Title: Charlotte's Web (Chapter 32)
Rating: M for graphic violence and language
Fandom: The Mentalist
Summary: Patrick Jane has lived his life obsessed with the capture of Red John ever since finding his beloved wife and daughter slain by the maniac's hand. Now, 10 years to the day after that horrific night, a young woman appears in Patrick's life, someone who threatens to destroy everything his life has become in the interim... if not his sanity, itself.
Author's Note: Really hope to get the next chapter out within the next 7 days. Life has been busy. Reviews are always appreciated!
"Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape." William S. Burroughs
"Generally speaking, the Way of the warrior is resolute acceptance of death." - Miyamoto Musashi
"One has to accept pain as a condition of existence. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing. One needs a will stubborn in conflict, but apt always to the total acceptance of every consequence of living and dying." - Morris West
"Be still
Close your eyes
Soon enough you'll be on your own
Steady and straight
And if they drag you through the mud
It doesn't change what's in your blood
(Over chains)
When they knock you down" - Be Still by The Killers
Saturday, November 4th, 2013 1:17 pm PST
Jane waited for Lisbon for almost ten minutes, sitting in the driver's seat of the little car he'd commandeered from the chubby hospital employee who'd tried to stall him not even forty minutes earlier.
"Come on, Lisbon. Come on," Jane hissed through his teeth, watching the entrance, eyes darting to the sides of the building before tracking back to the front doors, again. So many things could had happened, and the mentalist's mind was whirling with unsavory possibilities. Maybe Lisbon had caused too much of a scene. Maybe... maybe she'd been restrained? He doubted they would have sedated her for yelling.
She had been upset, but not crazy... And she was a white woman, a tourist. They'd want to placate her, not tackle her. But what if a Red John crony had decided to assist her? Had done something to her?
Jane had considered the possibility (in passing) ten minutes earlier, but his fear for Charlotte had propelled him forward. Now, the tight band of fear in his belly and chest tightened up another notch. Life was very quickly becoming dreamy, unreal, and adrenaline soaked. Jane's brain looped obsessively. He blinked, rubbed at tired eyes, could smell the distinct smell of his sweat tinged with something sour.
"Come on Lisbon... make a scene, distract them, and get out... come on, Lisbon. Be okay." He spoke to the empty car, to God, to his subconscious, to whomever might be listening. He thought suddenly of Lisbon, unconscious, with blood smeared on her face in a smiley face pattern. His heart skipped a beat.
That whole Hellish experience came back like a light-bulb flash and Jane tightened his grip on the steering wheel until his knuckles really did turn white. He ground his back molars together. Grind, grind, grind. A neurotic, anxiety-driven habit he'd had as a child and trained himself out of doing over the years.
Had someone in the hospital tried to "help" her and harmed her in some way? Red John had moles all over the place.
Jane cringed, running new, horrific scenarios through his mind.
Lisbon in a morgue, alive but unable to move, freezing in the dark.
Lisbon strung up like a deer about to be gutted in some run-down shack.
Lisbon in a wedding dress, surrounded by candles, immobilized by duct tape and ropes, mouth stuffed with putrid rags as Red John... what? This wasn't helping.
This wasn't helping.
"Stay focused, Patrick. Stay focused, Tricky-boy," Jane told himself. He closed his eyes, slowed his breathing.
Imagined Lisbon fine.
Lisbon... he imagined her: hassled, tired and worried sick over Charlotte, but Lisbon herself? He imagined her fine. Talking to hospital employees. Sitting in some room reserved for tourists and describing the missing truck for some local security guard.
Had the police arrived? Jane had been watching. He hadn't seen anybody. But was there a way into the hospital that they hadn't thought of?
But... what if Lisbon wasn't okay? What if she needed his help, right now? Right this very second? While he sat and daydreamed and wore the enamel off his molars and developed a tension headache?
Would Red John not only kill Charlotte, but also Lisbon? Would he do that, hoping to force his younger brother's hand, in order to demoralize him?
It was so hard to know for sure what was going through Peter's narcissistic mind. Jane had only a few faded months of childhood memories to go by, and his criminal profile reading; his own mentalism skills. Peter had equally impressive mentalism skills, and his motives were becoming increasingly unclear.
He was a narcissist and a sociopath but he was also, just a little bit, mad-as-a-hatter crazy.
Yet... he always seemed to be one step ahead of his twin brother, even when things didn't go according to plan. Or... was this the plan?
Was Red John so skilled at manipulation that he could play everybody like a fiddle? Were people nothing but automatons under Red John's hypnotic control? The very idea of it was existentially horrifying and brought up the oppressive, dark terror of ages past- of the ancient desire for free will, the desire for freedom from outside forces that might otherwise make you their organic puppet, hapless to fight back, to be able to chose your own course of action. Nothing but a fleshy bag of chemicals playing out a part somebody else was writing for you.
A horrifying thought.
Nobody wanted to believe themselves to be a soulless robot, destined for nothing but the grave.
Everyone wanted free will.
Everyone wanted to be more than just some easily manipulated, cosmic accident.
Jane ground his teeth together even harder, a habit he'd had as a child and hadn't engaged in in years, a habit that had led to enamel erosion and increased cavities in the back.
Bruxism, it was called.
When he'd been annoyed or stressed or anxious as a little boy he had resorted to mindlessly grinding his teeth together. The bruxism had brought on tension headaches.
