The Man From Primrose Lane Part 30

He nodded. "I'm in. I jumped down the rabbit hole when I stepped into your limo. Let's see where it goes."

"Good! We'll start tomorrow."

As Mr. Merkl served supper right there in the smoking den, David arranged some photos on a side table. Three school photos. Elaine, Elizabeth, Katy. Each about ten years old. Each with a similar background of white clouds and blue sky. There was a crack in Katy's picture, David noticed, a thin dark line above her left shoulder, a defect of the lens, possibly, or the background itself.

"I have one more favor to ask," I said.

David looked up.

"It's a little thing. There's going to be quite a lot of driving over the next few days. A lot of time in the car. I'd like to interview you about your history and your investigation into the case of the Man from Primrose Lane. You know, while we travel from place to place."

"For your book?"

"If I ever get around to finis.h.i.+ng it."

"Sure."

Later that evening, I drove David home in the Cadillac I keep in the garage.

During the journey, we were mostly silent. I knew I had to give him some time to let the bizarre facts of his present life sink in.

I saw her face out of the corner of my eye and swerved the car onto the shoulder, braking hard. David gripped the dashboard in panic.

"What?" David asked.

"Look." I pointed to the digital billboard suspended over Route 8, between Peninsula and Akron. Usually the sign alternated between advertis.e.m.e.nts every three seconds. Not today.

It was locked on one static shot.

A school photo of a ten-year-old girl named Erin McNight.

She had red hair. And freckles.

It was an Amber Alert.

EPISODE FOURTEEN.

THE BURNING RIVER.

On the other side of the reinforced door inside Tesla's lab was a cool dark room that smelled of oiled metal. I felt about for a light switch while I locked the door behind me. There it was, to my right. Click.

A row of fluorescents stretching the length of a football field shuttered on above, illuminating a storage facility and loading dock. I was unprepared for what I saw. I had imagined Tesla would have a prototype vessel for human travel. Never did I think he'd already reached the point of ma.s.s production.

I stood in a field of black eggs, their tops a foot taller than my head. Hundreds, s.h.i.+ning like a forest of dark, smooth crystals. What did Tesla need with so many? What in the h.e.l.l was he planning?

A part of me realized that, if I stayed, this would be the biggest story of my life, that it would make my career, my legacy. But the pull was too strong. If I told the world about it, I would surely never be allowed to use it.

Squeezing between rows of time machines, I quickly made my way toward the end of the warehouse. Three Humvee-wide loading docks were there, closed. Unfortunately, there were no Humvees. However, sitting in the farthest port was a Cushman, the kind with a little cab and a flatbed. Electric, of course. I noticed it was not plugged in. I hoped that meant the battery was charged.

Carefully-I had no idea how much shock these technological wonders could take-I rolled the closest black egg to the concrete ledge behind the Cushman. It was only a foot drop. I had to risk it. I pushed it over, an image of Humpty Dumpty stuck in my mind. It landed in the Cushman, wobbled to one side like a drunken weeble, then righted itself. I strapped it in tightly, using nylon belts already attached to the vehicle, for this specific purpose, it seemed, then climbed inside the cab.

I pushed the ignition b.u.t.ton and the Cushman came to life with a low moan. The battery light came on, too. Three bars remained. Not enough juice to make it around Cleveland, to Vermilion, where Dr. Tanmay Gupta waited for me. That route skirted the entire Foreclosed Zone, about a hundred and twenty miles of road. Not nearly enough to go around.

But through?

I punched the accelerator and the flimsy aluminum loading dock door exploded around me like sc.r.a.ps of tinfoil. The black egg remained relatively still in the bed of the Cushman.

It was growing dark outside, barely an hour's worth of light left for the world. Then again, uniks didn't need light to see.

Around the corner, Ilsa and the guards hurried back toward the front doors. They were too shocked at the Cushman barreling by to even raise their stunners. Lazy guards, probably stationed to this outpost inside the Scrubber Barrens because they couldn't do anything else. I was past them and halfway down the lane leading to I-77 before they even radioed in a distress call to HQ, I'm sure.

