The Holocaust Engine: The Holocaust Engine, #1

When Wesley Bontrager died, the press reported only that the professional quarterback had committed suicide in the infirmary at the Metro West Detention Center while awaiting arraignment for the murder of his friend and teammate, George Coles. What they did not say was that Bontrager also tore through his wrist and ankle restraints, killed a guard and the nurse who was trying to sedate him, and then, as the jailors watched from the control room, battered the steel door with his fists, his shoulder, and finally his own head until he fractured his skull with a series of convulsive collisions.

After storming the room, the response team found Bontrager—only three months removed from starting the last four games of the previous season—dead of a massive hemorrhage.

During an interview, his mother said, I blame his coaches and them no good coeds. Me and Mr. Bontrager did not raise him that way. That’s for sure.

His father, stolid and immovable, brought up the statements concerning his son’s symptoms and erratic behavior. The boy was sick. He just needed help.

Four days later, practice stopped after defensive end Tony Shivers—already sidelined with an undisclosed condition—began screaming and suddenly turned catatonic. Blood results tested negative for narcotics. The following Saturday, as every player on the team was undergoing a battery of tests, one of the team’s trainers walked into his neighbor’s backyard, pull-started a rusty lawnmower, turned it on its side, and dove head first into the spinning blades. When they arrived, the medical examiners came in HAZMAT suits.

Bontrager’s Disease was about to take its place amongst the pantheon of history’s most deadly diseases.

Only one of the major news outlets came close to discovering the truth before it was too late. They’d been looking for Bontrager’s girlfriend, Theresa Bettencourt, assumed dead, but at the time still only missing. Three weeks before multiple Tasers had aided in effecting Wesley Bontrager’s arrest, Theresa Bettencourt had called 911, while the couple vacationed in Key West, to report a welfare concern .

Plenty of locals remembered seeing or speaking to them. Wesley had done what he always did: he’d made friends. He looked nothing like a pro quarterback, they all agreed; 6’2’’, 240 pounds of smiling cheeks and baby fat. Wesley had been born on a farm north of Scranton to a family of Pennsylvania Dutch. He’d been blessed with a self-effacing sense of humor that let him in on all the jokes about his girth. Whenever anyone called him by his nickname, Fat Ninja, he struck his signature crouch. Bontrager had fit right in on an island of eccentrics.

The story had the two of them eating lunch oysters at The Raw Bar when a pair of Cuban brothers interrupted them with free drinks. It was the least they could do, they explained through thick accents, since they had won four hundred bucks when Wes threw for 278 yards and 3 TDs in the Dolphins’ win over the Colts. A few beers later and they were no longer strangers, they were buds, just like his teammates and his coaches and even a few of his opponents.

These buds rented Sea-Doos to tourists and begged their new friend to go out on the water while they took a few photographs for their kiosk. Of course, he would. Why not?

They walked together down to the house boat where the two brothers lived, and where waiting patrons could normally sit on chairs or on the gunwales, but where on this day a handwritten Out of Order sign hung from a chain across the walkway.

Wesley rocketed out with one of them. The other one, obviously uncomfortable with Theresa standing so close to the ramp, told her three times with simple English and hand gestures to wait right here. Then he started another watercraft, looked back and smiled one last time. Right here. And he sped off to take the soon-to-be-autographed action shots.

When he was out of sight, Theresa stood up, slid under the chain, and strode up to the boat. For the last several minutes, at odd intervals, she’d been hearing a soft scraping sound coming from inside, and at one point, she even though she heard a barely audible sound that might have been moaning—a little girl’s moaning. The outer door was locked, but Theresa had decided to investigate and, as with all her decisions, once her mind was made up, the rest was simply details. After a few jiggles, then finally a sharp lift, the rickety door opened.

According to the police report, once inside the galley, she could hear the sound much more clearly, so she walked through a combination of living room and office, and into another room that she described as smelling sharply of moldy wet garbage. Inside this room, against the near wall, sat a desk with a thick kitchen knife embedded into a cutting board. All around the knife were leaves, roots, and the remains of a chicken: wings, feathers, entrails, even a beak that pointed up at the low ceiling, each of these smattered with blood. Near the edges of the countertop, forming a triangle, were three votive candles that had burned until the wax puddled at the bottoms.