The tension headaches had developed a life of their own, during which time prepubescent Patrick Jane had begun to contemplate scary possibilities, possibilities like, oh, that he had developed some rare and fatal brain tumor and the headaches were a sign of the tumor as it grew, as it spread through his skull.
The brain tumor fears had triggered oddly self-contained panic attacks, which had begun to manifest in the night as a nosebleeds. A cause and effect of fear and anxiety, spiraling out of control. A nasty feedback loop of hypochondria.
Jane visually scanned the front of the building again, back and forth, thinking about the last few days, of Red John's abilities...
He would not be his sick, older brother's puppet.
He would out-think him.
He had to, because the alternative was something he could not live with.
If Red John killed Charlotte and Lisbon, that would be it.
He would kill himself. He would not be able to go on living.
He'd buy some expensive whiskey and fill up the bathtub with warm water and open up his arms from wrist to elbow on both sides and slip away in dark red water.
Blood letting had always seemed like a good way to go, to Jane. You left a relatively clean looking corpse, the organs could still be donated (if found early enough), it didn't involve relying on prescription drugs and...
(Don't think like this Patrick. They will be okay. Think Life. Think beating the monster)
That meant that if Red John had any sort of brain in his head (and he obviously did), he wouldn't kill both of them.
But even killing one of them?
Even killing one of them might be too much... maybe Red John wouldn't risk it. Maybe he would keep them both alive.
Maybe he'd kill others, but not Lisbon. And not Charlotte. Maybe...
Jane held onto that thought desperately. If he had been able to believe in God, he would have been praying.
And maybe Lisbon was completely fine and dandy. Maybe she was just taking too long or had been delayed.
Jane forced a wad of saliva down his throat. He turned the key in the ignition. He'd drive around the hospital and take a look out back.
Maybe Lisbon was walking the grounds with someone, or hiding around back in the bushes or something. Jane pulled the car out of its parking space and slowly rolled it over the tarmac.
He slowly crawled the car down a narrow alley (almost certainly where medical supply trucks came to deposit medications and supplies to the hospital) and circled the building. The back of the hospital was boring, neat, clean, nothing to see. A steel door with a concrete stoop and stairs.
Two large dumpsters, one of them locked with chains. A few cars that looked to be in better shape than the handful of cars in the front parking lot (almost certainly staff parking).
There was a small trailer with children's drawings and finger paintings hung up in the windows.
A wooden sign attached to the front and a wooden stoop and porch.
A young man in his early twenties dressed in a security guard's uniform was sitting on the stoop, eyes unfocused, gazing at the road. Gazing at the road, but Jane doubted he was actually seeing the road. His eyes were far, far away...
Jane followed the young man's gaze to the cement and felt his stomach tighten into a hot, hard ball of fear. The fear was sudden, an electric pulse. There was a large, almost-neon blossom of blood on the cement, only just starting to coagulate under the sun's baleful watch.
Whomever that blood belonged to... well, they had bled it out of themselves within the last ten minutes.
Terror swam up from Jane's stomach and settled back behind his eyes like some possessing demonic force. His vision pulsed in time with his heart as his blood pressure soared. Outwardly, he managed to keep calm. Inside, he was quaking.
(He hurt her, my God, he hurt her! He made her bleed oh Lisbon I am so sorry Lisbonsosorry)
He drove the car slowly up to the seated figure, rolled down the driver's side window. The young man looked up at him uneasily. The kid's face- which was pale under the dark pigment of his skin- seemed to blanch even more.
"Sir?" The young security officer said, and his voice sounded uneasy with confusion. "You... what are you doing here?"
"I had a problem with my other vehicle," Jane said, hoping his impromptu bullshit story made some sort of sense.
Keep things open-ended, Patrick. Let this guy tell you what's going on. Be firm, but don't put words in his mouth. Let him tell you what happened.
"Your other vehicle? What... what is wrong with it?" The kid asked, eyes narrowing as he glanced into the distance.
His pupils had dilated significantly since he'd spotted Jane, an involuntary fear response. Which meant he knew Red John or at least knew enough about Red John to be terrified of him. Combined with the lost expression, the pallor of his skin, the unfocused rumination, well... odds were good that if something had taken place back here within the last ten minutes, this young man had been around to see it play itself out.
Now, he wanted to know what was wrong with "Red John's" vehicle.
"That's none of your concern," Jane said, frustration rising. The young man nodded immediately, obviously frightened. One did not talk back to Red John. One did not overstep boundaries with Red John, or irritate Red John or make Red John annoyed. One played their cards very, very carefully with Red John.
"Um... how can I help you, sir?" That was generally the type of question that violent narcissists adored.
It was submissive, it was "respectful", it was open-ended enough to suggest malleability and compliance.
When had Red John come into this young man's life? How old had he been, and what had he done to him? How much of this young man's personality had been shaped by his fear of Red John? Or seeing terrible, violent acts?
Jane scanned the kid's face more carefully, saw scabs on the knuckles (probably he got into fights, maybe he had PTSD and a short fuse and roughed people up, maybe he was irritable most of the time from fear and worry or guilt from carrying out a monster's orders), saw bitten fingernails chewed down to the quick (this young man was chronically anxious, unable to relax, nervous, adrenaline-flooded, probably had some obsessive compulsive traits, probably chewed on pencils and pens and picked at scabs and washed himself much too harshly with a nail brush in the shower). He had tired, frenzied eyes, dark bags under them. A front gold tooth. Had his tooth been knocked out in a brawl?
Gold teeth were expensive. Had Red John paid for the dental work?