It wouldn't take HQ in Columbus long to release the uniks. And how long would it take them to cross the distance to me? An hour? Not long.

I turned North on I-77, toward the empty buildings of a once-great city.

I reminded myself that people had seen deer, healthy deer, from airplanes, thriving within the city limits. An hour or two of highly toxic dust and pollen wouldn't kill me. At least I didn't think it would.

The Ohio Department of Transportation had set up concrete barriers just north of the Scrubber Barrens, on I-77. They were old and crumbling now. Russian thistle grew from them, out of large holes filled with black water. The barriers were covered in graffiti. WELCOME TO NEW CLEVELAND! someone had written. It was easy enough to maneuver the Cushman around.

My intention was to avoid downtown, skirting it by taking I-490 West, a conduit running along the old steel mills that reconnected with I-90 on the other side. But as I came to the exit, I discovered that the ramp and a quarter mile of road had fallen into the Cuyahoga many years ago. I waited there a moment, contemplating my options. The abandoned LTV smelting plant sat quietly to my left, its chimneys blackened and crusted by decades of overuse, silent now. The whole Cuyahoga Valley with its spires of concrete smokestacks looked like an empty Mordor, a dead orc kingdom after the fall of Sauron. It looked like h.e.l.l after h.e.l.l.

There was no choice. I had to drive through downtown.

I rolled north on I-77, navigating around chuckholes that could hide elephants, and watched the Cleveland skyline appear on the horizon. Key Tower was gone. Utterly. The National City Building leaned dangerously away from the lake and would surely collapse during the next good storm, taking Old Stone Church with it. But Terminal Tower still stood, a man-made bastion of humanity, the avatar of Cleveland herself. A tattered Indians pendant fluttered in the poisonous breeze above its highest turret.

I exited at Ontario, the preferred route for baseball games at the Jake and rock concerts at the Q. Jacobs Field was being strangled by ivy so thick and so high that the vegetation appeared sentient and sleeping. The Q was nothing but rubble. To my left, the G.o.ds of Transportation, giant statues of men holding carved vehicles like sacrificial offerings, looked down at me, great Roman deities witnessing the end of times. These statues marked the entrance to the Lorain Road Bridge. The bridge stood, I saw. But the statues made me nervous. They reminded me of the oracles from the Neverending Story, the half-naked statues that had tried to kill the kid, so I moved on.

I turned left in front of the Hard Rock Cafe and drove around the large guitar marquee that had once rotated out front. As I came around the backside of Terminal Tower, my heart sank. The Veterans' Memorial Bridge was no more. Steel pylons twisted in the air like open hands grasping for the road it once held. Beyond it, I saw the Route 2 bridge still remained. However, a large section in the middle of the expanse had collapsed, a hole much too big to drive around, and one that suggested it was no longer structurally sound. That left the swing bridge in the Flats.

Before the city's mills became obsolete, decades before the housing crisis turned it into a ghost town, the Flats was a place of much reverie. Bars lined both sh.o.r.es of the Crooked River where it emptied into Lake Erie. Not just bars, but clubs and concert venues like the Odeon. It had been a place for bachelorette parties and dry-humping. Life had thrived here. It died long before the evictions, around the time we lost the World Series.

A single bridge linked the east and west banks of the Flats: a red steel swing bridge that spun upon a giant spindle situated on the west bank, allowing container s.h.i.+ps to slip upriver to the factories in the valley. In 1969, the overly polluted Cuyahoga River had actually caught fire not far from here. That incident had single-handedly ushered in the era of environmental safety legislation. So much for all that.

The bridge stood.

The ramp was not exactly aligned with the road on the east side, but it was only off by inches. There was plenty of room left for the Cushman to access it. A little luck, at last.

Still, I hesitated. I brought the Cushman to a stop just before the bridge and looked around. Upriver, the west bank had fallen into the Cuyahoga. What had once been upscale apartments were now riverfront property; most of the rooms were partially submerged. Toward the lake, the river was clogged with telephone poles, fallen trees, and an S-10 pickup-the kind with a combustible engine. Even from here, I could see the skeleton behind the wheel.

