Michael had decided on a detour, rationalizing that had he gone straight to Woonsocket, his room would not be ready.
Going instead to a place he’d vowed never to go near again.
Just looking, he’d told himself.
Only a section was visible from his vantage point just off Route 6. A small part of the behemoth collection of buildings that made up the Garthville House of Corrections, but enough to bring back the memory of his first glimpse through the window bars of the bus transporting him to the psych wing eleven years ago. The old structures still irredeemably ugly, redbrick long since turned nicotine brown, massive walls and fences topped with coils of vicious barbed wire.
A jagged fragment of one of Michael’s still-recurring nightmares.
Worse inside. Bad, bad place.
Today, he’d sat for a long while in the Toyota, staring back into the pit, wondering why exactly he’d done that to himself, driven there, of all places.
Not so difficult to answer, he guessed.
He’d wanted a reminder of what had brought him to Whirlwind.
His own failings, for sure, but this place was symbolic of his lowest times.
Fresh, real, sharp fear pierced him suddenly.
Of returning here, in another prison bus, in shackles.
‘Never,’ he said.
Not that he could be sure of that, since what he was about to embark on might well lead him to exactly such a place. And there was only one way to evade that possibility: turn around now, ditch the car and credit card and driver’s license and flash drive and clothing and MacBook, and get himself the hell as far away from New England as he could.
Renege on the deal, in other words. Forget about Reaper and the others. Forget about long-overdue justice, because who would that really help now? Not that he knew how to ditch a car that might end up being linked to a major crime: a vehicle that already had his prints all over it, because he’d taken off his gloves earlier, and he’d sneezed twice, so his DNA was spread around liberally too.
No point kidding himself.
Too late to cut and run.
And anyway, he wasn’t entirely certain that he wanted to. Because he was, when all was said and done, a man of his word, and even if all this was sheerest madness, then he was already an integral part of it.
Had been from the moment he’d said he was ‘in’.
Hard to believe that was only six days ago, but he was in, and that was that.
Done deal. No backing out.
So he’d taken one last look at Garthville, and then he’d closed his mind to it again, turned the car around and gotten back on the road.
And now, just before two o’clock, he was outside the Red Door Inn in Woonsocket, his mood lifting, because this looked like a seriously nice place.
An act of generosity by the man leading this operation.
Reaper, man of mystery.
Check-in straightforward. No one seeming to hear the pounding of his heart; no one querying his identity as Michael Rees, and now, all alone in his comfortable room, he made up his mind to do something he hadn’t managed since he’d landed the Boston café job.
He was going to try to enjoy this for as long as it lasted.
First, though, he had an instruction to follow.
He pulled his laptop from his bag.
The last email had arrived.
Isaiah had checked in.
A second line tacked onto this message.
The only one who had not adhered absolutely to directions.
No harm in it, though. On the contrary.
THANK YOU
Reaper leaned back in the armchair in his room at the Shiloh Inn, and closed his eyes.
‘I thank you, Michael Rider,’ he said quietly.
And then, a moment or two later, he opened his eyes, shut down the computer, then rose and moved back to the window, looked out again at the snow falling ever more heavily.
The plan ultimately strengthened by the weather, though if the new forecasts of a massive snowstorm likely to hit sometime on Christmas Eve were accurate, some vital preliminary changes would need to be made.
Time in hand to wait and see, forecasts being frequently unreliable.
He turned, picked up his overcoat from the bed, put it on with a grimace of the pain that seemed to be spreading further through his body, looked over at his pills on the bedside table, thought better of taking one now, picked up his cane and let himself out of the room.