So many possibilities. Right now he had to find out what had happened here, though. The kid's mental health wasn't his concern. At least, not at the moment, it wasn't.
Jane pointed at the blood on the road. He needed to know more.
"I will clean it up right away, sir," the young man stammered nervously, rising from where he was seated. "I'll go and get the mop myself, right now. I'm sorry. I should have done that immediately!"
"You look pale," Jane informed him, fishing for more details. Dudley Do-Right, here, was taking too long to spill his guts.
"I'm sorry. I don't mean to... I don't mean to look pale. I think maybe.. maybe am getting sick? I think so."
"It's a physiological reaction, not something within your control. Tell me the plan again. I am not convinced you have it down," Patrick announced, his eyes scanning the boy's face from behind his wraparound sunglasses, looking for microfacial clues, looking for anything.
Red John would've given the kid some set of instructions, right? Even if his part in Red John's little theatrical production was over for the day, the need to order him around would have been overwhelming. Narcissists loved to give orders. They loved to be obeyed.
"I... I... I didn't know there was a plan." The young man's voice was uneasy, questioning, rising at the end as if asking a question.
"If you need to get hold of me, where will I be later?"
"You told me I didn't need to know."
"Right. But if you have news to report... how will you get in touch?"
"News?" The young security guard asked, not understanding.
"Whatever. If people come by, asking questions. The police. Whomever."
"I will phone you on your cell phone?" The young security guard looked terrified. He'd committed himself to an answer. What if that answer was wrong? He looked on the edge of a full-fledged panic attack. Jane smiled, tried to put him at ease. (Rough day for both of us, huh, buddy? I know how you're feeling, I think...)
"And what is my number again? I want to make sure you have remembered it correctly," Jane coaxed in his most pleasant, most reassuring voice.
He needed to calm this guy down, because human memory was state dependent and people had a harder time remembering things and thinking critically when they were terrified.
The security guard repeated a cell number, eyes darting, expression distraught, uneasy. He looked at Jane hopefully. Jane nodded. Almost certainly the kid had recited Red John's number accurately. But still. This was too important to take a chance.
"Say it again," Jane coaxed calmly, using his best hypnotist voice. Sometimes people made mistakes. Sometimes they transposed numbers when they were terrified.
The young man blinked woodenly, a blink Jane knew immediately was a tic caused by extreme stress and something the young Latino did whenever he was nervous.
He blinked again.
Repeated the number in a tremulous whisper, as if terrified that he'd made a mistake the first time.
The number he gave was identical to the first number he'd recited. Jane nodded at him, fished in the glove compartment of his "borrowed" car, found a scrap of paper and a pen and handed them over to the kid.
"Write down your name and the best way for me to contact you," Jane urged the young man in a calm, lilting suggestion. The young man took the ballpoint and the spiral notepad, wrote down his name in over-sized, childish printing. Penned in what was almost certainly a local address.
No phone number, but a yahoo address. Guerillaman92. This kid had no phone, probably only used the internet infrequently, but still used it. Was there an internet cafe in Hermosillo? A public library with a net connection? Almost certainly.
"Write your name down at the bottom. I have a lot of contact info. Want to keep it straight," Jane ordered softly, calmly. The kid blinked in his shell-shocked way again and wrote down, carefully, slowly: Felix Enrique Morales. Large letters, like a child just learning to spell. He handed Jane the scrap of paper, the pen.
"The blood. Tell me about the blood..." Jane prompted, watching as the young man's eyelids drooped a little more. Felix's pupils were almost eclipsing the brown of his irises, now. His face was a little less pale. He looked like someone sleepwalking, eyes open, jaw relaxed, tension lines around his young eyes and mouth easing slightly. Jane smiled at him and repeated his command.
The kid was hypnotized.
And a little bit too easily for Jane's comfort.
"Tell me about the blood, Felix. Where did it come from?" Jane's smiled at him, made his voice almost sing-songy. Soft. A voice you could drift off to. He'd used the same tone of voice on Charlie, when she'd been afraid of monsters under the bed, in the closet. He'd told her monsters weren't real. He'd told her Daddy will always protect you, nothing bad will ever happen to Charlie, I swear, I won't let any monster hurt you, Charliekins-
This young man had some dissociative problem, almost certainly.
He'd become hypnotized much too easily, was much too chronically stressed, looked much too jumpy. Early trauma? Was he one of Red John's early little human-toys? He was older than Charlotte by a good five or six years, but had Charlotte been Red John's first little mentee?
The more Jane considered it, the more certain he became that Red John probably had handfuls of "kids" all over the place who had been trained by the so-called master. Journeymen of violence, if you wanted. Depending on what they'd been forced to witness- or carry out themselves under coercion- severe anxiety and dissociative disorders were almost certainly denotements of Red John's influence in their formative years.
The earlier they were when exposed to Red John's particular flavor of sadism? The more pervasive the psychiatric symptoms would be. In short? The longer they'd been Red John's playthings, the more fucked up they were.
And Felix was pretty- to use layman's terms- fucked up. He swayed on his feet, zombie-like. Despite his drooping eyelids, his mouth jerked in a twitchy Tourette's style half-smile that Patrick remembered a few Vietnam vets from his childhood sporting around. Those twitchy not-grins had scared him much more than the eeriest of grease-painted clown smiles. And little Patrick Jane had never been particularly fond of clowns, either.
Jane needed to know if it was Lisbon's blood but had no way to ask directly. He didn't want the young man to begin confabulating, to agree with whatever Jane said.