And then there was the girl.

She lay on a trundle, tied down with ropes wrapped in bath towels—Hispanic, maybe fourteen, but no more than sixteen. Her skin was pale, her lips discolored, her eyes red. She hardly took notice of Theresa, craning her neck to the desk and a cockroach the size of a toddler’s hand that scuttled up one of the legs. She breathed out sounds that might have been an attempt at speech. In between the noises, her breath came and went in shallow gulps. Anyone else might have recognized that the girl was sick, but Theresa Bettencourt was not anyone else.

She was not even Theresa Bettencourt.

Long before she invented her persona of sophistication and cool indifference, she was Terri Chalmers. Terri... with an i.

She’d not been born to a family of comfortable wealth, and did not have a cousin who was an actress, or a grandfather who was an English Peer, and contrary to what she told her boyfriends if they ever asked, she had not lost her virginity at the age of seventeen. She’d lost it at the age of nine, after the woman who’d given her birth—fresh out of rehab—had decided to take a turn at playing mother and snatched her away from the care of her grandparents. By the time Omaha, Nebraska Protective Services finally removed little Terri the next year, she had suffered one broken arm, one fractured rib, one cracked pelvis, two broken fingers, and one sexually transmitted disease; all of this at the hands of her mother’s meth-addicted boyfriend. The man would never stand trial for any of it, dying only a few months later riding his motorcycle with a blood alcohol content of .16.

Social workers had brought back a very different Terri Chalmers. This Terri had trouble making friends and got suspended at school. This Terri rarely slept through the night. This Terri trusted no one.

At eighteen, she took her first job as a dancer at a men’s club. The manager and the other girls trained her. They helped her develop her signature look—short dark hair, bright red lipstick, movements like a jaguar coming out of its tree.

Four years of college, and a string of adult videos under the name of Theresa Nightingale later, and the sobbing little girl in the county emergency room had fully transformed into Theresa Bettencourt: sensual, flirtatious, yet somehow still refined. Theresa Bettencourt: the object of every man’s desire.

When introduced at a Miami nightclub, she had collected Wesley as easily as if she had bought him at the grocery store along with a carton of milk. A week later, she called a real estate mogul at his Tampa office and told him she was moving out of his beach house. The affair had been a mistake and she could no longer live with the shame.

She didn’t love Wesley, of course, any more than she loved any of them. She never fantasized about walking down the aisle or living happily ever after. When she thought of Wesley at all, she imagined a messy divorce and a tell-all memoir for whatever ordeal she would one day decide as having best described their relationship.

Wesley Bontrager, the Athlete America Thought We Knew.

Theresa Bettencourt, a master of manipulation, was an expert at cultivating her own image. This was her, and this was the world she thought she knew. She didn’t know Caribbean folk medicine, however, and she certainly didn’t know that some girls needed more than the intrepid protagonist of someone’s imagined storyline.

When she looked down at the girl, and the trundle that scraped the floor with each of the girl’s epileptic movements, Theresa Bettencourt did not see that two brothers had smuggled their niece in from Cuba and were doing what they could after the local hospital had already discharged her, offering nothing more than a prescription and a referral to a specialist on the mainland. Theresa saw a victim. She saw a slave being forced to service her captors. The nervous ticks grew from trauma, and the mouth, as if she drank grape juice through puckered lips, had surely resulted from whatever these two animals had forced into her.

As she waited for police, she cut the ropes with the heavy knife and tried to make the girl more presentable. The young woman only stared up at her rescuer, but Theresa rubbed at the stains around her mouth, first with the sleeve of her blouse, then with a moistened finger. It would all make a fine chapter in her book.

Police arrested both brothers at the scene, but they were never charged, because the police never got a statement from the girl. In fact, they never even learned her name.

They checked her in at the hospital the same day. A social worker had started taking notes, but when she couldn’t get the girl to speak, she walked down the hall to call her supervisor.

The doctor, thinking that he recognized her, went upstairs to ask a colleague if this was the same girl from last week. When they went back to the room, she was gone.

They never sew her alive again.

