

Right before she fell asleep, she thought back to the question Tor had asked.

And you only show up now? Twenty-nine years later?

There was a good reason for this, at least in Pine’s mind. But maybe it was also a flawed one.

She didn’t dream about Tor that night. She didn’t dream of her sister, gone nearly three decades now. The only visual her subconscious held up was herself at six years old trudging to school for the first time without Mercy’s hand inside hers. A bereaved little girl in pigtails who had lost her other half, as Tor himself had intimated.