At precisely 11 A.M., a weary, shaken Vernon Colchester is released from police custody. A trifle disoriented. The bright sun hurts his eyes as though he’s been squirreled away in a grotto for a week. He’d expected hard questions. He’d not expected Captain Hammond to put a hand on his kneecap and hold it there, squeezing intermittently, and he had not expected him to insist that the first word out of his mouth anytime he spoke had to be sir.
“Sir, I didn’t kill anybody.”
“Sure you did, son. Absolutely you did.”
At the end of the first sentence that Hammond spoke he would always say son. Vernon detested that word as much as he hated having to say sir.
“I loved Addie. I’d never hurt her. That’s a crazy idea.”
“Say that again properly, son,” Hammond instructed him, and squeezed his knee.
“Sir, I loved Addie.”
“Nobody doubts that, son. Why did you dress her up?”
“Sir, I didn’t!”
“Speak the truth, son. You’ll see. Things will go better then.”
“Sir—”
“We know you loved her, son. Love can take a man into strange places. You agree with me on that, right?”
He didn’t know what to say.
“Don’t you agree, son? You’ve been in strange places. If you admit to that, at least, you won’t be admitting to anything much. We can agree on that, can’t we?”
“Sir, agree on what?” He was confused.
“That love can take you into strange places, son.”
He could admit to that, but he wouldn’t.
“Sir, I don’t know what you mean.”
“Oh son.” He squeezed his knee again.
Vernon didn’t know what he hated most, saying sir, being called son, or having his kneecap squeezed for no reason. None of that felt sexual, he couldn’t fight back at him on that, and yet the cop was trying to dominate him, to wear him down that way.
He just wanted him off.
He slept in a cell.
Outside in the bright sunlight, he finds himself at a loss, wanting to run, hide, wanting to scream at passengers on a city bus who presumed to glance his way. He reaches out to a friend instead, calling Caroline, who texts Anastasia. One girl arranges to pick the other up, then the two girls drive over a few blocks to meet Vernon in the center of town. He calls back once to see where they are and when they say they’re nearby he departs the coffee shop to wait on the street. The girls are slowing down, looking to park, when a large black SUV ducks ahead of them and stops just past where Vernon’s standing. In the wink of an eye, a heavyset man emerges from the backseat, leaps onto the curb, and before Vernon can react grabs him by the front of his shirt and by his belt and half hurls, half squashes him into the backseat of the vehicle.
The door slams shut on its own as the SUV speeds off.
At the wheel of her car, Caroline goes comatose, shocked. The scene has been previewed a thousand times in movies she’s seen, but this is real, this is happening to someone she knows. She feels unable to breathe, her chest clogged.
The moment falls to Anastasia to revive her.
“Get after them! Caroline! Caro! Get after them!”
The black SUV is speeding away.
“Caro!”
“He had a gun!”
“What?”
“He had a gun!”
“Fucking go! Drive!”
Traffic has already come between the two vehicles and Caroline can’t bring herself to drive that aggressively despite Anastasia’s protestations. Soon they’re leaving town on the highway and catching a glimpse of the vehicle as it outruns them and reappears and vanishes up and down hills and frequently around bends.
“Hurry up!”
“Oh my God oh my God!”
“Get a hold of yourself!”
Caroline does just that. “Call my uncle!”
“What?”
“Now!” She barks out the number as she careens around a corner.
“Careful!”
“Too late for that.”
Anastasia calls the farmhouse. Caroline, one hand on the wheel, seizes the phone from her. When Sandra answers she falls back into being polite yet demands to speak to Émile immediately. Apparently, he’s doing his exercises and is slow to make it to the phone. She’s screaming into the phone to hurry, not knowing that Sandra has put the receiver down and wandered off.
Finally, Émile answers. “Yes?”
“Uncle Émile, for God’s sake, it’s me!”
“Caro? What’s going on?”
“He’s been abducted! Vernon! They grabbed him right off the street!”
“The police?”
“No! Not the police! Or maybe. I don’t know who! Two guys with a gun! He just called me to pick him up because the cops let him go. They released him. Somebody else grabbed him!”
“What do you mean grabbed?”
“They threw him into the back of this big van thingee.”
“SUV!” Anastasia shouts out.
“Did you see which way they went?”
“Yes! Uncle Émile, we’re following them right now! Anastasia and me! We’re chasing them!”
“Oh no. For God’s sake be careful. Who’s driving?”
“I am!”
“Then give the phone to Anastasia. Right now, Caro.”
Partly to comply, more out of physical necessity, Caro flips the phone to her friend as she grips both hands tightly to the steering wheel. The other girl makes a miraculous catch before the phone falls between the seats, and shouts into the device, “What!”
“Anastasia,” Émile calmly directs her, “tell me exactly where you are and what direction you’re headed. Be as precise as you can be.” He then shouts through the house, “Sandra!” Back to his caller, informing his wife at the same time, he explains, “Sandra will call the Hanover Police Department on my mobile. She’ll speak to Chief Till. We’ll get a patrol car out to you right away. Tell Caroline to keep her distance.”
“No, I want her to hurry up, we’re falling behind!”
“Fall behind! We don’t want an accident. Do they know you’re chasing them?”
“I doubt it. Caroline doesn’t drive fast enough for them to think that.”
“I’m glad she doesn’t. Good for her. Okay, Anastasia, we have Chief Till on the other line. Now where are you?”
She knows the road. At that moment they happen to pass a highway sign and she doesn’t have to think twice. She spots a civic address and relays that number as well. “Add on, I don’t know, a quarter mile, maybe more, heading south, that’s where they are, ahead of us.”
