CHAPTER TEN

 

They had time to kill, so Roy asked Jim to take him to Sand Springs.

“What for?” Jim asked.

“I need to check on Rose. Talking to Lawrence made me miss her something fierce.”

“She your ex-wife or something?”

“We never got married,” Roy said. “Do you mind going out there? I just want to make sure she’s all right.”

Jim nodded. “Let’s go.”

***

Sand Springs was a suburb of Tulsa lying off to the west. Roy’s heart pounded in his chest as Jim steered the Harley onto Rose’s street.

“Third house on the left,” Roy said.

Jim roared past and pulled a U-turn. The Harley rumbled as Jim stopped before the red-bricked, ranch-style house. “You going to go up and say hello?”

“No,” Roy said. “I ain’t talked to her since she left me. She’s married and has kids and everything. She don’t want to hear from me. I just want to get a look at her. Make sure she’s okay. You know?”

Jim nodded.

Roy stared at the house. He couldn’t help but wonder what his life would be like if he had managed to hold on to Rose. This could be his house, his yard. He could have children. He could have a life.

The drapes in the front window were open, but it was hard to see inside. A boy around five or six years old peeked out the window at the Harley. Roy tapped Jim on the shoulder. “We’d better go.”

“You sure you don’t want to go up and knock?”

“I’m sure.”

Jim revved the engine, and as the motorcycle lurched forward, Roy caught a glimpse of Rose in the window talking to her son. She looked as beautiful as ever. He’d been making trips out to check on her for the past six years or so. He’d watched as her daughters grew, as she raised her son. He wished he could share more of her life, but sometimes a glimpse was all he could get.

His heart shuddered and he closed his eyes.

If only things could have been different.

As Jim turned the corner, Rose’s house disappeared from view as if it had never existed at all.

***

The apartment complex was called the Falls. Jim rode around the winding road that curved and twisted through the place. Roy clung to the sissy bar, trying to lean with Jim on the turns. The hills here were steep and Roy was glad he didn’t have to live there in the winter months. The ice storms would turn these roads into treacherous death traps. The night air was crisp but not too uncomfortable. It looked like rain.

Jim stopped the bike in the middle of the road, got off, and turned full circle with his arms outstretched, eyes closed. Roy figured that the residents, if they saw him, would assume Jim was drunk. Jim sighed and scratched his beard. “We’re close,” he said.

“To what?” Roy asked.

“Tonight’s victim. Ten years ago, a guy named Pete had been trying to find his friend’s apartment for a party, but he never made it.”

“You was there when it happened?”

Jim gave a single nod.

“We gonna stop Ken this time?” Roy asked.

“We’re going to try.”

“Got any plans? Some kind of trap or something?”

“Something.”

A pickup truck whipped around the curve behind them and honked, screeching to a halt. A big man leaned out of the cab and shook his fist. “Get that piece of shit out of the way!”

Roy felt certain Jim would rip the guy’s head off, but Jim only rolled his eyes. Roy climbed off the bike and jumped onto the sidewalk. Jim walked the bike slowly to the curb to allow the redneck to pass. The driver stomped on the accelerator, and the truck barked its tires and tore out with a wake of obscenities trailing behind it.

Jim walked around, taking deep breaths. From time to time, he would drop to one knee and run his fingers along the asphalt. Then he closed his eyes, threw back his head, and clenched his teeth. After a moment, while Roy prayed that no one was looking out a window, Jim rose.

Jim reached into his pocket and extracted the pouch he’d taken from the box on his shelf. He opened the pouch and poured its contents into his hand. Roy stepped closer to see what Jim kept in the pouch.

“Plain old sand?” Roy asked.

Jim grinned. “Far from ordinary, Roy.”

“Oh, it’s supposed to be magic sand.”

Jim didn’t acknowledge Roy’s sarcasm. “Special sand,” he said. “But don’t take my word for it; you’ll see tonight.”

Jim sprinkled sand around in a large circle that fell partly on the sidewalk and partly on the grass. He knelt and rubbed the sand into the grass and spread it around on the concrete so it wasn’t so obvious.

“I sure hope you got that in the right place,” Roy said with a grin.

“Me too.”

Roy shook his head. He wasn’t ready to deal with this. What he wanted was some kind of reassurance that things would be okay, but Jim had no words to give him. Roy sighed. He couldn’t back out now. That left sideways and straight ahead, and both paths led to the same thing: a showdown with Ken Hartford.

“Are we gonna wait here?” Roy asked.

“No,” Jim said. “Ken would sense us. I don’t want him on the defensive. We’ll have to let Ken get started then come in and spoil his plans.”

“If we ain’t here, how are we gonna know when to come back? I mean, we gotta get here before Ken kills someone else. What kind of timetable will we use?”

“My memory.”

Roy sure hoped that would be good enough.

***

There were arguments at Safe Haven. Jonathan and Susan sat in the living room of their cabin commune. The group was divided on what they should and should not do.

“Things are getting out of hand there,” Greg said. He was a trim man clad in cut-offs and a sleeveless shirt. Like all the men in the group, his hair hung below his shoulders, and he had a scruffy beard and mustache. “We need to step in and help.”

Jonathan shook his head. “Jim is there. It’s his place. It’s his brother. It’s his responsibility.”

“He was one of us,” a woman named Brenda said.

“The operative word there is was. You’ll note that that is past tense, Brenda. It’s too dangerous.”

“If Jim fails, we’ll be in danger anyway,” Susan said. “Ken knows about us, Jonathan. He’s always known. He’s never been able to reach us, but if he pulls this off, he’ll have to power to get here.”

“He doesn’t know how to get here. If we go to help, there will be a clear path to us. As things stand, Ken doesn’t even have a clue as to where to start looking for us. Goddamn it, we’re safe here! Don’t you see that?”

“Jim knows where we are.”

“He won’t tell.”

“What if he comes here?”

“He can’t.”

“What do you mean?”

Jonathan sighed. “He’s been looking for us, Susan.”

“We should go to him,” Brenda said.

“No!” Jonathan took a moment to regain his composure. “As I was saying, Jim has been looking for us. His only connection to us is a thin emotional link. He’s buried his emotions so far inside himself that he couldn’t tell Ken how to reach us even if he wanted to. He can’t access his own path here without some kind of emotional trauma.”

“What if something bad enough happens?”

“To be bad enough to trigger the memory, it will probably be more than enough to kill him.”

“It could happen to someone else, couldn’t it?”

Jonathan nodded. “Yes, but Jim doesn’t care enough about anyone in his life to reach that core. He hasn’t cared about anyone in a long, long time.”

“Not since Trisha,” Brenda said and turned away to hide the tears in her eyes.

“He has no real friends,” Jonathan said. “He has nothing. We are not involved and I say we keep it that way.”

Susan sat on the floor and closed her eyes. “You’re the one who has nothing,” she said.