"I will clean it up right away. I will do it right now." Felix's voice was hollowed out and gone.
"You know what? Leave it. This is a hospital. Blood gets on the ground sometimes. You'll look out of place if you haul out a mop and bucket."
"I can be fast. Then nobody will seeeee-"
"I said leave it," Jane repeated, edging a half-note of annoyance into his words. "What I want from you? I want you to go home for the day."
"I... I don't think I am allowed to leave."
"I'm telling you you're allowed. You have your keys on you?" Jane asked softly.
"Y-yes," the security guard answered, pulling a ring of keys from his pocket. He shook the keys at Jane to make sure Jane saw them. They clinked together, almost musically, like a baby's rattle.
"Need a lift home?" Jane asked, raising his sunglasses so the young man could see his eyes. The kid shook his head.
"No. No, sir. I can walk."
"You're sure, Felix?" Jane coaxed. Hypnotized, this young man could be all shades of helpful. What did he know about Red John? What vital information could he impart?
"Yes, sir."
"Okay. Go home, then. You look out of sorts."
"Okay."
"Go home and lie down," Jane ordered, waiting for the nod of recognition. The young man nodded immediately in agreement. He'd do whatever Red John told him to do, no disagreements. People who didn't listen to Red John's "suggestions" tended to have unfortunate ends.
"Okay, I will."
"Oh, and one other thing... the phone number I gave you earlier? I am not using that number anymore."
"Okay... then how do I get in touch with you?"
"You don't," Jane said, grinning wider. "When I want something from you, I'll get in touch with you. Okay?"
"Yes, sir."
"You know what? I think I am going to give you a ride home. Get in the car, Felix."
Felix stared at Jane with his crazily-dilated eyes. He nodded, came around to the passenger side of the car, and clicked the door open.
Jane nodded as he strapped himself in with the buckle and pulled out of the back parking lot. He knew from the young man's answers that Red John had Lisbon. She wasn't seriously hurt, or there would have been more blood.
Probably a quick blow to the head. Maybe a bloody nose, if Lisbon fought back. Nothing life-threatening.
Not yet. Lisbon had been alive and relatively well when Red John had taken her. Of that he was almost certain. Still, the boy hadn't mentioned Lisbon, or even where the blood had come from. Jane was 99% sure Lisbon had been snatched, but 99% sure wasn't certain. It was good enough for a regular CBI case, but not for Lisbon, not for Charlotte. Jane drove the car through Hermosillo, heading to the location of the airstream trailer. It was unlikely, but maybe Lisbon would be there waiting for him.
Maybe she would have gotten a drive back there with a hospital representative, since her truck had been stolen. Driven back to the airstream to wait for her "husband"? Or maybe she had been driven to the police station?
Who was he kidding? Red John had her, and he knew Red John had her. But he still had to check, to be sure. In the passenger seat Felix stared out the front window with wide, unblinking eyes.
Jane drove past a convenience store. He saw an old-school phone booth, parked the car, and ran over to the phone booth. He dialed the operator and asked for the number to the local police station, thanked her as she relayed the number and hung up the phone.
Jane fished a quarter out of his pants pocket, dropped it into the phone and dialed the number he'd just been given. When the phone picked up, he asked if there had been any reports in the last two hours of a stolen truck.
No, the receptionist assured him, before becoming nosy. Why?
Jane hung the phone back in its cradle and drove back to the airstream. No Lisbon. It had been worth a shot. But she wasn't there. She wasn't there.
The chances of Red John having planned all of this down to the latest details was unlikely.
They were- almost certainly- off-script now. Which meant that Red John didn't know that his baby brother had gotten his cell phone number, or had one of his "eyes" (as Charlotte called the people who worked for Red John). Which meant he'd go to a place both of them knew... the Crazy Chicken Man's home, in all likelihood.
"Felix," Jane started, sliding back in behind the wheel. The young man looked over at him.
"Sir?"
"The woman who was bleeding behind the hospital... describe her for me?"
Felix didn't hesitate. He was fully hypnotized now. Would remain hypnotized until Jane brought him out of it. "White. Brown hair. Short. 5 foot three, maybe? 5 foot four? Bangs. Real pretty. Big eyes." That sounded like Lisbon to Jane.
"What was she wearing?" Jane pressed. He'd known Lisbon was with Red John. But confirmation still hurt. Felix described Lisbon's sneakers, her jeans, the long sleeved dark shirt she'd been wearing, the jeans jacket.
"Right. How badly was she hurt?"
"Clipped on the head with a gun. Not bad. Head wounds bleed a lot, you know. Not dead. Not dead?"
"I don't know, was she dead?" Jane asked the young man softly. Felix inhaled. His faraway eyes traveled back through time twenty minutes. Might as well have been a lifetime.
"Not dead. You said she'd be fine. She'll be fine, Felix. Wake up with a hell of a headache, but she'll be hunky dory."
Jane nodded sullenly.
"What did my vehicle look like?" Jane asked. Was given a perfect description of his own missing truck. The ruse that had gotten Charlotte caught. Now Lisbon was caught, too.
Fish in a net.
Birds in a cage.
The red wolf fancied himself a mighty hunter.
He stalked and made his moves, and he always got his prey.
"Where do you think I was going with that woman, Felix?" Jane asked. He already had a sense that Red John would go back to the scene of the crime, to the crazy chicken man's house. It was the only real location in Hermosillo Jane knew, and Red John would know that.
He wouldn't wait for his brother somewhere unknown.