She’d wandered out the doors, through the parking lot, and onto College Street. The first two cars had swerved. The third stopped.

Three men got out of an old Suburban, and thinking that she was stoned, muttered to each other at their luck, and took the girl back to their conch cabin on the south end of Stock Island.

She did not resist. She never said a word, and made no move to defend herself when the room full of men began raping her.

By the end of the night, patient zero had infected patients one through nine.

Babylon was a gold cup in the Lord’s hand;

She made the whole earth drunk.

The nations drank her wine;

Therefore, they have now gone mad.

Jeremiah 51:7

The Suck-Up

Northeast End of the Marquesas, Gulf of Mexico

The vacation was over. He’d been looking forward to it for weeks, and now it was totally and utterly ruined—and with a little luck, it would stay that way.

Charles Stratton leaned back in the pilot chair of his fifty-foot flybridge, Bull Run, adjusted his Polo shirt and his Bermuda shorts for comfort, and restarted the engine.

On the deck below, his wife Mary shouted, Have you called the Coast Guard yet?

I’m going to move the boat around first.

I’m worried, Charley.

He throttled up and muttered to himself, And aren’t we all surprised.

On Monday, they’d sailed out of Naples, down the gulf shore of Florida, and into the narrow channels and shoals of the Marquesas. They’d spent two days of glorious fishing in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, with time and supplies for two more. Now, everything lay on the verge of ruin. Glorious ruin.

Charley, should we—

They’re fine, he bellowed, and throttled up a little more. Jesus.

As they cleared the mangrove branches on the south tip of the tiny coral atoll, a second boat came into view. The name on the back read, Scuttlebutt, an old thirty-foot Maverick. Next to the boat, standing knee high in gulf water, his bikini-clad daughter, Krissy, a freshman at the University of Florida, waved, holding a snorkel and a mask against her short blonde hair with her other hand.

See.

Krissy postured as if posing for a camera, this girl who’d chosen her college based on sorority sisters and tan lines. She had her mother’s looks—all but her facial expressions. Krissy had never worked a day in her life, and she pursed her lips at the world full of people who did, looking on everything that was not designer apparel with a bland sort of suspicion.

Her boyfriend, Reagan Castaneda, hailed them from the aft deck of the derelict craft.

They’d been on the cleft side of the island all morning, fishing in the clear water. Then, after a tasteless lunch of minestrone and pasta salad, Charles had applied a bit of SPF 15 to his face, hiked up his shorts, and tramped onto the spit of sand that formed a few narrow feet of beach while the kids snorkeled. Like most of the Marquesas, the tiny island was hardly suited to a walking tour, having barely any sand, instead nearly surrounded by rocks and tree roots. But he needed space—desperately—from his crew, so he’d disturbed tree after tree of frigate birds on his stroll to the island’s edge. The little ribbon of beach ended, and Charles had held his sandals while splashing through the cool water, feeling his way over the rocks next to the jutting mangroves as he rounded the southern tip.

He knew the boat was empty as soon as he saw it—no one visible, mangroves rubbing against the fiberglass hull with every wave, algae building at the waterline. He went back and told the others, and they came to see the funny sight for themselves.

Krissy’s boyfriend had investigated first. Listing a few degrees to port, the boat had the feel of something violated and ominous. Still, the senseless boy had flopped over the gunwale and went through the ship like a child diving into a ball pit.

He was supposed to be Krissy’s big catch—Reagan Castaneda, senior, Sigma Phi. The girls in Krissy’s sorority made him out to be some sort of great white whale—tall, handsome, good grades, whatever passed for cool to the tweeting generation—but after three days together on the yacht, Charles was ready for his daughter to take her fill of couple-selfies and throw this one back into the sea.

He was no more empty-headed than Krissy, but the boy was something that Charles Stratton hated—a yes man. He was Smithers in search of his Mr. Burns. Everything was sweet, his all-purpose term of abject acceptance. Every sip of lemonade and unsweetened tea; every morsel of Mary’s pasta salad, chicken salad, bean salad, and plain old garden salad; every sandwich and bland casserole the woman forked onto his plate—it was all sweet. In fact, everything his matronly creature of a wife did seemed just dandy to the Castaneda boy, who’d obviously come from the ‘win the mother, get the daughter’ school of womanizing.

