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PROLOGUE
UPPER WEST SIDE, MANHATTAN, SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO
The summons came at three a.m. Three short hits on the intercom.
Dr. Howard Parr leaped up, knocking over his drink. His cigarette flipped, sparks scattering. He made his way slowly down the steps to the door of his town house, swaying, clutching the banister. He peeked out the spy hole.The big envelope lay on the stoop. He opened the door, not even bothering to touch it with care, to avoid obscuring possible fingerprints. They all knew that he wasn’t going to the police.
Two objects inside. One was in pieces; the smashed remains of the closed circuit camera he’d put up, in an ill-conceived attempt to monitor his front door. Someone had ripped it out days after it had been installed. He’d been braced for a slap-down ever since, wishing he hadn’t done it. That he could roll onto his back, showing his throat, saying I’m sorry. But they didn’t care. The other object was a videotape. His guts lurched.
His swept the darkened, car-lined street. No one was there, but he felt malevolence oozing from the darkness like poison gas.
Howard trudged up the stairs, slid the tape into the VCR, docile as a beaten dog. A burning smell tickled his nose. He looked down. His cigarette was smoldering in the carpet. He crushed it as footage began.
He realized, with a sickening rush, that the camera’s jolting progress showed the interior of his own house. It turned a corner, zoomed in onto Howard himself, passed out on the kitchen floor. He could not have said what day it was. His nights often finished there. He found the hard cold floor tiles vaguely comforting, pressed against his hot face.
The camera moved up the stairs, passed Howard’s bedroom. A featureless hand in a rubber glove turned a knob, and walked into his eleven-year-old daughter’s room. Howard’s guts began to spasm.
The camera moved towards Lily’s bed. Light from the hallway spilled in. The camera focused on her half open mouth. The hand held up a spray bottle, with a “ta-da” flourish, and sprayed Lily’s face. She murmured, but subsided without waking. The camera sank as the man sat on the bed, bouncing. He slapped Lily’s face. She did not stir.
The hand pulled down the sheet and coverlet down with taunting slowness. The camera surveyed the girl’s body, curled into a huddled comma. She wore a T-shirt and panties. The rubber hand shoved the garment up over her ribcage, petted her budding breasts. The hand arranged her body, bent up her knee, splayed out her thigh. It zoomed in close onto the crotch of her chaste cotton panties, staring directly at that featureless field of white for many long, horrible seconds.
Howard clutched his mouth, struggling not to vomit.
The knife appeared in the hand. A short, dark blade. Howard’s breathing hitched. Lily was fine. Asleep upstairs. She’d scolded him before she went to bed, for being drunk, like always. She’d been OK, apart from angry. She hadn’t been…hurt. Howard gnawed his fist as the blade moved intimately over her body, pressing here and there. It paused over her femoral artery, then the disembodied hand replaced the coverlet, tucking it tenderly under her chin. Fingers wrapped around her throat for a moment. Then the hand thrust a finger into her mouth, and slowly withdrew it, petting her soft lips as he did so.
Howard lunged for the bathroom, did not make it. Spewed the alcoholic contents of his stomach in the hall. Fell to his knees, belly heaving. He crouched there for the better part of an hour before he dared to rise to his feet. Before he found the nerve to do what he had to do next.
His ulcerated gut wouldn’t digest a pill. He fixed an intramuscular dose, a dangerously large one, and jabbed the needle into his thigh.
It was for love, he told himself, over and over. He did this for her. His precious girl. The only way to protect Lily was to shut up, swallow the poison. Roll a rock over what he knew. His awful secret. He needed help for that. Stronger help than booze. If it killed him, so be it.
Lily would be better off.
CHAPTER1
PORTLAND, OREGON, PRESENT DAY
Just a dream, man. Just a dumb dream.
Right, and so? Knowing it was a dream didn’t help. When he was in it, he was in it. Stuck in a white nowhere, that booming voice in his head, saying words that that made him want to scream, though they were bland numeric sequences.“…DeepWeave four point two, combat level eight, sequence five commencing…four, three, two, one…”
Then Rudy came at him, stinking of drink and sweat. Slashing at Bruno, switchblade in one hand, broken beer bottle in the other.
Mamma lay on the floor behind Rudy, beaten and bleeding, eyes pleading over the gag. All because her useless, pussy son hadn’t had the balls to steal Rudy’s Beretta and shoot the scumbag dead. Kitchen shears would do fine, too, slashed across the jugular. A bread knife right between the ribs. A machete.Take that, dickhead.Or a chainsaw, even better. Swoosh, swing. Splatter that rabid bastard every which way.That’s what you get for hitting my mamma, fucking shit-for-brains.
But he never killed Rudy in the dream, even if he landed a perfect blow. The bastard just winked out of existence, and a fresh, unharmed Rudy popped out from another direction. The video game from hell, but somebody with a forked tongue was plugging in the quarters.
He fought grimly on, ducking, lunging, slashing, punching and kicking, then Rudy cloned himself into six Rudys, and they slammed him all at once, knocking him to the ground—
The images broke apart, fighting to maintain their space in his head, but waking reality rushed in through the cracks.
Ouch.It should have been a relief, but God, his head. It throbbed, like he’d been clobbered with a bat. His heart banged against his ribs.
He’d hit the floor. That was what had wakened him. He was on the floor, next to his bed. He was Bruno Ranieri, and he was thirty two, not twelve, and this was his own king-sized bed, in his own condo, not Mamma’s tenement apartment in Newark. The sweat-soaked sheet wound like a noose around one ankle were custom-made high-thread-count Egyptian cotton. His picture window framed the pink tinted Portland skyline and a view of Mt. Hood, not a sooty brick wall over a cluster of garbage cans. No drunken Rudy bellowing through thin walls as he beat up Mamma. He stared around at his own space, his own life.
Tried to believe it. To own it.
He gasped for breath. Hoarse rasps. Drenched with sweat, muscles twitching like he’d been electrocuted. He pried the twisted sheet off of his ankle, and sprawled flat against the cool wooden floor.