But it was still nice to have an "eye" confirm his suspicions.
"I don't know, you didn't say," Felix said woodenly.
"If you had to guess, though. If you had to guess where I might have gone. Where would I have gone, Felix?"
"A guessss?"
"That's right, just a guess. No wrong answers."
"Chicken man's house," Felix slurred drunkenly. "To the Chicken Man's house."
"Okay. Thank you."
Jane sped through Hermosillo and got onto the same old dirt road he'd traveled several times in the last few hours and floored the gas.
He was doing almost 90 miles an hour when he saw someone sitting in a lawn chair near the road, holding something.
Jane let up on the gas pedal and reversed the car in a cloud of red dust.
He felt like he'd been punched in the gut at what he saw. A boy with massive facial deformities and tumors was sitting propped up in a 1970s-style aluminum-and-vinyl lawn chair.
The chair was orange, yellow and brown, and Jane instantly remembered it (or one identical to it) from his own childhood. His father had had a set of them (purchased at Sears) outside the trailer with a glass table and umbrella for sitting in and drinking beer and smoking cigarettes and yelling.
Jane pulled the keys out of the car and approached the boy. He didn't move. His eyes were open and vacant, already beginning to milk over.
It was amazing how fast signs of death manifested themselves in real-life corpses. Death didn't wait long before altering the physical look of a body, before altering the smell.
To Jane, death would always smell like a fungus mixed with a putrid and sweet nail polish remover mixed with rotting meat.
Even on a freshly dead body, Patrick Jane could smell the cadeverine. Old Tricky-boy had always had one hell of a sniffer.
Jane approached the corpse, touched it gently. The boy's neck had been broken with one, forceful snap. Blood (but not his blood, the kid didn't appear to have a mark on him, aside from the dark bruising edging around his fatally broken neck) was smeared around his eyes and a happy-face smile had been painted with the same blood on his cooling lips.
Red John had painted Lisbon's face a similar way, not that long ago... only Lisbon's eyes had been closed and she'd been allowed to live.
In the boy's hands was a jack-in-the-box toy.
Jane felt a shiver run through him, a frisson, an electric current. He felt nauseated and too hot and too cold and small white pinpricks of light danced in his vision as the world swirled in a slow vertigo. He staggered, forced himself not to pass out. After a few seconds, his vision cleared and clarified again.
Back in the day, old Tricky-boy had bounced around in foster care for a few years after the summer of 1978 and as far as he'd known, all of his stuff (save for one suitcase worth) had been sold or given away to the Salvation Army.
Yet here it was... a jack-in-the-box he'd had since the age of eight, a toy he'd felt was too babyish at the time, but which played an eerie, tinkling version of John Lennon's "Imagine" when the handle was cranked.
The sides were tin with circus animal cartoons on them, and the jack-in-the-box which popped out of the box was a garishly grinning white-faced clown with a blood-red rictus and red dots on his cheeks, rainbow-colored curly hair and red blinking eyes (a switch on the bottom of the jack-in-the-box turned the eyes on).
Jane had found the toy scary as a little boy, but for some reason had never been able to dispose of it. It was the type of freaky plaything a child was simultaneously repelled by and attracted to. Too odd and weird to ignore for long, too strange to be "safe", too surreal to be put away in the back of the closet and left there, too scary not to give you goosebumps when you played with it.
He'd woken up one day to find the damned thing on the front steps of the trailer he shared with Alex, a gift from some mysterious nocturnal visitor. The mystery of the box's origins had compelled him to hold on to it... His name had been printed in crayon on a scrap of paper taped with scotch tape to the top of the box.
His father had joked that he had a "secret admirer".
At 8, little Patrick Jane had thought girls were a little daft and too giggly and emotional to be worth paying any attention to. He had glared at the toy while Alex Jane ribbed him.
And then the summer of 1978 had happened and the fire and Lucky had happened and he'd been shipped off to an ultra-strict Mormon family three hours upstate and when he'd come "home" his room had been cleaned out (save for his sticker-adorned clothes dresser and his bed) and all the old stuff had been gotten rid of.
When he'd asked his father what had happened to his toys and books and posters (his eyes burning with angry tears), his old man had shrugged and said "I figured no reminders would be best for you, Tricky boy," and a few days later Alex had taken a quiet, subdued and uneasy 10 year old Patrick into the city to buy him new clothes and shoes and school supplies.
He'd bought Patrick a banana split at Dairy Queen (blizzards were still another 7 years off, then) and then had taken his son to Toys R Us to buy "stuff" for his bedroom (Jane would have much preferred to check out a seedy looking used bookstore specializing in magic and the occult several blocks away but Alex Jane had insisted that he had to start being a "normal kid", and that meant baseball and green army men and mass produced plastic toys and leaky, translucent water guns that had to be refilled endlessly).
And now- all these years later- here was the "Imagine" Jack-in-the-box. Jane blinked, turned back to look at Felix propped up in a daze in the passenger seat.
He turned back to the box.
Jane let out an uneasy, shaky exhale and picked the box up in hands that looked much too large, much too calloused to be the proper owners of the box.
He turned the tin cube over, turned on the switch that made the eyes light up.
He began to turn the crank.
In his head he heard a cartoonish version of John Lennon's voice singing along in time to the tinkling music.
Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people living for tooooday...
Jane took a deep breath.
He'd never liked things that jumped out at him.
He'd always winced when balloons popped suddenly, when clowns in the circus jumped out and screeched at him and honked their stupid horns at him, when monsters in the Cineplex and the Royal Theater suddenly jumped out from the shadows on the big screen.
