Blow Out

CHAPTER

29

SAVICH DIDN’T MOVE. He nearly stopped breathing. He wondered in that instant what that SKB shotgun fired at this close range would do to his chest. Probably shred both the vest and him, and he’d be dead so fast he wouldn’t even realize it. He smiled at Martin Thornton. “This hole in the wall. Do you know what it made me think about?”

Martin blinked, his eyes slowly focused. He looked over at the wall. “What?”

“I was thinking that this was the very first time I’ve seen what a shotgun blast could do to a wall, and I was wondering what it would do to a human body. I’m wearing a Kevlar vest, but even so, I think it would splatter me from here into the next block. It would make an awful mess.”

Martin stared at him as if he’d lost his mind. Slowly, he shook his head. “No, I don’t want to think what it would do to you.”

“I hope you never have to see it. Now, I want you to listen to me carefully, Martin. Are you hearing me?”

Savich waited. Slowly, Martin nodded. Savich saw his fingers ease off the trigger, saw he was holding the shotgun more loosely now. Good, he had his attention.

“You’ve already done a very violent thing in firing that shotgun, but no one was hurt. Now concentrate, focus your mind. I want you to look inside yourself, Martin. Look at the powerful feelings that made you do that. Examine them, ruminate on each one of them. Look at them like you would something you want to eat, something you’re not really sure of, but you’re hungry, you have this compulsion to eat everything in front of you. I want you to ask yourself where those feelings are coming from.”

Martin looked bewildered. “I don’t know. I don’t want to look at them. I want them to go away and stay away, but they won’t. They get all heaped up in my head, and I can’t see clearly, can’t separate them out. They’re there all of a sudden and make me crazy, they just—happen, like this morning, everything just popped. I knew it was happening, but I couldn’t stop it, just couldn’t.”

“You’re a strong person, Martin. You’ve survived what many men would never survive, so I know you can deal with this, too. I’m not a physician to give you drugs or tell you to meditate to stop the feelings from overwhelming you.

“What I know is this—you and I are standing right here, you’ve got a shotgun in your hand, the police are outside, and your family is frightened. This is real, Martin, and it could turn tragic. You have to deal with this right now. Without violence, without any more loss of control. I want you to focus your mind on the most real thing in the world to you—your wife, Janet, who’s scared even though she’s hiding it really well. You don’t want her to be frightened any more, do you?”

“I—I, no, I don’t. I hate it when this happens because I can see she’s afraid, afraid of me. And she’s afraid even more for the girls. Oh God, I love Janet.”

“I can see why.”

Martin shook his head, as if coming out of a fog. His voice was shaking as he said, “I’m sorry. I understand. I think I’m feeling better now. Those feelings seem to be backing off, I’m more in control again. Really, I’m not just saying that. Please, Agent Savich, sit down.”

Martin paused, his hand loosening even more on the beautiful black walnut stock of the shotgun. He said, his voice curiously childlike, wistful, “I’ve never met an FBI agent before.” He turned to his wife, and his voice was easier now, less frightened. “Janet, did you hear what he said?”

“Yes, and it makes a lot of sense to me, Martin. You didn’t want to see a doctor before, but now that’s what we must do.” She glanced at Savich, and quickly again at the shotgun.

“Janet, did you hear what he said to me about my mother?”

She nodded. “Yes. He said your dead mother came to him, then she came to him again in his dreams. She spoke of you, her precious boy. She wants him to help you.” She touched her husband’s shoulder. “Martin, please put down that shotgun. I never want to see it again, ever. I want to throw it in the river.”

He nodded and grinned at her, actually grinned. “It’s going to cost us a fortune to repair the wall.”

“Forget about the wall. Agent Savich is going to help us, Martin.” She held out her hand. “Give me that thing. I know it’s beautiful. I know you paid a bundle for it, but it frightens me. It destroys. I’m going to unload it and lay it beside the front door. Okay?”

“Here,” was all he said, and handed her the shotgun. She paused a second, because she really didn’t want to touch it, but she took it and did exactly what she’d said she would. She walked to the front door, unloaded the shotgun, and laid it on the floor.

Us, Savich thought, Janet had said us, not just her husband. And that may have been the right thing to say. When she returned, he said, “Please, both of you, call me Dillon.” Odd how so few people called him by his first name, but somehow, in this circumstance, he knew it was right. He smiled at both of them.

“Thank you, Dillon,” Janet said. “Sit down, Martin. I’m going to go talk to the girls. They’re scared and I want them to know everything is all right. I’ll be right back.”

Martin looked undecided, but for only a moment. “All right. I’m sorry, Janet, I didn’t mean to—the girls, God, I scared them to death. I’m so sorry.”

She hugged him, kissed his cheek. “It will be all right. I’ll speak to the girls, make them understand, then I’ll be back. I’m going to leave them in the bedroom, it’ll make them feel safer, I think. Now, would you like some coffee, Dillon?”

He smiled at her. “Tea would be wonderful.”

