Now. Look.
Those words were spoken three and a half seconds before impact, as Blane watched the nightscape bloom like a black rose beyond the windscreen. He seemed gripped not by fear but by a sense of wonder.
Cool.
Joe stared at that final word for a long time, until the shiver it caused had passed, until he could consider all the implications of it with a measure of detachment.
Cool.
To the end, Blane reacted like a boy on an amusement-park ride. He had exhibited no more concern for his passengers and crew than a thoughtless and arrogant child might exhibit for the insects that he tortured with matches.
Cool.
Even a thoughtless child, as selfish as only the very young and the incurably immature can be, would nonetheless have shown some fear for himself Even a determinedly suicidal man, having leaped off a high ledge, would cry out in mortal fear if not regret as he hurtled toward the pavement. Yet this captain, in whatever altered state he occupied, watched oblivion approach with no apparent concern, even with delight, as though he recognized no physical threat to himself.
Cool.
Delroy Blane. Family man. Faithful husband. Devout Mormon. Stable, loving, kind, compassionate. Successful, happy, healthy. Everything to live for. Cleared by the toxicological tests.
What’s wrong with this picture?
Cool.
A useless anger rose in Joe. It was not aimed at Blane, who surely was a victim too—though he didn’t initially appear to be one. This was the simmering anger of his childhood and adolescence, undirected and therefore likely to swell like the ever-hotter steam in a boiler with no pressure-release valve.
He tucked the note pad into his jacket pocket.
His hands curled into fists. Unclenching them was difficult. He wanted to strike something. Anything. Until he broke it. Until his knuckles split and bled.
Such blind anger always reminded him of his father.
Frank Carpenter had not been an angry person. The opposite. He never raised his voice in other than amusement and surprise and happy exclamation. He was a good man—inexplicably good and oddly optimistic, considering the suffering with which fate saddled him.
Joe, however, had been perpetually angry for him.
He could not remember his dad with two legs. Frank had lost the left one when his car was broadsided by a pickup truck driven by a nineteen-year-old drunk with lapsed insurance. Joe was not yet three years old at the time.
Frank and Donna, Joe’s mother, had been married with little more than two paycheques and their work clothes. To save money, they carried only liability coverage with their car. The drunk driver had no assets, and they received no compensation from any insurance company for the loss of the limb.
The leg was amputated halfway between knee and hip. In those days there were no highly effective prostheses. Besides, a false leg with any sort of functioning knee was expensive. Frank became so agile and quick with one leg and a crutch that he joked about entering a marathon.
Joe had never been ashamed of his father’s difference. He knew his dad not as a one-legged man with a peculiar lurching gait, but as a bedtime storyteller, an indefatigable player of Uncle Wiggly and other games, a patient softball coach.
The first serious fight he’d gotten into was when he was six, in first grade. A kid named Les Olner had referred to Frank as a “stupid cripple.” Although Olner was a bully and bigger than Joe, his superior size was an insufficient advantage against the savage animal fury with which he was confronted. Joe beat the shit out of him. His intention was to put out Olner’s right eye, so he would know what it was like to live with one of two, but a teacher pulled him off the battered kid before he could half blind him.
Afterward, he felt no remorse. He still didn’t. He was not proud of this. It was just the way he felt.
Dorma knew that her husband’s heart would break a little if he learned his boy had gotten into trouble over him. She devised and enforced Joe’s punishment herself, and together they concealed the incident from Frank.