Return of the Reaper novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Curb
Doyle is four minutes late to the school curb and a gray van takes Lila in front of the other parents; he opens the case under his kitchen floor.
Lila Roark sat on the third bench with her owl in her lap and counted the cars.
Her daddy was late.
He was never late, and he was never very late, so she was not worried yet.
She had drawn a bird on her hand in blue pen, and she was giving it a name.
A man in a gray suit with sandy hair crouched in front of her.
"Hi, Lila," he said. "Your dad sent me. Come on."
She looked at his shiny shoes and did not stand up.
"My daddy said never," she said.
The man's smile did not move.
He stood, and a gray panel van rolled to the curb behind him with its side door already open.
A hand came out of the dark inside the van and closed on the front of her yellow raincoat.
Lila screamed.
It was the loudest sound she had ever made, and it went on and on.
Mister Pie fell off her lap.
She kicked, and her boot hit a man's shin.
He swore and hit her across the face with the flat of his hand.
Her head snapped sideways.
The world went white, and then it went small and ringing.
Then she was on the cold metal floor of the van with a knee between her shoulder blades.
The door slammed.
Somebody pulled her braids back to make her hold still, and she tasted blood on her tongue.
"Shut up," a man said. "Shut up or I do it again."
She tried to stop, and she couldn't, and she cried out for her daddy into the dark.
Doyle Roark was four minutes late to the school curb, and that was enough.
The bakery van's route had run long again.
His manager had held him at the loading door, waving a pay stub and saying overtime was a privilege.
It was 3:09 when Doyle finally pulled out, and he parked crooked on Tonawanda Street and ran the last half block.
The curb was full of parents, strollers and a crossing guard in an orange vest.
He looked at the third bench first.
It was empty.
On the concrete beside it lay a stuffed gray owl with one button eye.
Mister Pie.
Lila took him everywhere, and she would never have dropped him.
Doyle picked the owl up and turned in a slow circle.
A woman by the fence screamed, "That van!"
A gray panel van was pulling away from the far end of the curb.
Its side door was still sliding shut.
Through the gap he heard a scream he would have known through any wall in the world.
Then the door closed on it.
He didn't decide anything.
His body just ran.
He was across the grass before the crossing guard had finished blowing her whistle.
Doyle caught the back door handle with his left hand.
The metal was cold and wet under his fingers, and the van dragged him two steps, three, four.
He drove his right fist into the rear window.
The glass starred but didn't break.
"Lila!" he shouted.
From inside came a thin, wet, choking cry, and a man's voice telling her to shut up.
A man in the passenger seat leaned out with a phone in his hand and filmed him.
He was smiling.
The van lurched left and his grip tore loose.
Doyle hit the asphalt on his shoulder and rolled up onto one knee.
He ran after it anyway, two blocks down Tonawanda with his lungs burning.
The van turned at the light and was gone behind a produce truck.
He stopped at the intersection with his chest heaving and the owl crushed in his hand.
Nobody stopped for him, and nobody followed.
He walked back to the school.
His shoulder was bleeding through his jacket, and he didn't feel it.
The principal in a gray cardigan held the door open with both arms.
"We called the police," she said. "A man came in earlier with a pickup slip, Mr. Roark, and we didn't."
"What did he look like?"
His own voice sounded far away and perfectly level.
"A suit. Sandy hair. Very polite."
Doyle nodded once and went back to the bakery van.
He sat in the driver's seat without starting it.
His phone buzzed on the dash, an unknown number.
He let it ring four times before he answered.
"Mr. Roark," a man said, warm and easy, with traffic behind him.
"My name is Cade Cavanagh. I think you knew my father."
The street outside the windshield went very quiet.
"Where is my daughter?"
"Right here. Say hello, sweetheart."
A scuffle, a muffled sob, and then Lila's voice, high and cracked.
"Daddy, he hit me, I want to go home, Daddy, please."
There was a sharp crack of skin on skin, and she screamed.
"Enough," Cade said mildly, and the screaming dropped to hiccuping breaths.
Doyle's hand tightened until the knuckles of his right fist split open on the steering wheel.
"If you touch her again," he said.
"I'll touch her as often as I need to. She has to learn that nobody is coming until Saturday."
"What happens Saturday?"
"My father needs a man seen to. You do that, and she's home by Sunday dinner."
"I don't do that anymore."
"No," Cade said. "That's what you told my father at your wife's funeral."
"Don't call the police, Doyle. A child can go missing in a lot of different ways."
The line went dead.
Doyle sat there for exactly as long as it took to count his own heartbeat down to something he could use.
Then he started the van.
He didn't go back to the bakery.
He drove to the two-family house on Ontario Street and climbed the back stairs two at a time.
In the kitchen he put Mister Pie on the table, very gently, where Lila would see him first.
Then he knelt in front of the stove and pried up the third floorboard with a butter knife.
Under it was a steel case the size of a lunchbox.
He hadn't touched it in three years.
Anna's voice was still in his head, thin and exhausted, the day before the end.
Promise me you'll stop.
He had promised.
He laid his bleeding hand flat on the lid of the case.
"I'm sorry," he said to the empty kitchen.
Then he opened it.
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