The Inner Circle (Man of Wax Trilogy) Read online

  I wiped at my eyes, took a breath. “I just want to go home.”

  She nodded and took my hand and pulled me toward the jet.

  I hesitated, suddenly remembering Titus, wanting to wave my thanks to him one last time. But when I turned, my hand already halfway up, he and the orange Beetle were gone.

  Part Two

  BOOJUM

  25

  The Kid arrived that Monday morning, two days after our fateful visit to Miami Beach.

  Jesse had gone to the airport to pick him up. He’d asked me if I wanted to come along, but I hadn’t answered him, just sat there on the porch steps, smoking a cigarette. It was where I was still sitting three hours later when Jesse returned with the Kid, the Ford pickup truck leaving a small cloud of dust in its wake as it bounced up the rugged drive.

  Jesse and the Kid got out of the truck, Jesse in his blue jeans and cowboy shirt, his long sideburns and dusty hat, the Kid wearing his designer khakis and red polo, a little gel in his hair. He had a laptop bag strapped over his shoulder, and as he approached the house he nodded at me.

  “Ben,” he said, pausing at the foot of the steps. “How’s it hanging?”

  I just sat there, smoking my cigarette.

  He said, “I thought you quit.”

  I didn’t reply.

  Jesse had grabbed the Kid’s overnight bag, was trailing the Kid up to the house. Now he started up the stairs past me, just as the door opened.

  The Kid smiled. “Why, Maya, aren’t you a sight for sore eyes?”

  Maya sat down beside me on the steps. “You really need to work on your lines, Kid,” she said, smiling back at him.

  “Yeah, well,” the Kid said, shrugging. Then his smile faded and he tilted his head at me. “I thought he quit.”

  I was still sitting there smoking, now staring past the Kid at the pickup and the trees beyond, but I could sense Maya looking at me.

  “Yeah,” she said, “so did I.”

  “Graham around?”

  “I think he’s out back. With the bees.”

  “Right,” the Kid said. “The bees.”

  A silence passed. My cigarette was almost done but I kept at it, not wanting to flick it away until this little greeting session was over.

  “Right,” the Kid said again. “Well, I’ll be up in Carver’s room. If I see Ronny on the way, I’ll talk to him. Otherwise, can you tell him I need to see him?”

  Maya nodded. “Sure.”

  The Kid stood there for another moment, nodding again, smiling. He stared at me once more, said, “Ben, it’s good seeing you,” then hurried up the steps past me without waiting for a response.

  Maya waited until the door closed before swatting my arm with her hand. “Sometimes you can be so rude.”

  “Sometimes?” I ground the butt on the porch step, flicked it out into the grass.

  With an aggravated sigh, Maya got up and retrieved the butt, came back and held it in front of my face. “How many more of these are out there?”

  I said nothing.

  Maya’s normally small and worn face tightened. Her nose wrinkled, which meant she was ready to throw a fit, and I just sat there, waiting for it, almost begging for it. But then her features softened, and she slowly shook her head, sat down beside me on the porch step, placed her hand on my thigh.

  “What did it look like?” she asked.

  I reached down for the pack of Marlboros beside me on the step. Maya reached across my lap and grabbed my hand and pulled it back.

  “Ben,” she said.

  I looked at her.

  “What did it look like?”

  “What did what look like?”

  “His last word.”

  I had told the Kid we should keep Carver’s last cryptic two-syllable word a secret, and I had intended to, but then on the flight home I had confessed it to Maya. Why, I still wasn’t sure, and now I was beginning to regret it.

  “Ben, you’re gonna have to talk about it eventually. You can’t keep something like that pent up inside you.”

  Maya still had hold of my hand. I used my other hand to pull her hand off, then grabbed my pack of smokes and stood up. “I’m going for a walk,” I said, and started away before Maya could say anything else, heading toward the side of the farmhouse and turning a corner.

