The Storm King(117)

If the wind would listen he’d speak it his love. He’d telegraph it from Medea’s coils across the storm-ravaged miles to the New Jersey hills where the best pieces of himself resided.

The sound of the gunshot felt like it was enough to knock a person over. It pulsed through his ears as it rang through the nightclub’s halls.

“Tommy!” Owen bellowed. Pain had ratcheted its pitch, but his voice had regained that same strange delight as before. He released Nate’s hair and rolled off his back. Dropping back to the scarred floor, Nate was as still as a living creature could be. Each ragged breath sank him deeper into the planks.

“What took you so long?” Owen asked.

“Checked the other rooms,” Tom said. “Had to make sure there wasn’t anyone else up there.”

Nate could feel his fingers as they probed the splinters of wood he lay on. He couldn’t see his feet, but they seemed to move when he asked them to.

“You’re a credit to your profession, you know that?”

Nate experimented with bringing his knees into his stomach. His right side screamed. Its protest was noted, its concerns respectfully deferred until some future time.

“He doesn’t have a plan for us. Just another of his lies. So’d you think about what I said, Tom?” Owen asked. “I’m right, aren’t I?”

Nate rolled onto his side to look at the pair. The slant of Tom’s figure looked distressed, but he’d reached the dance floor in better shape than Owen. His flashlight was in one hand and his gun was in the other, pointed to the air into which Nate assumed it had been fired. He had a strip of cloth tied across his nose and mouth.

“Maybe.”



“Definitely. This can all be traced back to him. It’s all his fault, and he even knows it. He just told me as much.” Though it must have been torture, the huge man pulled himself back into a standing position.

Nate also made the excruciating transition from his side to his feet. He’d hobbled Owen, but not disabled him. He had to get James out of here.

“You, me, Lucy, Grams, these kids. It all started with Nate. You know what the Storm King would say. All that suffering. All that pain. Someone’s got to pay for it.”

Nate would have given anything to see Tom’s face.

“And the other kids, they don’t know you pushed Lucy into the lake that night.”

“It was an accident.”

The glass door to the promenade shattered and the glare of flames filled the nightclub. Long shadows leapt and dove across the walls.

“You know that doesn’t matter. You’re part of the reason he lost Lucy, and the Storm King doesn’t forgive.”

Nate stooped to lift James from the floor. The teen was thin, but he was dead weight. Nate’s vision went white when something in his side clicked out of place with the strain. When this pain decreased to a simmer, he began to drag James inch by inch toward the window from which he’d cleared the planks.

“We can still talk our way out of this. The kids’ll listen to you,” Owen told Tom. “It’s like when we burned the Deckers’ house back in high school. That fire bound us all together. Just like killing Lucy tied the two of us together. And that kind of makes up for all the bad stuff, doesn’t it? When something good comes out of it?”

The smoke had fully erased the Century Room. Flames devoured the pile of furniture that had blocked the exit to the promenade.

“It’s too late for him, Tom,” Nate said. Talking was like lighting his throat on fire. “Come here and we’ll get out of here together. I don’t blame you for Lucy, and neither would she.”



“You can’t trust him,” Owen said. “After everything he did to us? How can you believe a thing he says? Look at my leg, Tom. Look at what he did to me. You really think he’ll do what’s right for you instead of what’s right for him?”

Nate was nearly to the window, but he felt the approaching inferno like hands on his back.

“He’s getting away, Tom,” Owen said. “He’s got the kid, and he’s got your future, too. You’ll lose everything when it gets out. Your job, your family. What’ll your dad say? If they don’t put you in jail they’ll run you out of town. Then where’ll you go? With him? Just like in college, huh? He’ll have you over for dinner three times a week, right?” Owen laughed. “But just imagine life without him, Tom.”

Fingers closed around Nate’s bicep. Nate turned, utterly relieved. The cloth across Tom’s mouth was gone. But the look on his friend’s face wiped clear Nate’s smile and drained what remained of his strength.

“I can’t do it, Nate,” Tom said. “I just can’t.” The hand holding the gun came up.

“Imagine being free,” Owen said.

Tom’s face was anguish. “I’m sorry.”

He hurled himself at Nate.

Upon impact, Nate and the boy he carried crashed through the window, landing hard on the boardwalk. Through the shattered glass, he saw Tom turn back to Owen and point his Glock at the dance floor. The rotted wood beneath Nate buckled.

Then Nate was in the air, falling through the broken boardwalk and into the bottomless mouth of the lake.

One moment he was suspended like a gull on the wind, then he was under the surface. The body slam of its cold was more painful than Owen’s foot in his side. Up and down, air and water, alive and dead. Everything became uncertain in the dislocation of the collision. But his arm was still crooked around James’s limp body, and the last bubbles of his breath pointed him back to the living world. With a grip on James’s shirt, he kicked them both for the surface.