“Keep your distance,” Cinq-Mars instructs her, although Anastasia hears him talking to Chief Till as well. His voice is calm, directed, and she tries to emulate his tone in repeating the message to Caroline.
“We haven’t seen them for a bit,” she gets back to him a moment later.
“Steady on. Keep looking down side streets and driveways to see if they turned off.”
“Vernon must be terrified.” Suddenly, Anastasia is excitable again. “What’re you doing! What’re you doing!”
“What’s going on?” calmly, Émile is asking in her ear.
All that Anastasia knows is that Caroline is pulling over to the side of the road for no reason of which she’s aware without slowing down and not in a good spot, either. The shoulder is hazardous and the ride violent. The old jalopy Ford bucks like a crazed bull. Anastasia prangs her head on the ceiling then hits her chin on her own kneecap. In the chaos she sees a Hanover police car, lights flashing, siren off, roaring past them at the speed of sound and by the time their car fights its way back onto the roadway, rocking from side to side, the patrol car has virtually vanished. They spot it around a curve through trees, at bullet speed.
“My God, will you stay on the road, he would’ve gone around you, Caro!”
“Just—” Caroline thinks of what to say. She’s staring straight ahead, driving as though she wants to choke someone the way she holds the wheel.
“Just what?” her friend asks.
“I don’t know. Just, shut the fuck up, I guess.”
“Tell her I heard that,” Cinq-Mars says. “What’s going on?”
“The police are here. They’re ahead of us. They’re after them.”
She hears Émile convey the news to Chief Till, and she relays his message, then he advises the girls to pull over and come home. “Let the police take it from here.” He waits a moment.
Caro asks her friend to use the speaker phone, then speaks to her uncle while she drives. “Uncle Émile, seriously, there’s no place to turn around here, it’s too dangerous to stop. We have no choice. We’ll go straight until it’s safe to turn.”
He suspects that he’s being played, and knows there’s nothing he can do about that. “Stay on the line,” he advises her, “until you start heading back.”
“If you don’t mind too much, no. I’ll call you if something happens.”
A young person with a willfulness all her own.
“Be safe,” Émile warns before the connection goes silent.
* * *
In the rear seat of the vehicle being pursued, Vernon Colchester resists. He knows what’s coming. The big man has the advantage of size and positioning and uses it to pummel him without mercy. In the limited confines they compete to a moment when the student submits, it’s useless to fight on. He answers their questions. Not like they want him to. He’s wedged against the door with the heavy man almost entirely on top of him, still punching and demanding different answers, when the door is opened, his head falls back, and as they speed along the highway his scalp dangles a foot and a half above the pavement although it feels more like an inch, and he’s being shoved, incrementally, out the door. Toward, he believes, a certain death. Fiercely he kicks with his one free leg, grips whatever he can hold on to. Their stalemate persists until the heavy man squirms off his chest, yet still pins his hips, and the man yanks Vernon’s torso up by pulling him by the hair then aims a pistol between his eyeballs.
That gun again.
Vernon is looking at the man’s fat finger on the trigger.
“Motherfucker, jump!” commands his attacker. He’s breathing heavily from the exertion of punching him, his voice succinct. “Jump or die for sure. You got that one fucking chance I give you here.”
Not much of one. A fat chance, Vernon thinks, he doesn’t know why.
The door keeps swinging open, then closes partway. The car careens down the highway in excess of seventy miles an hour. Vernon looks out. The shoulder of the road a blur. He’s permitted to slip out from under the heavier man and with a gun to his head Vernon Colchester tries to leap but in the end merely stumbles out of the car.
He suffers a ferocious wallop as he hits the side of the road.
* * *
The officer in the gaining patrol car sees him bounce once, twice, lifting high off the ground, then hit the grass hard again before his limp form cartwheels down an embankment. The cop needs to make a choice in a hurry—and quits his pursuit to come to the aid of the injured boy.
He hopes that he’s merely injured anyway. As opposed to dead.
* * *
Caroline sees the flashing lights of the squad car, now stopped by the side of the road. She pulls in behind. Anastasia can see down the embankment and puts both hands to her mouth. Caroline opens her car door.
“Caro. No. Stay here with me.”
The words, the look on her friend’s face, are too much for Caroline; they provide her with the necessary impetus to clamber out of her seat. This time it’s Anastasia who’s frozen in place. Caroline steps to the side of the embankment, sees the two cops, one next to Vernon, the other still working his way down the hill. The embankment is mostly shrub grass and gravel. There’s blood. There’s a limb akimbo. There’s a motionless boy. Way, way in the distance, she hears the initial wail of an ambulance, she hopes, or more cop cars. Or both. When she turns back to inform Anastasia of what she sees, both their faces are cracked and broken.
* * *
Before his surgery, Vernon Colchester’s friends are informed that his chances of survival are touch-and-go.
The pressure on his brain must be relieved. A broken arm and leg are repaired and placed in protective removable casts although his broken ribs interfere with his ability to breathe. Three fingers are reset on the tip of the arm that’s not broken as has been the kneecap on his good leg. The broken leg has three pins embedded in the ankle now. They’re worried about a hip but can’t deal with it yet. His face has suffered a few serious lesions, one quite deep. He looks as though he had a bare-knuckle brawl as an amateur featherweight against the heavyweight champion of the world. They address his face with bandages.
After surgery, one of the attending physicians calls him lucky. Even so, everyone can tell that the doctor remains worried.