Just another family disappointment. And really, what’s one more at this point?

With his name—now that certainly speaks of conservative parenting—his choice of fraternity houses, and his major in business, it had seemed for all the world as if he might have had potential—someone else to answer the phone the next time Krissy wrecked her car.

Now, Charles’s initial hopes were sliding down reality’s drain. Three more years and Krissy would likely move back in. Heaven help her if she thought someone like this was coming along for the ride.

Reagan had his mysteries, Charles had to admit. For one, he’d never taken his shirt off in three days at sea, almost always wearing a white, button-down, long-sleeve shirt and a pair of khaki shorts, which made him look like a calypso dancer. For a second, during the previous day’s fishing, when the inexperienced boy had stripped too much line with a big tarpon and the fish had taken advantage and cut right under the boat, Charles had jumped up with his pocket knife to cut the line before it caught in the propeller blades. The boy had startled at the sudden appearance of the knife, and for a crazed second, Castaneda had swiveled his whole body as if he were about to kick his girlfriend’s father squarely in the knee. He had spent the next ten minutes making it into a joke.

Nonetheless, given everything else Charles had learned of him, these were certain to have mundane explanations. The shirt fetish, like the black swim shirt he was wearing at the moment over his obviously athletic frame—again long-sleeved—probably covered some ridiculous tattoo. The knife paranoia most likely arose from a childhood spent with an alcoholic father and the drama of the macho culture of Mexicans or Italians or whatever he was.

A flock of nesting birds flushed at the approaching motor, as Charles deftly pulled his boat so that the starboard bow nearly touched the Scuttlebutt’s stern. Thirty feet from shore, the draught showed a safe depth.

Are you going to call? his wife asked, still anxious to contact the Coast Guard.

In a sec. He took a flashlight from the galley, moved to the edge, and said to Castaneda, Permission to come aboard.

The boy clowned a salute.

You find anything?

It’s registered out of Key West. I found a name: Carson Stovall? The boy looked up, his almost girlishly long eye lashes forming a question.

The name means nothing to me, if you’re wondering if I know him from the great fraternity of fishing captains.

What do you think happened?

I think he lost his boat, Krissy quipped.

Charles smelled a hint of fish. The aft deck had a pair of mounted swivel chairs. Beneath the port gunwale hung a trio of fine Apex rods mounted on hooks. He opened a cooler next to the chair, and found beer cans floating in warm water.

Stovall’s a man after my own heart, he said. Nice little fishing rig he had here.

It kind of looks like the boat from Jaws.

Charles looked into Castaneda’s vacuous grin. The entire Facebook generation was just noxious. I don’t think a shark got him, Kiddo. If he was an old retired codger, he might have had a heart attack or something.

And fallen overboard?

Not the most likely scenario, Charles had to admit. Still, it beat the ravenous shark off the coast of Florida theory. He stepped into the galley and ran a hand over a fake wood-grained countertop. The boat was certainly well-ordered, with no sign of a fight; just a ship left for days in the gulf. On the wall hung several pictures, most of them involving a white-haired man in his sixties, usually shirtless, his prominent belly flaring for all to see. In one picture, he held up an enormous parrotfish; in another, a jack. In another, he and a fellow senior citizen held up a whole line of gray snappers. Charles felt a kinship with the smiles he saw in the photos. This boat had been Stovall’s escape from the mad world—untie the rope, power up the motor, and head out into the shallow waters with a friend or all alone.

Lucky bastard. Well, not so lucky anymore.

Bad heart or sharks, Charles had the unsettling realization that this Carson Stovall, whoever he had been, was now most certainly dead. No true angler would let his boat just drift away from port. Floating all the way from Key West? Not a chance. This man had died—the only logical explanation—and he never got off a distress call.

Who knows, said Charles, trying not to give away the cold shiver running up his arms. I’m going to call this in before Mary pops a blood vessel.

Can I listen? Castaneda said.

To what?

Radioing the Coast Guard.

It’s not 1976, Reagan. I’m just going to call them on my cell, he said, a bit incredulous. Then, to himself, But if you want to stand there while I do it....

