The Storm King(107)
Though he’d been waiting for it, Nate was startled when noise came from the door to the kitchen. He crept to the side of the stairs, as the locks were disengaged, releasing a held breath only when he heard Pete call to him. He was lucky Owen had secured the basement only to keep people in and not keep them out.
“What about her?” Pete asked, pointing down the stairs.
“We won’t be able to get her up the stairs on our own,” Nate said. He turned back toward the wheelchair-bound woman. “We’re getting some help, Mrs. Liffey. Don’t worry. We’ll get you somewhere safe.”
She was fully awake again, and shaking so hard that at first Nate thought she might be having a seizure.
“He will kill you, he will kill us, he will kill everyone—”
“We’ll be back,” Nate promised. He climbed the last of the stairs and stepped back up into the kitchen.
“Start knocking on doors,” he told Pete. There was no reason to whisper, but he did anyway. His limbs still carried extra weight from the chloroform, but this lightened with each breath of fresh air. “Get someone to call the police. Tell them about Owen and about the kids on the Night Ship. If the landlines and cells are down, have them drive you to the station.”
“What if they don’t believe me?” Pete asked as they reached the foyer.
Nate looked at the boy. Eyes bloodshot from crying, skin matted with pallor, his clothes and hair filthy with mud and soaked with rain. Words were only one kind of language, and Pete exuded a fluent dialect of pure distress. It was easy to forget that the Lake was mostly just a normal town filled with normal people. If this boy appeared at their door, none of them would doubt the story he told.
They didn’t have time to waste, but Nate found himself cupping the boy’s chin in his hand as if Pete were his own son. “I’m sorry about what we did to your dad.” A lifetime ago, Nate and his friends had felled a tree against the Corsos’ house. A DUI and job termination and divorce had followed. It was impossible to say how closely these events were connected. Life grows one bad thing upon another. But in a universe where small things could destroy whole worlds, Nate and his friends had made people’s lives worse and not better. “I didn’t know anything back then. If I could take it back, I would. I’d take it all back.” He wasn’t thinking only of the Corsos or the Jeffers, but of Lucy and Tom and Johnny and even Owen. They’d thought Nate was their friend, and he’d brought them nothing but pain.
Pete pulled Nate’s hand away. “Just save them, okay?” He wasn’t whispering anymore. “Save my friends.”
Rivers of torn leaves lit by the flaring sky guided Nate’s descent to the shore. He abandoned the streets as soon as he could, cutting through lawns and climbing fences to speed his way. His left hand felt like it was the size of a catcher’s mitt. It throbbed with his pulse and screamed with each clench of his loose thumb.
Tom answered the door already dressed in his outdoor gear. His friend’s ramshackle house was in between Owen’s place and the Night Ship. Nate hadn’t been sure if Tom would be home, but he was so glad that he was.
“The hell happened to you?” Tom asked. He didn’t look so great himself.
“We have to go to the Night Ship.” Nate was out of breath and shaking from cold. How far and how long had he run through the storm? How much farther must he go? Would he ever reach home? “Owen, he’s been—he’s the one who—” How to even begin.
“I’ve been on Wharf duty since you left. I came back for a dry uniform, but dispatch just called. They’re sending me to Owen’s. Pete Corso turned up and he’s been saying some crazy—”
“It’s all true. But you can’t go to the Liffeys’. We have to go to the Night Ship.”
“The—but why?”
“He’s going to kill the kids. He’s going to trap them in the Night Ship and then burn it all down.”
“You gotta get out of the rain. You’re shaking. Come on.” He beckoned Nate into the house. “I’ll get you some dry clothes and—holy Christ, what happened to your hand?”
“Please, Tommy. Please. He killed Lucy. He killed her while he raped her and hid her body in the headlands.”
This seemed to get through to Tom. He threw his hood over his head and pushed past Nate, through the front door, and into the storm. Nate followed him to the treeless backyard where a sliver of the old pier could be spied through the dark silhouettes of neighboring homes and countless veils of rain.
An unmistakable orange glow wavered by the landward windows of the promenade.
They were already too late.
Twenty-four
The ragged shape of another downed oak blazed in the headlights.
Next to Nate, Tom swore as he stomped on the brakes. The tree was so massive that not even driving across adjacent lawns would have let them clear it. All routes to the Strand were blocked.
With the promenade already in flames, the only way to the Night Ship was through the old pier’s boat launch, and they’d need one of Johnny’s boats to get there. The Vanhouten mansion was no more than two blocks away, but every moment mattered.
They abandoned the car and scaled the tree’s slick bark. Medea fought them through every step.