  The sun was glaring down on the east side of the house, so I walked a little in the shade, lighting myself another cigarette. I put the pack and lighter back in my pocket and then just stood there, smoking, staring down the hill that crested the backyard. My eyes momentarily rested on the five grave markers. The place where we’d buried Bronson Lam two years ago, the place where Carver had buried his own son two years ago, and the place we’d buried David Resh and Vanessa Martin less than a year ago. The fifth marker stood for Larry Vaughn, who had been killed outside my father-in-law’s house two years ago and whose body we hadn’t been able to bring back to the farmhouse.

  My gaze shifted past the grave markers, down the hill, at the apiary. Graham was down there now, moving slowly in his white jumpsuit, his round hat and wire veil covering his head.

  I started to head down the hill, coming around the rear corner of the house, stepping out of the cool shadows into the warm sunlight, when I heard the screen door on the back porch open.

  For some reason I expected it to be Ronny, or the Kid, or maybe even Ian, but it was Drew, dressed in jeans and his heavy flannel shirt. He came down the wooden steps, heading directly toward the barn, and didn’t stop until he glanced up and happened to notice me. A moment of indecision passed, both of us standing there, waiting for the other one to move, before each of us took a step forward and met halfway.

  I took one last drag of the cigarette, dropped it to the ground, smashed the glowing end with the heel of my shoe. I nodded at the barn, where we stored the weapons and ammunition and four-wheelers. “You’re going shooting?”

  A half smile passed over his scared face. “Nothing gets by you, Ben.”

  Silence.

  Drew said, “I saw the Kid inside.”

  I nodded.

  “I’m surprised you’re not in there with him.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing,” he said, and looked away, unconsciously touched one of the many scars on his face.

  They hadn’t always been there, those scars. Before, when I’d first met him two years ago, his face had been round and somewhat pudgy, his chin making its slow transformation into a double. Only a year before that things had been normal for him, living with his thirty-seven-year-old girlfriend and their four-year-old son in their small row house in Elmhurst, right by the train tracks and the Long Island Expressway. Life hadn’t been great but life hadn’t been bad either, and then one morning he woke up to find himself in Kenton, Oklahoma, his girlfriend and son taken away, both of them held hostage so he would do everything Simon said. But ever since Carver had come into his life Drew had changed things, working out, eating right, and the chin that had been very close to a double disappeared. He lifted weights every day, ran with the rest of us every morning, and that round and somewhat pudgy face of his had started to become leaner, tighter, more pronounced. Then the night came when all of that changed, and the blade of a knife sliced his face several times, scaring it permanently. Not that he really cared about his face, mind you, but the fact that the damage had been done here, at this farmhouse, away from the world and Simon and his games, was what hurt most, what had become the deepest cut of all, not just to Drew, but to the rest of us.

  “Tell me something,” I said.

  Drew nodded.

  “When it comes down to it, what do you think?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I think.”

  “Yes it does.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know anymore, Ben. A part of me doesn’t want to quit, but another part of me agrees with Ronny. That now without Carver, what point is there to continue?”

  I stared at him for a very long time. Then I sai
d, “Yeah,” nodding slowly. “Okay, thanks.”

  We left it at that. Drew went his way, I went mine. I started down the hill directly toward Graham while Drew headed toward the barn, where he would unlock the cabinet and take out one of the rifles and a box of ammunition and then ride one of the four-wheelers through the trees on a trail that led to the firing range Carver had set up with Graham five years ago. When I reached the apiary, I heard the four-wheeler’s engine as it revved to life, just beyond the constant buzzing of bees.

  Graham had noticed me walking toward him earlier, was already finishing up his inspection of one of the honeycombs. Holding it in his gloved hands, bees crawling all over the honeycomb and his white suit, he stared at the honeycomb for a while before slowly reinserting it back into the hive. His wooden cane was leaning against the same hive, and now he grabbed it, started to slowly make his way toward me.

  The apiary consisted of about fifty hives. Surrounding those large white boxes were white clovers Graham had planted himself, giving the bees enough opportunity to find a substantial amount of pollen without forcing them to fly too far away.