He hopped back over to the Bull Run.

Mary held her pullover tightly around the collar. His wife of nearly two decades would turn forty this summer. With the hair that she refused to allow anywhere near the seawater, and a trim figure that she kept away from direct sunlight, she could have passed for early thirties. Not that she maintained any kind of youthful vitality—more like she was perfectly preserved. Mary Stratton lived the leisurely life of a kept women, a life she hardly appreciated. What did she care what her husband needed from her? Not his Mary; always trying to play the part of the supportive spouse, but never actually supporting. The few times she’d hosted events for Stratton’s coworkers had been an embarrassment, as her Tennessee Baptist rattled obnoxiously against the New York socialites the other executives had married.

You don’t think it could have been pirates, she said. Or smugglers, or something like that?

No! I don’t think—

I was thinking a shark might have got him when he jumped in for a swim, Castaneda said, to which Mary’s eyes popped and her head bobbed.

Charles shook his head and pulled out his phone, the sensation of foreboding gone, the feeling of annoyance now fully returned. He’d never been so eager to get off the water. A plan took shape in his thoughts: an added day on their reservation at the Casa Marina; a stomach ache or just plain old request for an afternoon at the hotel; Mary and Krissy dragging the boy on one of their shopping runs, leaving him alone with the private beach and the pool-side bar.

Mary, he said without looking. You haven’t done anything with tonight’s reservation, have you?

No.

Why don’t we make it an extra day? You guys can root around the island tomorrow. I’ll make some inquiries. Give us a little time to make sure it’s safe before we head back to Naples.

You don’t mind?

He offered a noncommittal shrug. It’s probably best.

The harried woman on the phone asked him a quarter hour’s worth of questions. They were going to send a search craft as soon as possible.

As soon as possible? Good Lord! What else do they have to do?

She asked if they’d be waiting with the derelict.

Of course not! If you had any idea what I’m putting up with.... By the time your people arrive, I’ll be begging to join Stovall, no matter what happened to him.

They were already in route to the Keys before he disconnected.

The setting sun had turned the water from tropical bright to pastel blue. A group of flying fish skipped across the waves, out of the Bull Run’s powerful wake. They’d been planning to spend the night on the island from the start. They needed gas, and Mary always wanted a day to stretch her legs. The plan had been Friday on the Keys, Saturday back in the gulf waters, head for port on Sunday, close up the beach house, say goodbye to the kids—maybe have a talk with Krissy about her choice in men—then fly back to Connecticut. He’d be back to work on Tuesday.

Now they could all stretch their legs for an extra day. He’d caught a couple of nice fish—a barracuda, and a twenty-two-pound permit that he half considered keeping as a mantelpiece. Now all he wanted was a shot of Crown and an empty bar stool on either side.

Castaneda perked up. Is that Key West?

Right on queue.

Castaneda climbed up to the flybridge and took the empty seat, dressed again in white and khaki, leaving the girls on their devices down in the galley.

That’s it, Charles answered, nodding toward the smudge of land and buildings still very much in the distance. Is this your first time?

Oh, no, I’ve been here more than once with my family.

Well, now you’ll get a couple days with my family. Maybe you can show the girls some of your favorite spots.

Sweet.

Charles sighed. Yeah.

Key West wasn’t exactly what Charles Stratton would consider sweet. He was just old enough to remember a time when the island still had an air of dropped out counterculture—a beatnik mystique. Then it learned how to package that mystique and sell it at a premium. Now, Key West was a tiny island thoroughly overrun by tourists all looking for something that had not existed in forty years. It was still a haven for nonconformists, but Charles had found that if you took too many of the strange and poured them all into the same tiny little sausage skin of habitation, what you were left with looked like a set piece arranged for some sappy network TV show.

Have you started your job hunt? he asked.

Castaneda offered a weak shrug. I’ve been to a couple of fairs.

You’d better get on it. They don’t grow on trees anymore.

Charles had assumed that he would be fending off a mongrel begging for scraps the entire trip. He’d half wondered if his relationship to Krissy was a pretext for getting a ‘foot in the door’ at Charles’s company. Castaneda was a business major set to graduate in a month and a half, and Charles Stratton the chief financial officer at Satterwhite Investments. But again, no. The boy didn’t even have enough ambition to sniff at an opportunity when it plopped down right in front of his nose.