“A real live tea drinker. Goodness, we’re coffee addicts in this house. I’ll be right back. You talk to him, Martin. You talk to him, tell him everything, and then listen.” She nodded, patted her husband’s shoulder, and lightly shoved him down into a big easy chair with a remote control pocket holder on the side, obviously his chair.

Martin eased down into the chair like it was an old friend and stretched out his legs in front of him. As if by habit, he reached into the chair’s side pocket, felt the remote control, brought his hand back up. He didn’t face Savich yet, just looked down at the remote for several moments. Then he splayed his palms on his legs, as if trying to relax. He said, still without looking up, “I lost it. I just lost it. Like Janet said, it’s happened a couple of other times, but I never had a gun before.” He shuddered, drew a deep breath, and at last met Savich’s eyes. “I went out last week to a gun show in Baltimore, and I bought the SKB and a big box of shells.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know really. I felt I had to. Something was pushing me, like it had me by the throat. I felt like something bad was coming.”

“Was it a memory, or dream, what?”

“A dream where everything is black, and I’m hiding, where, I don’t know, but I do know to my soul I have to stay hidden. I know something horrible is happening, but I can’t move.”

“Do you think it had something to do with your mother’s murder?”

Martin looked toward the hole in the living room wall. “Everything was black. I couldn’t see anything, couldn’t even tell where I was. I didn’t even know my mother was murdered until I was eighteen.”

“You didn’t know or you didn’t remember?”

“I don’t really know which. All I knew was that she wasn’t there anymore. Sheriff Harms—I remember him really well—he was younger then than I am now—I saw him in my dream when I was eighteen. I actually saw my hand in his. Mine was so small and his was like a giant’s, I do remember that, and he was leading me downstairs and my father and a whole lot of people were there, looking very serious and sad. He handed me over to my father. Then I don’t remember anything, except that we were living in Boston, though I don’t remember moving there, or how or why. Mom was gone, and that was really hard, but my father said it wasn’t our fault she died, that he expected me to be a good, strong, young man.

“After a while I didn’t really ask about her anymore or think about her, accepted that my father and I were in Boston, and I went to school and made friends like any other kid.

“Like I said, I didn’t know anything about how my mother died until I was eighteen. About two months before I graduated high school, I began having nightmares—really violent dreams about people having their throats cut, people being stabbed in the chest—horrible dreams, blood everywhere, and I’d wake up screaming.” He paused, shuddering with memory. “I remember my father came in once. He didn’t say anything, even when I gasped out the dream I’d had. He stood there, stared at me like I was a freak, like he was afraid of me. Then he left, and he didn’t come back when I had the other dreams. I woke up alone and I stayed alone.” Martin looked at Savich. “It was around that time I realized something was really wrong.”

Martin’s father hadn’t said anything about this to Sherlock. Hadn’t Townsend Barrister realized what the dreams meant? Of course he had.

Savich sat forward on the sofa, his hands clasped between his knees. “Later, did you talk to your father about the dreams?”

Martin shook his head. “I couldn’t, and besides, I knew he didn’t want to know. I’d look at him and my two little bratty and normal stepsisters at the dinner table, and I’d think, I could dream tonight that someone is stabbing Cassie through her neck and cutting Tammy’s throat. And I could see their blood, their surprise, the looks on their faces and then they’d be dead.

“It wasn’t something I could talk about. They wouldn’t understand. My father behaved as if he’d rather not even have me there, as if he’d rather I didn’t even exist. It was like he was afraid of me.”

“Then what happened? Did you tell your father anything?”

“Yes, I asked him one day how my mother died.”

“Out of the blue? For the first time since she was murdered in 1973, you thought to ask him?”

Martin nodded slowly. “Yeah. It came to me, probably because of my dreams, I’m not sure. But it came out. Suddenly I had to know.”

“What did your father say?”

“He told me there’d been a terrible accident on the day of my sixth birthday. My mother had slipped and fallen on a kitchen knife, and she’d died. And he’d brought me here to Boston, so we could both recover, start over again. He called her death an accident. Can you believe that?”

“I gather you didn’t believe him?”

“No, I could see in his eyes he was keeping something back. I realize now he didn’t want my half-sisters or my stepmother, Jenny, to find out, and be afraid, maybe be afraid of him.

“So I went off to search on my own. I looked up the Barristers in old newspaper files. Remember, this was before the Internet, back in 1984. But it was enough to point me back. I remembered a road sign clear as day—Blessed Creek. I knew it was a little hick town in the Poconos, in northeastern Pennsylvania. I drove out there. It didn’t take me long looking through archives from that time to learn that she’d been murdered, that my father had taken me away to Boston right after the funeral.”

“Is that why you disappeared after your high school graduation? Did you think your father had something to do with it?”

Martin wouldn’t meet his eyes.

“Listen to me, Martin. You were only six years old when she was killed. Kids have an amazing ability to block things out that could harm them. And that’s what you did. You saved yourself by repressing everything that happened until you were older, more ready to face up to what happened.”

“I know, I know.” He was twisting his hands together, and Savich knew that for the moment, they’d accomplished enough.

“Hey, don’t worry about it, Martin. Show me how that remote works. It looks pretty fancy.”