Whenever his father had made him go and clean up balloons, he had taken scotch tape and a pin with him- by putting a piece of tape on the balloon before putting the pin in, one could pop the damn things without the startling, unnecessary bangs.
Jane kept turning the crank.
The box didn't "play" the full song. He knew that. It played the first few lines and then jumped right to the end.
It was easy to get away with, seeing as the music box version didn't have any vocals.
You, yooouuuu may say
I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one
I hope some day you'll join us
And the world will be as one.
The lid flipped backwards on hidden hinges and the clown popped out, eyes flashing and a prerecorded laughter (which had never paired well with Lennon's Imagine) spilling out into the hot Mexican mid-afternoon. Jane waited for the clown to stop laughing.
He'd known (or expected) nothing but a clown to pop out of the box, but still, his heart was racing as hard as if he'd half-expected the damned thing to explode.
The clown's laughter cut off eventually. Then, a deeper, darker version of his own, adult voice came out of the little box.
Jane had been expecting this alteration (or something like it), but he still felt his arms prickle with fresh gooseflesh. Red John was so damned creepy...
"Patrick, Hello. I believe no introductions are needed at this point, are they? It's been a long time, brother, hasn't it? So many memories we've shared. So many challenges, so much pain... I figured a few laughs are in order. I know you haven't seen this little rinky dink thing in ages, but I hope you remember it now. That Lennon... pity what happens to good people in this life sometimes, isn't it? Before we meet, I thought I'd help grease the wheels inside that rickety old brain of yours. There will be more memories from Paddy's childhood awaiting you on your final journey home. Enjoy them. God knows... I have."
The voice cut out and the clown began to laugh again. Jane shuddered and pushed the toy back down on its vintage springs and shut the lid. He looked back down at the deformed, dead child cooling under the blue sky's indifferent gaze, and his own eyebrows furrowed at the sight.
"I am sorry for what has happened to you," Jane told the motionless child. The cooling child... the decaying child. The boy was no longer a boy. Not really. He was rotting meat.
Jane swallowed. Walked back to the car with the box in his hands. He put the jack-in-the-box in the back seat, slid the keys back into the ignition and turned the engine back on. He'd have to drive slower, now, to make sure he wasn't "missing" anything.
Which gave Red John more time to do whatever he was doing in preparation for Patrick's arrival, back at "home".
In the passenger seat, Felix sat motionless, staring, like a robot that had been put on stand-by.
"Felix? Someone left some presents for us out in the desert. I am going to need your help looking for them," Jane intoned.
"Presents?"
"Could be anything. A box, an envelope, a book, some child's toy. Anything out of the ordinary, that shouldn't be there. You look out your window, and I'll look out mine. And you'll tell me if you see anything unusual in the desert. Okay?"
"Yes," Felix agreed dazedly. "Yes. Anything out of the ordinary in the desert."
"That's right," Jane assured him. He'd have to drive ridiculously slowly now, maybe 10 miles an hour. Maybe under that. Surely Red John wouldn't put anything meant for him to find way out in the desert. It would be near the road, wouldn't it? It would be within visual range?
Jane had driven for almost 7 minutes when, on his side, on his left, he saw it. A faded box.
Jane stopped the car, got out, and raced over to the item. It was a Lite-Brite set he'd had around the time Peter had come to stay, and he'd forgotten about it.
There were some peeling KISS stickers on the box. Jane quickly opened one of the sides and pulled the unit out.
The lite-brite was hooked up to a small portable device, something to give it power away from a wall socket. Jane turned it on and a message burst to glowing life.
U R NOT SO INNOCENT and a red smiley face. Of course. Always that damned red smiley face.
There was nothing else in the box, no scraps of paper, nothing else at all.
It was just a taunt.
What meaning did the Lite-Brite have? Jane wasn't sure.
He hadn't really played with it, it had been one of those objects that sits in a kid's room mostly gathering dust.
He had a sudden, blurred memory come back to him then. A few days after Peter had come to stay, Peter in his room (it would always be his room, and his room alone no matter what Alex said) sitting cross-legged (back then they called it sitting "Indian style") on the carpet, pushing lite-brite pieces into the core unit.
Jane had asked him where he had been, what his life had been like, what it had been like with his mother. Their mother.
"She's a whore," Peter had said, still aimlessly sticking lite-brite pieces into the machine. Jane felt a flash of rightenous anger.
"No, she's not!" He didn't actually know if she was or not, but it seemed like the right thing to say to a creepy twin brother calling the woman who'd brought you into the world a whore. Agreeing with him was clearly out of the question.
"Sure she is," Peter said, bored, sticking another lite-brite piece into the screen. He wasn't making a picture. He was just sticking random pieces in... wherever.
"You shouldn't talk about her like that," Jane said, settling back down on his bed, a few comics scattered by his feet. The room had smelled like Jif peanut butter and crayons.
He'd had a glass of milk in a tumbler on his night stand...
"Why not?"
"Because she's your mother... my mother, too. You shouldn't call people that."
"Whores?" Peter queried. Jane had nodded his small head exuberantly.
"It's disrespectful," Jane had told his brother dutifully.
"Honesty trumps political correctness, little brother," Peter shot back, sounding much older than his short, ten years.
Jane had stared at him, trying to figure him out. Such a weird kid. Such dark, old eyes. He seemed like someone much older than ten measly years, someone much, much older wearing a ten year old boy costume. An extremely realistic boy mask. That was what it felt like, looking at Peter Jane back then, back then in the golden orange and brown summer of 1978.