I thought I might take a little time off.

Of course. Charles took a deep breath.

Pathetic. Is there even a point in trying to instill a few shreds of wisdom?

Take a break, Charles shouted over the motor and rushing wind. See the world. Listen, the business field doesn’t run like an artist commune, Reagan. An employer is going to want to see some drive, some desire. You’ve got to establish your credibility right from the very beginning. Show them that you’re somebody who will put in the work, somebody who can work with others. Somebody who isn’t such a God damned suck-up. Those first years are the most important. Even if your first job isn’t a dream.... Hey, are you listening?

The boy pointed in the direction of his glassy stare and mouthed something as if they were inside the galley.

What?

"I said, does that look right to you?"

As they rounded the harbor side of the island, nearing Garrison Bight, now dark, the shore looked normal to the casual eye. And Charles nearly said so. Nearly. But something was wrong. He felt it. Part of his mind told him that he was letting the abandoned boat, and his nervous shipmates, get the best of him. Whatever happened to Stovall was twenty miles away. Yet something else told him to take his time, to steady himself, to look close and find the puzzle piece that was jarringly out of place.

Okay, he whispered to himself. Where the hell is everybody?

It wasn’t quite deserted. Three hundred yards or so away, while running parallel to the shore, he could make out the shapes of people. But this was a Friday night, and Spring Break for some. Even without a cruise liner in the harbor, the numbers looked wrong.

Seriously wrong.

As they closed the distance, they passed the Pier House, and he couldn’t see a single soul out on the deck. He saw only one person, maybe a waiter doing something on the patio and heading back inside. Every table should have been full, with more lined up at the rail feeding the fish under the lights.

The two men looked a question at each other, and Charles felt his heart beginning to beat with an odd force.

Mary. Mare! Her head appeared below. Pull up the local news. Tell me if anything strange is going on.

Our connections are real bad, she said, but I’ll try. What do you mean, ‘strange’?

I don’t know.

As the boat powered slowly into Garrison Bight, he looked around. The lighting was normal, cars sat in the parking lot, boats in the slips—less than usual, but otherwise normal.

Maybe.

Someone close was playing their rock music loud enough to be heard over the motor. Behind that, from farther away, he could hear some sort of static, like voices from a crowd at a rock concert.

Strange.

Charles pulled up before Charterboat Row and lined up the back of the Bull Run with the open berth. Just as he started backwards, a little dingy appeared. A single occupant, holding the outboard motor’s tiller, steered his boat directly into Charles’ slip.

With a flash of anger, his tension vanished. I don’t believe this.

Castaneda looked at him and shrugged. You want to just pull into another? He glared at the spineless boy, then to the man climbing out of the dingy, and yelled, Hey. Hey, Jackass! Can you not see me back here? He let momentum carry the boat to the pier, right at the edge of the slip, then he slid down the ladder handrails and jumped onto the wooden planks.

The man, short, late twenties, wearing jeans and some band’s concert shirt, turned his head of sloppy, mangy hair from side to side while looking down, as if he had lost his keys.

I’m talking to you, fella, Charles said while approaching.

Mr. Stratton, Castaneda called out, why don’t you wait a second?

Charles could hear him telling the girls to go back inside the galley.

He was five feet away when he really saw the man’s face. The fluorescent lights from the slip’s open-air doorway showed eyes that looked frightened, and lips, oddly purple, cracked and swollen.

Hesitation crept into Charles Stratton’s voice. I know you... saw me coming in....

The man’s head was twitching. He looked on the verge of panic. Then, he suddenly looked up.

Those eyes. Those crazed, bloodshot, empty eyes.

An unexpected explosion of movement, and the figure burst forward. No time to react. No time to even think.

Charles was suddenly clinching to ward off a flurry of blows. Stop! He felt a stinging on his arms and shoulders. Indignation gave way to fear, as the realization struck that he would have to do something to defend himself. With his arms inside the flailing attacker, he pushed a hand into the man’s face, his thumbs searching for an eyeball.

Something to cause pain. Something to make him stop. Up the cheek, against closed lids.

