Page 4 of The Chain House

Today it was Agent Nathan Sparks, an officer twenty years her junior. None of the rotating guards would be able to keep up if she were to really start running, she knew. Granted, they were armed and not in attire conducive for exercise, but as a former college athlete, four years running cross-country at Harvard, Beth craved the wind in her face. She wanted to let loose and really stretch her legs, as she’d been doing, alone, through the familiar trails in the woods on the outskirts of the governor’s mansion, for years. But she held back, allowing Nathan to save face as they jogged side by side under leafy boughs and moving shadows and spots of filtered morning sunlight, their footfalls sometimes in rhythm, sometimes in unison, and occasionally soporific.

And peaceful.

Until Beth suddenly heard footsteps trailing behind them that hadn’t been there seconds before.

Agent Nate was the first to look over his shoulder, quickly moving in front of Beth as a man in full camouflage gear and wearing a Guy Fawkes mask moved toward them with careful purpose, only twenty yards away, with a gun raised.

The man fired before Nathan could raise his gun. The gunshot echoed and birds flew from trees. The bullet hit the agent between the eyes, dropping him lifelessly to the trail.

Beth screamed, sprinted in the opposite direction.

The next bullet found her right calf, and she went down hard, rolling from the trail and into a thicket of brambles and tall weeds. She crawled like a wounded soldier over jagged deadfall, away from her attacker, but it was futile.

He was on her in seconds, his knee on her back, her face pressed to the ground, the mask inches from her ear, his deep, familiar voice, “Remember me?”

CHAPTER2

WHO IS MALLARD Malone, anyway?

This was what Sam Harper thought as he entered his childhood home and noticed the stack of hardcover Mallard Malone novels on the end table beside his father’s recliner.

He called out, “Hey, Dad, it’s me,” over the sound of The Who’s Tommy coming from the kitchen, but his father didn’t answer. Dr. Trevor Harper liked his music loud when he cooked, and it smelled like chicken alfredo, his son’s favorite.

Sam had never been drawn into the global hype of who exactly Mallard Malone was, other than an unknown novelist probably sitting on enough money to support a small country, but the question had been on Sam’s mind of late.

Who was Mallard Malone?

The question popped up organically, even with the most who-gives-a-shit readers out there, upon the publication of each subsequent Mallard Malone novel, of which there were now seven, with an eighth and final book quickly approaching.

But why was there a stack of Mallard Malone novels in his father’s house?

Dr. Trevor Harper, a fifty-year-old history professor at the University of Louisville, was an avid reader, but he despised popular fiction in general and the Mallard Malone novels in particular, even though, to Sam’s knowledge, he’d yet to read that first page.

Sam didn’t care one way or another; he wasn’t necessarily a Mallard Malone fan either. He’d hurried over with fresh career news that had him busting at the seams, but seeing the stack of Mallard Malone novels had been jarring enough to give him pause.

Pinball Wizard played loudly from the kitchen.

It was one of a million songs that, to Sam, encapsulated his childhood.

He’d grown up in a music-lovers household, but since his mother’s death sixteen years ago after a grueling yearlong battle with ovarian cancer, it was a rare time when his father wasn’t playing music, either on vinyl from the dining room or CD in the five-disc changer in the living room, or, of late, Alexa in the kitchen. Sam chalked it up to his father’s perpetual loneliness without her, and the fact that any type of quiet made his father sad.

Sam had warned his dad he couldn’t stay long, but wanted to tell him the news in person, and agreed to stay for a quick dinner. Sam had spent the five-mile drive from his apartment contemplating how best to break the news to his father, who not only wished his son had chosen a career other than filmmaking but had already made his feelings on Sam’s latest project quite clear.

Sam, nothing good can come from doing a documentary on Sal Batise, his father had said of the former cult leader, sociopath, and rumored cannibal. Nothing good can come from you diving too deep into that cesspool of filth and senseless carnage, he’d said, with venom Sam still didn’t understand. And, his father added, too many sensationalized documentaries have already been done on the man, and … and done poorly, I might add, because no one, even after going through the countless hours of taped interviews with that monster, can decipher what’s true and what’s not, Sam, because there has never been a better liar who ever walked the earth.

His father wasn’t wrong.

Sal Batise, a.k.a. the Kentucky Cannibal, the Breaker of Chains, may have admittedly drawn inspiration from the infamous cult leader Charles Manson, but it was the opinion of most that Sal, on his near two-decade stint on death row, had not only surpassed even Manson in his innate ability to so convincingly lie in front of a camera, but in every sensationalized way possible.

But shit was about to get real, Sam thought, suddenly hesitant to enter the kitchen, where Pete Townsend and Roger Daltry brought back comfortable feelings of nostalgia, of home, a sensory embrace of safety he could easily bury himself into and under, if only to escape the anxiety now suddenly hitting him like a ton of bricks. The realization that, yes, he might be in way over his head, and what was he thinking, reaching out to the state penitentiary about that asinine contest?

Because deep down, you didn’t think they’d respond.

Deep down, you were hoping they wouldn’t respond.

Because there was no way in hell Sal Batise would pick you over a real news network.

And now what, Sam?