Suspended above the bridge was the operator's office, its windows dark. When there had been need to travel the river, it had been a lonely person's job to sit in that booth all day long and swing the bridge open for the freighters.

I urged the Cushman forward.

For a moment everything was fine. I began to breathe a sigh of relief. And then I heard something pierce the tires. All four at once. The Cushman lurched forward, axles skidding along the grated metal, throwing sparks. At the same time, the bridge began to turn away from the east bank. The gears above my head whined and protested as the machinery was called upon to perform its job once more.

I dug into my belongings and came up with the stunner. Its battery was low. Not enough to take on more than two harriers, if that was what I was dealing with.

The Cushman vibrated to a stop halfway across the bridge. A minute later the bridge stopped, too, locking us away from the other sh.o.r.e. The only way out was onto the west bank.

I heard a rumbling, like thunder. It had been so long since I had heard this sound, it took me a moment. A diesel engine. I heard it growling from around the corner of an old bar. A second later a tow truck pulled into view and actually paused at a stop sign before turning left toward me. There were two dark figures in the cab.

The truck stopped before the bridge and then turned around and backed up, its steel pipe emitting a thick black smoke, its steel claw swaying back and forth, searching for the grille of the Cushman. Just before it made contact, the truck stopped. The driver's door opened and a tall man lumbered out, pointing a sawed-off shotgun at my face.

"Ho, there!" he said. There was a boil on the side of his neck the size of a baby's fist.

"h.e.l.lo?" I shouted out the window.

"What brings you this far north, my friend?" The shotgun remained focused on my face.

I turned the stunner's trigger so that it was programmed to go off upon harsh contact and slid it into my pants pocket.

"Pa.s.sing through," I said. "Not bringing trouble."

"Ayuh," he said. "Climb on down, will you?"

I did as he said, opening the cab and stepping onto the swing bridge. The floor was latticed corrugated steel. The Cuyahoga bubbled beneath us like the River Styx.

"Maggie!" he hollered.

The pa.s.senger door of the tow truck opened and a wraith of a woman walked out and over to the gears.h.i.+ft on the back that controlled the claw. Her hair hung over her face in a cascade of filthy dreadlocks. She wore a low-slung iRis 4.0 T-s.h.i.+rt and from where I stood I could see the round blue eye in her trachea where someone had replaced her voice box with a cosmetic pitch alternator. It was a hallmark of an expensive prost.i.tute but those days were long gone and no one had paid to have it removed. Without talking, she set to work securing the Cushman to the truck. As she did, the driver conducted a thorough exam of my person, patting for a handgun. When he was done, he laughed.

"Come to Cleveland without a sidearm? Who are you running from?"

"Uniks."

The word caught the man like a slap across the jaw. His face turned a pallid pink. Then he smiled. "You hear that, Maggie? Uniks! No one'd bother sending uniks into Cleveland. No point to it. They'd kill you up here. You'd starve to death."

"I think they mean to kill me."

But the driver waved me off. "What do ya have in the bed?" he asked, poking at the black egg in a way that made me feel very queasy.

"Dunno," I said. "I'm just the driver. Supposed to take it from Erie to Toledo. Under the radar."

"Ransom," he said, as if to himself. "Somebody'd pay a handsome lot for this, then, wouldn't they?"

I shrugged. "Depends on if you want to twist with the type who would pay a guy like me to drive this thing through the wastes of Cleveland."

"Oh, lad, I can twist, all right. I can tussle." He nudged me with the business end of the shotgun. "Tell you what I'm gonna do. I'm a let you go. It's a day's walk out of the city, heading east on 90. You'll find the outpost in Willoughby ere twilight tomorrow. You go on back home and tell your boss to make me a deal. I'll take good care of his treasure till then."

Maggie finished her business and then walked, head down, to her seat in the idling truck.

I shook my head. "I can't do that."

"Oh, no?"

"No."

"You got a gun in your face, mister. Maybe you do what I tells you to do."