With hands still windmilling around him, he yelled again. Stop! God damn it!

Just then, a cold pricking sensation started in his side and ran right to the center of his chest, and the dark sky turned suddenly light. His back slapped against wooden planks, and his head thumped. He looked up, staring at the wild-eyed assailant that now had his mouth open as if he were growling, his face, and the scaling knife he held in his right hand, poised at something farther down the pier.

Have I been stabbed?

Then another explosion of movement came, this one white and khaki, and two men crashed onto the planks.

Charles found his vision could not resolve anything more than a swirl of shapes and colors. He heard no sound.

And then he did. The ambient light faded. The sight in front of him resolved into an image of the Castaneda boy lying on top of the knife-wielding lunatic. The wild man flailed his head from side to side, but Castaneda had pinned one of his arms across the man’s body. Then Charles saw the knife.

Castaneda had it... in his free hand... poised above the crazed man’s face as if he were spear fishing and waiting for his prey to hold still just long enough to.... When he moved, he did so with machine-like precision, driving the blade deep into the other man’s eye socket.

Charles heard a sucking sound over his own fevered breathing, like a foot stepping into mud. A scream like a dog’s yelp. Charles’s eyes went wide.

With the blade halfway in, Castaneda set his jawbone into the butt of the handle and added the weight of his head to the quivering thrust. The knife moved again, forcing its way slowly down, all the way, into the twitching skull. Blood streamed down the dead man’s face.

Of everything Charles Stratton had seen on this day, his daughter’s brainless boyfriend knifing a madman with the cool precision of a contract killer easily counted as the most bizarre.

Ms. Stratton! the Castaneda thing called out, coming up onto his knees so that his body covered his victim’s head. Call 911! Charles is hurt. We need an ambulance. Krissy. Krissy! I need that towel, the one on the chair. Throw me the towel.

Charles Stratton did not see a young man coming into his own right before his eyes. He saw a completely different human being than the one that had been agreeably grinning at him these last three days. The towel dropped nearby, and Charles watched as Reagan leaned over to pick it up, still hunched over the madman’s ruined face. At this moment, Charles didn’t know what the boy planned to do to him with the towel. Would he use it to staunch the bleeding, or did he intend to smother him? Was this what he did to witnesses? Either way, his body started to register pain, and although he couldn’t speak or make coordinated movements, a tremor had seized his extremities, and he now shook as if he were being electrocuted. Still, he could not look away from Castaneda.

Then Charles saw why Reagan had wanted the towel. It had nothing to do with him. Reagan took the dead man’s head in the crook of his arm and used the towel to cover his face. It first stood atop the knife like a little tent with a huge center support. Then he turned the dead man’s skull to the right, set it back down, and tucked the cloth in on both sides of the man’s shoulders. If the girls had not seen the killing as it occurred, they would have no idea what Castaneda had just done.

I can’t get through, Mary screamed hysterically. It says all the lines are busy.

Keep trying! Castaneda yelled.

What happened, Krissy cried.

I got stabbed in the chest by some psychopath, and your frat boy/mob enforcer boyfriend just rammed the knife into his skull.

Your dad’s been stabbed.

Oh God.

He could see Krissy now, hunched over on the dock as if she’d been punched, shouting, Daddy, Daddy!

Reagan turned her back toward the boat. Get your mom. Right now!

Charles tried to speak when the boy came for him, but the best he could manage was a barely audible stream of mush. When Reagan looked him up and down, Charles would have cringed in anticipation if he could. Then Reagan hurriedly removed his shirt, took the collar in his teeth, and used both arms to tear it into strips. Charles didn’t see any tattoos. If anything, the body now wrapping cloth strips around his arm and tying them off looked like the after-picture of some torturous workout system’s advertisement page.

You’re breathing too fast. Reagan’s voice was pure intent—no passion, no emotion—like a doctor delivering the fact to a patient whose name he’d just read off a clipboard. You gotta slow it down, Stratton, or you’re going to die. Think about Mary. Think about Krissy. The last of his shirt he wadded into a ball and pressed against his side, and Charles thought he might black out. Think about holding your grandkid and the great story you’re going get to tell all the other Wall Street drones at work. He turned his head and shouted, Ms. Stratton!