"Even if something is true, sometimes... you don't have to say it," little Jane had tried for. It felt like a clumsy directive at the time, dishonest and stupid. Peter grinned at him as he spoke.
"What good is there in a lie? If you're going to lie, then at least put some effort into it, don't simply deny the obvious," Peter said. He grinned.
"Yes, she's our mother. But you asked what life was like for me. So I am telling you. She was a whore," Peter said in a blasé tone of voice. "Deal with it, baby brother."
Jane had stared down at his brother sitting Indian-style on his bedroom floor; taller, meaner and ostentatiously disagreeable.
Peter looked back up at him, then, as if reading his mind, and grinned his cavity-ridden grin. Made the sound of a woman having an orgasm. The noise made Jane furious.
Jane had picked up a small metal fighter jet model from... somewhere... and thrown it at his twin. It hit Peter on the side of the head, above his right eye. One second he was grinning, next second he was holding his eye and making a low moaning noise. There was blood on his face!
Jane had been instantly repentant. Asking forgiveness, getting the strange boy with the too-similar face a cold wash cloth from the bathroom. Peter held it to his head, dotting at the blood, pulling it away to look at the bloom of liquid red with cruel satisfaction.
He grinned up at his brother approvingly.
"You're not so innocent, are you?"
"It was an accident. I didn't mean for it to hit you. I just wanted you to stop talking like that," Jane had begged him. "You know? I really didn't mean to hurt you."
"Sure you did," Peter insisted, still dabbing at his bloody wound. "Of course you did. I bugged you and you hurt me back. Tit for tat. It's how brothers are, isn't it?"
"It was an accident," Patrick insisted, almost panicked. Peter was weird and aggravating but he still had never meant to actually hurt him.
"Accident? Sure. Sure. I get you," Peter said, getting up.
He'd disappeared into the kitchen, then, and come back with some sugar cookies and a glass of milk with chocolate Nesquik powder mixed into it.
He sat back down and continued to stuff little colored plastic plugs into the lite-brite's face.
Some time later he'd made a low noise in Patrick's direction, a sound someone might make to get the attention of a horse, or a dog. Jane looked over and Peter clicked the lite-brite on with a flourish.
Spelled out in alternating red and pink and orange was the announcement: "MOMMY IS A WHORE. SORRY."
Peter was already grinning, amused at Jane's little boy reaction.
The side of his head was bloody where he'd stopped applying pressure from the face cloth.
The bloody face and the grin and those demented, glittering eyes... Jane had wanted to just get up and smash him in the face with all his strength. Just punch him as hard as he could in that stupid grin, those stupid, silver-filled teeth he didn't care about anyway.
Just smack that dumb and taunting expression right off his stupid, stupid face...
Under his aggravation, there had been fear. Confusion. Peter wasn't right in the head.
Instead, Jane had gotten up, taken his comic books into the living room without another word.
When Alex had come home, Peter had a small bandage over his eye.
He lied about how he got the injury, claimed to have tripped over his "clumsy feet" and hit the corner of his eye on the edge of "Paddy's" night table.
Alex had stared at Peter, raised an eyebrow, nodded and gotten himself a beer to drink out of the fridge and that had been that.
Peter had grinned at him when Alex looked away, sort of a "our little secret" type expression directed at Patrick which had made Jane want to throw some other hard, pointed, metal toy at the boy who so unfairly shared his face and his last name, and who was now sharing his room. Who was taking over his life.
Grinning bastard.
Always smiling.
What the Hell was so funny, that he was always smiling like that? It irked ten-year-old Patrick something fierce. Irked him and scared him and made his stomach hurt.
Because that smile wasn't just a smile, was it?
It was also a tacit threat.
Do whatever you want to me. I am bigger than you, badder than you, can take more pain than you, have seen more darkness than you have and am not right in the head. Hurt me and I will smile. Hurt me worse and I will laugh. Kill me, even, and I will go to my grave giggling. You can't win, Tricky boy. Hurt me, though? And after I stop smiling? I will make your life a living Hell.
That was what that grin had meant to Jane, even as a ten year old child.
The year smiles had stopped being smiles, and had morphed into threats. Into nightmares. Into nocturnal panic attacks and startled, sleep-clogged screams of "No!" screamed out in the night.
Jane now put the Lite-Brite back into its box and closed it, came back to the car and put the old toy in the back, annoyed. His fear for both Charlotte and Lisbon was growing by the minute, and at the same time he felt annoyed with Red John, with this showy little production.
It wasn't as dramatic or impressive as Red John probably thought it was. It came off as a cheap ploy for attention, an immature and childish bid for... what?
Understanding?
Acceptance?
No fucking way.
He got back behind the wheel again and started the car back up, blood pressure rising, irritation mixing with fear and lack of sleep and now, anger.
Felix stared from his side of the car, Felix the amazing traumatized Zombie! and Jane continued on down the road toward the Crazy Chicken Man's shack with Red John's bloodied child-face in his mind's eye. Grinning, mocking, tormenting...
By the time he'd reached the Chicken Man's shack, he'd recovered several other objects. There was a junior high scrapbook from his grade 7 year with notes written in the back, including a faded note from a "Pete" (but Jane was sure he hadn't gone to school with anybody named Peter, not in the seventh grade, anyway), reading: "I like you Patrick. You're funny. You're smart. We should team up."