"The Second Amendment was repealed five years before the Great Foreclosures. No doubt you found this weapon under the bed of the tow truck you pilfered. But I figure you've been hard-pressed to find any sh.e.l.ls. Maybe a couple, in garages or attics. Here and there. But you probably used those to bring down game along the fringe. You and I both know this gun isn't loaded. Not now. Not in a long time. You don't even clean the thing anymore."

For a long moment the highwayman didn't say anything and his expression remained unreadable. "Maybe it is loaded. Maybe not," he said. "But I a.s.sure you the stock is strong enough to bash in your mudderruddy skull."

I swung the stunner toward his neck and prayed there was enough battery left for just one more shock. In alarm, he squeezed the trigger, and for a second I believed I had seriously miscalculated the situation. But his action had been instinct. There was a dull click as the hammer hit the empty barrel. Then the stunner collided with his neck and sizzled to life. The electricity traveled along his body in a ripple, on down through his feet, which, I had not noticed until then, were wrapped not in leather but a torn blanket full of holes. The electricity traveled the length of the metal bridge and down into its large hinge, which was now half submerged in the muck and mire of the river. The only thing that saved me was my rubber-soled shoes.

It started with a spark thrown off from that hinge. The river caught fire. Again. I felt a warm rush of air and then everything was enveloped in flame. The driver, lying immobile at my feet, began to cook. And scream.

I dashed to the open door of the tow truck. It smelled like the den of a malnourished bear, the sort that is slowly dying of cancer of the a.n.u.s. I nudged the truck into gear and began to move it off the bridge, away from the river of fire, that cursed river. Maggie, finally noticing her master was no longer in charge, simply opened the door and stepped into the air. I watched her wasted body fall into the river. It is an image that haunts me to this day.

Miraculously, the truck's tank was full of diesel. Plenty to deliver me to Vermilion, to Tanmay, if the uniks didn't catch up first. My best chance of stopping them had been that stunner, which was melting into the man's neck on the road behind me. What could I do but go on?

As I started down the road, I looked back to the inferno raging behind. I watched a man jumping up and down inside the operator's nest, screaming for help. I looked forward and pretended he didn't exist.

Then I opened the window and listened for the approaching screams of the uniks.

"You look like a.s.s," said Jason.

They sat at a table in a dark corner of the Nervous Dog coffee shop, a hipster hideaway tucked in a forgotten West Akron shopping plaza. It was early morning the day after Erin McKnight's kidnapping. Another layer to compound the mystery. David wanted to clean house a bit. Be a good Boy Scout, be prepared for anything that came next. And that meant drawing in some loose threads before he became further entangled.

"I've had better days."

"They treat you okay in the pokey? n.o.body tried to, you know, get gay with you or nothing?"

"No, Jason. n.o.body tried to get gay with me."

"I spent a week in juvie once. Joyride in my sister's car. I was thirteen. Some creepy s.h.i.+t goes on in there."

David rubbed at the pain behind his temples. "What do you have for me, Jason?"

"On the redhead's old man?" Jason handed him a small notebook stuffed with a couple photos of a rough-looking man with a high forehead and white-white hair walking to his pickup. The years since David had seen him at the Kent State vigil had been unkind. "He's a piece of work. Contractor. Nasty divorce about ten years ago. Ran his ex-wife over the coals. Had a private eye take pictures of her f.u.c.king another dude in the Metro Parks. Got custody of Katy-she was fourteen. Started drinking. Beat up a guy pretty bad at Nighttown in 2008. Apparently the dude mouthed off about his daughter, how smoking hot she grew up to be or something. Put him in the hospital. Served three weeks downtown, on work-release. He's in AA now. Man has a short fuse. But if you ask me, I don't like him for it."

"Why not?"

"Uh. Guys like this. You got to know the type. He's all fists. Pow. He doesn't think. He reacts. With your guy on Primrose Lane ... that took some planning. Some thought. Too much time for a guy like this. He'd have cooled off before it was over. And besides, no way could I see him killing a woman."

"You've heard Elizabeth was murdered, then?"

"I'm sorry, David. Really."

"Thanks." David reached into his satchel. He brought out a thin gray metal box, about the size of a notebook.

"What's that?" asked Jason.