I still can’t get anything! What are we going to do?

What the hell? Castaneda looked all around, taking in the surroundings. When he looked back down, his eyes flashed condescension. You better hope this works.

The boy vanished, and Charles could no longer move his neck enough to turn and see what Reagan was doing. After a few seconds, he heard the jingle of keys and the beep of a car alarm. Then he reappeared, and Reagan lifted Charles in his arms like an oversized sack of dog food. He’d never imagined pain so intense.

Ladies, Castaneda called out. We are leaving.

How? Mary said.

We’re taking the other guy’s car.

Did you knock him out? Krissy said. What about the boat?

Now! And then he moved.

They both moved—upstairs, onto pavement, every bounce sending shock waves of agony to his steadily unhinging brain.

You just had to tell off the peasant, didn’t you, Charles? Reagan said. Couldn’t keep it together enough to realize that we just stepped into some kind of shit storm.

They stopped. Another beep, a moment’s pause, and they were moving again.

It’s this one in the middle of the parking lot, Reagan called over his shoulder. Krissy, I need you to open the back door and get in. I’m going to hand him to you.

They stopped again. Another pause.

Krissy, a voice as cold as a knife sliding into an eye socket said. Get in the car right now or your dad is going to die.

A whimper. A door opening. From far off in the distance came something that sounded like a woman screaming, but he couldn’t be sure.

Passenger seat, Mary. Reagan continued taking charge. Knock all that stuff on the floorboard.

Charles Stratton’s back slid across a car seat, his vision aimed up at his steely-eyed rescuer, then only at fabric and a dome light.

His head on your lap. Hold it. Hold it!

And there was Krissy, crying, her delicate chin quivering, terrified. Now a hand was pressing the clump of blood-soaked cloth against his ribs.

A door slammed, then another and another.

Is that other man dead? said Mary, sobbing.

We’ll worry about that later, Reagan said, and the car started. Krissy, you’ve got to keep him from moving. They lurched forward. I have to take some hard turns, but you gotta keep him as still as possible. Mary, pull up a map.

I’m getting directions.

I don’t need directions! I need a map! The car speed up and then slowed. I never plotted alternate routes to the hospital by car. If we have to get off the main road, I need you to tell me where to turn.

Plotted alternate routes to the hospital? What the hell does that mean? Strange. All so strange.

Whatever it meant, it sounded good to Charles’s ears. Reagan was not trying to kill him; that was clear. Charles was beginning to feel real affection for this young man, a pronounced warmth in the center of his being, even as his arms and legs sizzled with the painful stings of nerve sleep. Guido the frat boy was trying to keep him alive—trying like the devil. The car sped up and turned hard enough to make the tires screech.

Reagan!

I see it.

A hard right, and Charles felt his mind starting to drift. He thought it might not be so bad to have a connected mobster in the family. A picture of his office, sitting behind his desk, Tom Barnett seated opposite, gradually materialized: Tom, if you and your FTC cronies don’t get out of my office right now, I’m going to make one God damned phone call and you can kiss your ass goodbye.

Nice.

Ms. Stratton.

It didn’t make sense. He still knew that much. Why would a mobster hide out in a state college?

Ms. Stratton!

I know. I know. Left. Left here!

But lots of things didn’t make sense. That didn’t mean they weren’t real.

Here. Here. Okay. The next. Another left. Here!

His marriage, for example.... He’d been so hard on Mary. Why? What did she ever do to deserve it? She was four months pregnant at the wedding—with the only child she would ever be able to bear—and he’d always considered that she trapped him. So odd. Why had he ever thought that? He had practically forced himself on her.

Oh my God! Mary cried.

What is happening? Krissy sobbed.

No time! Reagan was still in charge.

They swerved right and back to the left. Straight now, and accelerating.

Okay, Mary said, forcing a small level of calm. We’re getting close.

Listen to her, Charles thought. All that emotion for me. Even seeing... whatever they were seeing. So frightened. Yet still fighting. Fighting for me.

He was sorry, so sorry, for the pain he’d caused. Why had he ever thought any of it was important? The late nights, the socials, the affairs. The