It was written in a childish sloppy cursive, nothing like Red John's current adult handwriting, which was elegant and formal and looked like the letters of someone who had spent many hours refining his penmanship.
There was a Chinese puzzle box much like one Jane had had in his teens. When Jane got it open, there was a polaroid of Charlotte inside; Charlotte unconscious and lying in a coffin with bruising around the neck, dressed in the clothing she'd been wearing the last time Jane had seen her... less than two hours earlier.
That polaroid made Jane feel like fainting all over again when he saw it.
By now Charlotte would be in the ground, of that Jane had little doubt. If she woke up in the ground... she would be panicking.
She would be freaking the Hell out. Who wouldn't freak out alone in the dark, in a coffin, in the ground?
In the polaroid, Charlotte's worn out backpack was stuffed down by her feet.
What was in that backpack, exactly?
Jane knew she carried a pocket knife on her person. He had been meaning to go through her stuff, to reassure himself that she had no way to harm herself if the situation changed and turned dire, but he hadn't gotten around to it.
It had felt too intrusive on his part, like telling her he didn't trust her, and then time had run out and she was gone and now... Jane had forced himself to take a deep breath.
He'd found clippings from newspapers detailing his life.
Another photograph of his border collie puppy, Lucky, pinned to the front of a bedraggled Snoopy plush he'd had as a youngster. Snoopy, black and white.. Lucky, black and white.
A framed newspaper article Felix had seen from his passenger side window: Patrick Jane is helping California state police catch the notorious psychopathic killer Red John! Most heinous and mysterious killer since the Zodiac!
On the back of the framed news article was the taunt :"Didn't do a very good job of 'catching' me, did you, baby brother? All those crime scenes... and if I ever screwed up? It's your DNA as well as mine at those crime scenes. Makes you rethink your priorities, doesn't it?"
The last item Jane found was a Corolle baby doll that wasn't from his childhood, but from Charlotte's.
It smelled vaguely of baby powder, had a soft body and a plastic head, hands and feet.
It looked familiar, except for the cut marks all over it which had been inflicted with something that had partially melted the plastic.
Someone- almost certainly Charlotte, herself- had mutilated the doll and painted the cut marks with red enamel model paint. A note had been folded and attached to the doll's abdomen with a safety pin.
"Daddy's little girl is a bit of a fledgling psycho, wouldn't you say, Patrick? Is this just art therapy on her part, or have I planted the seed for something that will never and can never be plucked out? You have to admit, this is not normal behaviour. Does it make your bowels tighten with fear? Just what- exactly- is your little Charlie capable of? Even if you save her from me, can you save her from herself?"
Jane had all of Red John's little trek-down-memory-lane souvenirs in the back now, all he'd managed to find, at any rate.
Felix was still out of it in hypnotized la-la land.
Jane pulled the car into the dusty lot in front of the Chicken Man's shack and scanned the property with his eyes.
Nothing, except for a small, scrawny Latino boy standing in a little suit, wearing a little top hat and a cape.
Jane narrowed his eyes.
It was one of his costumes (or a nearly identical replica) from when he'd been a child.
The kid even had on the damned white gloves that he'd hated as a child, that had made his palms sweat and itch.
No wand, though.
In both hands he held out a portable DVD player.
There were tear tracks on his dusty cheeks.
"Felix, stay here, okay? Stay in the car. Go to sleep," Jane told his young passenger, before slamming the driver's side door.
He walked slowly over to the young magician.
Scrawny kid, tanned skin, faded bruises on the face.
The kid's eyes got larger with fear as Jane approached.
He was another Red John mentee, no doubt.
"Is he in the shed?" Patrick asked in what was almost a whisper as he approached the boy. The boy stiffened a little. Finally nodded. Then nodded his head towards the portable DVD player.
Jane took the device from the kid, opened it, pressed play.
Charlotte was in a coffin on the little 7 inch screen.
Then she was in the ground.
Two men were filling the hole in the ground up with red, rocky
soil. Towards the end of the video, Jane almost thought he heard muffled screams.
Then Red John's face, grinning at him, a drastic cut away. Lisbon bound and gagged, sitting on a lawn chair in what was almost certainly the steel shed now in front of both Jane and the boy magician.
"We have a lot to discuss, don't we, baby brother? Maybe we can work out some deal we'll both be happy with. Don't dawdle, Tricky. Little Charlie is in the ground, and I do seem to remember she has a horrific phobia of enclosed spaces. Her breathing sounded a bit like rice krispies towards the end, there, too. Right before I planted her. Make haste, not waste, baby brother..." And the video cut out.
More mockery. The DVD was doing nothing except slowing him down. Jane pressed the oversize STOP button, folded the DVD player up and handed it back to the boy.
"I 'm supposed to go in there?" He asked the boy. The boy nodded. Shrugged. It all seemed a bit anti-climactic.
"Can you talk?" Jane pressed.
The kid looked up at him. Shock his head no. Looked back at the shed, eyes full of dread.
Jane thought again of Charlie, in that damned coffin, with throat injuries, maybe trouble breathing, panicking, with access to (at the very least) a pocket knife.
He didn't have time to psychoanalyze this boy, not with his daughter buried alive and Lisbon gagged and tied to a chair.
Jane slid the steel shed of the door open and walked into the darkness.
There was a black drape suspended from the top of the shed, obscuring his vision. Before Jane could pass through the drape, he heard Red John's eerie voice from the darkness.
"Close the door, Patrick."
He did as instructed, and found himself in pitch blackness.