  I stood far enough away from the hives that the bees mostly ignored me, only a few coming up to see who I was and what I wanted, then buzzing away when they realized I wasn’t a threat. I waited there until Graham caught up with me, moving slowly not just because of the bees but because of the cancer that had once ravaged his left leg.

  When he was ten yards away, he extended his cane to me. I stepped forward, took it from him, then watched as he carefully brushed off the bees that still crawled about his body. Once he’d finished, he extended his hand toward me again, and I gave him back his cane.

  “The Kid’s here,” I said. “He was asking for you.”

  Graham looked up, and through the wire veil I could see his face. He nodded, and we started up the hill back toward the farmhouse.

  As we walked, he said, “So why aren’t you with him now?”

  “Why does everyone keep asking me that?”

  “I don’t know,” Graham said. “Maybe because you’re the only one who doesn’t agree with Ronny.”

  “I’m not the only one who doesn’t agree with Ronny.”

  “No, you’re not. But many aren’t sure what to think. They’re still too shocked by what happened. All of us are shocked, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But eventually that shock will wear off. Eventually our time of mourning will come to an end. And then a decision has to be made. What Ronny is thinking is not selfish, believe me. He’s talked to me about this already, and it’s not something he wants to do but feels there’s no choice.”

  We walked a little more in silence, slowly, Graham having trouble climbing the hill with his cane. Off in the distance came what sounded like thunder. But there were no clouds in the sky, and I knew exactly where that sound was coming from, could picture Drew laying on the ground with his rifle, aiming at the target two hundred yards away.

  “I just don’t think it’s right,” I said.

  “And neither does Ronny. But when it comes down to it, what choice do any of us have? You say you disagree and that’s fine, but what kind of argument have you given? Really, Ben, you have to stop blaming yourself for what happened. It wasn’t your fault.”

  “But I could have—”

  “No,” Graham said, stopping suddenly and turning toward me. He glanced back down the hill, decided we were far enough that he could lift the wire veil from his face. “Stop it, Ben. You always do this to yourself. Always with the buts, with the what ifs.”

  I said nothing.

  “I’d like to think I knew Carver pretty well,” Graham said, turning slightly and beginning to walk back up the hill again, “and I can guarantee he wouldn’t blame you. Ronny told me what happened. Ian told me what happened. And from what they both told me, all of it was Carver’s decision. None of it was yours. So stop blaming yourself.”

  “But you weren’t there,” I said quietly.

  “No, I wasn’t. You were. And you know something, Ben? I’m glad it was you. Because anyone else wouldn’t have been able to do what you did. Not the way you did it. Besides Carver, everyone stayed alive.”

  “Ian—”

  “Is still alive. Yes, his leg is broken, and it probably will never properly heal, but he’s still breathing thanks to you.”

  We passed the five grave markers as more thunder sounded out in the distance.

  “Let me tell you a secret, Ben. Well, it’s not exactly a secret, but it’s something I haven’t told anybody. When I was eight years old, I was stung by a bee. It was a small sting, right on the bottom of my foot, but I had to be rushed to the hospital. As it turned out I have a strong allergy to bees. And so I stayed away from them most of my life. When my wife and I had people over during the summer, we always stayed inside for our picnics, never went out because I was afraid of what might happen.”

  We came to the back porch. Since there was no railing, I stayed a few feet behind Graham in case he lost balance as he climbed the steps. Finally we were at the top, and Graham went straight for the swing. He sat down with a heavy sigh. I sat down next him. He took off his hat, set it aside, took off his gloves and set them aside. He unzipped the top of his jumpsuit and sat back a little on the swing, keeping his cane between his legs, staring down the hill at the endless horizon of trees.

  “So forty years passed and I stayed away from them. Then when Lois died and I had nothing else, I came out here to live the rest of my life. And one day I was out mowing the lawn and a bee flew around my head. I nearly pissed my pants. Can you imagine that—a fifty-year-old man nearly pissing his pants? I jumped off the mower and ran inside, actually locked the door. And I just waited in there.”

  He shook his head, produced a small smile.

  “I’ve been in wars, I’ve investigated murders, I’ve stared into the eyes of cold hard killers who no longer had souls, and at fifty years old I realized my biggest fear was bees. And I told myself I could not die before I faced that fear. So do you know what I did?” He raised his hand, pointed a gnarled finger down the hill at the apiary. “I decided to become a beekeeper.”

  He looked at me, his dark eyes searching my face, this sixty-five-year-old man who lived out in the middle of nowhere. And I watched him, I watched this old man who had outlived his wife, who had never been blessed with children, who all he had now were bees, I watched him as he said:

  “As far as I know Carver wasn’t afraid of bees. But do you know what his fear was? That something terrible would happen to his wife and son. And then all of a sudden they were taken from him and he had nothing else to fear. He didn’t even fear for his own life. But he knew the risks, just as I know the risks. And just as I keep working with my bees, Carver kept trying his best to stop these people—Simon and Caesar and whoever else. He knew that one of these days his luck was going to end. And still he kept doing it. So if it’s anybody’s fault what happened this past weekend, it isn’t yours.”

  “Beekeepers get stung all the time,” I said.

  “Some do, certainly, but not all. I haven’t yet.”

  I started to nod, but movement caught my attention, a small yellow and black dot on Graham’s arm.

  “Graham,” I said, my voice suddenly tense, and he looked down at where I was staring, at the bee crawling across his white jumpsuit.

  And at that moment Graham did the strangest thing: he slowly raised his hand, palm up, against his arm. Held it there, waiting, until the bee crawled onto it. Then he moved his hand until it was right in front of my face, and I could see the bee there on his palm, its black eyes, its wings, what I took to be its stinger.

  Graham said, “What is your biggest fear?”

  I swallowed, almost mesmerized by the bee. “That my family is dead.”

  “And do you believe they are?”

  Still watching the bee, waiting for it to sting the hand now holding it, I whispered, “Yes.”

  Graham moved his hand back to hi
s face. He raised it to his mouth, pursed his lips, and gently blew the bee away. When he looked back at me, his dark eyes had softened, the crease in his brow had disappeared, and he looked just like he had when I arrived yesterday, before he stepped forward to embrace me.

  “Then why are you still afraid?”

  26

  Four years ago, when Carver had woken up in a crummy motel room in Maine, the bloated body of a baby in the toilet, the realization hit him hard that the life he’d always known was now gone. Believing that both his wife and son were dead, that it was no use playing Simon’s game, Carver had simply walked away.

  When he met up with the Kid again, when they tried everything they could to stop Simon and his cohorts, he’d asked the Kid to look up Graham Fredrick, a man he’d known briefly in the army, and a week later Carver had come out here, in the middle of the northern Colorado wilderness, shook Graham’s hand and explained the situation. Graham had listened intently, never saying a word, until Carver finished with his story. Then Graham had said, “Feel free to stay as long as you’d like,” and since then the farmhouse had become Carver’s base of operations.

  Graham Fredrick had moved here fifteen years before, after his wife passed away. The property consisted of just over one hundred acres, mostly woods, and it was at least ten miles from the closest town, at least three miles from the nearest residence.

  The farmhouse was an old two-story stone-sided colonial, built over a century ago. A barn that had been built maybe fifty years ago was slumped half a football field away, its shingles falling off, its paint peeling.

  The outside of the barn was the first thing I’d painted two years ago.

  It was clear that Graham didn’t care much about the barn, that it was only used to store the lawn mower and supplies for his bees and—after Carver had arrived—extra artillery. The flaking paint didn’t bother him in the least—it didn’t seem to bother Carver or anyone else either—but it bothered me. As a painter I couldn’t bear to see it the way it was, not while I was around, not after it quickly became clear my four days of nonstop writing was not going to somehow make the world a better place.